(May 4th, 2020, 15:51)Impy Wrote: 2. Chaos should have better early game options.
Chaos is the weakest realm when it comes to taking your first node or even so much as the 100 gold lairs.
- Hell Hounds, while powerful in packs are a drain on your mana reserves when compared to what other realms can do.
- There are a lot of very situational spells like disrupt, warp wood, corruption and shatter. Even warp creature, a spell I really like, doesn't start being useful until mid to late game. Some of the more niche spells can be combined to make room, for example shatter can be merged with disrupt into a spell that can break weapons or walls.
- Fire Elementals are inferior to all of the other common combat summon options. I'd like to see them gain non-corporeal and have part of their attack split into fire breath to give them a bit of their own flavor. Zombies make undead, Wild Boars have good stats, Phantom Warriors phase through walls and deal unblockable damage, Fire Elementals attack first and can engage air units.
- I would love to see a relatively cheap common spell that gives and improves fire breath attacks. It would have a ton of interactions with later spells and summons and give hell hounds the competitive edge they need to stay relevant in the opening turns.
5. More control over offered mercenaries, heroes and artifacts.
A lot of my games have been greatly decided by being given a very lucky merc or hero. On the other hand, even more games have been decided by being unable to get any sort of half-decent hero and never receiving a decent item offer despite hording thousands of gold for just that purpose. I would prefer to receive offers on a set schedule rather than random intervals, so that I can plan for them. In addition, having a schedule on this event will prevent confusion with units popping in at the opponent's Fortress in large numbers on random turns. Most of all I want to be given some sort of choice beyond that of buying or skipping an offer.
- For example, a caravan arrives at the start of the year containing heroes, mercenaries and merchants selling artifacts. There's four choices but you may only visit one (2 if Charismatic). This would give a lot more agency to both players and AI as far as deciding their fate. The non-hero centric AI players can focus on getting strong mercenaries and caster heroes to improve their overland skill. Both the player and hero-centric AI can pick and choose the heroes they need or the ones they already have gear for. The player will be able to shop for artifacts that they cannot craft naturally or if going for a macro unit strategy, they can buy mercs and utility heroes. This is just one way to implement this sort of change, but as far as desired features go, this is the one I want to see more than any other.
6. Air travel for more races.
This is somewhat related to my comment about mercenaries in regards to how certain mercs have decided entire games for me. Nightmares and Pegasi with their high speed, strong ranged attacks and most importantly flight, are capable of utterly crushing neutrals you would otherwise be unable to even approach. The king of all mercenaries however is the Airship and the king of heroes is the Wind Mage. Having access to air travel for my troops is usually the deciding factor in the mid to late game for me. I think that the power spike of access to travel by flight can be reduced by giving access to a weaker form of air travel to the more industrious races. Dwarves, high men, nomads, beastmen and halflings might be able to build a flying machine that can transport troops. Weaker than a trireme and with no ranged attacks, but with 3-4 speed and the all-important ability to carry other units. Late game army logistics bottlenecks should no longer be an issue for either AI or human players as they are certain to have at least one of those races by that point. It will provide a natural way to group troops together for uniform movement over any terrain regardless of how unlucky the offers for heroes and mercenaries have been to a non-Sorcery player.
Chaos has one of the strongest early game treasure hunting capabilities already...Flame Blade on any bowmen unit is extremely strong, and it's much easier to spam than Heroism. Chaos isn't supposed to have strong combat summoning either, the realm specializes in turning normal units into strong fantastic units, and having good offensive regular summons. With Chaos being a strong late-game Realm as well, any further boosts to the early game would bad for balance.
I'd agree with having more ways to interact with merchants and mercs. An option to "call for heroes/merchants/mercs" would be good.
Agree with air travel. Flying ships in Sorcery is a ridiculously powerful advantage. However, this will likely require very substantial and complicated changes to AI.