Test games played

[Arnuz]

Agreed on the bonus considerations.

Without healer the crusader is painful to use. That forces armies to get in small fights just to be able to use heal. It also makes no sense, why wouldn't they heal during marches... I'd much rather substitute priests, finally it's a sturdier faster priest without ranged magic (which is flavourless anyhow). Paladins don't need resistance to all anyway, and priests would only slow them down. For purify... Bah, who cares, elves can't clean up either. Some shaman will have to be enslaved.

Also, keep in mind what you've said in the other thread about removing cheap units: it's even worse when it's for a support one that might only be eventually built with lots of buildings...

[Arnuz]

Right, or the cavalry, but it also has something particular - first strike. I really like the idea of going around with a cavalry/crusader mix and eventually paladins when they arrive.

[zitro1987]

What if we replace priests with this high-movement melee healing unit? Give it healer/healing/purify.

To give it a different flavor from cavalry or paladin, we could replace its first strike with something else.

[Seravy]

Erhm the gold is still a resource that can only be spent on the building, OR the unit, not both. It doesn't matter if you use gold or production on it, the point is, you can only spend each point of gold/production on either a unit, or building, not both at the same time.
In other words, you either pay 20% less for buildings, or the same amount for the the better unit - for simplicity let's say the units are also 20% more cost efficient - so your overall economy result is, your resources are worth 25% more as everything is 20% more cost-effective. But the two 20%s do not add together for a 40% bonus. As we already had one of them, adding the other is not a major buff.

...we can argue how much more cost efficient high men units actually are, of course, but at least on magicians they are as good as a 33% discount (you only need to produce two to have as many figures as if it was three units of another race) - in reality closer to 25% though because you don't get extra "Caster" with the extra figures.

Either way, I'm done implementing this and I just need to fill in a number for the bonus amount, which is the hard part...

Let's try to figure this out.
Assuming we have a baseline of average growth with no economic bonus and all buildings, High Men have exactly that, plus an additional rebel problem.
The rebel problem is worth 10% on High Men cities, and it varies on others. Let's look at it race by race. I'll average the modifier for all other races and compare it to the High Men modifier.

Barbarians +1.6%
Beastmen +13.9%
Dark Elf +0%
Draconian +15.4%
Dwarf -16.1%
Gnoll +8.5%
Halfling -4.6%
High elf +1.6%
Klackons +28.5%
Lizardmen +24.7%
Nomad +10%
Orcs +17.7%
Trolls +26.2%

Summing that all up we get 9.8% on average. So we can conclude High Men have +10% rebels on average, both on their own, or conquered cities.

Now, how much does 10% rebels hurt the economy? Well, you get to produce 10% less and get 10% less gold. So a 10% building cost reduction can perfectly negate that drawback, and even be better, as some unrest will be never existing due to already present unrest removal.

So, based on these calculations, 10% seems like the fair amount...if the bonus extended for both units and buildings, but it's only buildings. I'm wiling to accept that High Men units are good enough to be worth at least 10% more cost effective, so we can say this is good enough as is.

With "high unrest" and "good units+cheaper buildings" cancelling each other out, and I'm willing to err on the side of even assuming the benefits are better (we probably underestimated the units and overestimated the rebel influence), we still have the race with only half of a positive trait and two negative traits, while most other races have a sum of 1 positive trait (if we make good and bad traits cancel each other).
So we need to at least get rid of the remaining negative traits, which are "bad resistance" and "no early unit" by adding either a larger bonus, or a new unit, or both.

So I'm voting for 12-15% building cost reduction and the inclusion of at least one strong semi-early unit, crusader, knight or something like that.

[Seravy]

So yeah the remaining question is to replace the priest, the cavalry or the spearmen and the stats of the new unit.

[zitro1987]

Crusader:
Requires Fighter's Guild and Shrine ... or ... Requires Smithy and Cathedral
90 cost / 2 upk
6 figures (foot troops, large sword/shield)
7 melee
4 armor
5 resistance
2 hp
3 movement
Healer/Healing/Purify/+1 resist to all
Large Shield

[Arnuz]

Nuuuuh,... We need something that can keep up with cavalry and paladins, so that we can get humans to be the mechanised troops of CoM... Humans=horses always. These armoured horses are somewhat slower than the others, so:
Requires stables and (shrine/parthenon?) [cathedral is too much, as Seravy said it needs to be earlyish, 2 opposing tech trees at the same time takes time anyhow]
4 figs
4 movement (palads should be the same imho)
? melee/same armor as paladins/same health as cavalry/resistance in between/large shield is a good idea but might make them too expensive which we don't want, it's needed earlyish.
Healer/Healing. Illusions immunity? (for the ascetic singlemindedness) (if not too expensive, again)
Substitutes the priest. the Cavalry works well with them till the paladins arrive, spearmen is sorely needed by humans for police and early scouting given their meager resources (I have problems even with dwarves to get the smithies up everywhere). Yes, humans lose the resist bonus and purify (they are well known polluters which is not terrible, these units will more than make up for it by giving humans an aggressive nature.

If you opt for substituting spearmen instead, then please make human swordsmen cheaper. As much as spearmen ideally, at the cost of nerfing them somewhat if needed.

Finally - I'd call these paladins and call the paladins knights. The paladins being the ones that heal. Or is this because of DND influence?

[Seravy]

First of all, I'm going to play a low difficulty game and see how well cavalry works. If they are adequate, we don't need a new unit. If not, then I'm leaning towards not giving it healing and just have the Knight as a replacement cavalry with better stats and higher cost.

[Seravy]

Well, even without magical weapons, my cavalry is doing a fairly decent job at killing lizardmen swordsmen despite their extra health and magic weapons.
Against a war bear, well, they aren't so great. They beat it but get hurt in the process quite badly. Ofc, the problem is lack of magical weapons again. With it, the damage would be way better because the bear has high armor.

Overall, I feel the cavalry is not a bad unit. Clearly it won't be the thing that stops enemy stacks of 9 nagas, but it can conquer small AI hamlets with 4 swordsmen in the early game, get you some neutrals, and even dispose a few enemy summoned creatures. They can probably also beat hell hound or phantom warrior nodes and lairs too.

The problem is the same as always : lack of production availability. You need a barrack and alchemist guild for the cavalry to work, so if you want to produce them, you can't do settlers. Now, this is true for most races - but for high men, settlers are a bit more important due to their bad interracial tables. While the average interracial unrest is not worse than the unrest of high men cities, it's all over the place - if the conquered cities are klackons or orcs, they'll be absolutely horrible. If it's halflings, even better than a high men city.

...and we are back to http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=8957 again.
Early units are not used because you can't afford to do so, even if they would be a valuable addition to your strategy. It's not the stats. By the time you have the production capacity to build these, and no longer need to put all your production into settlers and basic infrastructure, they get outdated indeed.
Unfortunately, we have concluded a higher starting population is a bad idea.
Which leaves...giving a free settler or two to people so they don't need to worry about that. If people don't have to choose between building cities and building units, then there is no problem, the starting production is enough for one of the two, just not both. I never liked that idea very much, but it might be the only way out.
As is you either find enough gold in treasure to buy several settlers, or don't produce normal units and rely entirely on summoning while you build them, or start a war and use the enemy cities (which are not your preferred race) instead of your own. I don't think this is very good for the game.

[Arnuz]

Mmmhh... Not that I don't like the idea but, what's preventing people from getting their free settler(s) and building more anyway? Then you can start a new city in all 8 directions (N,NE, etc).

For me, what's missing is the motivation from doing early units. Again, what do you think of the possibility of having cavalry that's backed up by the new priests as fast as them, and that eventually gets subbed by paladins? I'm hoping that this game style proves valuable enough to be used despite it being based on standard units. As humans have the flavour of relying less on magic than the others, it seems a good start to try this with them first. And for the same reason, ranged-magic-less priests would seem particularly fit. But the real reason is to give them a mechanic that works in their favour using basic units. (Not removing spearmen would also avoid worsening the consequences of rebelliousness)

All that said then feel free to give out the free settler freebies! Just, could the starting troops have no food maintenance to avoid self killing starts?