The Problem with Counter based Design

[MrBiscuits]

the problem is that when built they are usually in completely the wrong place and it would take ages to inch them across the map to where you actually need them. This is much worse in CoM than the original game since the road movement bonus has gone on Arcanus (although strangely not in the battle screen) and there are no enchanted roads on Myrror anymore. Also Word of Recall has gone too.

I agree that moving units is tedious and would be nice if we could improve that but I don't see how. This isn't Master of Orion where we can group 3500 ships in one stack or send any unit from any star to any other directly. Unfortunately travel in this game involves a lot of micromanagement due to small stack size and non-uniform terrain with plenty of roadblocks and bottlenecks.

CoM makes it worse because you generally need and have more units, although that's an indirect necessity - due to improved AI, players can no longer expect to win the game with 1 spearmen in each city + 1 doomstack like in old MoM, so even if economy wasn't changed to support more units, using more units would still be a necessity.

I disagree the changes to movement cost had any relevance though, for two reasons. One, the majority of movement happens on sea, as any larger distance is generally between different continents, and ships are significantly faster in CoM than in MoM. And two, movement is automatic (unless you have a WP with someone settled on your continent which generally isn't something you want, and should either upgrade to an Alliance ASAP or conquer them instead. ), anyway, you still only need to click the destination once, regardless of the travel time being 5 or 10 turns. So movement speed is not relevant to the level of micromanagement though it might lead to a city being poorly defended longer which is of course not that great.
But let's not forget that while removing road bonus, CoM also doubled movement speed on the units, or more. Would you prefer moving your speed 2 Cavalry at 0.5 moves per tile or your speed 5 Cavalry at 1 moves per tile?

I find the logistics of moving hundreds of units around by far the worst part of the game. As soon as it gets bogged down in a war of attrition I start a new game.

A few ideas to improve it:

Earth gate is an arcane rare spell
Roads get double movement inside your (or shared) territory
More land and less sea (I play plane of the earth as standard and take the 50% score hit)
Rebalance to have less units in general (I realise this is far easier said than done and the current state is after several years of balancing as it is currently)

Does improved AI require you to have more units? Maybe the AI could have fewer units as well.

Actually I normally don't transport units by sea, it's too much micromanagement and find it too frustrating to lose 8 units when you lose one ship (I'd like to see sea combat have the units visible inside ships like for floating island, better ships could have protection in the same way as castle walls and the some get to fire a ranged attack each turn).
Instead I use floating island, water walking, flight, wraith form, towers etc....yes I know this is suboptimal behaviour, but I just can't face the hassle that sea transport brings for most of the game.

Were cavalry only 2 speed in the original game? I can't actually remember to be honest as it's been so long since I've played it. But WoR definitely speeded things along in the end game.

[Seravy]

Earth gate is an arcane rare spell

Definitely not, that would break the game.

Roads get double movement inside your (or shared) territory

Not relevant, as it doesn't affect micromanagement, only the turn count it takes for the units to automatically reach their destination.

More land and less sea (I play plane of the earth as standard and take the 50% score hit)

We already have this, 1.1.2 reduced the amount of sea quite significantly.

Rebalance to have less units in general (I realise this is far easier said than done and the current state is after several years of balancing as it is currently)

Does improved AI require you to have more units? Maybe the AI could have fewer units as well.

Yes because garrisons. Even if the AI only has 3 stacks of halberdiers, that still means you need to defend 9-10 cities those 3 stacks could reach within 1-2 turns on movement. In general, defensive play requires more units than offensive play and defensive play being viable is a requirement to have good AI.
If offensive play is superior to defensive play, you either beat the AI before they can be relevant, or they beat you before you can be relevant. Neither is fun nor gives the impression of the AI outsmarting the player - the faster, more aggressive one wins.

Unless we change the game in a way the defender can protect their territory using much fewer units than what it takes to threaten that territory, more units are necessary. But that can't be done without completely redesigning how movement and siege works and giving massive penalties to moving close to enemy territory or trying to attack anything.
As is, the game works like chess - a single piece can threaten 8+ tiles on the board easily, but unlike chess, you have to defend all those tiles, not just your king.

Were cavalry only 2 speed in the original game?

Yes. In fact standard normal units were speed 1 except Cavalry types which were speed 2, and even good racial units were around speed 2. Speed 3 and higher was very rare.
WoR was a Sorcery spell so it's not viable unless you play Sorcery or find Sorcery books.
Recall hero on the other hand was Arcane and heroes were omnipotent enough that they could destroy pretty much any incoming enemy army so you didn't even need garrisons. As units moved only 1 tile, enemy stacks became visible before reaching your cities so you could recall hero there and kill the approaching enemy. The AI in MoM also didn't have the ability to attack directly from sea, not even by using flying units.

[MrBiscuits]

Definitely not, that would break the game

It's the normal unit equivalent to the spell to move summoning circle. And only available at rare.

Not relevant, as it doesn't affect micromanagement, only the turn count it takes for the units to automatically reach their destination.

The problem currently is the time to get units to where you want it as well as micromanagement

We already have this, 1.1.2 reduced the amount of sea quite significantly.

Ah ok I've not played that version yet. GoG is still on 1.0.1

Yes because garrisons. Even if the AI only has 3 stacks of halberdiers, that still means you need to defend 9-10 cities those 3 stacks could reach within 1-2 turns on movement. In general, defensive play requires more units than offensive play and defensive play being viable is a requirement to have good AI.

If the AI has fewer units then they will have fewer stacks and fewer units in them too. So overall you'll need fewer defensive units.

[Seravy]

GoG is still on 1.0.1

Did you disable updates? It should be on 1.1.2...

[MrBiscuits]

GoG is still on 1.0.1

Did you disable updates? It should be on 1.1.2...

I think 1.1.1 is listed as 1.0.1.01 on GoG, but yes 1.0.1.02.01 is available now.

Maybe I should start a new topic on the logistics of moving units around, as it is going off topic from the counter design.

[Seravy]

omg what are those insane version numbers.

[zitro1987]

I think the unit logistics and the debate on what is ‘cannon fodder’ is at the heart of the counter topics in this thread.

Unit logistics is tedious and a big part of the frustration with normal unit losses. it is hard to think of solutions in terms of spells or features that existed in MoM (spell of return, magic roads). We also don’t want to quickly advance into purely enemy territory too easily, or have the road system of original facilitate conquest (why do we benefit from AI territory?)

My best suggestion at the moment includes a specific usage of magic roads that slightly facilitates logistics within your territory:
*magic roads have 0.5move (or less!) and cannot be built by engineers
*modified ‘conjure road’ as an uncommon city enchantment arcane spell. Only city are targets and converts ordinary roads within the city territory to magic roads.
*Only units belonging of same wizard as city can enjoy extra movement

[Seravy]

I still think the issue is sea travel though, not land travel.
Having to remember which city needs which type and how many units, and how many of those are already on their way towards it is also a problem.

Do I still need 5 more Paladins for this city or only 1? Or was that the other city? Did this one need a tank for the gate and 3 magicians for the back row? Are the 3 magicians I sent out last turn going there or was that another city?

[MrBiscuits]

I think it's worth comparing strategies involving normal units with summoned units .

With normal units, when you conquer a city the infrastructure is usually destroyed enough that you can't build good units for a while until you've rebuilt the barracks/alchemists guild/fighters guild/armours guild etc. So you'll still be relying on troops built a long way away.

When conquering with summoned units you can just use summoning circle which costs no mana at all and you're producing units exactly where you want them to continue to conquer nearby cities.

Normal units need a spell I think that helps move them around late game, perhaps just one unit at a time with an associated cost. Actually you can transport stacks of units a long way with a spell, but only across planes with planar travel. There's no equivalent for transporting them in the same plane, which I think is strange.

As it stands after about halfway through the game 80%+ of your time is spent trying to get units from A to B, rather than more fun strategy stuff.

[Seravy]

With normal units, when you conquer a city the infrastructure is usually destroyed enough that you can't build good units for a while until you've rebuilt the barracks/alchemists guild/fighters guild/armours guild etc. So you'll still be relying on troops built a long way away.

When conquering with summoned units you can just use summoning circle which costs no mana at all and you're producing units exactly where you want them to continue to conquer nearby cities.

This is part of the design though. You can build normal units in every city, but can only summon to one place at a time.
So if you conquer 5 cities in a turn, you could, if the buildings weren't destroyed, build normal units in each of those cities immediately, and send your armies to conquer another 5 cities, so your "conquest speed" will be 5 cities per turn, assuming you're confident enough in your single normal unit to leave the city defence to them. It's more realistic to assume you want at least 3 of them, in which case you conquer 5 cities each 3 turns.
You can do this in addition to casting spells, so you can still keep summoning more doomstacks and/or recast dispelled critical global enchantments, unit buffs, or whatever else is needed to win the war.

On the other hand, using summoned creatures, you can only afford one good creature (rare or better) per turn, or you can summon 3 uncommons which are on par with 3 normal units. This means it costs you 5 (more realistically, 6-9) turns to put one rare creature, or three uncommons in each city. So you can conquer 5 cities every 5-9 turns, half as fast as if you could buy the normal units. You also can't cast other overland spells during this time so if you lost your crusade or unit buffs, you have to wait additional turns before advancing. Overall conquest speed will be about 3 times slower than the above version.

Finally, if units have instant travel speed, Earth Gate or otherwise, you only need one turn to garrsion any new city - sending in pre-built units from elsewhere. This way you can conquer 5 cities in 1 turn.

Overall, instant travel is 3 times faster for conquest than using normal units produced on the spot, and 9 times faster than using summoning circle and summoning new creatures. Basically, with Earth Gate, you can conquer at the same speed as if the instant Raze feature still existed. As conquest speed is the only thing balancing most of the doomstack strategies available, this would break the game.

If a travel spell in Arcane existed, it would need to have a delay, like this :

Dimensional Gate
Arcane Rare
30 MP
Target stack enters another dimension. Select a map tile adjacent to one of your cities.
The stack will emerge from the other dimension on that tile N turns later, where N is one third of the distance between the source and destination.

While this doesn't have the issue with conquest speed, or at least not to that extent as instant travel, it still has issues. It makes sea travel magic and boats useless, and strategies to control the sea entirely meaningless. It's not any better than simply removing oceans from the game entirely and letting units walk to the destination automatically. You only ever need to get a single army, like your best heroes, across the sea and conquer the weakest town the enemy has, and all your other armies can be transported to the continent with no way to stop it.

Honestly, this would be absurdly painful to play against as well - if you lose a single city to an enemy doomstack, 5 turns later dozens of stacks will just appear out of nowhere on your continent. What's worse, players who don't yet know about this spell will assume the AI is cheating and just spawns the units from thin air without ever building them.