Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
I thought about that and it makes sense except to overthink it disrupts the simplistic balance points and makes balance conditional rather than simply applicable, meaning to really get a comparison of 'value' would then mean taking stock of the % of qualifying tiles on the map for said bonus to apply. If that makes sense... It's more realistic that way, yes. I assume that the Bottleneck promos give the hero the insight to find an appropriate position for a bottleneck to apply no matter where they might find it because we are always looking at map tiles that are actually not all that zoomed in and highly realistic to begin with. Even if it's a small cave or river channel or rocky outcropping in an otherwise flat plain, there's almost always a way to set yourself up properly SOMEWHERE in a tile that represents a few hundred miles by a few hundred miles. The realism is certainly stretched by the simplicity of it. And yet then I get folks getting on me for being too worried about realism and not enough about basic game comprehendability.Perhaps Bottleneck and Swarm should be (slightly) terrain dependent? Mountains and Forests should not be good swarm terrain, whereas Bottlenecking should not work so well in completely open terrain without rivers - with rivers, you can still get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatius_Cocles .
Bottleneck doesn't work well against warlords or hunters and not too great against scouts or criminals and powerful solitary hunting animals.@Thunderbrd
At low unit levels, very much so.
But if you factor in that Might adds at best 10% STR per point to Heroes (Heroes are 10+ base STR), while it adds at worst 12% STR per point to stacks (the strongest normal Neanderthal unit is 7 STR, I think - and that is multiplied alongside the base STR via Merging, increasing the bonus rather nicely)... and then you also factor in Quality (another multiplier that affects stacks much more heavily than singular units), well, I'm not sure this +300% Bottleneck thing stays as impressive, not to mention that it only works against Merged stacks, but does nothing against strong singular units (say, bandits), so you can severely cripple an anti-stack Hero with a sneaky bandit gang attack, whereas the stack's bonuses are universal against any type of an enemy.
To sum up: at seriously high levels, I'd really doubt that Heroes are that much of a good choice, still. Just my opinion, of course.
BUT - you pointed out bandits so I wanted to clarify something you might not realize about units like those (ruffians) - they start at extremely high volumes as it is. They cannot merge nor split but that is not to say they are singular volume units. Most units aren't solo volume units - that's what makes Heroes so powerful with Bottleneck.
Take for example, you train a Rifleman. This is a Volume rank 5 (battalion) unit without any merges at all, whereas the Hero is volume 1. The Prehistoric units aren't as volume high due to them having more natural strength (quality) vs later more civilized people who lose that quality edge slowly and find it replaced by volume to compensate.
Thankfully as well, Heroes often can still earn an extra quality jump too now and then, which just makes the bottlenecking that much more powerful.
Again, nothing doesn't have a counter so one can never argue there's a perfect solution to solve all problems. Right now there kinda is and it's still a broken point I'm working on fixing but not gonna open that can of worms to this discussion lol.