That is a vanilla bug. I have seen it before too. Better report it.

Bp - I have a thread posting the outpost bug here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/435722. Recommend you start your own. I was disappointed this fix wasn't in the 1.02 changelog but oh well.

My impression/bugs list after playing through 200+turns on insane world/expert Ai's/large map/all dense/terrifying monsters: 

- palace - messed up tooltip info: faction prestige -20 -> +1

- scarce gold - I have right now 8 cities, and taxes on medium in order not to go into negative. I never upgrade units, it is cheaper just to spend 2 turns producing new unit with all the bonuses of a fortress than to pay 75g for each unit's upgrade. It will cost me couple hundred just to pay for all units. If you do not have constant cash flow from taking over lairs, money is an issue. Cities alone right now are unable to provide stable economy and maintain good army. We have lots of buildings providing bonuses to production, but very few to gold. I think also towns should give more gildar. Let's say +4 for lvl 2, +8 for lvl 3 etc.

- i propose that hero's equipment to be cheap. I cannot even now afforded horses for heroes, whereas i am fielding lots of cavalry. I think anything you can produce should be cheap. 

-perks for units: good only for the very early game (on insane world not even). There is only one combination that is really good: +10 accuracy, +1 attack +15 witght and +10 hp (or +20 weight for heavy troops). A lot of perks offers bonus just for first 1-3 turns. Since fights are intended to last long, they are basically useless. All the perks that speed up units like charge are not so useful in this mod, since it still takes a long time to take down anything. I can rush to archers, but then i have to bush them for 10 turns to kill them (meanwhile i am slaughter by defenses). Also bansai perk is also weird: when troop is down to 25% of hp, usually its attack is very low and +9 does not help much. It would be better something like 'hard to kill': +5 dodge/+5 initiative and +10/+20 dodge for correspondingly 50%/75% of hp. 

Ideas of perks: +10 critical chance, +10% of ignore damage defense, +50% chance of extra counter attack (or even +1 to counter attack), +15% chance of double strike or true strike or ignore defense or stun, +1 move/+5 attack after each kill, doing critical strike as a counter attack to a critical strike received, life on hit, +20% of extra attack etc. More choice the better.  

- knives should be renamed to 'daze'. That's what they do to enemy AI that insists to use them whenever they are available, even though they do no damage. Damage should be shown (tooltips says nothing) and be way more up. Here is another idea for perk: knife thrower (+500% damage to knives & cool-down 2 turns $ 20% chance of stunning throw), or poisonous knives etc. 

- units like sand golem, summons etc. should have also attack bonus per level. It will make them useful in a middle game as well. 

- middle-late research is very slow. It is a cool idea, except that AI cheats/trades with others non stop. As result playing on expert and having 4x number of cities, and more research i am waaaay behind AI's. I am having 6 troops per army, 4 units troops and AI has already 9 & 7. And this is on expert. In vanilla such a difference rarely happens, and even if it does, you catch up quickly, right now all my researchers are 20+ turns ...  

- problem with cities: i thought i have problem conquering cities b/c i played on ridiculous last game. Nope. Since AI is so fast with research and city development their cities are unconquerable during the middle game. Especially if they have 7 catapults parked there plus 15+ militia troops etc. Balance is screwed. I am not sure, whether it means we are encouraged to play on normal alone or just wait till end game to attempt conquering other AI's. Siege equipment early on would be nice too. Another problem are enormous bonuses defending troops get in a city 40+hp. Not rare is to see militia knights having 800+hp. Fireball is a joke with such defenses. 

- catapults are OP. They should be going down quickly when surrounded by my troops, yet they shoot aiming at themselves attacking all the troops around them. They have way too much hp and defense, should have instead good air-dodge and spell res, but -20 normal dodge. When troops attack them they should always hit. For now they are like a small dragon rather than catapults .... 

- i am continuously attacked in cities covered by wardens and having nightwatch build in them. Incredibly annoying. I have been doing tests, only weak cities are attacked and if I reinforce defense city is ignored. Hence, nightwatch does not work at times (it is not that monsters randomly walk in mine city). 

It is a long post but i am going to take a break till they fix path-finding problems and other bugs, i am just tired of crushes/re-loading process...

Can you send me a save game so I can look at your economy?

Yup, i will do it when i am back home

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/16401819/FE/economy.EleSav

So that's a save. Another issue i realized that since armies are having huge amount of hp healing current healing per season is not enough ... Even though i have a cleric after each battle i have to take couple of turns in the city to recover which slows the game a lot. 

Any comments on other points? 

Alright.  I have officially won my first game at Master's Affliction.  I am going to officially have to graduate myself and make the game harder - Harder/Harder/Unmoderate is too easy.

Thoughts...

Played Tarth.  What won me the game, more than anything else, was Explosive Shot/Spread Shot from Path of the Archer.  Between that, and by the end of the game a lvl 20 Irane, I probably could have steamrolled everything.

Is Explosive Shot supposed to hit twice?  Because it certainly seems to... and both hits have a chance to crit.  It is an extremely powerful ability that let me pretty much send Irane out by herself, taking on full stacks of monsters.

By the end of the game, I'd taken over effectively half of the world, was building toward a Tower of the Witch for eventually a Forge for Spell of Making, had taken out two Wildlands - well, one.  I completely (near as I could tell) cleared out the Swamp wildlands (including the elemental lord), but it never 'cleared' out.

Eventually I rolled over Magnar and Resoln, the two Empires (who were very weak late game) with two Storm Dragons, my Sovereign, three Yew 7 man mounted archers, and 3 paladins (champion armor + lots defensive stuff).  Never lost a single unit.  I ended up winning a diplomatic victory, well above in score compared to Altar or Pariden, who by the end really really wanted to be nice to me.

Frankly, I lucked out at the beginning.  Aggressive expansion let me outclass the Empire factions, plus (as I found out after I took their cities) lair spawns had actually hemmed them in very nicely - there was a really nasty syndicate spawn that completely prevented Magnar from expanding over a landbridge to the north (or so I assume - it was fully upgraded by the time I stomped it).  Similarly, a bunch of spider/troll lairs were to the southeast of Resoln's area, and apparently they were unable to get through there.  It likely didn't help that both Resoln and Magnar were at war with Pariden and Altar as well, and were essentially functioning as a buffer.

Interesting times, definitely.  Need to try a different faction now though.

Sean - check out the most recent playthrough here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/436313.

Could be a game ending bug where I think there might be too many defenders in a city and when I try to move a normal unit out, it somehow grabs some city defenders and puts them in the overland army. And then it just goes downhill from there with all kinds of weird stuff going on.

Just concerned the qty of defenders in your mod may exceed some game limitations and cause funkiness.

Had the same bug - i moved my milita out of city ones, but after re-starting and re-loading all was fine.

Had also a bug that after battle one of my stationed units got 12 soldiers there (instead of 4) and i could not disband or move out this unit, had also an error that during tactical battle my sov was nowhere to be found on a field of battle but still could cast spells from outside of area. All this bugs happened with 9 troops in a city.

Still, very rare bugs.

The palace bug is annoying. I will get it fixed.

I took a look at your economy. You have taxes set at low. The intention is for you to start raising taxes. At normal tax rates you have more than enough money. Once you have all your slave buildings up, you can increase taxes to High for only a slight research penalty and no harm to production. That is how the empire plays the midgame. They get less research, but tons of gildar. You can start using it along with Black Markets to rush buy everything. You are literally there economically, you just need to crank up the taxes.

Much of your other problems come from your economic problem. Later game items are easily affordable once you have your taxes up, you can afford pretty much all of it.

If you are playing as Yithril, you get access to the Barbaric trait. Your best unit designs are going to rely on light armor, battleaxe,  horses, high Hp and Bloodthirsty. Other factions have different choices. Overall, the first strike is the most important. Yithril is an exception from the rule. An aggressive first strike can cripple your enemy. After that, it doesn't matter much what traits they have. Against monsters, you have to fight single soldier units, so first strike is not as useful. This is why Yithril is such a powerful faction. Their soldiers are good against every type of enemy. Other factions are no so lucky.

The traits you suggest are already in the game as special faction traits. The ones you don't like I think you have just not seen a strong Bushido unit. A spear with +9 attack strikes for decent damage up until death. It's a great trait for your weak militias and tank units that use many counterattacks.

Knives are a terrible weapon. I have not decided how to make them useful. There is some hope the devs will add some logic to let us improve ranged attacks and open some possibilities. I will try to do something with them soon. Maybe it will do 10 attacks at 2 damage to hurt unarmored units.

Summoned units have more power when summoners summon them. That includes damage increases, better armor, etc... I don't like per level increases, but we'll see what happens.

I checked the techs too. You are playing a mundane faction. Really, you aren't supposed be researching the whole tech tree. At your current pace, you'll have the whole tech tree for warfare in 200 turns. By turn 500, you are only halfway through the game. If that pace is too slow, try playing on fast. Admittedly, I am still working on the endgame features, so I understand how the game may seem to fall apart later in the game. I'll work on that.

Catapults are not perfect. I will balance them a little better.

Wardens and Nightwatches are not guarantees. They simply reduce the chance for a monster to choose to attack. 

Sean, can your unit designs be used with vanilla/stormworld also or do they include MA only traits?

All unit designs us traits that are unique to the mod.

It is true, it can be a good trait, but not when you face 1000+hp bastards So my perspective can be screwed by insane level at this point. Even AI on expert goes into hundreds of hp, so you just cannot really cripple them on initial attacks ... I just would like to have more traits that are as useful and powerful as Barbaric trait allowing further specialization of troops, but i agree that a balance is always tricky. 

I think problem lies with vanilla. AI on expert with two cities should not have 7000+ more research than a player with 7 cities after 200 turns. I think that somehow slower pace of research of your mod, which i support wholeheartedly - it should really count what you research and research should have big impact on a game - somehow favors AI's research. When i play on vanilla with AI on expert there is almost no difference between our researches's level, or slight advantage of AI.   

Regarding towns i have some problem with them. Fortresses are always useful, since they build troops non-stop or provide safety. Research cities even if idle provide research. But you pump so much production into towns, then you build all food upgrades and then they are useless. They should produce some guildar when idle at least. 

I forgot: about research - sure you do not need other techs... For instance, you do not need more soldiers in one troop, nor armies of 9 units.... That's also a problem - you need very, very advance civic technologies to field really effective army. 

I just have seen an army of trolls having together 8k of hp ... I just wonder how much hp they will in the end game.... 

One more issue: regarding recovering hp. I think, at least in the cities, it should be by percentage - like 20% per turn would be nice. It in pain in the ass to recover massive hp ... 

I agree, something has to be done with recovering hp in a city. As it is now it's more efficient to disband a unit and build a new one than letting it sit in a city for 40 turns.

I played a little bit longer, situation so far is:

- playing Tarth (normal world, challenging AI), I have 7 cities, very little metal (one metal source from ~50 turns back), no horses/wargs, 2 crystal sources. It's around turn 250. Still not at war.

- I'm supposedly the strongest faction but not by far, still haven't seen Krax (playing on large map with 5 other factions).

- Irane the absolute killer and archers are the primary army, but failed miserably (as did a group of pretty strong heroes) against a 7-unit Ogrex3 army which I thought I could take out. That was fun. I killed them with third attack, after my heroes recovered. It was a slow battle of attrition, and there's no way I could've won without Earthshields (two Earth Elementals taking the blows while the archers did the damage). There's an Ogre lair close to me and it'll take some serious planning to conquer that.

- after that an underwhelming win against Ashwake dragon with 4 groups of ice mages and 2 heroes. I had 130 fire resist on heroes due to ring, amulet and spell. Poor dragon did overall ~40 damage to one of my heroes and died.

- I noticed something that might be a bug, but I'm not sure - my city expanded enough to engulf Altar (or Magnar, can't remember) outpost and suddenly it's my outpost. Is that how it's supposed to work? I can't remember how it was in vanilla .

I always pick strength and muscle, always those two, and usually the third one is Bushido, but I feel there aren't many good choices.  Why shouldn't there be some training-time costed abilities that are more of a definite help?  Design is a little underwhelming right now IMO.

One thing I plan to change is Town Hp bonus. I want to move it from a +X Hp when defending to +X Hp recovery. That way Towns become an important logistics concern for warfare. Towns already produce a ton of gildar, give you influence, and prestige. They grow 4 times faster than a normal city and 8 times faster when idle. They are supposed to be something that reaches its full potential fast. But once it does that, it has few other uses. That is the trade off compared to a Fortress or Conclave. You can of course train tanks there much more efficiently than in a Fortress. Seriously, replace those earth shields with meaty units from a town. With the +10 defense, +12Hp per soldier in the unit, you will have a supreme tank. Is no one doing that?

As to needing civics tech to field a strong army, that is an affect of you playing with massive Hp on higher difficulties. I am starting to see that the Hp bonus high difficulties has is screwing up the game. I will adjust the settings to reduce Hp for the enemy and replace it with other benefits. The problem is that I am balancing for normal games and most players are adding +50-200% Hp to the balance I have created. It's kind of a crappy way to increase difficulty. Fortunately there are other ways to make the game harder. 

I am also going to switch some traits into what we call a battleautocastspell. This will allow them to work for more than one turn, which is a defect of the trait coding. That kind of change is going to take a while. One thing I will say is that one time action traits are good against units with many soldiers. Permanent bonuses or bonuses when damaged are good against single units. Trolls have a great advantage in that respect. But the later portions of the game when you are fighting real armies, you will want to use the one turn traits more often. 

Dragons are a little too weak right now. I am going to set up their lairs to actually spawn roaming pack drakes and then epic dragons later in the game. I will make the lair spawn a quest where you can engage in diplomacy with dragon kind. If you complete the quest, you will get a dragon camp. If you fail, the dragon king will return for his realm...

Outposts will switch sides if you can get your ZoC to overtake it. Towns are good for this strategy.

If you pick Strength, Muscle, Bushido, you are wasting a good opportunity to have a great unit. It really depends on which faction you play. That combo makes me think you are Gilden. If so, Front Line and Elite Front Line are a better choice than Bushido and Weapon Proficiency (please call it this so the traits don't sound childish). It all depends on what kind of units you are able to train and which faction you are. And the reason traits should never cost labor is because not choosing a trait compared to choosing a trait that is valuable but costly, causes a huge disparity in training times. If you have really good traits that cost alot, the choice to not have them will never be a good strategy. If you reduce the cost of the really good traits, every unit will take them. It's impossible to balance as we can clearly see in the vanilla. No, the only way to do it is to say that each trait is a focus in the unit's training period, which is included in the cost of the unit. Otherwise the system will never be balanced. This system also fits much better into the reasoning of why it takes up to 2 years to train a peasant to hold a spear.

But please, if you have an idea for a good trait, post it and I will add it. The truth is, they are very difficult to come up with given the obtuse restrictions of the game. I saw some other post about adding traits to the vanilla game and there is not one there that is possible to add.

+3 attack when moving, lol. 

Found something:

PathOfTheGovernor isn't working for some of the options, because their prereq references "PathOfGovernor" instead of "PathOfTheGovernor1". This goes for path of the merchant, sage, and maybe some others.

===

In re: your post.

I guess what troubles me is a trait like charge.  Before it was useful ... now it's hard to take.  Initiative -3 means they will get fewer turns.  But ... I guess if I think about it, it's good for armored knights one-shotting people, and less useful against something that will survive and hit back.  OK, that actually sounds appropriate.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be obtusely critical.  I understand your vision here and I will listen to your suggestions ... certainly the monsters are beating on me pretty good, so I'll experiment more.  (I mostly play Altar as it happens.)

I will let you know if I come up with any traits as well.

This seems good.  While at it ... naybe even some mild spell-like abilities (like Stun, except obviously not stun or anything powerful as that ... not sure what the exact term is for these but they are grouped in the spells file.)

Sean - personally I don't see a problem with HP bonuses on the higher difficulty. I chose insane for a reason - I knew what I was getting into. I intend on playing your mod on your map with your recommended settings in the next week and give some feedback.

I guess what I'm saying - I like seeing 3K+ HP 4 stacks of corpse spiders. Makes me crap my pants. Not that I like crapping my pants... wait, maybe I do...

But there remains a question whether it is possible to destroy some late packs at all. There is a progression of hp increase and there is increase in your attack power. What if in the late game you will have wandering packs of 9 dragons 4k hp each of them? Even if you can kill them, it is not fun any more - it just takes simply tooo long. On the other hand, magic become useless, since each fight requires 2k+ mana to win. Then you wait 50 turn for another battle ....

Sean is right - game should be dangerous, but the method of just pumping up hp is quite boring one .... 

Sean: i still think 'hard to kill' perk with bonus to ini & dodge when low on hp will be cool.

I also think that 9-units armies are no brainer. AI always goes for those. Since their research is always better than yours, and they can use your designs, if you have 6-units armies with 5 soldiers in unit you will always be at great disadvantage to AI's 9-units 7-man armies. Having more units in army or more soldiers in an unit is often way bigger bonus than inventing new weapon. Hence, those techs which allow you field more numerous armies should be early on research on civic size. I think there is also a problem with AI's research. They research simply too fast, and this will ruin games you intend to have: long, epic, 500+turns long. AI is done with research around turn 250 in those. And i am talking expert difficulty. Which difficulty i should play to have AI not so enormously ahead of me? Again, i think problem is trading, with AI trading with each other without tech allowing it, and without meeting each other. Hence, you are competing against 7-factions researching together.

Another idea that i enjoy recently is: we have this perk for faction that prevents you from using armor. What if we give un-armored troops an ability to change into wolf/bears/spiders or other monsters depending on level of unit/hero. It can be a perk, or can be a spell/unique skill of a hero and entire nation build around this idea.

Yup, wherever i see a dragon i think: easy relaxing low-mana battle

@bp - yeah, I see your point. It's not a level of difficulty I would play the majority of time because it is a chore to eat through all those HP's. But I don't mind exploring the challenge from time to time.

Putting the logistics techs earlier in the tree creates the same problem though. It will just not take as long to do the chore of researching larger units. I want the choice to be weapons or unit size. With that in mind, I can think of a few ways to curtail AI research. The reason they are outdoing you on research is partially due to constant tech trading. The other thing though is that any economic boost I give them also gives the same portion of research, prestige and probably a few other things. It's another hardcoded AI difficulty setting that is not as elegant as I would like. But there is no reason I can't get around it, but it won't be pretty. I'll think more about it and get back to you. Basically it would entail making a special AI faction for each faction that has the specific bonuses I want, but not so much extra growth and research. I think bonus gildar should be enough for most difficulties.

Also, I have learned never to decline a tech trade offer. As long as you are also accepting those trades, you can mostly keep up with the AI. In fact, a Diplomat Sov can seriously game diplomacy to get tons of tech. I had one game as Kraxis where I had so much Influence, I could buy tech points at a 1 to 1 ratio. It was pretty much game over for the AI by then. I had a total monopoly on Influence, preventing any war and giving me much better trades. It was pretty epic, but not something I would want to do every game.