Ahriman
Tyrant
I'm mostly fine with including as many tabletop units as possible with one particular exception; the tabletop game has a wide variation in the detail in which it describes factions. I worry that adopting this doctrine is going to cause problems like in your design for dark elves and high elves. Dark and high elves are really detailed - there are tons and tons of units available to them because they've been around since the very beginning of warhammer and so they have tons of canon to support them. If you include every unit available to them, then you will have those factions able to do everything (ie great monsters and great melee and great cavalry and great magic etc. etc), and to have many more specialist units available (each faction should have roughly the same total number of national units).
Each faction should have roughly the same units; if Dark Elves have 35 units while Skaven and Dwarves only have 20, then we have a problem.
I don't know how feasible this is, but its worth thinking about if you can come up with enou
But do you really want any faction able to recruit ogres? I don't really see high elven ogres around.
Why? Its not like it troubles the AI (which was the problem for it in FFH for eg); I see warchariots and knights and cannons built by the AI every game. So, what is the problem with forcing some slight specialisation between cities? I agree that its nice for standard/core units to not need a building (unlike FFH, where training yard is needed for swordsman, hunting lodge needed for hunters, etc.), but I fail to see why you can't have a requirement for really advanced units.
You can't easily implement more than 2 techs to require any given unit. So you would have to implement this by broadening tech requirements for the techs that grant the units (I'm not sure if there is a restriction on the number of techs another tech can require). I'll develop some ideas for this.
I don't think these proposals are possible. In particular, I don't think the AI will be able to handle them. They would also be massively hard to balance with free xp from buildings and structures.
Remember that fundamentally the human player is much much better at preserving their units than the AI. Very often in a human vs AI war, the AI has superior production capacity (because of dogpiling or just difficulty level bonuses) but the human superior intelligence, so the AI is constantly producing new units to throw at the human, who is trying to cleverly use tactics to preserve their army.
This simple fact (humans use older units, AI uses more recently constructed units) means that these proposals are unlikely to work.
I think the best way to go is to stick with "high elven population", "greenskin population" type buildings that are present in all of a factions cities, and can give things like food bonus/penalty, milproduction bonus/penalty, etc., and leader traits.
So a high elven army (slow city growth, units with 2 moves and first strike chance, expensive units) will still play quite differently from a greenskin army (raider promotion autopillaging, city attack bonuses, huge low-tech army from military production bonuses/research penalties).
I find that the game plays very differently on high difficulties. The AI fields a much larger army and is much further ahead in tech. I'm going to be behind in tech leader(s) most of the game, where as on low difficulties you can easily dominate the AI and walk over whoever you like with superior units.
with Chronicles and get to +2 with Contemplation. Carnival and maybe Gallows could easily go; the others have some function and enable city specialization; there's some role for cheap early walls before later access to Castles (maybe rename to Palisade?)
