Tech tree issues.

[Ahriman]

A few thoughts on the overall tech tree as it currently stands.

1. I dislike how entire tiers of units are all available with a single tech. Feudalism is the biggest culprit here, enabling militia archers, spearmen and swordsmen for most civs. Tournaments also has a lot of units hanging off it, though some also require other techs. Imagine if Longbowmen, Rangers and Champions were all made available by the same tech in FFH. It also feels strange for flavor reasons; while it makes sense that for say Bretonnia Feudalism should be important, would this really be true for all the different civs in the Warhammer world?
Feudalism also supplies some nice civics upgrades, so feels like it provides too much for just one tech.
I'd try and move some of these units out to different techs.

2. Monster bonding is insanely expensive. While the tech for a dragon *should* be expensive given how good they are, this may be a little much, and also the beastmaster and lore of life tier3 mage require this tech at the moment. I'd reduce the cost by ~20-25%, and move these other units to different techs.

3. Hunters and Rangers are too weak, and that makes their tech path not really worth getting. I'd like to add a slight bombardment ability to them, like those on Longbowmen, and try to make them actual skirmish troops. The separate unit bonuses for forest, jungle, tundra and hills all feel a little weak. Maybe combine some of these?

4. I dislike that *every* unit line is dependent on metals. Is there no scope for a unit line that gets its full strength without any metals?

5. The high end of the tech tree still feels a little empty, and many factions only have access to 2-3 high end units. I suspect this is partly because of factions not being "done" yet, but it would be good to think about what else can be worked in. FFH has many different high-end national units (war chariot, knight, beastmaster, marksman, crossbowman, druid, eidolon, paladin, archmage, high priest, berserker) but there aren't many here.
This is particularly true for the less civilized nations; technological civs can get things from the industrial techs, chaos can get stuff from high end chaos (presumably these techs will do more eventually - the Hyperborem sprite is begging for a Bloodthirster) but other civs run out of anything interesting to research for near the top of the tree.
High level techs mostly aren't really significantly more expensive than those that precede them, so once you get to the fairly late game you can get all the high level techs fairly quickly. Though they mostly don't provide that much in the way of bonuses, so I guess they don't justify a higher cost really as it stands.

6. Partly because the lack of heroes (which I'm sure will be added) and religion units (which I hope will be added??) the general variety of units seems a little sparse. I quite liked how we had both swordsmen and axemen; swordsmen were better at attacking cities, while axemen were better at defending stacks. Diversity and combined arms useage is good.

7. While putting a cap of 5 catapults is probably a good idea for human players given how powerful they are with their bombardment ability, it does mean that the AI tends to not have enough for meaningful assaults. Most of the the time the AI just throws huge numbers of units against heavily fortified cities, without using any bombardment beforehand. FFH suffers less from this problem.

8. A lot of things come later than perhaps they should. No meaningful way to reduce city maintenance until courthouses with Civil Service means expanding beyond a handful of cities is likely to lead to a total economy crash. The AI does this pretty often, and even as a player you have to expand much slower than you're used to. No lumbermills, watermills or windmills until a very late game machinery means you'll never see these. And they're mostly pretty weak anyway, given the big bonuses to farms and mines from civics and techs.

9. Lack of victory options. While clearly civs will have their own victory options in a the Rhyes-style scenario, it would be nice if their were there were some more victory options for other games. Cultural victories are not going to be possible given how low low culture is in this mod, religion doesn't work at the moment (and inquisitors are completely superfluous) so domination/elimination is all thats left. Maybe a couple of different options; some kind of evil destroy the world option for chaos civs (from End of Times tech), and some kind of spaceship or alliance type victory using either the Alliance or Covenant systems, or just a tech victory.

Probably some others I've forgotten for now.

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

1. very good observation. i agree, i knew there was something about where units were enabled that i really disliked, and this is it.

2. ive never actually reached this far in the mod *blush*

3. i would like to see skermisher units get a promotion that allows them to randomly ignore terain movement cost for a turn or 2. i think that would make them a littel better. though i think bombardment like longbowmen should be reserved for archers only. dont want to step on their toes ya know?

4. Agree 100%

5. i agree yet again, but i think this issue will be resolved as more civs are fleshed out.

6. Heroes are one of the things im absolutely DYING to begin work on.

7. never noticed this.

8. another good observation.

9. id also like more victory conditions, regiside would be nice for when heroes are implemented i think.

 

[Ahriman]

Regicide sounds problematic.... either it makes the heroes unusable, or having the outcome of the entire game depend on some bad die rolls (attacking at 98%.... oooohh, so sorry, you lose).
AI is also notoriously bad at using their heroes, they die pretty fast.

I have managed once to use the gnome workshop to trigger monster bonding and build a dragon, but that was a Dark Elf game where I was so far ahead by that point that I could get both the Monster bonding prereqs and Invention before any AIs built the workshop. As it is, it costs like 4x as much as other techs.

Oh, and another one:
Technology trading is available too early. Push this back a bit, or all of the civs instatrade all their early techs. As it is I only play with the no technology brokering option.

 

[Ahriman]

Also, stirrups needs to not require iron working. You should be able to get level 2 horses (without the iron bonus, obviously) without having to get iron first. Iron working is too valuable a tech, giving both iron, militia swords and spears *and* jungle clearing.

 

[rocklikeafool]

4. I dislike that *every* unit line is dependent on metals. Is there no scope for a unit line that gets its full strength without any metals?

Um...did you forget the magic line? No magic unit requires metal. They do require the specific college in one of your city to build them. But metal...um, no. Also, I don't think archery requires any metals. Yes, all the melee and mounted require somethin, but that's it.

 

[Ahriman]

Archery units are pathetically weak without metals.

I don't really consider magic a combat line; you're capped on the number of units, and they take a long time to develop, and they can't serve on the frontline. Other than for elves, they don't do much until the late game - by which time you've already got melee, archery and cavalry lines researched.

Basically, if you are an area without metals, magic is not an alternative line that you can take; it won't save you from invasions in the short-medium term. Whereas in FFH, without metal you can get effective horsemen or hunters, and failing that you can cower in cities with archers.

 

[rocklikeafool]

Archery units are pathetically weak without metals.

I don't really consider magic a combat line; you're capped on the number of units, and they take a long time to develop, and they can't serve on the frontline. Other than for elves, they don't do much until the late game - by which time you've already got melee, archery and cavalry lines researched.

Basically, if you are an area without metals, magic is not an alternative line that you can take; it won't save you from invasions in the short-medium term. Whereas in FFH, without metal you can get effective horsemen or hunters, and failing that you can cower in cities with archers.

Lemme point out that archers in FfH are nothin til Longbowmen. And til Longbowmen ya can't use metals for the archery line. Also, btw, most players that I've met won't use any archery units but archer and longbowmen. So, metals are still a significant factor in FfH.

 

[Ahriman]

Though the archery line is weak in FFH, reguar archers are very capable city defenders (esp if on hills) without needing metals. Metal is much less significant in FFH not because of the archery line, but because of the recon line, and because horsemen don't benefit from metals (except tier3).

 

[rocklikeafool]

Though the archery line is weak in FFH, reguar archers are very capable city defenders (esp if on hills) without needing metals. Metal is much less significant in FFH not because of the archery line, but because of the recon line, and because horsemen don't benefit from metals (except tier3).

Well, as the DEs most often (remember they get barbs like damn near insane), I find the ancient archer unit is a capable defender as well. The key in WH imho is to put fortresses (or jus archers til you can build fortresses) and city in key positions.
See, WH is much more warbased than FfH. Yes, FfH is warbased but it also caters to builders. However, WH doesn't really cater to builders, except with the fact that the wonders are there for builders. As a result of WH bein more warbased, it has different and more realistic warfare.
Consider RL history. In this case, let's look at the Philistines. The Philistines bullied everyone in the current "Holy Land" region. Why? They controlled the local source of bronze in the region. (BTW, the philistines were bad archers.) Then there are the Hittites, who bullied the same region and fought over it with the Egyptians. Why? They controlled iron of the Anatolian peninsula.

SO, METAL DOES MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE. And WH reflects that. Strongly so.

 

[frenzyslave]

Archer militia can use metals.

 

[rocklikeafool]

Archer militia can use metals.

Ah, there ya go!

 

[Ahriman]

Exactly.... and archers are weak *without* metals.

Actually, the warhammer mod as it stands is more builderish than FFH. In FFH there are few buildings and they're expensive; there are many more buildings to build in this mod.

And historically, superior metalcrafting very rarely lead to any significant regional power or dominance. Dominance came from political unity and organisation (eg Rome), superior military doctrine or training (eg Prussia), economic power (eg Britain) or brute numbers (Mongols, Russia). Spain had superior late medieval metal-crafting that the rest of Europe, but they were at best a minor power until they got wealth from the new world. Many of the "barbarian" states actually had superior metal armor (and better cavalry) to Roman legions, but were disorganised and so were unable to resist Roman advances.

More importantly, its no fun to be screwed if you don't have any metals near you.

 

[rocklikeafool]

And historically, superior metalcrafting very rarely lead to any significant regional power or dominance. Dominance came from political unity and organisation (eg Rome), superior military doctrine or training (eg Prussia), economic power (eg Britain) or brute numbers (Mongols, Russia). Spain had superior late medieval metal-crafting that the rest of Europe, but they were at best a minor power until they got wealth from the new world. Many of the "barbarian" states actually had superior metal armor (and better cavalry) to Roman legions, but were disorganised and so were unable to resist Roman advances.

Here's my response to your history points:

Spoiler :

Um...Rome controlled the best sources of iron in the known world at the time. Also, their very large sheilds were wat allowed their legion to do wat was known as the "tortoise formation". So, yes, their use of metal did help a lot.

As far as Prussia goes, well, swords and armor were outta style by the 1700 and 1800s. So, imo, that doesn't quite apply in an argument bout metal involvin a Fantasy mod. Since most Fantasy mods (and definitely this one) have magic and middle ages technology.

The Mongols were actually very, very disciplined. Ghengis Khan made sure his troops drilled in Horse Archer tactics on a regular basis. That's why he defeated the Chinese military, which was certainly as large (and prolly larger) as the Mongol Horde.

The Russians, the Red Army, were a prime example of modern military discipline, which is a litte known fact. Even when the Russian army was bein battered by the Afghanis, they still obeyed their officers and kept their despair down inside themselves. It wasn't until Moscow called off the invasion of Afghanistan that the Russians ceased their attacks.

As for the Metal of the Barbarians, well, they never, as a general rule, had a uniform battledress. So, every soldier of the Germanic and Asian hordes that invaded Rome wore watever he wanted to. The only reason the Barbarians Hordes overthrew Rome in the end was because Rome was collaspin economically. Their taxes were too high and inflation was goin crazy. It didn't help that a whole line of weak Emperors did nothin to stop it and only partied all the damn time, satin nothin but their own pleasures. So, eventually, Rome couldn't feild strong nough armies to hold the Barbarians at bay.

Britain was an economic power because it's armies, since the Hundred Years War, had been better trained and had greater faith in their monarchy than many other nation's armies had in their respective monarch. Their trainin and the lines "King and Country" and "God save the King (or Queen)" went very far toward establishin a military tradition of pride and excellent trainin. That made them an economic power, because they essentially conquered all their colonies (stole land from Native Americans [as the USA did later on], took over the rulerships of several Indian rajas and kings, and forced many other countries to give them tribute (Siam, for one). So, their military made them economically strong.

As for Spain, the Native Spaniards weren't the ones who knew better metal makin techniques. It was the Moors who brought that. As the Spaniards slowly took back Spain, they stole these metal makin techniques from the Moors. Also, they suffered from many weak kings and had problems with lords disobeyin their kings. They also had many cruel kings who caused the alienation of their lords. (Consider El Cid, for example, who was cast out of Castile by his king, Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon, and took over the city of Valencia from the moors. He ruled it as his own personal princedom til his death at the hands of a Moorish invasion from North Africa.) So, Spain didn't have the better metal techniques or the strength of good rulers until Ferdinand and Isabella, who sent Columbus to discover the "New World".

Good Historical debate, btw.

More importantly, its no fun to be screwed if you don't have any metals near you.

The reason for that, I believe (based on wat the WH team has told me beforehand), is to encourage warfare. If you lack a resource, which you prolly will at some point, you have to seize it from your rivals. Warhammer is bout warfare, remember that; much of wat is done is to encourage warfare.

 

[Ahriman]

But that argument doesn't work. If your neighbor has copper and you don't, you can't invade them to take their copper, because all their units are better than yours, and there is no non-metal alternative tech path that you could use to have similar strength units.
If anything, metal lack encourages a builder path; if my neighbor has copper and I don't, I am going to try and *avoid* war with them or at least keep it defensive on my part so I can tech up and hope I have iron in my borders.

Historic stuff:

You are correct that there are of course many reasons for (military) dominance of powers. I agree with most of your examples, though what I had in mind was mostly
Napoleonic->WW2 Russia, where its main quality was vast conscript armies
British c19 industrial and imperial economy that allowed construction of a vast navy
Mongol invasions of Europe and mid-east, where sheer numbers spelled doom for the caliphate and eastern european/rus armies.
My point was that superior resource access has almost never been the primary reason for a particular power's military dominance.

As for your only example about metals (Rome)....
Roman shields were made primarily of wood, with the only metal being edging and a reinforcing plate in the center so you could punch with it.
Testudo formations had nothing to do with iron quality or availability; they were about training and discpipline.
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=a5258a2b9d6753cfeab2bd7322386ffd

 

[rocklikeafool]

But that argument doesn't work. If your neighbor has copper and you don't, you can't invade them to take their copper, because all their units are better than yours, and there is no non-metal alternative tech path that you could use to have similar strength units.
If anything, metal lack encourages a builder path; if my neighbor has copper and I don't, I am going to try and *avoid* war with them or at least keep it defensive on my part so I can tech up and hope I have iron in my borders.

That's why most of the early units and several other units can gain the wartatoos promotion. It's sposed to balance out the difference a lil while you're fightin to get copper/iron/meteric iron. So, make sure to research the tech (can't remember which tech makes wartatoos available) for that if you lack metals.

I'll respond to your historical points later.

 

[Masada]

I agree with all your reccomendations, I went even further with mine, ask PL about it

History arguement.

Spoiler :

I think I’m going to call BS on the British example, what a load of rubbish. The British army was notorious for being incompetent and poorly led, it was competent from around the 13th Centaury onwards, briefly it might actually revive for a moment think Wellington and then generally slide back into uselessness; it quite simply wasn’t needed. The Scots, Irish and Welsh were never serious threats for long, and even if they had won would have been driven out pretty quickly afterwards. The fleet was ascendant, and all important, British military thinking from the end of the 100 years war onwards centred on the role of the Navy, the army was seen as a necessary evil, especially after Charles II and Crowell in the Civil War. With muskets and rifles its unsurprising that even with an incompetent military made up of the dregs of English society, or god forbid the Scots, Irish or Welsh and normally led by the second or third born sons of the Nobility it would win. The British army spent most of its time killing natives in the Colonies, British policy with regards to Europe was to make sure the balance didn’t swing by to much and otherwise to stay the hell away from it.

Britain was an economic power because lo and behold it nice things like a Parliament, a Constitutional Monarchy (and before that had a King with limits placed on his power), rule of law, had a natural advantage with regards to transportation ie the sea, and after the Dutch had the most sophisticated capital system in the world. Funnily enough because it had a Parliament and a limited constrained monarchy it dodged the bullet of having a single person who may or may not be an idiot on the throne (sure you end up with competent even brilliant kings, but not often), combined that with a rule of law which provided incentives for people to actually manufacture stuff unlike say France where the King could if he felt like it decide he wanted to make all the cloth manufacturers ban mechanical looms (France was the most centralised and economically destructive nation before the advent of the Soviet Union), transport helps a great deal it increases the efficiency of your economy and what really helped the British was that because the government could borrow massive amounts of capital it could keep on fighting basically indefinitely (it has exhibited this on a number of occasions, the Napoleonic Wars, the Second World War and surprisingly the Anglo-Dutch wars where immediately after the Civil War in engaged the economic superpower of the world and humbled it in a series of wars).

Rocklikeafool is right, the Mongol armies never had in excess of half a million men, they probably conquered most of what they achieved with troops between 80,000 to 200,000 they were extremely competent soldiers and incredibly disciplined. Tactics that involved riding away from enemies while shooting, drawing them into ambushes and then promptly cutting them to pieces requires a great deal of discipline, it stands in stark contrast to French discipline which tended to involve charging all day and committing virtual suicide for honour…

The Red Army walked into Afghanistan and came out a wreck; the Soviet Union put two full guards’ armies in Afghanistan and lost. The Soviet Union only had four in East Germany waiting to charge through the Fulda Gap, to conquer Afghanistan they were using fully half the strength of what they intended to beat NATO with. The Soviet Union collapsed because of Afghanistan, Soviet military spending could not keep up with maintaining two full armies in the field and loosing something like a fifth of their operational vehicle strength a month (Russian armies were heavily mechanized). Since the Soviet Union’s industrial base was set up to produce new vehicles and for reasons unknown the Soviet Union Central Planning Committee never seemed to grasp that repairing vehicles might be simpler and cheaper… And if you would care to look up the rate of Soviet desertions from the Red Army one would notice that they were the highest since the opening 6 months of Operation Barbarossa in the Second World War. Soviet conscripts were received 6 weeks training and were sent into Afghanistan and died in droves.

As to Rome, Rome stole all its metal crafting, a lot of it came from Transalpine Gaul and Cisalpine Gaul a heck of a lot of Roman military tech in the early to middle Republic was adopted from “Barbarians”. As to its collapse, it wasn’t solely economic, it was solely political and it wasn’t solely technological it was a mix of all three or none at all there is no single reason why Rome collapsed.

As to Spain, France made it look positively unified for most of its history, The King of France was actually for a long time only the Lord of the Isle de Paris, the South virtually ignored the King, the Normans did exactly the same. Heck the Kings of England had more French lands than the Kings of France, Aquitaine from Eleanor of Aquitaine, Bois etc the hundred year war was at its simplest level a conflict between the King of France and its “vassal” in England (vassal by way of holding French provinces) and The Kings of England reacting rather badly to being called “vassals”. And that’s not even mentioning the mess that was the Holy Roman Empire. Ferdinand and Isabella helped seal the rifts, but it wasn’t long after that Portugal declared its independence. Europe for a heck of a long time was a mess; England crawled out of its Feudal Hell in a long struggle starting really after the Magna Carta and ending with the Civil War (although by that stage Charles was an Absolute Monarch with a Feudal Monarchs poor finances), France crawled out of it reasonably early, then crawled back into it with the Sun King when he reinstated Feudalism and made it worse, Spain wallowed in Pseudo-Feudalism right up to the Civil War, Germany only really broke it after the 30 years war depopulated and destroyed the old order, Russia well it was Feudalistic right up the 1880’s and some of its aspects continued till the Civil War… (Rather general with all those I know but that’s the feel of Europe, screwed at the time).

Also having a ready easy source of wealth from the New World, destroyed Spanish industry at home, that combined with military adventurism in the Low Countries, against France, against the Italian states and just about everyone in Europe helped to make Spain default on its debt something like a dozen times. When the money began to slow down you had a country which required constant injections of silver and gold and began to collapse when they stopped. With no internal industry (really it was mired a century or more back technologically) and with no means of actually getting out of the hole it had dug itself, collapse was inevitable. (Also note that the Spaniards had an army to admire, Tericos were the terror of the battlefield for a long time, shame shaky finances had to cripple them in the United Republic.)

 

[Ahriman]

Agree with most of the historic stuff, definitely true for Britain but I was talking about the Navy. For Russia, I wasn't talking about coldwar-era soviets. For mongols, 200k was still a vast horde compared to anything else post-ancient era. Russia, Poland, Baghdad were just speedbumps. Only the Mameluk Egyptian armies were big enough to win a battle.

 

[Masada]

Yes but notice the geographic spread of the Mongols, ie from China to Poland qutie a large territory to rule and from thier first invasion of Russia I remeber that there were two (?) armies with around 12k in one and 15k in the other, the Russians mobilized double that and still lost.

The Poles mobilized almost half a million men, and while you can discount significant portions of that, peasants. You can also note that the Polish noblity were superb horseman and very capable soldiers, they still lost.

Although if the Mongols had gone further into Europe, tI doubt they could have held dealt with the masses of Castles and difficulty associated for a primarily light-meduim cavarly army attacking them.

For the British example i was actually refering to Rocklikeafool's arguement which starts with "Britain was an economic power because it's armies, since the Hundred Years War, had been better trained and had greater faith in their monarchy than many other nation's armies had in their respective monarch." The British navy was competant, certainly but its mastery of the Seas was quite tentative on a number of occasions and really didnt come into play as a dominate force until it defeated the Dutch. Even Trafalguar was a close run thing in reality, if Nelson hadnt been there or if (struggling to remeber) the French Commander had been less timid (behaviour he had shown in Egypt previously) it is concievable that Britian could have been defeated. I still struggle to understand why the French and Spanish Capitans many of whom realised the danger of cutting the line could not manage to get across to thier commander the danger (there is even evidence he realised it, he noted in his diary to that effect).

 

[Ahriman]

Yes, British army was very weak compared to continental ones particularly post Napoleonic wars. Arguably at Trafalgar superior training of British gunnery crews was as decisive as any particular tactical brilliance. But post-Trafalgar, British mastery of the seas was pretty undisputed, mostly because of the huge size of their fleets.

 

[Adrogans]

Regarding the Mongols (been a long time since I have read up on them) but they also took over many cities w/o the need for bloodshed thru the use of intimidation and psychology (hey we catapulted plague ridden corpses over the walls of your neighbor so don't think they will help you. Oh yeah we also killed everyone in it when they opened the doors cause they took to long. So open up right away would ya?) This enabled them to keep the infrastructure intact and support themselves with it very nicely. They also were very open to allowing you to continue practicing your faith (like the Roman's were at first) because really what did it matter if all it did was cause problems when fought over.

The British have mostly been answered, they had fairly disciplined rank and file usually thru draconian methods, but the leadership was rarely trained and was mainly just given positions based on birthright. Some became excellent leaders/tacticians but most really did it only because it was expected and they stunk at it.

edit - But yeah I do dislike the amount of units you can get per a single tech. (back to the issues) and I do think that metals are important as a iron arrowhead will not pierce steel armor when shot from a bow (excluding possible modern compound bows as I have never seen that tested, but I have seen longbows and normal bows tested). A heavy crossbow probably will, but a light crossbow likely wont either.