Thoughts on Broken Lords - What if their hit points were adjusted for the amount of dust the player has in the bank? I also feel like they could use some more unique dust-enhancing options in their tech tree to replace the lack of food options as their tech tree feels a little bland.

Not sure if it's a right place but I want to share my experience of playing for Necrophage.



I've played for them yesterday and found their Parasite ability kinda cheating any bugged...

I took only 2 Proliferators and after few battles I've got 16 Foragers in my army, with limit of 6. Oo

The first problem that I met: noone could defeat my army anymore and there was no reason to go on playing.

The second: I had to use auto-fight only or I got an exception on deployment phase.

I noticed Foragers needs a lot of gold, but this is not enough to controll their population.

Plus I can always sell them for 500+ Dust for unit.



In the same time, looks like AI doesn't know about it and loses every game I played against him, I haven't even seen him, some another AI does a job for me.

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.

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.

badken wrote:
EcthelionHelm specifically used the word "nerf".



I'm not overly concerned with balance changes, but to keep the single player game interesting, some factions should be more powerful than other factions. I am not interested in making custom factions, that is way more complexity than I want to deal with. My main concern is that the main factions not get "over-rebalanced" to suit multiplayer without regard to keeping the single player game interesting. While multiplayer can be fun, my guess is that like most computer strategy games, people playing multiplayer are a small minority of players (see this article at Rock Paper Shotgun for an interesting case study). Also, I prefer the single player game, so I selfishly want it to get the most developer attention.

Every baseline faction should be equally capable of winning in a game. Just in different ways. Making factions lopsided doesn't make single player interesting, it guts the number of playable factions. Which is not, in fact, a good thing.



If you want single player interesting you want all the factions balanced and good at different things, or similar things in different ways. It's not about making things balanced for multiplayer, it's about making things fair and balanced in every game mode.



The last thing we need is some base factions being several times more effective at accomplishing a specific goal than other factions, or one faction several times better at accomplishing all specific goals than any other faction. I'm looking at you Vaulters.



That doesn't make single player interesting. Interesting is everyone having a fighting chance and having to claw through 3+ opponents who are actually a challenge. Improve AI, balance factions. It'll be a lot better game in ALL respects for it.