ChrisAdams3997
Prince
I know about the quads, don't worry they are still nice, beautiful, and expensive. These were only a couple of cases where a unit and it's upgrade were left the same cost. For instance the eagle thopter and buzzard thopter both had the same production cost, same with rocket artillery and the much more powerful missile launcher. I think there might have been one other pair like this, but I don't recall off the top of my head. An upgrade unit should always cost at least a little more than the previous unit, and I could only see this as something missed before? Those kind of things aren't uncommon when large scale XML changes are made to lots of units. If there was a specific reason for either of the cases above, let me know, but it seemed unlikely.
A related thing a saw that might also need to be changed, though I didn't touch it yet (might have been intentional) is the bombard damage of the rocket artillery/howitzer (Tier2 units). Both are 8%, same as Maula Mortars, while the missile launcher jumps up to 18%, then jonly up to 22% for the assault cannon. Intentional or do you know?
Not really. First strikes are a funny thing, because their usefulness is highly dependent on the combat ratio of the two units involved. When you already are much more powerful than who you are fighting, they have a larger impact, and where the other guy is more powerful, their impact is lessened. I covered some of the math about this using a few extreme cases in this post. This makes them hard to balance since they can be both overpowered and underpowered at the same time. However, since taking first strikes usually (though not with siege since they lack combat promos, etc.) means giving up more powerful +%combat promotions, the drill line has always been considerably weaker in 95% of cases than nearly any other option.
Siege units are all too often involved in attacking well defended cities where, unless you have a great tech lead, you are fighting at a combat ratio disadvantage. The traditional drill line gave so very little addition to survival chances in such cases, you were always better off taking barrage (at least do more collateral before dying/retreating) or accuracy (never attack with them, just take down the city defenses), drill just wasn't a good third option since it added so little to your odds. What I've mostly done is to condense the normal 4 promotions down to 3 so each is a little more potent and actually will be useful, but the total available remains mostly constant. If you really thought they were useful enough to take before, then I apologize, we disagree
. Of course if it's needs more balancing, I'm all ears on what people experience in game, particularly if it becomes a dominant option compared to the other two promotion lines.Yep, this is of course coming from the discussion on the Organized trait. Hopefully I didn't overdue it, it's harder to test late game mechanics as I'm always having to start new games when developing. But my guess from the usual late game surpluses is it'll play out alright. And give more usefulness to the poor organized trait.
It's for now the extension of David's original system as it'll take some work to put in what we've discussed. That's slated for the next patch.
. It just can't be made too powerful where surviving becomes a given, as that would push players from ever taking barrage since it's the naturally riskier promotion line. 
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