Ok so I just finished a four hour game as High Elves, I mostly played with the Woodelf units so I don't have as much feedback for the Darkelves. Also it was my first time with the mod, and my gut reaction to most things new is "Man that seems really overpowered!", still the balance felt a little out. I assume these units are ment to be more or less equal to their racial defaults, just a bit more flavourful and providing some alternate play styles.

-
Woodelves: I found the Heritage trait to be reasonable, though I wonder if the entangle on the Swordsmen might be a tad strong. On the flip side it keeps the unit relevent longer, and I'm largely in favour of extending the period in which T1s are a viable choice.
-

-
Glade Maiden: The unit feels pretty good statwise, I like that it doesn't feel like it really leans towards melee or ranged. That said Seduce seems a tad strong for an eairly game T2 with Phase. The lower strength of Charm would feel more in line with the teir.
-

-
Warden of Nature: This guy is a total monster, although the fact that he's actually classed as monster in the game might be a point for concern. He synergizes alarmingly well with the Druid class, as he both gains the +2 Magic Res / Mind Control Immunity of the Beast Mastery passive and huge buffs from the combat spell Savage Rage. Of coarse he is a giant walking tree, maybe he should feel at home in druid armies.

Beyond that his passive chance to Entangle on attack seems really powerful. Although his speed is slow enough that he can be kited, I'll admit it felt good to finally catch kiting ranged units and root them in place for their sorely deserved beating.

Lowering the physical check on it by a point or two might bring it more in line with most other brawlery T3 units. Although the fire weakness might balance it out in the long run. I can confirm from first hand experience that he does not infact appreciate flamethrower tanks.
-


-
Darkelves: I threw a few cities underground and played around with them a bit but I can't say it was my focus. I did however immediately notice what I consider to be a massive oversight! For cave dwelling elves they seemed mighty blind down in the dark. I would humbly suggest adding Night Vision to their Heritage passive.
-

-
Blade Dancer / Spider Queen: I never took either of these units into manual battle so I can't say much for now, although I threw a few armies of them at some neutral camps and they seemed to be wiping things out well above their teir rankings. Still, without trying them first hand I don't want to pass judgement. Storm Sisters are notorious for obliterating armies three times their strength in auto combat so whos to say.
-

Hi Mike, thank you for your detailed report, this is really helpful since I didn't have the time (yet) to seriously playtest any of the content myself. I will write a more detailed answer when I have looked into each of your suggestions, just wanted to tell you before that that this is some valuable input for me ;)

Happy to be of service, I've played around with the human units now as well, great job on them as a side note, so as it seems well recived I'll drop my thoughts on them too!

-
Visionary: The Resourceful trait was interesting and I liked the way it encouraged a rapid offense, but I found myself constantly checking my units before moving them to keep track of what they had stacked up. I'm honestly not sure how it fares in terms of balance as it was hard to keep track of what it was doing at any given moment.

The statue building struck me as massively overpowered. One of my cities managed over 100 bonus production from it. In general I'm not a fan of stats from terrain, it tends to scale out of control as the city grows and the player starts terraforming. Besides, it clutters up the pretty map with all those messy icons!
-


-
Daredevil: These guys felt perfect, they manage to fill a different role then the basic calvalry they compete with for build value, and they synergize in fun ways with multiple classes. The net felt good, they're fragile enough when mounted that going in to snare a high threat target really has them living up to the name. The dismount felt good as well, popping sprint to get behind a dangerous target then jumping off and hitting it with a backstab from the Rogue passive skill was amazing.
-


-
Airship: This thing is really interesting. It's has a nice glass cannon feel, fragile enough that its utility as a transport really shines rather than just being mass production fodder. The AoE net at gold is also a great reward for getting it up in ranks.

The Air Transport trait is a really neat idea, I was on an islands map and it was amazing being able to travel around so efficiently. While I susect it was a necessary side effect of getting it to project the float aura the fact that the unit defaults to army leader really goes a long way towards promote engaging play. That is to say if you want a hero to project its auras you have to move it out of the stack which changes how you plan armies and move them around. Whats more if you manage to jump a stack in transite as it were you can effecively nullify any accompanying heros passives.

My only critique is the repair crew trait at level 2, I'd be curious how they play without it, or maybe with a lower repair rate. My reasoning is that with a nerf to it the player is incentivised to get a Dreadnought hero to accompany any serious long range expedition for healing. With the way they increase mobility I like the idea of making freqent trips back to towns to get repairs and move more small groups forward. Also running into a moments where your far afield and have to ask yourself "Do I really want to risk this thing dying on me and leaving me stranded out here?" feels engaging.
-


-
Occultist: Talisman is really strong, I'm not sure if it's to strong, but it's a pretty hard counter to supports. Although actually I think I'm okay with that, screw storm sisters and apprentices!

Beyond that the statue seems fine but the hags building I'm less sure of. A permenant non disjunctable passive strategic map damage radius is potent, especially if it were to be paired with the Sorc or Druid castable varients. Still, I'm not sure it's exactly game breaking, although some sort of visual indication that a city has it might be handy.
-


-
Ritemaster: Fun little unit, the Bloodletting mechanic has fantastic verstility. Do you keep him in the back and bleed your own ranged units so you can pass around some potent buffs or send him, fragile though he is, into the fray to lay down those devistating weakness rituals.

I was unimpressed with his gold medal summon however, it takes quite a while to level up to that point without putting him into serious danger, and while I don't want to discount the potency of summoning up units the homunculus just felt really underwelming. If its limited to one per battle the unit summoned could do to be a bit more impactful.

Alternatively reducing the health on the homunculus and maybe spawning it bleeding (or otherwise decaying) and removing the cooldown might be interesting. It would effecively turn it into a ranged attack that if not killed (likely in a single blow) can keep harrasing units for a few turns before poofing. It would make the need to get something into the back line to take out the summoner a high priority.
-


-
Hag: My first reaction was horror at how strong the chain ranged attack was, right up until I noticed it made no distinction between friend and foe, smart. Overall I like the Hag, it requires a bit of planning to keep your units out of harms way, and if you don't get the jump effect off the damage is appropriately subpar, atleast before you get a few vulnerability procs off. At one point I actually intentionally used one of my knights as a middle man to get the third hit to another unit.

I'm less sure about the black cat curse thing, it's basically a free kill if you land it, although posion resist is common enough that the if is fairly serious.

Oh and while not exactly balance related, atleast in a mechanical sense, the model could do with a bit of shrinkage. Distinguising them from reanimaters is a real concern, but after having an ogre stand next to my hag to provide scale I can confirm that shes no kind of human I've ever seen.
-

Hey Mike, thank you for the second part of your analysis of the existing units etc. so far. Not to mention it was really fun to read this, you have some great writing skills here ;)

You may or may not have seen this, but I updated the mod today and made a couple of changes in respect to the different points you mentioned here. Generally I think that the buildings are definitely not the strong part of the mod, so I am always happy for suggestions how to replace or modify the general boni they give.

Now let me say something about the stuff I didn't change (you can find the rest in the change log):

@Elven Swordman: I may be wrong here, but in the longer course of the game the unit doesn't have much more going for it apart from the vine shield it can get through wood elves, so I think it should be ok.

@Warden of Nature: I moved entangling strike to elite instead of changing the resistance check. The reason is that the game generally doesn't use different resistance check strengths for different attacks, so I didn't want to make a second version of entangling strike with a different strength. But I must admit I didn't think of beast mastery that would affect the warden as druid player - a possible 'counter' for this could be to lower its resistance by 1, but I wasn't sure yet if that would be too much of a nerf. Also I have to take a look at path of life myself, for it should actually work (I looked at the arch angel and he gets the exact same ability).

@Resourceful: After all the effort I had to put in this ability I am not sure, if I am ready to change it so easily. I will have to take a look in a game and see how confusing/difficult to track it really is.

@Air Transport: I think completely removing the repair crew ability would be too much, after all you can't count on having a dreadnought hero available in every game (naturally unless you play dreadnought :P) and bringing a builder for a unit who has most of it's value outside combat would often enough not be worth it imho. So instead I only lowered the amount of health the ability restores to 6, which means the ship will regenerate as much health as an ordinary unit that has no healing / fast regen support.

@Talisman: The problem here is, if I make it +1 res vs. ranged it is too weak. Also, units that would be scary with the ability (e.g. shadow stalkers) can't get it since the heritage trait will only be applied to racial units.

@Hag: I decreased the size a little, but not too much, to keep it different enough from the reanimator. Also I am still not 100% convinced if sorcerer hags will be op, so maybe at some point I may have to change how witch lightning works (e.g. one shot with more damage).

@EO - Was the Airship defaulting to leader completely intentional, or the only way to make the stack float work?

It is indeed a significant tradeoff losing something like a blood brothers buff(when you are a necro) on your Warrior spec WL.

Hi Psychotic, yes that was intentional. It wouldn't have felt right to make a transport ability where the unit transporting the stack isn't shown as stack leader on the strategic map. It is a significant trade-off, yes, but as Mike pointed out it can also help to make the unit more interesting to use. (When you are the attacking player you can always move the ship out of the stack before engaging the enemy.)

Fair enough, creating tradeoffs isn't necesarrily a bad thing.

I've got some comments on the frostling evil side units though.

They are well designed, but the current weird thing I feel about them is that they have more synergy with Tigrans than frostlings.
The wofkin trait provides predator - but inflict bleeding wounds comes more from Tigran units (who all innately have predator as well) than Frostlings.

I also noted the synergy "problem", but it is hard to avoid things like that AND make the subfactions interesting enough. In the end, the wolfkin have best synergy with other wolfkin (so Frostlings), but also nice synergy with tigrans, so I think it should be ok. At least I don't know what to do about it unless I want to completely redesign the subfaction which is very unlikely to happen (especially since the wolfkin are among my favorites so far).

Once you get the last building in the line and your troops get wolfkin skills, synergy stops being a problem, until then your best bet is to use only wolfkin units( which isn't bad since they are quite good melee fighters).

What I mean regarding the synergy is that the only Frostling units that have 'inflict bleeding wounds' or 'razor projectiles' to cause wounds are the T3 heritage unit and Harpoon thrower upgraded from the 2nd heritage building.

Which means the wolfkin ability to 'blood rite' is very difficult to use for them

Wolfkin does give you predator, allowing synergy for Mark Prey though

Tigrans, meanwhile, have inflict bleeding wounds on the Shredder, Cheetah, prowler, and chariot (some default, some on medal - and they all have predator)
This means they can take advantage of both the Blood Rite and mark prey abilties more easily than Frostlings can (and without needing the 4th heritage building). (although they cannot use howl synergies)

Edit: I suggest switching the sons of Fenrir's Inflict crippling wounds on medal to inflict bleeding wounds instead.

Hm actually Sons of Fenrir are supposed to have inflict bleeding wounds as an inherent ability -- will look into this tomorrow ;)

hi =D I'm not a modder so i don't know if this can be done, but are we able to choose which racial heritage we want at the beginning while choosing our race, instead of relying on the buildings to pick it? I find it that it takes awhile for a city to become the race full heritage in the late game, Why not have all your cities become that racial heritage right away when you build them, or have we tried that already? Don't get me wrong I like the way it's played already but what about this idea, have a special building just for settlers that when settlers are produced in that city with the special building will cause that settler to bring with it when it makes a new colony, have that racial heritage and a few upgrades already built, maybe have it level dependent. Just throwing some ideas out there hoping peeps will catch them. =D

Theoratically there is at least one way to achieve what you propose (at least the first part): One could make a new specialisation for evil and good path each which would subsequently unlock the different units and unit-upgrades (for all races). Or alternatively those empire upgrades could be avatar skills (so anyone can research them regardless of spec). It would actually make the system a little simpler, but the drawback is that other unique effects of the buildings (e.g. dark elves that make the city be neutral about blight/underground) would have to be sacfrificed and also balancing could become a big problem then. (it is for a reason that it takes so long to get the heritage trait for all units in a city; just compare the subfaction traits with lvl 4 or 5 military racial gov upgrades...)

As for the settler idea, I don't know to what extent city founding can be manipulated, but I have a feeling that what you have in mind won't be possible.

@Psychotic: The Sons of Fenrir "problem" is now fixed, don't know why I forgot to give them the inflict bleeding effect in the end ...

Hey, as I mentioned, I loved the flamecallers. But undead, greaterlifestealing.... Theyre HARD to beat. I could take on a stack an a half of T3's with mild spell use (gift of nekron), and not even really be damaged after.

(shrugging smile) Just so you know. .... I love em. But I CAN abuse them. ... The only simple thing I can think of (other than have bask in the flames have to be recast, which could be hard (i've not snooped you source edits yet)) is to give them a greater inherent weakness to frost, more akin to what frostlings have to fire.

Ok. Thats it! Now off to explore the lizardssssssss.....!

Would it be possible to delete the original settler and create a brand new unit like the settler, maybe multiple settlers with different building upgrades to go with it?

Anywho I was reading past mentions of an airship and I had a question, does the AI know about the whole whose ever is leader that they will use his ability commands over the others in the stack of the others who have commands like "Melee Command" for instance? That is if they want to use the airships ability to fly over the mountain and what not. =D

So another sugestion about the racial mod (=which I love by the way, Great Job=) is an idea for a sub-race for the Orcs evil little hacking bitting gnawing creeplings, anywho I was thinking of a joint cooroperation between the orcs and the goblins as a sub-race for the evil side. Kinda very much like the Lord of the Rings way of doin it, but only to an extend, such as only the most strongest and most powerful of the gobline horde would make it to the military might of the orcs, but I'm sure there are more ways than one to make this a reality. They will just have hordes and hordes of them beating you down if you ever faced them in game. =D