Should Heroes be Able to Take Armies Alone?

I think that a powerful, experienced, well-equipped hero, especially a channeler, should be a major threat to any army. However, this should only really be possible with a good deal of work. Right now, I worry about heroes being too vulnerable since they can be singled out.

I've been arguing since beta that I would like to see a divide between adventuring parties of heroes and armies of large units. This would be in keeping with the 'strategy game in an RPG world' concept.

1) Army:

- Composed of large units of soldiers.

- Capable of capturing territory.

- Cannot engage in quests.

- Slow moving.

2) Adventuring Party:

- Composed of individual soldiers  / henchmen and heroes.

- Cannot capture territory, but can pass across borders to explore, quest, etc.

- Can engage in quests.

- Fast moving.

- Has a chance to avoid armies.

3) Heroes

- Can join armies.

- One hero per army can be selected as the leader, giving the army certain bonuses.

This would create a situation where heroes have a clearly defined role vs. armies. A hero is still important in an army, but shines as part of an adventuring party. This would prevent an 'army' of one hero swooping in to capture a city of thousands of people, forcing players to use armies to take and hold territory. This would also open up the world for exploration, questing, and adventuring, since parties of heroes could move about the world without causing major problems for anyone.

I agree. I would point out that your idea seems very difficult to add to the game.

I'm fine with heroes being able to stop armies single-handed, IF there is a value that makes it impossible to do it over and over in a short period of time. For example, an army may have 500 health and a hero may have 500 health. If they face off, the hero should not walk out of that combat with full health.

Heroes are already becoming deeper with the feats/perks/whatevers that Derek is giving them. I suspect this will be enough to give them a point. A deeper and more colorful situation could exist, but this one should suffice. And it's easy to expand - perks that give bonuses to the whole battlefield are entirely possible.

That said, I do think that a high-level hero should be able to take out small armies. It's a fantasy game, we need some badasses. Even if they would be better at the head of their own army.

I would say Age of Wonders does it great. My lvl 15+ hero there is very powerful. It can singlehandedly kill any faction top monster 1v1 and lose just a bit of health. But it cannot defeat whole armies, especially when spellcasting comes into effect. If I send him too far ahead they can gank him and kill him. And it is perfect this way. Better then MoM when once you got a group of 5 heroes with a couple of levels each and some equipment there was nothing the AI could do to stop them.

True, that's also because in AOW you gain XP only by giving the fatal blow to enemies, which forces you to careful plan a combat and be very careful when using heroes.

That way you don't have lots of heroes increasing their skills just because they were present for five second on a battlefield when others were doing all the work. In your average AOW game, usually you end up only having a couple of battle-ready heroes, the rest are just there for strategic purpouses (and they are still useful). Nobody is invincible in AOW.

I like Goontrooper's assesment of strategic advantages and disadvantages (as opposed to merely discussing tactical ones). Sadly, I think the design is far too advanced to implement most of what would be needed to make it work; there are no "classes" of units, and each (hero, army member, etc.) is a piece on the rather uniform board.

Actually they gain XP per each turn even if you don't do anything with them. But they gain more by killing stuff

Heroes are much better balanced then they used to be.  In the early versions of EWOM you could get a team of heroes in the best armor and a war hammer and they would put the work in on most enemy forces.  Nowadays you have to have a good team of troops with them.  At the current moment I think the balance is just about what it should be.

But one a turn means very little when it takes 25 to reach level 2, even in a really long game.

Good, but here are a couple of additional thoughts for when heroes are in armies:

- Magic focused heroes should give less army bonuses just by their presence than combat focused heroes.

- Combat focused heroes should generally be most effective when used to take out individual important targets (heroes and monsters), and less so when fighting lots of grunts.

- Monsters should be usually be good for fighting large numbers of weaker units than other things.

I agree that it is beyond the scope of WoM and FE, but it might be nice for the next expansion.

Agreed that different heroes should give different bonuses. I'd like to see the skill trees / traits / etc. follow something like Shogun Total War 2 (for a recent example) where some abilities helped in direct combat, some in army leadership, and some at the strategic level. Hero stats would also be important. A Charismatic leader would gain a bonus for leading an army or running a city, and might trigger positive evens, while a low Charisma leader would do the opposite.

From what Derek said in his journals, I think we are well on our way to getting there.

Champions\heroes will be specialized units - they have a higher accuracy than normal units, and monsters don't get to do overkill damage to them. I expect that they will be able to pick up additional abilities, such as Monster Slayer (+X to attack, damage and defense versus unit types Beast and Abomination) and Evasion (+X to ranged defense, to simulate that it's rather more difficult to hit a single person at range than one of several standing close together, which is what a normal unit simulates).

However, large number of similiarly leveled and equipped melee units will wear them down. So, a high-level hero with plate armor can mow down enemy peasants but against an army of knights in similiar armor and wielding good weapons, he is best off bringing some friends of his own.

One interesting aspect you raise is whether heroes should have better overland speed than normal units. The answer to that is probably yes, for gameplay reasons - if quests are likely to take adventurers from one end of kingdom to another, it would be nice if it only took a few turns.

Quite how this should be done - several options present themselves:

Basic "Hero" trait grants increased overland movement.

Basic "Hero" trait grants additional movement in own territory only (also for allies who grant right of passage?).

Basic "Hero" trait grants additional movement on roads.

Perhaps a combination of all these?

Also, heroic horses (mounts that only heroes can use), can also provide additional bonuses to all of these.

Thus, early game hero travel will be relatively slow, whilst later game heroes can move around very quickly.

Tbh, i agree with Black knights that the way heroes work is very wrong but i also think the general mathematics rules behind combat in general is wrong and that the trouble with heroes in WoM is deeply tied with that in that regards.

This is what i understand :

-System rules for each attackers if they hit or not with with dodge and accuracy.

-Attackers (each singled out if in a stack) deal up to their attack score in damage +10% or something.

-Defenders (singled if in a stack )ward up to their defense score. Or they ward their defense score and then the attackers get a chance to bypass part or all of the defense score.

Basically. The first set of rolls is and all or nothing. The second set of rolls, considering the relatively low number of HP units have, is also, in most cases, an all or nothing. Granted, with large stacks and high number of units the sheer number of rolls is going to produce some rather stable results (i mean the results of your attacks are around your expectation a little better or a little worse), but where a single units is concerned (namely, a hero) the rolls' results are not stable at all. With luck (and good equipment) a hero can wipe out armies. True. With lack of luck you have a dead champion. Now i get the idea that things are balanced so that a hero matter on the battle field -but- if you ask me there's no way you're gonna have champions who matters which are not ultimates war machines as long as you're gonna have to make them survive through lucky lord's hammer shots, while allowing units with smaller attack score to still do a bit of damage on heavily armored units.

If you ask me what numbers would be needed as for stats effect, equipment, HP of units w/e for this system to be balanced the answer is : i don't know and i even doubt these exists. And to begin with, the first roll is already all or nothing, why the second is as well ?

Now what i don't understand is why the system works this way. Was it to make it simple ? Try balancing it and we'll talk about simplicity. If i wonder about that, it's that there was absolutely NO NEED to be creative when setting combat system.

Take the example of most MMORPG's around here the system is that :

-make one or several rolls for hit/miss/dodge/critical/whatever

-Damage is : Base damage (roll for a random component if any) x (1 - damage absorbtion)

where damage absorbtion is most of the time : Armor / (Armor + constant)

That way the more armor you have, the harder you are to kill, yet, armor alone never completely wards off damages. Thus, the damage are pretty stable. Thus the number of enemies is what stops your hero. Not lucky shots.

Or you can go the Titan Quest way :

Armor deflect either 66% of attack damage or Armor Class, whichever is lower.