Feedback on Mounts (especially sacred)

[danielkwinsor]

In general, I like the concept of treating mounts and riders differently. As a longtime EA Arco player, it is presenting me these difficulties:

A half-off unit at the cap still costs 1 whole holy point. Since I'm not resource or gold constrained, this effectively means that I cannot recruit twice as many, I still only recruit the same number. If half a holy point were used, I'd be able to recruit more. Will you please change to half a holy point?
Similarly also means that a guy who took a smaller hit and had his horse die now is completely lost, just saving a bit of gold. In Dom5 he could have taken a bigger hit and lived.

They suffer more afflictions and have more chances for losing a unit... although this might be balanced by having more benefits. But those afflictions can kill...
I haven't checked this, but does one of the crippled cavalry who dies on a march go back as half off? The message about crippling and limping isn't clear.

And selecting units with afflictions appears to select only the riders, not the mount. Now, I manually hold down Tab and single click everything, which is a hassle. Will you please make the buttons also select mounts? -- maybe alternatively hold down ctrl for selecting only mounts, and ctrl shift for both mount and rider?
BTW, are mounts even healed? I am watching my mounts and they seem to be not healing, despite a Melissa. If true, this means those cripples are 100% a death sentence.

A complaint that I had before has become even worse. When you have a carryover of resources and RPs from the month before, it is very hard to see which one, how much, and so on. This has made it harder. Can we get some indicator in the recruitment queue please?

[Arcadia]

You also have stuff like no tattoos on Sauromatia sacred's mounts or elves dying in droves with no protection mounts. A lot of testing and adjustments have to be made for sure.

[Dezzmont]

The seperation of riders and mounts was intentionally a nerf to cavalry and especially sacred cavalry, which are historically super dominant troops by making them experience much more attrition, so the affliction vulnerability is definitely intentional, and possibly the holy points cost remaining 1 at the stable as well. It is extremely unlikely these changes will be reverted because Sacred Cavalry are still some of the best sacreds in the game, despite the added vulnerablity.

Mounts not healing does sound like a bug however.

[ExasperatedCultist]

Originally posted by Dezzmont:

The seperation of riders and mounts was intentionally a nerf to cavalry and especially sacred cavalry, which are historically super dominant troops by making them experience much more attrition, so the affliction vulnerability is definitely intentional, and possibly the holy points cost remaining 1 at the stable as well. It is extremely unlikely these changes will be reverted because Sacred Cavalry are still some of the best sacreds in the game, despite the added vulnerablity.

Mounts not healing does sound like a bug however.

The addition of mounts has been a strong buff to the viability of heavy cavalry and light non-sacred cavalry. It is only light sacred cavalry that's worse off.

[Draken]

Originally posted by ExasperatedCultist:

Originally posted by Dezzmont:

The seperation of riders and mounts was intentionally a nerf to cavalry and especially sacred cavalry, which are historically super dominant troops by making them experience much more attrition, so the affliction vulnerability is definitely intentional, and possibly the holy points cost remaining 1 at the stable as well. It is extremely unlikely these changes will be reverted because Sacred Cavalry are still some of the best sacreds in the game, despite the added vulnerablity.

Mounts not healing does sound like a bug however.

The addition of mounts has been a strong buff to the viability of heavy cavalry and light non-sacred cavalry. It is only light sacred cavalry that's worse off.

Some chariots are also off worse.
The Mushussu Charioteer is probably the worst. You have a 1 turn limited recruitment unit that does perform a lot worse thanks to the increased independent army sizes and instead of having two shapes you now just get half off of your 1 a turn recruitment.

So actually getting an impactful number to expand with them is not really viable anymore like it was in Dom 5. At leat in my experience.

That behavior even clashes with their own descirption that states that each Mushussu has multiple Charioteer with it that just get replaced after battle, which is no longer the case. Instead the Mushussu, which is care for a by a whole retinue, just goes home alone.

[Demonsthenes]

I kinda like how the elf cavalry function as near invulnerable in melee but vulnerable to archery, given that the elf cavalry nations have good Air access; it suggests the culture is to just cast air shield or Mistform rather than armor their horses. Though I think giving them like 5 protection lightweight barding would feel more realistic.

For the TNN line Glamour elf mages, part of what I like about it is that it encourages fluffing; for example Eriu's Milesian Mages can buff Ironskin and Mistform onto their Sidhe Lords, and with those buffs an ungeared Sidhe Lord with just a reinvigoration bless can take the Capital PD I tested it on. Feels interesting at least. TNN can do similar fluffing with Bean Sidhe.

I find the mages like the Sauromatia Witch King that come with an ultra low MR mount to be a lot more annoying as a setup.

I wanted to add that the mount system's "return to home" mechanic also field very weird on foreign recruit cavalry like LA TC; getting a rebate in the random province you made a unit it feels weird; why would the rider walk all the way there when he could just get a horse where he is? And it's logistically annoying.

Definitely agree the Mussushu chariots don't feel modeled well, and that it just feels cheesy that someone casting Wind of Death at your army of 100 sacred cavalry will in some cases not kill many riders, but will kill all the horses and thus send the entire army home at the end of the month... Which costs a prohibitive amount of holy points to correct.

This was proposed on another thread, but I think a cool answer would be for dismounted units to just be infantry rather than sent home, but to have an "extra mounts" or "extra riders" stat a la scar souls. If the unit is dismounted at the end of a battle, it spends one such point and gets a fresh mount. Points for mundane mounts can be replaced by extra recpoints in a province, just like how rusty weapons recover.

[Dezzmont]

Originally posted by ExasperatedCultist:

Originally posted by Dezzmont:

The seperation of riders and mounts was intentionally a nerf to cavalry and especially sacred cavalry, which are historically super dominant troops by making them experience much more attrition, so the affliction vulnerability is definitely intentional, and possibly the holy points cost remaining 1 at the stable as well. It is extremely unlikely these changes will be reverted because Sacred Cavalry are still some of the best sacreds in the game, despite the added vulnerablity.

Mounts not healing does sound like a bug however.

The addition of mounts has been a strong buff to the viability of heavy cavalry and light non-sacred cavalry. It is only light sacred cavalry that's worse off.

I would call it a sidegrade for heavy sacred cavalry, who weren't exactly struggling in Dom 5 (Knights of the Chalice, and Movarc'h Knights come to mind as extremely good heavy cavalry in Dom 5). They weren't as often maxing out their defenses, but it was still a big part of their power that you were essentially trying to smack through 35+ prot on a 15 defense unit, and while it takes two kills to kill one cavalry, both kills are significantly easier now to get just on the base unit.

A 20 prot 10 defense Destrier that a Knight of the Chalice is riding is significantly easier to kill than it used to be, even though they have twice as much HP as a human, simply because of that massive protection loss: A hit that would have only tickled the unit in Dom 5 now instantly slaughters that poor horse. And once they are dismounted 12 defense and 19 protection with a shield is comically anemic for a 50 gold unit.

Also Bloodrush is significantly worse for mounted sacreds, which was a big hit because it further pushed the defense score up and was very synergistic with lance charges.

If your layering a lot of defenses that help the horse (like regen, for example), then they come out a bit ahead (Though now the rider is a weakpoint in some ways, not the mount), but they now require more support than they usually did.

Light sacred Cavalry were absolutely devastated of course, and those included some of the best units in the entire game (Windriders and Van, for example), but that nerf was almost certainly very intentional. I would still call the overall system a net loss for all sacred cavalry though, unless I am missing some interaction of course, and I have noticed a lot more attrition to my Cavalry overall than in Dom 5.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Dezzmont:

Also Bloodrush is significantly worse for mounted sacreds, which was a big hit because it further pushed the defense score up and was very synergistic with lance charges.

Point of order: It wasn't all that great. Blood Surge was only ever +1 defense, and while it was synergistic with lance charges, under the old system it was also somewhat anti-synergistic because the strength bonus didn't apply to the hoof/bite attacks of the mount, only the rider's weapon.

The true value for blood surge was specifically for cavalry-like units, like White Centaurs, who had a lance charge but didn't have the division between rider and mount attacks. For actual cavalry... I mean I guess if you had re-usable light lances, like Oiorpata's, it buffed up your repel checks, but there honestly aren't many of those, and even less on sacreds.

[crawlers]

Some things like heat/cold/fear aura got stronger due to now the mount emitting them too, and while blood surge doesnt combine as well with the new change, righteous fury does (mounts are usually sacred too, so they can provoke and benefit from it). Theoretically death explosion got stronger but it is still a meme.

[Zonk]

And selecting units with afflictions appears to select only the riders, not the mount.

Are you sure? This was supposed to have been changed in patch 6.12, the filters to select limping & crippled units should now also apply to mounts.

[Tlaloc_]

Much could be said for the impact of the mount changes on other units.

In Dom 5, the Vanir nations were a real favourite for me, I must have played 40+ mp games across the whole line, I've now played a 6 games trying out different approaches with them in Dom 6 and my opinion is that the sum of changes from 5 have totally devastated the ability to use Vans and Helhirding. In 5 they were units that lived on pretty tight margins; they don't have much protection/hp and they don't do much damage, they were all-in on bless, defense stacking and glamour to survive and be useful, even then there were many threat vectors that could handle them from the very early game (webs/melds/tramplers/berserkers/tarpits).

Now Dominions 6 has opened up many new threat vectors for the van cavalry;
- the bless system has become much less friendly in terms of options to shore up weaknesses (resistances, strength and stats are all far costlier to acquire).
- while before the rider could absorb missile with their shield, the fay horse is extremely vulnerable to archery fire, a few archers can trivially kill or rout a fay horse.
- you might consider buffing them with air shield/mistform but research required for these prohibits using vans/helhiridng to expand, once the research comes up it is extremely mage intensive to apply the buffs to even a modest force of cavalry. And path costs mean that you essentially require a Vanjarl to do this, a 440 gold mage is necessary for these units to be functional. Once you reach high levels of tech you can start to do this, but if you can't rely on them for 40 turns why would you bother?
- losing the mount loses the sacred, its extremely immersion-breaking to believe that the riders would abandon the army and wander off alone (especially since they usually die before they get home). The Van nations generally have a focus on elite ground troops, can dismounted sacreds not simply join the shield wall? The discount on recruitment is also simply irrelevant, saving a marginal amount of gold even recruiting 10 replacements a turn.

There just isn't much of a reason to make these cavalry any more in my opinion, or to make builds that focus on them. They just don't really have anything particularly special to them that makes up for the huge difficulty in keeping both units alive and mounted. All of the old vulnerabilities remain, and they have not become better in other ways, a strict and severe downgrade. It frustrates me immensely that the soul and fun of these nations has been ripped out and replaced with getting humbled by every local peasant with a short bow.

[mestaritareenalla]

Biggest annoyances is the units disappearing if you just kill one half (or dismount and give enough time for mount to run), and the MR resists stuff for normal horses - which also makes it super easy to dismount them.

Just paralyzing or sleeping a horse automatically dismounts the rider, and for that one battle it's fair enough - the riders still get to fight. They just disappear afterwards if the battle went long enough for the horse to wake up and run. It's a really lame way to have your army whittled down, the discount is little comfort when you gotta still get them to the front again and for sacreds, holy points are still the restricting factor.