Requiring some advice for an extensive mod I'm working on

I have looked into this and the main thing I have noticed is that most lairs have this tag:

 <ReleaseGuardiansOnInfluenceHit>1</ReleaseGuardiansOnInfluenceHit>

By setting that to 0 you could make it so the guardians never leave their lairs. Then you could manually set a wandering radius for those monsters instead or just have separate wanderers spawn over time instead.

Frogboy had mentioned that monsters will stay near their lair more in the next build.

The monsters aren't recruited with the champions. So you can just give them more guards so they die less.

This is the default effect of having 2 or more tech prereqs.

Other then that just go through the ElementalDefs.xml file and see what you change.

The monster thing is likely to be fixed eventually by the devs, but we will have to see what improvements are made in .984. They claim faction AI won't settle near monsters and monster aggression when wandering will depend on difficulty. What we could do is make each lair stay put as DsRaider suggests. Then have the lair spawn enemies that wander in a radius of 2 and respawn quite often. That was my solution anyhow. I also hope the devs eventually teach other factions to sweep an area so that the human is not the only one sweeping up monsters. I notice the AI does not think in terms of clearing an area. Hopefully a few more updates to the AI will make it choose better targets to attack and link that to settling logic.

I am about to add 8 extra units to hero huts. I suggest you do the same.

I played your earlier weapon mod. It had some good logic to it. I used much the same idea in my mod, except I reward late game techs with massive power that as a high cost. But up until the midgame, I agree weapons should have inherent tactics associated with them and new weapons should simply add more choices and counters. They shouldn't simply overpower the previous techs. A good way to do this is to keep a tight control of weight capacity and increase the penalty for going over the limits. Beyond that, there are a few posts where people have talked about their personal additions to melee weapons. Adding some interesting effects via meleeappliesspell is the way to go. 

Some of my ideas on this:

Weapon Abilities:

Axe - 20% chance to get an extra swing at full damage

Dagger - +2 Counterattacks  (Other people used a Bleed mechanic, which is essentially poison)

Maces - Bash, high weight capacity and damage with an Initiative penalty makes these strike slow

Staff - +4 Defense to mimic its ability to shield you from blows

Shortbow - -4 Initiative, low damage, low labor costs

Longbow - -8 Initiative, high damage, costs metal and more labor (also considered a low damage with armor piercing to get an absolute value of 2-4 damage.

Hero Abilities:

Cleave - 25% chance to do damage per soldier in the unit

Crack Armor - 33% chance to reduce enemy armor by 5% (stacks)

The list goes on, but surely some of that could work to make weapons take on specific roles, more than just upgrade power. When it is a straight power upgrade, add weight and increase the costs. That limits the number of super units, which is acceptable as long as high quality units can be defeated by weaker ones. I still haven't been able to balance this against spellcraft because ranged attacks cannot be resisted with spell resistance.

Any ideas - please go modular.  I'd be with you on the monsters based on what you can achieve / how they ultimately behave. 

I'd very much like the second idea about not killing off other side's heroes.  I don't understand how adding monsters make them more powerful to recruit.  Because you don't get those if you pay the money for the hero.  They die off or vanish and you just get the hero. 

Not sure I am with you on the un-tiering but would be interested to see where you go with it.  (Just my own thoughts on your presentation so far)

dsraider idea its great but not working now because that would destroy ai, since we have no multiplayer the game only matters if ai can play it, lets hope we get some ai tool too someday, until then unfortunately big changes need to work in conjunction with ai, atm ai would be slaughered if lair guardians would attack cause they dont care enough, and place cities too close to lairs

even if this is solver then the problem would remain

lairs too much aggressive cant work, becuase ai will NEVER be able to understand each lair strenght and move trying to dodge the hardest etc etc

too much aggressivness can lead only to the usual ai champions with 20 injuries on them

Meh, my Path of the Healer can heal injuries for 500 mana. So let them die with aggressive lairs.

ok but 500 mana is a lot it need to be used at right time and on right champ

what priority can you use to prevent ai tol waste 500 mana on nonimportant injuries or useless champions or cast it too much every time there is 1 injury ?

(btw can you put istargetworth into that stuff? )

we really need more parameters to play with ai or modding is quite useless imo

IsWorthy... as soon as it is hooked up.