Obtaining Elites and Monsters in Campaign

[IIFriggII]

When playing campaigns, the one thing which really sticks out to me as something wrong is how once you get a tech you can mass produce it so easily.

It feels weird that once you’ve been able to produce one elite unit, you can mass produce them easily. Elites are apparently just trained and need no real life experience at all.
Same with monsters, creating an abomination or breeding a dragon is apparently something you can do as easily as asking some peasants to pick up their scythe and gather in regiments (true you gather a lot more peasants, but there would be a serious time limitation on the monsters as creating one is not just a matter of putting gold down it’s throat and thinking when enough gold has been stopped into it a dragon egg will pop out the behind).

I truly feel like creating big monsters and elite troops should be a true challenge so having a few of them actually mean something, besides you are being broke.
So something like a tier up system where it makes sense; at rank X units which have a particular good/hard battle and survives “keeping their rule intact” (dwarfs who haven’t actively fought most of the battle can’t upgrade, skavens can; as example) could get the ability to get upgraded at a price, because of equipment changes.

For monsters they could add a maximum breeding speed which is very long and can only train 1 unit at a time;
It would be cool with a “growth” meter which had them start out at 50% size and stats, then as they grew threw their combats they got full stats (so getting a full-grown dragon to fight for you would actually take work and dedication and you wouldn’t get an army of them as soon as you found 1 egg.)


Edit: As for bonusses and upgrades.
it gets to much when you cannot realisticly do anything but stacking the troops you got a bunch of bonusses for, instead of going with a higher tier troop with the same purpose or for uni-purpose.

[Wyvern]

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

When playing campaigns, the one thing which really sticks out to me as something wrong is how once you get a tech you can mass produce it so easily.

It feels weird that once you’ve been able to produce one elite unit, you can mass produce them easily. Elites are apparently just trained and need no real life experience at all.
Same with monsters, creating an abomination or breeding a dragon is apparently something you can do as easily as asking some peasants to pick up their scythe and gather in regiments (true you gather a lot more peasants, but there would be a serious time limitation on the monsters as creating one is not just a matter of putting gold down it’s throat and thinking when enough gold has been stopped into it a dragon egg will pop out the behind).

I truly feel like creating big monsters and elite troops should be a true challenge so having a few of them actually mean something, besides you are being broke.
So something like a tier up system where it makes sense; at rank X units which have a particular good/hard battle and survives “keeping their rule intact” (dwarfs who haven’t actively fought most of the battle can’t upgrade, skavens can; as example) could get the ability to get upgraded at a price, because of equipment changes.

For monsters they could add a maximum breeding speed which is very long and can only train 1 unit at a time;
It would be cool with a “growth” meter which had them start out at 50% size and stats, then as they grew threw their combats they got full stats (so getting a full-grown dragon to fight for you would actually take work and dedication and you wouldn’t get an army of them as soon as you found 1 egg.)

TBH, the fact that elites are theoretically spammable shouldn't be all that helpful if you need to cover a lot of territory or raise armies quickly, even factions with powerhouse econ struggle to put a lot of elite armies on the field, as you noted. So technically, it shouldn't really be a problem, and at best a tradeoff of elite vs spam. Think of it as a professional army vs a conscript army.

HOWEVER, the devs undermined chaff heavy armies pretty badly in WH2. In WH1 redline buffs were more powerful(honest steel for empire for example was +12 +12, now its only +8 +8, and Skarsniks gobbo buffs were ludicrously good) and the penalty in upkeep for additional armies on higher difficulties was only something like 3-4%. Now it's 15% on VH/Legendary, which is exorbitant, and means that a player is much more incentivized to spam a few elite armies rather than a bunch of low-mid tier ones.

[Kapika96]

So lose one elite army and game over since they'll be no time to create a new one before all your cities are turned to ashes?

[shadain597]

You're missing something pretty big. Constructing a building doesn't magically create new kinds of units. Military buildings allow for the training and recruitment of units that the province would otherwise would be unable to field. You don't "find a dragon egg." You create the necessary infrastructure (buildings) in order to reliably source the monsters and train them to be a part of the army. Elite units already take longer to recruit, and the upkeep method already limits the number of elite units you can field, while keeping things rather simple.

You might like the Tomb Kings though, since they have buildings which cap the number of units they can train globally. Also, their monstrous units are literally constructed, no breeding required.

[IIFriggII]

Originally posted by shadain597:

You're missing something pretty big. Constructing a building doesn't magically create new kinds of units. Military buildings allow for the training and recruitment of units that the province would otherwise would be unable to field. You don't "find a dragon egg." You create the necessary infrastructure (buildings) in order to reliably source the monsters and train them to be a part of the army. Elite units already take longer to recruit, and the upkeep method already limits the number of elite units you can field, while keeping things rather simple.

You might like the Tomb Kings though, since they have buildings which cap the number of units they can train globally. Also, their monstrous units are literally constructed, no breeding required.

you telling me that the elven empire could suddenly construct hordes of star dragons if only they had enough gold?

the same with elite soldiers or monsters.
it is not as much of building the things to "create them" but more to "sustain them" and with the rates you can spit these out is just absolutely not sustainable (you would run out of monsters willing/capable of breeding at those rates and out of soldiers with enough talent to even consider them ever being elite much less having the experience for the "elite status".

the time to created them is not an issue when you can easily recruit 5-10 at a time if need be (yer 3 turns out and you got an army of dragons... it is just very silly and makes both elites and big monsters feel extremely common.

[shadain597]

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

you telling me that the elven empire could suddenly construct hordes of star dragons if only they had enough gold?

the same with elite soldiers or monsters.
it is not as much of building the things to "create them" but more to "sustain them" and with the rates you can spit these out is just absolutely not sustainable (you would run out of monsters willing/capable of breeding at those rates and out of soldiers with enough talent to even consider them ever being elite much less having the experience for the "elite status".

the time to created them is not an issue when you can easily recruit 5-10 at a time if need be (yer 3 turns out and you got an army of dragons... it is just very silly and makes both elites and big monsters feel extremely common.

You aren't listening. Those dragons aren't "constructed." They already exist somewhere. Same with the elite troops. Oh, and the elven troops have had PLENTY of time to learn how to be elite soldiers. The trick is getting them all into your army. And, yes, theoretically you could recruit a whole army of dragons in a relatively short amount of turns. However, when does that opportunity arise? When is it viable to support armies like that? The closest I've gotten was with Settra, who had maybe 50% constructs and the rest elite infantry. Oh, and that was at the end of the campaign with about half of my other armies being 100% trash.

So again, if it bothers you go play TK. I'm sure you'll love all of the caps. If the game was changed to suit your vision, the first major battle of a war would be decisive. The loser would be guaranteed to continue losing because it would be impossible to recover, no matter how large your empire is. That *might* be more realistic, but I fail to see how that would make the game any more fun.

[archmag]

Maybe new TW game has what you want. It has global pool of units that you can recruit from and each unit in the pool has limited amount and rate of respawn. Levi units (common) have ~20% chance to appear in a pool each turn and max amount is 3. Elite units have ~4% chance to appear in a pool and max amount is 1. Those rates and max amount can be increased by having more settlements and research so later elites become more common, but initially when you just get access to them you can't spam them and losing them in battle means that you won't have access to them for a long time.

It also has some upgrade mechanics - when you research better tiers of units you can upgrade existing units to next tier. And to start research for each unit at first you need to complete some requirement, like hire 10 spearmen to start research in spearmen improvement thread.

[IIFriggII]

Originally posted by archmag:

Maybe new TW game has what you want. It has global pool of units that you can recruit from and each unit in the pool has limited amount and rate of respawn. Levi units (common) have ~20% chance to appear in a pool each turn and max amount is 3. Elite units have ~4% chance to appear in a pool and max amount is 1. Those rates and max amount can be increased by having more settlements and research so later elites become more common, but initially when you just get access to them you can't spam them and losing them in battle means that you won't have access to them for a long time.

It also has some upgrade mechanics - when you research better tiers of units you can upgrade existing units to next tier. And to start research for each unit at first you need to complete some requirement, like hire 10 spearmen to start research in spearmen improvement thread.

the problem there becomes it's RNG based completely, with no effort put into the unit/s involved; which is the same issue as now;
"you don't feel attached/involved/rewarded in the progress of obtaining these big scary monster or a heavy elite units neither does it feel particularly bad to lose one as these units are extremely commen and easy to acquire once you got the tech (or in the case of full Rng you are just not involved at all and feel like nothing you do/did matters to this progress so you are not invested)"

one of the places a mechanic feel correct with this is the "blessed spawns" of the lizardman, as you got to complete a quest to even get them and they are truly rewarding and special to have, you also Really don't want to lose them as they are very hard to replace, but you want to use them because they are so good and reasonably easy to keep alive.
this place gives you the feel which should be there when also gaining higher tiers of units; gaining a giant should be a really cool quest setup to acquire such a monster and acquiring more took you to different places on the map, maybe even sidequest of helping local people or eating them etc.


not on subject but would also be nice if they went through the quest and attached race specific quest for search ruins and general quest, as well as making them dynamic so they Know if you got a giant army with you (as some bandits properly shouldn't be able to hurt you or other such nonesense).
as it get really silly and stupid with some of them as it is.

[Aenarion]

Recruit times are already pretty long for elites. Too long for me in fact. Its not worth having an army waiting for demis and steam tanks for 3 turns when you can recruit reiksguard, greatswords and great cannon in 1 turn with the right buildings.

[..]

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

It feels weird that once you’ve been able to produce one elite unit, you can mass produce them easily. Elites are apparently just trained and need no real life experience at all.

I get that it takes time to recruit, train, equip, and maintain them; that's represented by the additional turns and additional costs/upkeep. For "real life experience", they are able to gain levels through battle in the form of kills in order to make them a significantly better(explaining the xp buffs from lords, etc. would be too much, so I'll leave that out).

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

For monsters they could add a maximum breeding speed which is very long and can only train 1 unit at a time;
It would be cool with a “growth” meter which had them start out at 50% size and stats, then as they grew threw their combats they got full stats (so getting a full-grown dragon to fight for you would actually take work and dedication and you wouldn’t get an army of them as soon as you found 1 egg.)

"Growth" is pretty much the same as a regular experience bar, just under a different name and with a wider stat gap. Problem with this would be how to balance it. It would probably be easier for a modder to post it than have CA implement it since only those that are ok with it would take it.

For the "breeding" thing, how is that supposed to work for VC's terrorgheists? There's a lot of balance stuff involved when implementing a global mechanic like this. You really just have to RP it yourself if you want to enjoy it the way you want to.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

one of the places a mechanic feel correct with this is the "blessed spawns" of the lizardman, as you got to complete a quest to even get them and they are truly rewarding and special to have, you also Really don't want to lose them as they are very hard to replace, but you want to use them because they are so good and reasonably easy to keep alive.

This is the most useless mechanics out of all other races according to my experience. I captured almost 1/4 of the Vortex map as Lizardmen and I don't have even one of them yet. I had only one mission appear to make a trade agreement with some race (how would it make a unit blessed?), but run of time doing it. After that did not have a single mission. I have 3.5 full armies going around with just normal lizardmen units instead.

[Wyvern]

Originally posted by archmag:

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

one of the places a mechanic feel correct with this is the "blessed spawns" of the lizardman, as you got to complete a quest to even get them and they are truly rewarding and special to have, you also Really don't want to lose them as they are very hard to replace, but you want to use them because they are so good and reasonably easy to keep alive.

This is the most useless mechanics out of all other races according to my experience. I captured almost 1/4 of the Vortex map as Lizardmen and I don't have even one of them yet. I had only one mission appear to make a trade agreement with some race (how would it make a unit blessed?), but run of time doing it. After that did not have a single mission. I have 3.5 full armies going around with just normal lizardmen units instead.

Blessed spawnings honestly fail on multiple levels.
1)Theyre random.
2)A lot of the quests youre given are basically undoable, even if you throw your all into them
3)A large portion of the blessed units are functionally useless/pointless. Only a handful of them provide significant worthwhile benefits over their vanilla counterparts.

[IIFriggII]

Originally posted by Wyvern:

Originally posted by archmag:

This is the most useless mechanics out of all other races according to my experience. I captured almost 1/4 of the Vortex map as Lizardmen and I don't have even one of them yet. I had only one mission appear to make a trade agreement with some race (how would it make a unit blessed?), but run of time doing it. After that did not have a single mission. I have 3.5 full armies going around with just normal lizardmen units instead.

Blessed spawnings honestly fail on multiple levels.
1)Theyre random.
2)A lot of the quests youre given are basically undoable, even if you throw your all into them
3)A large portion of the blessed units are functionally useless/pointless. Only a handful of them 1)provide significant worthwhile benefits over their vanilla counterparts.

true they are random, and it would be better if the building allowed you to force a quest for a specific blessed spawn, i do agree there (but at the lack of ANY feeling of special/elite/unique/important unit, besides heroes/lord, i got to overexcited that there was something where i could havea feel that i am building up something special.

2)again true, the quest types are not good in general, but that goes with EVERY none main story quest that they are just badly written/made and makes little or no sense to a "emperor/lord/etc with a large army behind your back". should really be improved.

3) they are all better than their counterpart, but it is true only saurus and skink types are worth it (and late endgame only saurus types are worth, temp and war). but that's because feral beast are just not worth the 1/20 unit spot and croxi's are generally just overlapping what your infantry is already doing in mid/late game (they are super nice in early game, but fall off extremely.)

Originally posted by rymeintrinseca:

Recruit times are already pretty long for elites. Too long for me in fact. Its not worth having an army waiting for demis and steam tanks for 3 turns when you can recruit reiksguard, greatswords and great cannon in 1 turn with the right buildings.

which is why you have a lord specificly for recruiting units and bring them to your other armies.
which removes the need for anything else, you can produce 5 tier 3 units in 3 turns, without having to do anything other than let a random lord just stand there and magically Spawn very rare monsters and elite troops as if there was unlimited of them available at all time.

Originally posted by ..:

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

It feels weird that once you’ve been able to produce one elite unit, you can mass produce them easily. Elites are apparently just trained and need no real life experience at all.

I get that it takes time to recruit, train, equip, and maintain them; that's represented by the additional turns and additional costs/upkeep. For "real life experience", they are able to gain levels through battle in the form of kills in order to make them a significantly better(explaining the xp buffs from lords, etc. would be too much, so I'll leave that out).

here is my problem with it.
no matter How much money you have you Cannot produce more top elite soldiers than what the talent and experience pool available allows.
you could throw as much money into a military pool as you wish and very quickly you would reach a limit of talent and general real combat experience to produce the highest or second highest of tiers of soldiers.

besides that the cost of sustaining them would be roughly the same as sustaining any other soldier, once they are fully equipped and rdy for combat.
not 10 times more for some "arbitrary reason".

it just comes down to them ignoring way to many factors to simplify everything into gold+time+tech=everything and nothing more.
there is no consideration of whether or not there is the needed supplies to sustain 10 cronosaurs (which would eat an absolutely absurd amounr each day, most of which they couldn't gather themselves due to limited ressources of the size of a pray they can use),
or whether or not there are soldiers available with the combat experience and the pure raw talent which it takes to become a top tier fighter (considering how few amazing fighters we have irl, the iddea that you can just pop out like 1.000 elite troops in 2 years from somewhere with a few houndread thousind individuals is absolutely absurd; not to mention the leadership issues when you start desperately clawing Anyone who are even remotely talented into creating these elite units).

i just feel there is So much going last and the entire campaign map setup for progression, controlling etc. is very bare bone.
one of the big issues is how recruiting and upkeep works.
another part is the extremly barebone "diplomacy system" which allows for so little, and got so few options to work around that it comes down to "am i killing or trading with these" and that's about it.

Originally posted by ..:

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

For monsters they could add a maximum breeding speed which is very long and can only train 1 unit at a time;
It would be cool with a “growth” meter which had them start out at 50% size and stats, then as they grew threw their combats they got full stats (so getting a full-grown dragon to fight for you would actually take work and dedication and you wouldn’t get an army of them as soon as you found 1 egg.)

"Growth" is pretty much the same as a regular experience bar, just under a different name and with a wider stat gap. Problem with this would be how to balance it. It would probably be easier for a modder to post it than have CA implement it since only those that are ok with it would take it.

For the "breeding" thing, how is that supposed to work for VC's terrorgheists? There's a lot of balance stuff involved when implementing a global mechanic like this. You really just have to RP it yourself if you want to enjoy it the way you want to.

as for growth it is a way to limit, in a more realistic way, how many rare/elite units you can get, i came up with that on the spot so obviously there is a better way if i am paid to design it or used some hours with sheets figuring it out.

for breeding, terrorgheists would be a creation of necromancy (if i recall correctly) which obviously takes a lot of special material to accomplish, material which doesn't just magically spawn, i presume, so this would be something you would need to acquire to put together a terrorgheists; which also would limit how fast you could acquire these.

the problem it is trying to solve is you reaching saurus tampler tech, then 4 years after you got an army of over 1,500 tamplers out of nowhere.
or you reach dragon tech and 3 years after you got 2 sun dragons in Every fighting army, or simply 5-10 in one, out of "nowhere".

there need to be an actual time progression to get each one of these units, and it needs to feel like you actually got an influence on that time and that your effort is rewarded (not just that you got random stuff thrown at you for doing next to nothing, or you reached a tech and now you can mass produce etc.)

so it is not that i want to remove the super high tier armies completely, i just want it to feel like something you build up over a long game, not just sitting there being meeeeeh for the first 50-70 turns (ofc. invading taking over stuff etc. as normal) and then BOOM suddenly everything is super elite and giant dragons and monsters Everywhere.
so NOTHING cool and special for the first 50-70 turns then completely overflooded the rest of the game (and all you can do is max out the hero lvl's at that point, which doesn't feel intune with the progression of the units which are just thrown at you at this point; so it feels like a weird uncoherent progression design setup).

it just creates a very suboptimal progression experience imho, compared to what it should be.

[Aenarion]

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

Originally posted by rymeintrinseca:

Recruit times are already pretty long for elites. Too long for me in fact. Its not worth having an army waiting for demis and steam tanks for 3 turns when you can recruit reiksguard, greatswords and great cannon in 1 turn with the right buildings.

which is why you have a lord specificly for recruiting units and bring them to your other armies.
which removes the need for anything else, you can produce 5 tier 3 units in 3 turns, without having to do anything other than let a random lord just stand there and magically Spawn very rare monsters and elite troops as if there was unlimited of them available at all time.

That might work on normal or hard but it's madness on VH/legendary where you're paying 5k+ per turn in upkeep increase for that one lord.

[IIFriggII]

Originally posted by rymeintrinseca:

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

which is why you have a lord specificly for recruiting units and bring them to your other armies.
which removes the need for anything else, you can produce 5 tier 3 units in 3 turns, without having to do anything other than let a random lord just stand there and magically Spawn very rare monsters and elite troops as if there was unlimited of them available at all time.

That might work on normal or hard but it's madness on VH/legendary where you're paying 5k+ per turn in upkeep increase for that one lord.

it is very durable to have 2 lords before you reach max tech and longer build times, even on the hardest difficulty with extra difficulty mods and harder ai mods.

however if you are like me, then it is annoying that i need a pointless "throw away lord" just to not idle around and it would be Far more enjoyable if instead of waiting the x-turns the build just happened in the cities itself and once it was build it was added to the garrison and ready to be picked up; kind of like the might&magic heroes games city setup.

[TVMAN]

Originally posted by Tjaranis:

When playing campaigns, the one thing which really sticks out to me as something wrong is how once you get a tech you can mass produce it so easily.

It feels weird that once you’ve been able to produce one elite unit, you can mass produce them easily.

You playing with some money cheats or something? The purchase and upkeep costs for those units are not trivial.