The choice between barbarian or imperial

Since the Fantasians want to be a barbarian-style kingdom/country, which I approve of (always fun to have variety!), there should be some bonuses to doing so. My idea was to balance the fact that they have poor weaponry and armor with more skills like higher power strike. This is of course pretty straight forward, but how would this be done?

A lot of evolving of troops will lie in upgrading. A good idea would be in making a maximum number of upgrades for each troop type. This upgrade can be armor upgrades as well as stats upgrades. Imperial countries would probably be more satisfied with better armor and weapons, while the more 'barbarian' countries would prefer high athletics, ironflesh and power strike.

So what do you guys think of not being able to research both all upgrades for stats and all upgrades for armor, so you have to make a choice (you can do 50-50 and the like though, but there will be a maximum of upgrades you can do for a troop)?

So you could either spend all your resources on researching/upgrading stats and gain let's say +8 athletics and +8 ironflesh, or you could mix it and gain +4 athletics, +4ironflesh and some medium armour and weapon improvements, or you could concentrated on the armour and weapon improvements at the cost of the skills? I'd be all for that. And yes, there should be a limit for upgrades.

I like it

We would need to work out a balance
Ie, Ironflesh would cost 2 upgrade points, same as a medium strength weapon, ect...

What if we wanted to strike a balance? Medium armor and medium skills upgrade?

Edit: also, with how useless armor was even before the current patch, will it receive a buff?

Tibertus wrote:What if we wanted to strike a balance? Medium armor and medium skills upgrade?

Edit: also, with how useless armor was even before the current patch, will it receive a buff?

Yes it would need a rebalancing of the soak and reduction factors.

Don't say because you have good equpment you cannot have good skills.

Just make it so prices for upgrades increase exponentially the more you have.
So you can always get better but it sure as hell will cost you.

Its true plazek but the issue comes there is a limit you can reach really, but technical barbarians were always known for there strenght and agility, because the weight and restrictions from armour are not there.

So increase the effect of heavy equipment.

Perhaps even give negative powerstrike bonuses or something if you think really heavy armour actually reduces your strength. Though I am not sure of that.

Nah I prefer the idea to differentiate between light (and usually shock) troops and heavy armored tanks.

By limiting the skills of professionally trained soldiers and making it so that barbarians cannot develop good equipment should they so choose.

Gotta love that diversity.

Rather than magically give barbarians higher skills and trained soldiers less why not explain there differences with reasons that make sense? Like what I posted above.

If you wanted more differentiation between troops then allow for more specialisation than we do right now. For example allow some skills to be "tag skills" a la Fallout 1,2 and 3.

Then barbarians can tage their athletics or powerstrike and get double points per cost (for example) and heavy defenders can choose to tag shields or "heavy armour use" which might be a good skill to add if you want to increase differentiation between trooop types.

Thats some good thinking plazek, I like that idea. Could be hard to balance out well though I think.

I think this thing has always been hard to balance

true that

What about a strategic balance?

Trained, heavily armored troops will be more expensive to recruit, while naked barbarians can be much cheaper.

I like that idea as well. Hordes versus elites.

Me too.
I want to see as many options with as few restrictions as possible.

There is no logical impossibility for a very well equipped and trained force it just costs time and money.

Time is another thing you should consider. Not ALL barbarians were badasses, it took time and many battles if they wanted to be the best warriors. Maybe this should effect troop production time, perhaps higher skilled troops should take longer to make. Of course this would make no sense for equipment but higher quality equipment would take longer to produced unless you had highly skilled worked/efficient production.

Which made me think maybe you should also have training facilities as well. These would increase the amount of skill points you get/reduce the time to produce soldiers or whatever.

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It would allow more possibilities because a barbarian nation may forgo almost all equipment production and just want to be "badass" so work on their training facilities (not very barbarian sounding huh, but you know what I mean).


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However you also want to be careful not to have too many buildings on the strategic level that effect troops equipment/skills as each change to any factions troops will need a patch for the mod. Unless we planned to utilise an SVN or somehing this would soon become very annoying.