Greenskin Morale and Enslave

[Grakor]

So the latest balance discussions had me thinking about these subjects, and I wanted to bring them up.

Greenskins by far are the worst faction when it comes to mixing via bribe/enslave. They aren't evil, and thus have massive morale penalties when mixed with demons or undead (total of -3, -1 for evil and -2 for undead/demon.) On the other hand, they also have a mutual morale penalty (-2) when mixed with humanoids, which makes them incompatible with humans and dwarfs. On top of all of this, trolls introduce a further -2 morale penalty to non-greenskin, non-beast units due to stinky. Because greenskin heroes have enslave instead of bribe, they introduce further morale issues because every unit they enslave will just inherently have 2 less morale.

Also, Katzok doesn't get the location to get the Idol of Happiness in AoF2. He even has fewer ways to compensate for morale problems than other factions.

This all means that there are very few units greenskins can mix into their army without massive morale penalties. Forest folk units work (and forest folk can add plenty of useful units to literally any other faction,) unless you're using trolls. In that case, you're mostly enslaving beasts or wasting slots on morale boosting items. Or just ignoring the team morale face, which probably won't be an option once desertion becomes a thing. Similarly, pretty much no one wants to add greenskins to another faction's army because of the morale issues they bring. Forest folk might be the exception, again, but you're weighing greenskins against picking up useful humans AND dwarfs.

I really think that some tweaking needs to be done with greenskins to make them more on par with other factions when it comes to faction mixing. Probably the simplest solution would be to simply make them all evil, so they no longer hate demons and undead so intensely. Or, perhaps change the "neutral units hate undead/demons" morale penalty to more specifically "neutral humanoids hate undead/demons."

And a feature request: would it be alright to have an (expensive) way to buy out the enslave debuff in a similar way you can heal wounds and cowardice? Bribe would still be better for swinging actual fights and would be more convenient by not having to lower the targets health to 1 first, it'd just make enslave not suck so much when you're dealing with low-morale units.

[Les]

In brief - I have the same felling that Greenskins need to somehow re-balanced for Team Morale incompatibilities. I keep that in mind.

However, a few notes:

(i) Enslaved attribute (and it's negative bonus) is removed when you can recruit a given unit;

(ii) The Idol of Happiness is only one of 7+ ways which improves Team Morale. For example, Bard's Lute or Trickster's Hat will do better job;

(iii) Desertion's design is actually tilting Team Morale balance towards Greenskins - giving them few ways to 'persuade' unit to stay.

[werdi-eh]

I belive stinky was meant to balamce the trolls but in my experience it just make me run full green team. The passive moral penalties (less atk) do not bother me too much , but a non-happy ogre will turn tail in 2 hits.
Greenskins are meant to be stupid, and goblins cowards, but trolls are bigger and maybe barver?
If slaved units got only the enslaved penalty instead of race+enslaved, we could make better use of that abilitie.

[Grakor]

Originally posted by Les:

(i) Enslaved attribute (and it's negative bonus) is removed when you can recruit a given unit;

(ii) The Idol of Happiness is only one of 7+ ways which improves Team Morale. For example, Bard's Lute or Trickster's Hat will do better job;

1. True, but most of the time the units you want to enslave are the ones that you can't just recruit. Most useful enslave units for Greenskins IMO, for example, are the dryads to give yourself more magic variety and some long-range archers.

2. IMO the Idol and the...Seal of Excellence I think is the name?...are superior to the lute and hat, for the big reason that they're not taking up important slots on your characters. The Bard's Lute, for example, is a two-handed weapon, taking up space that could be filled with legendary or relic weapons and shields. The opportunity cost alone is pretty high, but also factor in that the lute and hat ALSO come with pretty hefty negatives, such as the lute lowering your attack by 3. They're usually not worth it.

Originally posted by werdi-eh:

I belive stinky was meant to balamce the trolls but in my experience it just make me run full green team. The passive moral penalties (less atk) do not bother me too much , but a non-happy ogre will turn tail in 2 hits.
Greenskins are meant to be stupid, and goblins cowards, but trolls are bigger and maybe barver?
If slaved units got only the enslaved penalty instead of race+enslaved, we could make better use of that abilitie.

Making the enslaved penalty rule out other team morale issues is a mixed bag. Honestly, they need the team morale bonuses from things like charisma and the seal/idol in order to overcome the enslaved penalty in the first place. I also think that if enslaved units didn't have to worry about racial issues, it'd just encourage players to do silly things like picking up liches, chaos mages, warlocks, and high priests all together.

[elypzkou]

mmh i read this and now i have a doubt, does stinky stack ?
if you have 2 trolls do you need to counter double stinky debuff ?

[Grakor]

Originally posted by elypzkou:

mmh i read this and now i have a doubt, does stinky stack ?
if you have 2 trolls do you need to counter double stinky debuff ?

I don't believe stinky stacks with itself, but it will stack with other morale penalties. Try picking up the free troll from the bridge event in a chaos/demon army and laugh at how they mutually wreck each others morale into shambles.

[Les]

(i) Troll's Stinky doesn't stack, however one Troll will lower morale for the whole group.

(ii) The purpose of Stinky is to discourage adding Trolls to other armies. A wall made from Troll Throwers was just too strong in defensive - imagine putting few Fireball-throwing mages and Rangers behind a wall of Troll Throwers will Greater Regeneration. Such combo was practically unbreakable.

The similar trait (Church Donation) was introduced for Paladins and Inquisitors to balance their use in teams (to a lesser degree).

(iii) Heroes holding Bard's Lute and Trickster's Hat sacrifice their power for better team bonuses - that's pretty good balance imho, preventing to create overpowered teams with super-hero and super-team. No you have to chose - more mixed army or super-hero ^^

[Grakor]

My problem with the lute is that it's already not going to be your go-to weapon if you want to make a powerful hero. There's the opportunity cost of not getting a Razor's Edge, Vampire's Kiss, etc. So with the -3 attack on the lute, you're talking a swing of about 5-7 points of attack, plus the loss of whatever shield or dual-wield option the hero might have, which is insane.

Now granted, you can put it on a caster hero in the main games, which involves a significantly smaller loss since they pretty much never use attack anyway. You only get one hero in Free World, so it's a bit harsher there, though.

[Grakor]

Ignoring the Bard's Lute for a moment, I do have a legit question: why aren't the greenskins considered evil? I'm not against a more nuanced look at the faction, but right now they pretty much act like murderous thugs, so it's a bit weird that they don't have evil. Frankly, all of their issues with allying up with other factions would disappear if they were turned evil, lost the humanoids penalty, and instead were included in the "neutral units don't like demons/undead" penalty.

Is it possible to mod them this way to test this out? I haven't looked into modding AoF much right yet, and it seems most of the mods are manipulating or making new campaigns/locations.

Edit: That said, if I were to make a guess of the new AoF4 faction by the game's current unit data, I'd say that the current greenskins are likely to get another faction they can get some decent enslave units from. So, it may resolve itself by then, whenever AoF4 comes out.

PS Recruitable cyclops when?

[Les]

The mainstream games have modding feature developed quite a lot and we plan to add it to AOF-FW later this year, somewhere mid-2019.

The theme of the Age of Fear series is towards Dark Fantasy with majority of heroes being Grey / Evil. Greenskins are Neutral and have their own branch of magic and skills - I didn't want to put them together with Undead/Demons as that will cause the majority of factions being evil.

[werdi-eh]

You dont call a wolf devil because it hunts and kills. Why should you call greenskins evil for following their wild instint?

[Grakor]

I wouldn't call greenskins animals. They are sentient. Comparing them to wolves is silly.

Anyway, sounds like the tag is less about actual morality and more about being unholy or profane. Which makes sense.

[Shotagonist]

I think its fine the way its balanced. The Greenskins being slightly above the curve stat-wise but trading the ability to cross faction easily is fine. However, it would be cool then to bump the Greenskin-only morale boost, just to emphasize the main strategy.

[Les]

Originally posted by Shotagonist:

I think its fine the way its balanced. The Greenskins being slightly above the curve stat-wise but trading the ability to cross faction easily is fine. However, it would be cool then to bump the Greenskin-only morale boost, just to emphasize the main strategy.

It’s exactly what I came up with yesterday ^^

Once bases are introduced, Greenskins will get an upgrade that boosts Team Morale.

That should balance out Stinky and/or allow for more factions mixing.

[Tempest]

Personally,i think if you use the tools available ,its pretty easy to cancel out morale issues..Darius alone goes a long way to doing so.

[Grakor]

Getting the bard is hardly a given. He's a pain in the neck to get, in fact, just by virtue of being tied to the magic bazaar. Beyond that, you have to know that he's even available that way, and unless you're like me and have seen the game files and know what the specific triggers are, or someone told you, you'd have no idea.

I did find out that, bizarrely, necromancers don't count as humanoids.