MANoob wrote:
Problems with broken lords basically come down to two things - 55 point preset and horrible pop cost scaling when going wide.



I tried playing custom broken lords (businessman 3, dust efficient, cellulose mutation) and had success to some extent as a "tall" empire, however this is still nowhere near as good as what you can do with other factions and similar setup. Default broken lords are much worse. Advanced armor is a horrible tech to start with, 2 other actually work, but then again you are at 55 points and your affinity is bad...



You need dust for everything, but affinity doesn't even give you any extra, on top of that your pop costs more dust than it costs food for other races even at 1 city early on (going from 1 to 2 pop for instance is thirty something food and fify something dust... if you have a single city). Food costs do increase faster at a single city, but at multiple cities it doesn't even compare.



Their lore suggests that they need to drain life force of other creatures, however their affinity does very little to reflect that (they just collect dust and that can be accomplished via trade just as well).



The quick fix to them would be give them businessman 3, Glassteel legacy(so that armor tech is worth at least smth) and make pop cost depend only on pop count in a given city as it once was. Costs for pop buyout at pop > 10 will need to go up in this case probably to avoid explosive expansion though, since dust is global unlike food. I'd say current pop cost formula could even work if wide vs tall were balanced in the game, however atm wide seems to be much stronger than tall. Balancing this is another approach to the problem, but a much harder one and is outside of single faction balance scope.



But I think a more interesting approach can be taken (albeit a harder one implementation wise).



Here are a few ideas of custom traits/techs/affinity bonuses that may go well with broken lords and make them feel closer to their background story (not sure which form would be optimal):



Dust to dust - Gain 50% of industry cost of destroyed enemy stacks as dust.

Reapers of souls - when conquering a city you gain x% of its food stock as dust. Population is reduced to 1 and you get full ownership instantly. (I've always found it weird how living pop instantly converts to BL pop).

Chivalry(negative trait, gives you extra points) - Bribe is not available and to declare a war you need an active warning that was issued at least 2 turns ago.



BL stating hero with army defense 2 and dust efficiency 2 is fine IMO.



Units are decent, but ryder should get its lifesteal buffed (maybe 30% of damage dealt?). Also I think healing cost should scale with unit industry cost to avoid it being essentially free later on.

These are great points.

I BOLD best points in your message. And I think they have an idea about pop cost. Cause they mentioned it in Q&A session.

And I would love to see someway to gain dust from battles. Like 20 % of industry cost of killed units. And to balance that making healing cost to include industry cost. To be similar to buying out units. Example: to heal from almost 0 to 100 % HP should cost almost same as buying out same unit.



And their biggest problem is that conquested cities don't have that much dust and lot of useless food. And dust improvements are worse than food ones (so called SOWER problems.)

Ok, another review, Drakken this time.



I'll cover the traits and affinity first.

• Well connected (15 pts). - This has a hidden advantage of being able to make diplomatic treaties with all factions from the beginning, however you don't get the peace tech until age 2 and there's not much to do in terms of diplomacy before you do. It might be worth it if it gives you the whole map as well, otherwise the price needs to go down.
• Advanced Diarchy(5 pts) - this is actually a very good trait imo, but only if you have the influence to make use of it. Being able to pick -33% building cost or buyout reduction right after turn 20 is a big boost.
• Endless Excavation(10pts) - Seems to be the only trait that can give you an early game influence boost, which drakken really need, however its super inconsistent (you're not guaranteed to be anywhere near ruins in your starting region and even if you are the spot near ruins can be bad in terms of FIDS and anomalies) and doesn't scale at all. In this form it's not really worth 10 points, plus the inconsistency is really frustrating. Maybe if you got the bonus from all ruins in the region without exploiting the tiles it would be consistent enough and worth the points.
• Empire Mint(10 pts) - Not the best starting tech for drakken. I'd rather have sewer system for influence.
• Language square(10 pts) - Goes well with the diplomatic theme, but your racial quest doesn't really need it, so its somewhat questionable from pragmatic perspective.
  
  

Affinity - diplomatic pressure. This is one of the more costly affinities at 25 points and also one of the more interesting ones. I has a hidden bonus of gaining extra minor faction slots earlier, which is a nice boost. However, I think there are quite a few problems with the diplomacy part:

• In multiplayer I believe it would turn into endless tug of war until someone runs out of influence. A minimal number of turns between diplomatic status changes would definitely help.
• Diplomatic victory is boring atm, after you've forced everyone into alliance you're pretty much left off to send compliments around and make useless trades until you get enough diplomatic points.
• There are simply not enough diplomatic actions to make the diplomacy game interesting
  
  

Possible improvements of the diplomatic system would deserve their own post though.



I've tried to optimize the drakken to maintain the same diplomatic playstyle but be better at it and that's what I ended up with:

• Advanced diarchy
• Endless excavation (still had to take it for the influence boost, reload if no ruins in a decent spot )
• Naive 2/2 (this works really well as one might expect)
• Sewer system - for the +1 influence on happy
• Cellulose mutation - unoriginal, but big cities are the best way to get influence atm
  
  

Overall I felt like there are simply not enough traits that work well with their playstyle.



For vanilla drakken I'd suggest dropping price on well connected and endless excavation and at least giving them naive 2/2 because it's stupid not to have with their affinity. Maybe some influence boosting trait that's better than endless excavation could work as well (like +1 influence on district).



As for their starting hero he has absolutely ridiculous army health boost 3 (which kinda makes their crappy starting units tolerable) and a quite weak food boost 1. He also has a good support ability, which is kinda unexpected given how bad most of the other supports are, but appreciated . I think he needs to be changed to health boost 2/influence boost 2. Health 3 is ridiculously OP once you get decent units and influence boost would really help drakken early game influence problems.



Another problem with the drakken imo is that they have the worst units in the game. This would make sense if they were mostly support diplomatic faction, having good buffers, but this is not the case either and goes poorly with them being dragons.

• Drakkenlings are one of the toughest units, but 18 damage is so ridiculously low they barely scratch anything. They definetely can use a small buff there.
• Wyverns are just pretty bad statwise with no good abilities to compensate. Maybe they can get "beam" ability or smth like that.
• Ancients have a very weak support ability, good stats, but low damage kills them. I think the low damage should be removed (making them good shooters, and they're freaking dragons so they should deal some damage). Then their weak aura can be considered as just a little bonus. I feel like their health and ini will need to go down somewhat in this case or they will be too OP. Alternatively, they need much stronger support ability, but I think the first option is preferable given their outlook.
  
  

myrec wrote:


And their biggest problem is that conquested cities don't have that much dust and lot of useless food. And dust improvements are worse than food ones (so called SOWER problems.)

Think this will be partially fixed if the trait I suggested (converting conquered city pop to dust) will be implemented. Then they can just raze the city if they do not need it and use the dust for another city or boosting their military.

Kruos wrote:


About the 'Dust to dust' suggestion, there is already a similar tech in game, the Dust Crematorium, a really good one both usefull and lore wise. It gives you dust for each xp generated after battle. Alas its availability is not before chapter 4 if I recall correctly.



A very simple buff could be to unlock this tech sooner, or even to have it unlocked at the beginning, and boost this capacity once at chapter 4 for example.

Great point, totally forgot about it. I still think this should scale with unit industry cost, since xp does not really scale with tech level.

Escl wrote:
The main issue with the Broken Lords is their weakness early game, which is caused by having to pay an exorbitant amount of dust to heal their units. This means that their population falls behind other factions immediately since they do not have the gold to support both healing and population growth in the early game.



It can cost upwards of 200 dust to heal a hero and 2 stalwards each time they fight a minor faction stack in the early game. At this time your cities are generating maybe 30 dust per turn so this is completely unreasonable. This is compounded by the fact that with such low initiative the stalwards never get to apply their 20% healing upon killing a unit and always end up losing hp every fight. In the mid game it may cost 1000 dust to heal a stack but at this point your cities will be generating 500-1000 dust per turn so it is no longer a problem and starts to become an advantage instead.



If any opposing faction declares war on you in the first 30 turns and attacks your main stack you will take irrecoverable economical damage even if all your units survive the fight. None of the other factions are this vulnerable to early aggression. The Broken Lords healing abilities actually becomes quite strong mid-late game as your army never has to rest and can fight infinitely against inferior stacks. However, in this game you cannot survive a weak early game against equally skilled players to make use of the strong mid-late game healing advantage.

That's why I think healing should scale with industry cost, and maybe hero level. This way it could be made much cheaper early game while not being free lategame. Maybe BL hero can use some sort of vampiric ability like stalwarts have as well. Personally I just prefer to use other faction heroes as generals and make your starting BL hero a governor. +2 dust/pop really helps.

This game where the community together plays cultists might show you some ideas on how to play them well:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTety8oVtYsSH4GuDAy0P687XYucsZBBU

Cultists - Very weak when you take your initial area. Your economy is weaker than others because you only have one base...conversion is very expensive considering some army can just come and destroy the neutral camp and your influence is wasted. The same could be said for expansion settlements but they have defences you can build. The difference in power when you defeat a faction with cultists compared to another faction is also massive. Cultists essentially just throw away the massive gain you get by taking cities where as the other factions gain a massive boost.



-Not sure about these if anyone can confirm or deny that would be great-

Cultists first unit is poor for a starter unit...not being offensive at all.

Roads can be used to get around faster? - because you don't own surrounding lands.

Your economy can't build to anything like the strength of other factions. A few neutral camps do not make up for several cities.

You can get too many units...the upkeep becomes so big you have to dismiss many.

Once you have defeated close by factions it becomes much harder as you can't expand and move around faster via roads. So your slow and can't produce units near the enemy if they are smart enough to take out any converted camps near them.





Biggest concern economy power is massive difference and lack of being able to expand at all is too big a weakness. Why do they need that they get FREE units? you need massive influence to cover units, dust for upkeep and industry and food and science if you want your city to grow. You better hope your city is in an amazing place otherwise 2/3 bases are way better as they can specialise.

The main issue with the Broken Lords is their weakness early game, which is caused by having to pay an exorbitant amount of dust to heal their units. This means that their population falls behind other factions immediately since they do not have the gold to support both healing and population growth in the early game.



It can cost upwards of 200 dust to heal a hero and 2 stalwards each time they fight a minor faction stack in the early game. At this time your cities are generating maybe 30 dust per turn so this is completely unreasonable. This is compounded by the fact that with such low initiative the stalwards never get to apply their 20% healing upon killing a unit and always end up losing hp every fight. In the mid game it may cost 1000 dust to heal a stack but at this point your cities will be generating 500-1000 dust per turn so it is no longer a problem and starts to become an advantage instead.



If any opposing faction declares war on you in the first 30 turns and attacks your main stack you will take irrecoverable economical damage even if all your units survive the fight. None of the other factions are this vulnerable to early aggression. The Broken Lords healing abilities actually becomes quite strong mid-late game as your army never has to rest and can fight infinitely against inferior stacks. However, in this game you cannot survive a weak early game against equally skilled players to make use of the strong mid-late game healing advantage.

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
Considering that the main method of play for the automatons was building up production and storing it, as well as building reasonably tall systems, I don't believe so. the Wild Walkers specialize in production but they don't store overproduction.

Does anyone in the game? I still haven't messed with the stockpiles. I find them somewhat inefficient, and by end game, I'm usually mopping up the A.I.

Considering that the main method of play for the automatons was building up production and storing it, as well as building reasonably tall systems, I don't believe so. the Wild Walkers specialize in production but they don't store overproduction.

Is their any faction in EL that reflects the play style of The Automatons in ES?

Hello there!



First, thank your for your participation to this thread, you gave us ideas.

We discussed with Kaboomer about it and we created 2 threads about the factions: one about their economy power,

another one about their military power.



All the feedback will help us in order to balance the factions.



Thank you.



/vanish in the fog or war and let you continue to suggest ideas

Some very good ideas here.



About the 'Dust to dust' suggestion, there is already a similar tech in game, the Dust Crematorium, a really good one both usefull and lore wise. It gives you dust for each xp generated after battle. Alas its availability is not before chapter 4 if I recall correctly.



A very simple buff could be to unlock this tech sooner, or even to have it unlocked at the beginning, and boost this capacity once at chapter 4 for example.

MANoob - nice analysis. I would add a fire effect to the Drakken as a AE attack instead of beam.

Continuing with some thoughts on Broken Lords. There are other threads on this, but I want to keep my stuff in one place.



Problems with broken lords basically come down to two things - 55 point preset and horrible pop cost scaling when going wide.



I tried playing custom broken lords (businessman 3, dust efficient, cellulose mutation) and had success to some extent as a "tall" empire, however this is still nowhere near as good as what you can do with other factions and similar setup. Default broken lords are much worse. Advanced armor is a horrible tech to start with, 2 other actually work, but then again you are at 55 points and your affinity is bad...



You need dust for everything, but affinity doesn't even give you any extra, on top of that your pop costs more dust than it costs food for other races even at 1 city early on (going from 1 to 2 pop for instance is thirty something food and fify something dust... if you have a single city). Food costs do increase faster at a single city, but at multiple cities it doesn't even compare.



Their lore suggests that they need to drain life force of other creatures, however their affinity does very little to reflect that (they just collect dust and that can be accomplished via trade just as well).



The quick fix to them would be give them businessman 3, Glassteel legacy(so that armor tech is worth at least smth) and make pop cost depend only on pop count in a given city as it once was. Costs for pop buyout at pop > 10 will need to go up in this case probably to avoid explosive expansion though, since dust is global unlike food. I'd say current pop cost formula could even work if wide vs tall were balanced in the game, however atm wide seems to be much stronger than tall. Balancing this is another approach to the problem, but a much harder one and is outside of single faction balance scope.



But I think a more interesting approach can be taken (albeit a harder one implementation wise).



Here are a few ideas of custom traits/techs/affinity bonuses that may go well with broken lords and make them feel closer to their background story (not sure which form would be optimal):



Dust to dust - Gain 50% of industry cost of destroyed enemy stacks as dust.

Reapers of souls - when conquering a city you gain x% of its food stock as dust. Population is reduced to 1 and you get full ownership instantly. (I've always found it weird how living pop instantly converts to BL pop).

Chivalry(negative trait, gives you extra points) - Bribe is not available and to declare a war you need an active warning that was issued at least 2 turns ago.



BL stating hero with army defense 2 and dust efficiency 2 is fine IMO.



Units are decent, but ryder should get its lifesteal buffed (maybe 30% of damage dealt?). Also I think healing cost should scale with unit industry cost to avoid it being essentially free later on.

Another big post, Roving clans this time.



Roving clans seem to be one of the stronger factions, maybe second to Vaulters only. However if you look at their traits most of them seem to be quite trashy. Let's see what makes them strong.



Point wise they are sitting at 100/80, however it should really be 90/80 due to quite silly oversight (rookery).

• Peace and prosperity (10 pts) - May be ok when playing against AI, I doubt players would gladly sign these though. Price is a bit too high for what it does IMO.
• Make trade not war(-5 pts) - One of the playstyle defining traits and actually isn't that bad if you consider the rest of the setup.
• Mercenary comforts (20 pts) - If you give smth an x2 buff either the original was too weak or the result would be OP. I haven't played with mercs enough to say if its the former or the latter, but I would rather buff mercs across the board while reducing this to 150% and making it cheaper. Not sure the buff is really needed though. Right now they looked very strong midgame with the x2 buff to me. Lategame tier 3 weapons will change this but you need to make it to lategame to see it happen.
• Insider trading (5 pts) - trash trait imo, I would buy it if it costed 1 pt.
• Cuts both ways(10 pts) - While playing with the AI this has proven to give very little profit. Not sure how that will change in multiplayer, but it needs more testing. Also, to be balanced with any number of players it should be inversely proportional to the player number. From my current experience with it I wouldn't pick it.
• Keys to the market(10 pts) - Could be decent in multiplayer, but in singleplayer it's very bad
• Brace Yourself (-5 pts) - Why the hell would I pick a trade penalty as a trader faction?
• Rookery(10pts) - WHAT IS THIS THING DOING HERE??? It's not a tech anymore! Why it still can be picked as a starting tech?! - so 90/80 pts in reality.
• Imperial coinage(15 pts) - this is an age 2 tech at age 1 and buying luxuries can be useful early on, but I don't think it's worth 15 points
• Mercenary market(15 pts) - By the time you have dust for it you can research it conventionally. Definitely not worth 15 points.
  
  

Affinity: Nomadic cities - can relocate cities and districts. Also gives you Privateers in age 2 (even though it does not mention it). Relocating cities is situational, but can be useful, privateers at age 2 with mercenary comforts is very good.



Overall the traits look pretty bad. So what makes clans one of the better factions? 3 main things I would say:

• Base unit speed 6+. This means 50% faster exploration, more gains from ruins, faster settlers etc. This comes essentially for free.
• Privateers at age 2 and OP mercenary comforts. Pretty self explanatory.
• Very good techs boosting trade as rewards for racial quests. I think other races should be balanced around this level to make completing main quest more attractive.
  
  

From all these only mercenary comforts cost extra points on top of the affinity. I've made two custom races emphasizing different aspects of the clans playstyle picking more useful traits, needless to say they ended up much more powerful if not blindly OP. These are by no means fully optimized of course, I just wanted something solid for the corresponding playstyle.



Nomads 80/80

• Fast travelers 2/2
• Language Square
• Search Party
• Offense first
• Optimal defense
  
  

Travel at 8-11 (hero +2 amulet +1) speed on the map, search all the ruins, take all the quests, discover all the regions, colonize whatever you want. Defense and offense buffs were taken for an extra edge over roaming armies and villages, however you can take mercenary comforts or anything else you want instead.



Traders 80/80

• Make trade not war
• Fast travelers 1/2
• Businessman 3/3
• Merchants 2/2
• Mercenary comforts
  
  

Have all the dust in the world and mercs will kill whoever tries to oppose you.



Ok, so what can be done in terms of balancing (for both core and custom factions)?



I'd suggest the following:

• Peace and prosperity, Insider trading, Cuts both ways, Keys to the market, Imperial coinage, Mercenary market costs reduced. Cuts both ways profit rebalanced to depend on player # (and probably boosted).
• Mercenary comforts nerfed, cost reduced
• Clans unit speed reduced. Clans get Fast travelers instead. (to avoid stupidly fast custom clans)
• Wells of dust and trader's tents can use a nerf, unless other all other factions will be granted equally powerful tech through quests.
  
  

Starting hero has health boost 2 and dust efficiency 2 so it's pretty well rounded and I'd leave it this way.



With regards to units, Clans units are pretty good imo (without being OP), with the exception of Yirmak, which doesn't really offer smth new apart from higher base damage (which will be negligible with high tier equipment). Maybe circular attack can work here, but stats will have to be readjusted for it a bit.



More thoughts on other factions later...

yes Broken Lords are lords of broken mechanics. they will fix some of them as they already said. It will be possible for them to settle cities and ryders to be able to heal something, not 3 hp per attack

Gameslayer989 wrote:
Just to clarify, the proliferator is actually ranged. They have a standard range of 3 units and can use the unsteady debuff from at range. Honestly I don't like to have necrodrones in my army, instead flooding the place with foragers with proliferators hiding behind doing some nice, if unreliable, damage

oO' Guess I should autocombat less. They definetely were melee some time ago. Well, given that the situation is a bit better, however they still can not compete with real shooters like orcs if you're lucky enough to get them. I'd say they can safely lose ''low damage" and still be well balanced, since they can't do anything other than shoot in combat. It's a kinda hard to balance a unit based on its out of combat value.

Sahoj wrote:
I found the Broken Lords to be nasty in human hands among some newbie level play on a small 4 player map with 3 players. (Others were Vaulters and Wild Walkers)



The Broken Lords found the Vaulters early (turns 40-60ish) and handed them a beatdown. +1 Broken Lords.



Around turn 50ish the Wild Walkers found the Broken Lords and the factions squabbled and fought heavily over a heavily forested region. Broken Lords broke the Wild Walkers here and took the region. +1 Broken Lords.



Vaulters recovered during the Broken Lords/Wild Walkers war and flew in and broke the military might of the Broken Lords. Then our game desynced crazy and we couldn't get it to run anymore. At this point our alliances shifted as the Vaulter's player became dominant and we were starting to work to tag team him down.



The Broken Lords player more or less won on two battle fronts at the same time. Admittedly - I didn't have anything to hard counter his troops (I was the Wild Walkers) and focused on taking out his strong units one by one so he couldn't break through to my other regions in strength. His healing ability and durability allowed him to win both early 'wars' with the Vaulters and Wild Walkers - if he would've focused one of us down we couldn't have stopped him.



I'm not sure if struggling AI should account for balancing a faction.

Small map vs wild walkers and vaulters is close to ideal case for BL since they have pretty tanky starting unit with bonus against ranged (stalwarts), so in open combat their starting army has good chances. However with a careful defensive strategy on vaulters/wild walkers side they should not be able to deal major damage and take cities. This needs more practice to be proven of course. However, economy wise they would fall far behind very very fast, I'd say more like after 50 turns rather than 150. When your only chance to win is to rush on a small map I would say this is bad balance.

Gameslayer989 wrote:
Just to clarify, the proliferator is actually ranged. They have a standard range of 3 units and can use the unsteady debuff from at range. Honestly I don't like to have necrodrones in my army, instead flooding the place with foragers with proliferators hiding behind doing some nice, if unreliable, damage

Well, that would work because Foragers seem got buff after the game release; during beta Foragers are pretty shitty.



Overall Necrophage's current weakness is their hero is too slow...

Sahoj wrote:
The Broken Lords player more or less won on two battle fronts at the same time. Admittedly - I didn't have anything to hard counter his troops (I was the Wild Walkers) and focused on taking out his strong units one by one so he couldn't break through to my other regions in strength. His healing ability and durability allowed him to win both early 'wars' with the Vaulters and Wild Walkers - if he would've focused one of us down we couldn't have stopped him.

Broken Lords' issue is long term, like turn 150+... Technically BL is a biltzekrieg faction that must attack others early otherwise it would lose the population war in long term.

I found the Broken Lords to be nasty in human hands among some newbie level play on a small 4 player map with 3 players. (Others were Vaulters and Wild Walkers)



The Broken Lords found the Vaulters early (turns 40-60ish) and handed them a beatdown. +1 Broken Lords.



Around turn 50ish the Wild Walkers found the Broken Lords and the factions squabbled and fought heavily over a heavily forested region. Broken Lords broke the Wild Walkers here and took the region. +1 Broken Lords.



Vaulters recovered during the Broken Lords/Wild Walkers war and flew in and broke the military might of the Broken Lords. Then our game desynced crazy and we couldn't get it to run anymore. At this point our alliances shifted as the Vaulter's player became dominant and we were starting to work to tag team him down.



The Broken Lords player more or less won on two battle fronts at the same time. Admittedly - I didn't have anything to hard counter his troops (I was the Wild Walkers) and focused on taking out his strong units one by one so he couldn't break through to my other regions in strength. His healing ability and durability allowed him to win both early 'wars' with the Vaulters and Wild Walkers - if he would've focused one of us down we couldn't have stopped him.



I'm not sure if struggling AI should account for balancing a faction.

MANoob wrote:
Given that it's also melee and other creatures can have useful weapon abilities as well, I would much rather have a necrodrone in my army for a difficult battle. I'm not saying that proliferators are horrible in combat, but for me they are hard to justify based on combat ability alone.

Just to clarify, the proliferator is actually ranged. They have a standard range of 3 units and can use the unsteady debuff from at range. Honestly I don't like to have necrodrones in my army, instead flooding the place with foragers with proliferators hiding behind doing some nice, if unreliable, damage

That's the charm of the Necrophages.