Just to start to compile some changes I'd like to see:



With Ardent Mages being bugged for so long and their ranged unit no longer being blindly OP I'd really suggest filling out more points in their faction. They're preeeeeetty bad.



Drakkenling's 18 damage is bizarrely low for it's industry cost. 22+ seems more appropriate. Wyvern and Elder Dragon also need the ability to use boots so they don't fall off end game. I'd also suggest adding Naive to them to fill them out at 80 points as it would be a trait they would have anyway. Their hero having the health3 capacity might be okay still, but that would be what I would look at if they were OP after these changes.



Broken lords also need more points to fill out their faction. Coming in at a surprisingly low 55 points. I don't know really what to suggest.



Vaulters could straight up lose Veins of Auriga and still be a strong faction.



Wandering Clans units should also have boots so they remain useful late game, but in turn their mercenaries should really go down to 150% HP (with the appropriate point reduction on that skill.)



Wild Walkers could really use a kick somewhere. They aren't BAD, they just aren't as good as the top factions. They also come in at only 65/80 points.

Lucky Nasarog I had to abandon my cultists cause of a Fatal Error caused by Conversion



Well, I have no clue of what I could change now (im really bad at balancing ^^) but tell me, Balance mod is something I can do, without much work (a little bit... But I love modding..)



Be precise in your suggestion please

The factions need lots of balancing, no doubt, but thankfully I'm not seeing any major game crushing bugs in my playthroughs.

Ardent mages were really useful when they first launched, but they've nearly consistently broken them in every patch since then, to the point where I doubt many if ANY players have put any meaningful time in to them. First it was their hero getting low damage and their ranged units getting low damage. Then that was removed and they jacked up their ranged units stats. Then THAT was removed and then their melee unit went to 32 HP for no reason. And now they're at launch with no real testing, so.... yeah.



Broken Lords have nearly consistently been the worst faction in the game, but I suspect the AI is just bad at knowing how to play them and is doing things wrong. Broken lords by mid game stop using industry at all and just put everything in to dust generation and buyout troops if need be. Player Broken Lords aren't that bad, but AI broken lords is "free land here"



Roving Clans 200% HP on mercenaries has been broken ever since mercenaries havn't been terrible. Also, I feel trade routes end up giving way too much dust by mid-end game. It's not uncommon for like 80% of your dust to come from trade routes (on any faction mind you.)



The Drakken sit at a (IMO) poor balance base. Their hero gets the health3 upgrade which means their main force is going to be completely overstat. In age 2 it's not uncommon to have 400 HP on drakkenlings. HOWEVER, their drakkenlings are a little understat and wyverns are wayyy understat to make up for the uber powerful hero buff. This means as the game progresses and you have 3-4 armies or garrisons that don't have your hero booosting them up that they start to get a little weak. The Drakkenling is reasonably comparable to the Stalwart, except the Drakkenling costs more industry. The wyvern also doesn't get boots so by age 3 or 4 you'll just stop building them entirely due to boot upgrades mattering a lot. Other than THAT though, the Drakken just really don't have much going for them. I'd put them definitely in the bottom 4 factions.



Vaulters are still OP with their 200% strategic resources that needs to be lowered to 150%. If they get tier 3 glassteel there's very little anyone can do to stop their onslaught of mega troops backed by their super expansion and incredibly low expansion disapproval.



Wild Walkers just do their thing. they're a strong early game faction that can use their early game to bully around other factions, but again I suspect the AI isn't using them properly.



If I had to rate the factions I'd probably go:



1. Vaulters/Wandering Clans.

2. Vaulters/Wandering Clans.

3. Necrophage.

4. Wild Walkers

5. Drakken.

6. Broken Lords.

Ardent Mages and Cultists I wouldn't rate due to being too much or having too many rebalances on their units to give a good idea on where they sit.



Also worth noting: The Ardent Mages, Broken Lords, Wild Walkers, and Drakken all do not use their full 80 faction points, while other factions can use even 110 out of the 80 allotted. This might be a good time to look at WHY they use so few points. ALSO worth noting is that while same base abilities are good (such as recycling) some base abilities are just terrible (such as the Cultist's one.) That might explain why some factions are overstat and some understat, but then it wouldn't explain why they all get the same 80 points to being with in custom faction. If I took necrophage affinity with conversion I'd have a much better cultist faction. The Vaulters have a ridiculous 115 points yet their holy resource ability is also extremely good.

Wow... A lot to read there. I have even more work now. I will take the best ideas of you all and add them to my balance mod

Gameslayer989 wrote:
Just want to say demanding gods is in my opinion actually incredibly useful as the necrophages purely because of their high military playstyle. In order to keep your people happy you need either a ton of boosters, or just this. It prevents a lot of the cities you made yourself from becomming unhappy as a result of your warlike ways (aka expansion dissapproval). The way I see this is more of a Choose to either have population growth or +30 happiness on a city. If this was changed to empire wide it would very rapidly spiral out of control. Prevent the growth of 1 city to increase all cities happiness by 30 is way too much. Increasing happiness by 60 also feels way too much. I think perhaps you've been using this on cities with 5-6 population, as opposed to the 9-10 size cities, which yeah it's not worth it then.

I do agree that I may have gone a bit over the top with the suggested buffs here, but let's compare with the central market, which is the same age tech and costs just as much science. It gives slightly less approval (25), but also +10% food & dust at high approval. It costs 250 industry(one time) and 2 dust per turn to maintain. Going from 9 to 10 pop costs about 700 food and would give you +30 approval for 10 turns. That's 70 food/turn, not counting extra resources that this extra pop unit could have harvested, a bit steep IMO. At the very least the duration should be much longer. An empire wide buff was probably a bad idea since it can go out of control with 10+ regions owned.

Gameslayer989 wrote:


Well remember that if you go over the cap your army starts costing a ridiculous amount of dust to maintain, in that way I think it's balanced. Also don't forget that ideally roaming armies should basically not exist after a certain amount of turns as all villages are pacified. I will say however that I do think they perhaps shouldn't sell for as much. Foragers really arn't that great of units by themselves, so I think it's fine if the necro's have virtually infinate of them, because a properly equiped army can deal with unequipped foragers very easily. the problem instead lies in the fact that for every forgaer I sell I can retrofit 1.5-2 other foragers with the dust. This then becomes a problem.



Also, proliferators are not that bad of a unit to have in combat. Can't they equip the weapon that inflicts the Unsteady debuff to enemies? That thing can be very strong

I agree with the most stuff here, however situationally you can have an opportunity to farm a huge army for a short time, win the battles you need, and then sell it and maintain a positive balance. It's also possible to have uncolonized regions on a big map that could spawn very big armies later on. This is very difficult to account for, so I'd say it is broken under certain conditions, even though it can be fine at other times. Unsteady debuff brings proliferators target to its own attack level so to speak, even then not quite and only at higher weapon tiers. 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.

MANoob wrote:

Demanding gods should have double effect and duration or be empire wide. Another thing I would do is replace Alchemist's Furnace with Mill Foundry as a starting tech.

Just want to say demanding gods is in my opinion actually incredibly useful as the necrophages purely because of their high military playstyle. In order to keep your people happy you need either a ton of boosters, or just this. It prevents a lot of the cities you made yourself from becomming unhappy as a result of your warlike ways (aka expansion dissapproval). The way I see this is more of a Choose to either have population growth or +30 happiness on a city. If this was changed to empire wide it would very rapidly spiral out of control. Prevent the growth of 1 city to increase all cities happiness by 30 is way too much. Increasing happiness by 60 also feels way too much. I think perhaps you've been using this on cities with 5-6 population, as opposed to the 9-10 size cities, which yeah it's not worth it then.

Proliferators are kinda broken. They are not very useful in combat due to low damage, but their special ability can be abused in many ways. For instance they can farm roaming armies and sell spawned foragers on the market (this is actually a good way to get extra cash). Going over the army limit is broken as well since you can spawn a huge army prior to some important battle. If you remove the ability to go over the cap they would instantly become useless though. Maybe a cap can be introduced here, like 2 summoned foragers per proliferator in the army max. But I would rather see them do smth useful in combat (e. g. remove low damage from them and let them spawn a forager from a killed enemy in combat, but lasting only till the end of combat).

[/LIST]

Well remember that if you go over the cap your army starts costing a ridiculous amount of dust to maintain, in that way I think it's balanced. Also don't forget that ideally roaming armies should basically not exist after a certain amount of turns as all villages are pacified. I will say however that I do think they perhaps shouldn't sell for as much. Foragers really arn't that great of units by themselves, so I think it's fine if the necro's have virtually infinate of them, because a properly equiped army can deal with unequipped foragers very easily. the problem instead lies in the fact that for every forgaer I sell I can retrofit 1.5-2 other foragers with the dust. This then becomes a problem.



Also, proliferators are not that bad of a unit to have in combat. Can't they equip the weapon that inflicts the Unsteady debuff to enemies? That thing can be very strong

Posting thoughts on other factions as promised. Necrophages will be next. Prepare for another wall of text.



Necrophages are a faction that kind of works gameplay wise, however it actually got worse since the initial early release in terms of playstyle. Mainly because some of its traits got much weaker.



Going one by one:

• Agriculturally challenged - this trait is one of the parts defining faction's playstyle since it forces you to either get extra food from stockpiles through affinity or conquer villages to utilize cull the herd, since you don't have parley. I would never pick it for a custom faction though
• Cellulose mutation - This is one of the main reasons default necrophages are still decent. It doesn't synergize well with anything else they have though.
• Cull the herd - This is actually pretty good for the cost, and kind of defines the playstyle as mentioned earlier.
• Fast epimorphosis - this seems quite weak and not worth the points.
• Pitiless - Another defining trait, that suggests that necrophages should be an aggressive faction. Pretty good for a warmonger for extra points.
• Will of the hive - This was never rebalanced after the combat system change, so now it's complete garbage even at 5 point cost.
• Cannon fodder - for some reason the devs decided that this racial tech should be separate from affinity and worth extra points... At least this one might be worth it, although I thing the price could be lower.
• Demanding gods - another racial tech coming as an extra for a steep price and a complete garbage. However it's kinda needed to complete one of the faction quests later on.
• Necrodrone - Not the best and not the worst starting tech.
• Alchemist's furnace - Not what I would pick as a starting tech tbh.
  
  

Affinity - grants 120 food stockpiles per 8 cadavers. This means 15 food per unit killed. This used to be much much better and right now is pretty close to useless.



Overall necrophages seem to fit into two playstyles - warmongers and city builders (due to cellulose mutation). However atm their main military traits (food for corpses and +attack for wars declared) are nerfed into oblivion. Also they are a "food" faction looking at their traits and heroes, however builders and warmongers need industry and/or dust. This means that custom wild walkers for instance can be much better necrophages than necrophages themselves.



Ok, let's see what can be done. First of all I would buff up the affinity and will of the hive trait. For instance:

• Recycling - gain one 250 food stockpile per 6 cadavers (as it once was I think). Stockpile techs upgrade this, so you get bigger stockpiles lategame and some scaling. Alternatively, stockpile value should be based on total industry cost of units killed, but that's harder to implement.
• Will of the hive - +10% attack per war declared (capped at 30%) would work better IMO. Cost can be bumped up to 10 in this case. Fast epimorphosis could use a buff as well, 5% is barely noticeable.
• Demanding gods should have double effect and duration or be empire wide. Another thing I would do is replace Alchemist's Furnace with Mill Foundry as a starting tech.
• 
  
  

Necrophages also desperately need smth to boost their production, since they are focused on pop growth I would suggest extra industry per pop. This would go well with the whole "slavery" thematic. This can be another trait akin to cull the herd.

Forced labor - +2 industry per pop per pacified village.



Initial hero is pretty bad as well. I won't go into skill tree balancing here, but starting with slavery (which you can not use until you pacify a village) and attack boost 1 is bad. I would at least give him slavery + damage boost 2 or industry boost 2 + attack boost 2.



Now onto units.

• Foragers - I think they are a bit on the weak side stat wise and don't really have anything going for them after they've lost last stand. Just compare them to warlocks(which cost only 5 industry more) for example. I think they could use another 8-10 damage or 30-40 hp. Hp is probably preferable to make them a tankier alternative to the drones.
• Drones are pretty good, but lack foot slot for no good reason, which gimps them later on a bit. I think they should have fast 1 to compensate for that at least.
• Proliferators are kinda broken. They are not very useful in combat due to low damage, but their special ability can be abused in many ways. For instance they can farm roaming armies and sell spawned foragers on the market (this is actually a good way to get extra cash). Going over the army limit is broken as well since you can spawn a huge army prior to some important battle. If you remove the ability to go over the cap they would instantly become useless though. Maybe a cap can be introduced here, like 2 summoned foragers per proliferator in the army max. But I would rather see them do smth useful in combat (e. g. remove low damage from them and let them spawn a forager from a killed enemy in combat, but lasting only till the end of combat).
  
  

Will post thoughts on other factions later...

mith167 wrote:
I would agree with everyone that broken lords are...pretty broken. Definitely some balance issues, but overall for a game that was just released the balance isn't bad enough for any race to be unplayable.

The horrible part is they're basically ES Sowers, and Amplutude made the same mistakes all over again. It's disappointing, but oh are the lords fun to play.

I would agree with everyone that broken lords are...pretty broken. Definitely some balance issues, but overall for a game that was just released the balance isn't bad enough for any race to be unplayable.

pwk11 wrote:
When some of you say Ardent Mages are weak do you mean on difficulty levels above normal? Because I just wiped out all 3 factions with one leader and 6 zealots pretty easily.

Arden mages are not weak. Arden mages' spells are weak. Not worth using. Like they were not rebalanced for new combat. And pillars' prices are not balanced too. But nothing that could not be done in one simple patch with just numbers. And ofc they need little nerf to stats and little buff to "power trough pain". To make them HAVE TO balance on the edge of living. And maybe let them hurt themselves to gain little dust. That would be PERFECT. Same way as BL heal they would dmg themselves to have more dust and to have more attack, but at the expense of risking their lives.

More pain and dust (magic substance) to arden mages (pain for magic faction).

When some of you say Ardent Mages are weak do you mean on difficulty levels above normal? Because I just wiped out all 3 factions with one leader and 6 zealots pretty easily.

Autocthon wrote:
Yes, they explain badly. No, retuning factions will not hurt faction role or cause a spiral of buffs/nerfs. Sit down. Platy Vaulters or Roving Clans. Now play any other faction. They're miles apart, even when thye militant factions should have better military power they just don't.



Broken Lords are supposed to be militant, yet they don't have the economic base to handle lategame in any feasible strength, nor the production base to churn out their own units.

Ardent Mages are supposed to be flexible and adaptive, yet their primary traits are a weak bag of tricks that scales terribly.

Drakken are supposed to combine defensive military strength (planet police) with strong political power, yet without forcing diplomacy they don't have the military powerbase to command respect from the militarily terrible AI.



A simple tweak, in say a Necrophage Drakken 1v1, would be to increase the defensive power of the Drakken units within their territory. This doesn't give the drakken an offensive advantage, but rather gives an edge when defending against the inevitable rush of Necrophage Infantry. It's not going to water down any roles, but rather strengthen individual gameplay mechanics as they pertain to a role.

These are great ideas. I would like to see some lore buffs. Like make Broken Lords more broken and more lords.

Ryders should life steal something (not 6 HP at max level), stalwards should have been healed when units they attacked this or previous turn died (not only this, cause that makes me wait so everyone can attack to be healed), bishops heal is good, but their dmg is too high. Their opulation: should cost only 10(maybe 20) % more for every city they have. Not like exponential more. They should not be able to bribe (that's really cheap and you would never pay your own soul to someone to be your friend, kill them or do quests). And they should have tech for bonus for armor. (They love dust and they love armor.)

Yes, they explain badly. No, retuning factions will not hurt faction role or cause a spiral of buffs/nerfs. Sit down. Platy Vaulters or Roving Clans. Now play any other faction. They're miles apart, even when thye militant factions should have better military power they just don't.



Broken Lords are supposed to be militant, yet they don't have the economic base to handle lategame in any feasible strength, nor the production base to churn out their own units.

Ardent Mages are supposed to be flexible and adaptive, yet their primary traits are a weak bag of tricks that scales terribly.

Drakken are supposed to combine defensive military strength (planet police) with strong political power, yet without forcing diplomacy they don't have the military powerbase to command respect from the militarily terrible AI.



A simple tweak, in say a Necrophage Drakken 1v1, would be to increase the defensive power of the Drakken units within their territory. This doesn't give the drakken an offensive advantage, but rather gives an edge when defending against the inevitable rush of Necrophage Infantry. It's not going to water down any roles, but rather strengthen individual gameplay mechanics as they pertain to a role.

some things of note:



why should the draken have strong units if they are a race focused on diplomacy and influence victory path.



and how people should defend vs Necrophage since this race supposed to be strong in fights early game and go for the elimination victory path? because if Necrophage gets debuffed they will loose their role.



and if other races get buffed in other ways, the remaining races will have trouble with them, and its a spiral of unbalances that don't reflect the role the races have.





its an rpg with many paths and many things to twick arround. its impossible to have a perfectly balanced game especially in a pure 1vs1 race battle, because one is better than the other in a characteristic and vice versa.



the major keys for balancing are the mercs, and heroes bought in the market, and the assimilation of minor factions, and a little more focus of treaties (the forcing of a short term peace treaty between draken and Necrophage is an example (maybe stupid, but its just an idea) of a balancing strategy that the draken player needs, just to have a chance to excel in his strength vs other players that play other factions. Or vs 2 Necrophage enemies you have the strategy to buy in the market some really strong units that can 1vs1 them in a balanced way in the early game), etc.



but all views on these aspects should be worked on and explained so people can understand the big picture of the strategies that can be used by each faction to control the strengths of other factions and avoid simply the loss of the game (and interest on it) in just a few turns. <-------- really important



and the explaining part is important, because i had some headaches from the lack of info, and to understand some things in this game (building the wonder victory path for the wild walkers you need to do the faction quests until you unlock the actual wonder, is one example) i had to look in the forums and in game info and user manual and on youtube videos and so on and so on, without getting the info i needed (the same goes for city leveling, how to use the diplomacy screen and its unlocks and options and how the AI behaves in a general way to the options). i know that explaining everything is bad because it takes out some interest from exploring the game, but not explaining core game mechanics is also bad, in a way that shows the lack of polishment and effort put into the game.

What has everyone found out about how powerful the different factions are?



A few things I have noticed :



Broken lords are consistently near the bottom / first to be eliminated, etc. Presumably, the AI can't really deal with the absurd dust scaling cost per pop. I know they are supposed to grow through conquest, but the AI isn't very good at it and this cripples them in SP.



Cultists and Roving Clans seem to consistently be near the top.



Cultists seem to have (by far) the best economic heroes. A early +1 fids/pop in everything is great for boosting out your first few buildings or population, and then they have easily accessible +% dust and +% science traits. This also leads to a +%influence trait, and the shared +%all fids traits, without having to 'waste' any points on combat skills as many other faction heroes do.

Broken Lords and Wild Walkers heroes are pretty good at their specialties. Most other heroes are pretty bad economically.



Cultist and Ardent Mages seem to have the best battle heroes (although the wild walker + range upgrade puts them in the running too). Good access to +damage or +health skills, along with a few other important bonuses.



Faction quests seem wildly unbalanced in requirements / rewards. I am getting important armor/weapons techs 2 eras ahead of where I currently am by killing a few neutral units with obsolete equipment. Other times I need to have very specific or high level units, or must have certain extremely rare resources (had half the map, but no mithrate to build an extractor on). Custom hero equipment got from these seems powerful, but is pretty useless - they have only % bonuses. Since all flat attack / damage bonuses come from weapons, swapping out a traditional weapon for a hero only weapon is a great way to gimp yourself.



Ardent Mages seem very weak - with one important exception. Their pillars provide 2 fids, slowly increasing (after researching every upgrade) to 5 fids, or 6 fids with the awesomely expensive tier 6 tech. The tooltip says they are supposed to get up to 16 fids - how the heck I am supposed to get there? Ardent Mages might seem a lot more viable if pillars utility scaled better. Battle spells aren't too much better - the +5 to 10 defense/offsense/health/damage is usually not a big deal. BUT there is also one spell that does an aoe stun. This by itself makes the ardent mages near broken - combined with the ais already mediocre ability to equip units and fight battles, its very easy to conquer anything between my aoe stuns and my aoe archers.

In regards to custom broken lords being good - anything with businessman 3, dust efficiency and cellulose mutation will be good, its just a very powerful combo by itself. Almost any other race would be even stronger with it though. I've played both lords and mages with this setup and mages get a much better growth via food while still having tons of dust (without the need to spend it on pop). You need food tech and buildings of course, but its worth it. Now if lords stayed in their original form (with pop cost not being modified by number of cities) they would be very very strong. Right now however you're screwed if you go wide with them and going tall is not as good.



In regards to default factions being optimized and at the same cap as custom ones - that would work only if all traits are perfectly balanced, which is a good long term goal for balancing, however right now it would be very difficult to achieve since it needs major changes. Otherwise pretty much everyone would end up with same OP traits like cellulose mutation and ditch bad traits, which are plenty, even though they make sense lore wise.



In regards to heroes as part of overall balance - I think they are important, but not as much as some people here think, since it comes down pretty much only to the starting hero and mainly affects early game. Afterwards you have equal chance to hire a hero of any race from my observations. Hero balancing would help diversity though, since with vaulters for instance I almost always pick up Broken Lords (for strategic res) or Cultist (for overall OPness) heroes as governors. Initial hero ends up being an army commander.



Another big problem with custom factions and overall faction design are racial technologies. There's a great deal of inconsistency in them:

[LIST=1]

Some are "baked into" affinity and come for free

Some are externalized and can be picked by everyone

Some are externalized, but can be only picked by certain affinity

[/LIST]



Mages techs make the least sense here. They are available to everyone, but only mages can take arcana level increases, I don't see any logic behind this. This is actually also one of the main reasons for vaulters being so overcapped - their racial techs are expensive traits. Also, I think most racial and starting techs are overpriced in terms of trait points.



I think one of the following approaches should be taken:

[LIST=1]

All racial techs come with affinity and can not be picked by anyone else. Affinity costs readjusted. This is the easiest option in terms of balance.

All racial techs are picked separately for extra points, but only by the faction they were originally designed for

All racial techs are picked separately for extra points by everyone. This is the most difficult to balance and the most customizable option

[/LIST]



Now onto specific faction balance ideas. I think this should be done (and playtested) iteratively, since making major changes at once can break things even more.



Let's start with Ardent Mages. I think the following can be done for now:

• Add businessman 3
• Add landscapist
  
  

This makes sense from flavor perspective and puts them at 82 points. This is slightly overcapped, but the build is far from optimal. But I don't really want them to have dust efficient or cellulose mutation, since that will overlap with Broken Lords and Necrophages.



Spell rebalancing:

• Buffs (defense/attack) give +% instead of a fixed number. I'd say smth in 20-30 range would work. That would make them scale with equipment and be balanced at any tech level. Arcana level increases duration (1-6 turns).
• Heal/Damage spells are trickier to balance, making them percentage based won't work well imo. Buffing them up to smth like 15-90 depending on level can work with the current stats, but needs to be tested.
• Stun spell should either be single target (even then would be pretty OP) or reduce speed/initiative as suggested earlier.
  
  

Pillars should be fixed to scale appropriately. Increasing pillar cost based on # of cities is a no (maybe only the one affecting speed).



In long term I would like to see spells completely reworked though, since current ones look quite uninspired.

Some random suggestions (trying to stay with original names and make some sense):

• Arcana of agility gives a spell that can target a friendly or a hostile troop increasing and decreasing speed respectively (both in combat and on global map). Levels affect increase/decrease and duration. Speed can not be decreased below certain minimum.
• Arcana of matter grants damage shield in combat (like cities do). Hp of shield is percentage based. I don't really understand how "matter" boosts science (unless they materialize some highly inspirational weed), so maybe casting it directly on city to temporarily reduce cost of building and unit construction would make more sense. But science boost works for early game as well.
• Arcana of authority kinda works as is, except for being insanely OP in combat. I would add a cooldown to the stun, make it singe target and turn it into mind control at higher levels. It can also boost morale when cast on friendlies (this can be AOE). On global map, influence boost works as well, however smth more interesting can be done, like pacifying villages or reducing diplomatic action cost (with appropriate spell cost adjustments and cooldowns of course). Personally I would probably make it a spell that can be applied to a friendly or enemy city directly, granting an influence and defense buff/debuff respectively. (Yeah, I don't like the whole pillar mechanic as you may have noticed)
• Arcana of materializing's pillar doesn't make any sense atm since after the fist few it doesn't even pay for itself. The name is very similar to arcana of matter, so tbh I would rename it to smth else. If staying with "materializing" idea it can summon some sort of "dust demon". Can be done both on map and in combat. Materializing a rain of fire works too though, but is not as interesting mechanics wise. It can also create impassable terrain on the map (with cooldown of course, to avoid it constantly blocking someone).
• Arcana of regrowth - apart from boosting food production, can also boost regeneration of nearby troops as well. In combat, rather than giving and instant heal, creates a pillar healing everyone near it each turn (heal strength reduced). I think this would be more interesting mechanically.
  
  

Some other arcana ideas which can either go to ages 5 and 6 or replace the current ones:

• Arcana of precognition. Map - grants vision on certain area, radius and duration depend on level. Combat - grants vision on enemy orders and allows to submit them second.
• Arcana of space. Teleports a troop between two visible tiles (both global map and combat). At higher levels can teleport hostile troops. Max range and cooldown depends on level.
• Arcana of terraforming. Select two tiles. Second tile changes its type to match the first one. Can not create water or impassable terrain. (Same use in combat, for combat its create or remove forest mainly).
• 
  
  

A lot of other interesting stuff is possible, my main point is that magic shouldn't be as bland as it is now.



To be continued with other factions a bit later...

This is my first post ever so sorry if I say things people said and I am not quoting.



I haven't played all the factions and havent really finished any game as any faction other than wild walkers so I will only cover them.



Forest walk is a must but I would not give it at the start, I would give it in a quest in era 1, reasons for this is that lore wise they left the forest and gameplay wise giving it at start may give too much of explore advantage.

Walkers- need a skill (and not something to boost production they already have too much of that) and need to be more tanky since well they are expensive as hell.

Shaman- I would give them a skill to transform into an animal (lore wise this is what they do) when transformed they become cavalry (so cavalry slayer rape them) become melee, lose shaman skills and have a boost in stats (including hp), Id make this skill an ability u can activate in combat, if u don't transform the shaman would have crappy stats but some skills.



I figured wild walkers are powerfull early game depending on ur starting tiles or you can be far behind (I had game where I started in the desert and got destroyed by vaulters) also if u don get enchanted forest or anomalies you will be far behind in tech. If u get nice tiles you will probably be able to bully any race if u change ranger and hero weapon to the longbow (some minor factons still rape you, I play with minor factions on hard), mid and late game is all about having the resources to buy unit with the latest equipment, if u don't get t1 resorces it can go down fast since you will really just have rangers + a minor faction vs real armies (imagine vaulters marines + dawn with titanium equipment)



Sorry for my bad english, it isn't my first language

badken wrote:
The reason I think that differently powered factions make the single player game more interesting is that it offers a different kind of challenge than just raw difficulty setting. It doesn't make some factions more or less playable, it just makes some of them easier. Sometimes I want an easier game, sometimes a little more of a challenge, but I don't necessarily want to bump up the difficulty because that's too much of a challenge. For me, Vaulters were a great introduction to the game, and I sometimes like to play a powerful faction to make things easy and keep the game more relaxing.



Not everyone is always looking for a challenge when they play a game. In fact I've seen studies asking players why they play computer games, and challenge came in 3rd or 4th behind relaxation and pleasure.

If you don't want a challenge play easy mode. That's what it's there for.

EcthelionHelm wrote:
So if I am understanding you - you WANT for certain factions to be definitively worse than others to offer more replayability? Pretty sure that is going to be a minority opinion.



As for the logic of having base factions have a higher point total than the custom cap - base factions tend to have their points spread out all over the place. A custom faction tends to laser focus (broken lords + 30% dust + dust on terrain or all the trade bonuses on clans, etc) a specific trait that the player picks as their preferred strength, while the base factions tend to be more flavorful but less powerful, even with points over cap.

Like I said. In favor of more or less laser focusing the presets. It takes vaulter level of overcapping to make the raw power in the presets "worth it" and by then you've got a faction good at everything to the point where it can theoretically outperform a faction laser focused on a single task, total FIDS is king for building momentum.

I'm so sad that BL are so WEAK. They should get more power at least to get to 80 points as custom faction. They said that not custom factions are stronger than custom to make you choose if you want change or you just want power.



I hope they will balance it out. Cause right now when I play normal(not custom) BL I feel like I'm ruining my game.