I feel like the importance of a specific unit line waxes and wanes with eras in VP. For example, knights are super good for their time period. Artillery and Rocket Artillery are amazing for siege when they come on line. Gatling Guns are so good I consider them the best unit for their time. Tercio are solid, and the fusilier is a very major upgrade of melee infantry power when it first hits the field.
In the late game, Rocket Artillery and Modern Armor are some of the dominant units... with carrier + planes adding strong naval support, and bazookas/helicopters/mech infantry taking a back seat. That is not unique to the late era, its just another wax and wane of unit roles.
The thing is in medieval era every unit has a specific role.
- Knights are the most expensive (plus strategic resource requirement) and powerful spearhead units best used to find weak points into enemy lines and capitalize on that.
- Heavy Skirmishers are harassing units that used to wear down enemy lines with constant hit-and-run attacks. Used primarily on open terrain. Also quite expensive and require resources.
- Pikemen are excellent and cost effective anti-cavalry infantry. Especially in defense formations used to protect ranged units from Knight attacks (but less against Skirmishers).
- Longswordsmen are quite expensive jack of all trades infantry used as meat shields. Also can deal with Pikemen quite well and also attacks cities.
- Crossbowmen are slow but long ranged infantry that is better used behind lines of Longswordsmen or Pikemen.
- Trebuchets are siege weapons specializing in city bomboardment.
But in the late game there is no point to build certain units. Why would I build Bazookas when there are better anti-armor units like Rocket Artillery and Gunships? Why would Rocket Artillery have anti-armor bonuses anyway? It's practically more advanced archery unit with better range, RCS and hefty bonuses against Armor and Cities. Gunships are basically specialized anti armor units and nothing else.
We certainly could attempt to fix that, but I'm not sure if we should....I think there is some uniqueness to letting different unit lines shine at different times in the game....and it also helps weaken the power of upgrades (as you keep upgrading a unit line at some point your going to hit its "weak time" and may want to branch into other lines).
What do you think about removing anti armor promotion from Rocket Artillery? This way it will make more sense to build Bazookas or Gunships. Latter would also benefit from additional mobility. Say, one more mobility point.
As far as GDR and Xcoms go, I feel like VP has done well to make this solid parts of the late era, instead of the gimmicky units they were before. If people wanted to reflavor them (aka new portrait, new animation, new name) as a MOD MOD, I think that's a fine idea....but that goes beyond balance, you would need new artwork, etc.
To be honest I would have replaced them with more units for Ranged Naval (+1) and Archery (+1) lines.
How making units more specialized will affect AI capabilities in warfare?
There are already late game unit mods that add more air and naval units that you can download if you like.
Do you have any suggestions other than Advanced Naval Warfare mod?
