Why no love for Warlords 3 Darklords Rising?

[weirwood]

Hi folks,

I've decided to indulge my nostalgia for the Warlords series by making a rebalance mod for Darklords Rising, as it turns 25 this August. I've had some good feedback from a couple of the old guard over at warlorders.com, but a few people here might also be interested.

The main focus is an overhaul of all the units and heroes in the main game, so you can replay the single player campaigns and scenarios and have a fresh,and hopefully more challenging experience. Competitive multiplayer isn't my highest priority, but the feedback from veterans has been invaluable for tweaking the balance of units. Additional views would be very welcome.

It's very much still a WIP, but I've had a first pass on all units, which you can review here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...cEPeUJaEhka1-WAWjEnx8ozw6C-z0jE5XKgJ/pubhtml#

If you're more interested in hands-on playtesting, I should have something uploaded in the next couple of weeks.

 

[weirwood]

Reposting this from warlorders.com to hopefully get a bit more feedback.

I think now that a rough outline is in place, it makes the most sense to follow a top-down approach - balancing from the strongest, most expensive units downward. I'm almost completely happy with all the Dragons' abilities and stats as they are, now it's mostly a question of fine-tuning the cost, upkeep and setup.

So here are my main questions:

Black vs Blue - We know that there are two bugs that affect lightning; first, it seems to ignore warding when the lightning unit is one the attacking side. A bit fringe, but beneficial. Second, if an acid attack triggers, a lightning attack no longer can. So in a direct duel, blackies completely outclass blues.

Knowing this, do blue dragons even have a chance to be competitive? And either way, what's a fair difference in price to address this discrepancy?

Blues are still meat units, and lightning is still useful, though I would rate even lightning 5 below trample 1 vs ground units. One thought I've had just now is to increase Blues movement to 30 so they can match Silver Dragons, but that would shrink the niche of my rebalanced Air Elementals further.

I've tweaked the upkeep costs, but upkeep only plays a role for regular units.

Next question, Green vs Red, aka Fear vs Chaos. Chaos is the dedicated anti-hero ability, while Fear counters a smaller selection of heroes, but also the ubiquitous Morale units. It's an open question to me whether Leadership 4+ or Morale 4+ is more common in competitive hero stacks. High Leadership usually costs a significant amount of AP, while high Morale can be achieved by combining a L6 spell with an Archon or Unicorn, or even weaker units if an item comes into play.

I'm still in flux with my hero rebalancing, but the changes in my first experiments tend to favor generally cheaper access to either (and Fortify too) for different classes. I'm in favor of Red and Green Dragons, and Chaos and Fear, having the same cost. I haven't been consistent about making Chaos cheaper on lower tier units, but that's the way I think I should go here.

Green vs Gold: We've talked about this before. There's an asymmetry in the benefit of negative modifiers, which get capped at -1 no matter what, and positive ones. Yet, Greens completely neutralize Golds while still reaching that -1 cap. The way I understand it, Gold Dragons' role is more to lead powerful non-hero stacks in the early expansion phase so you have fewer losses there. For min/maxed hero stacks, their Morale 4 is overkill. But for the former reason, I'm wary of buffing their Morale to 5. So my concrete question is, should they be cheaper? 1400? If their best notional use is to build more strong stacks than your opponent has heroes, should their upkeep be lower?

Some hero classes don't have good access to positive modifiers, so maybe there's a niche for them there?

Silver Dragons don't have a uniquely powerful ability, but they're a bit faster and cheaper, while still having dragon combat stats. Here, it's a question what the proper price points between them, Archons and Unicorns are, to make them worth considering as a replacement. I think 1200 plus the dragon tax is fair. It's hard to beat the price of summoned units, though. One thought I've toyed with is to give the Paladin a summoning spell for Silvers that would be more expensive in both AP and mana that the Priest's Divine Aid.

I like Undead Dragons as designed. 4 hp doesn't help against missiles but makes them tougher than other dragons against everything else. Curse isn't useless, but it's a good thematic compromise for a dragon that no longer has a breath attack. They had very low upkeep. I understand the theme behind it, but I've still increased it to not be completely meaningless for their tier.

 

[thesheeep]

I've had some good feedback from a couple of the old guard over at warlorders.com, but a few people here might also be interested.

So THAT's where KGB went.
I kind of remember him from the old I2 forums.

I must admit I've never been too deep into the non-WBC Warlords games, but if you do finish this one up to some kind of beta state, I'd be willing to give it a go and share my thoughts.
But I just don't remember enough about the game to go on descriptions alone.

 

[Jugashvili]

Thank you for your work and for keeping W3 alive, I'll give it a try and provide feedback. Re: balancing dragons, are you talking about gold costs (as in buying production in-game) or point costs (in designing factions)? I understand why you're starting from top to bottom but I'd argue dragons and elementals are the least important things to balance since not many factions can produce them (unless you're making custom factions) and they mostly come as rewards from quests and ruins and thus involve some level of randomness. Summoning is the biggest risk for unbalancing here and in this case undead dragons are very easy to produce with a lvl 5 necromancer, at no cost in mana. Re: fear vs. chaos, for heroes I usually go for leadership since morale is often redundant due to morale-boosting units, so as a hero killer I'd give chaos the edge. As an all-rounder, though, I think fear is more useful.

 

[weirwood]

Thanks. Most of my feedback is coming from a multiplayer viewpoint, where you absolutely make custom army lists. But my own focus is on the pre-made campaigns and scenarios, so I'm trying to square the circle somewhat. Gold cost and army point cost are directly related - you divide the former by 11 to get the latter, with a bunch of additional rules. You can look up the details here:

http://www.desjardins.org/david/dlrinfo/sides.txt

One of the final touches will be a theme-focused recreating of the random sides, according to my finalized rebalanced unit costs. The idea and hope is that you can start up a random game, pick any side, and have an interesting and balanced army set and challenging opponents to play against, without having to set up custom army lists first.