-4 Init is a pretty tough thing to swallow sometimes.  You can't just look at the damage, need the whole picture.  As well, the only way most people get their trained units to high (> 10) level is through reloading a lot.  In the normal course of things there is a lot of attrition.  Some units will make it, but most will not.  You can't balance the game against someone whose units never die.

BTW I don't consider reloading to be cheating, if it is what you want to do then go to it.  But don't complain the hammer is broken when your trained units are L15 and your heroes are uninjured because of this.

I would like the OP's LH men to do battle against my 14-attack (+1 fire ring, +1 cold ring, +3 fire amulet, +3 ice amulet) ice staff mages.  One shot ... pop!  But you don't see me creating a post that 14-attack ice staff mages are OP'ed do you?  The game is full of OP'ed strategies ... or at least it was until people started posting crap like this and Derek started listening to it.  Argh.

P.S.  I miss the old Juggernauts.

What kind of comparison is that? The crystal cost on your mages will be monstrous compared to a single lightning hammer

I agree.  I had the AI attack me with to Juggernauts and 10 of his very deadly friends. The two Juggs were dead before they made it half way to me.   The juggs need to either show up earlier to become more relevant or they need to move faster.  As of now, they seem like more show than substance. I have to say that this experience may be different with a different sovereign or going to war earlier.  If memory serves me correctly I lost one unit out of 12.  This was at a point in the game that felt like mop up work.  The problem with the mop up part of the game is it will take at least 100 turns or better.  It makes me lose interest and I am not sure if I even want to finish the game.

After writing this post, I realize that it has to be insane to find the right balance in this game.  The variables of each game can be so different that you have to play out the same situation with different sovereigns with close to the same skill sets to find out if something is really not working correctly, and even then the style of play comes into play also.  Best of luck SD.

I think what Trojasmic was trying to say is that the lightening hammer may seem OP when your hero is at a high level but there are far more powerful things that can do far more damage by the time your hero reaches this level.  I have to say there is a sweet spot during the game that the hammer seems like the only choice but only a hero that has no magic or distance type of weapon in the later part of the game will make having a hammer being the first choice.  I find melee units somewhat useless in the late mid stage to late stage of the game.  Most units by this time can do so much damage that I would rather eliminate them from a distance while my hero plays the pincushion role by absorbing enemy damage.

Melee being relatively useless late game compared to ranged is a separate issue tho.

What the OP was trying to say is that having one melee weapon in the game that is better than any other melee weapon for the most part of the game(if not all) is bad game design because it renders all other melee weapons useless. They might as well not be in the game, and that's a waste of development resources, especially if said weapon is very easy to obtain.

Someone said earlier that they don't want the game 'watered down'. But what is more watered down - a game that has multitude of melee weapons, all useful, or a game that (for all practical purposes) only has one melee weapon which is a no-brainer choice over all others?

Lightning hammer really strong. Bash, still sucks.

simple solution: swap lightning hammer and windhammer (iirc name);  the one you find as loot sometimes that's a hammer with +2 lightning damage.

So just switch which one of those is available as a tech and which one is a neat item you only find as loot.

The solutions are either to give only flat amounts, to any item, except legendary ones, or to allow a scaling bonus with a max, like +5, +7, whatever floats your boat.

That's just too easy also to say that nerfing is never the solution. Developers are not gods and they can overlook things. That's also why patchs exist.

First of all, melee is not a separate issue.  This post is about the lightening hammer being OP(which is a melee weapon).  I'm saying that this melee weapon has less effect on battles when this weapon is at it's most potent because there are several other options that is far more superior to this hammer.  I will repeat what I said earlier that there is a point in the game were the lightening hammer seems like the only option but I disagree with the fact that this weapon is op through the whole game.  I would again suggest that this game is more fun to play when it has more items that are like this item than less.  I ask when is that last time someone looked forward to researching the generic items?   If the hammer is deemed OP, I believe the better option is to have the option to research armor that resists the lightening making the weapon less effective. This is the back and forth battle of research that seems to be missing.

Far as the water down comment, what I meant was that almost everything that was fun to get has been nerfed.  Instead of making everything weak and rather uninteresting, why not move more of the weak items stronger.  It is more fun to find or research something that makes a difference in the game than a bunch of ho hum things that after spending much time to research really doesn't do all that much.  I think this also partially lends to doom stacks because armies are vulnerable to the surrounding environment.  The units take to long to create several stacks and too weak to be by themselves.  When demons were strong, they had an army of their own.  Now that they have been nerfed, they became a supporting cast unit to the champion, just like everything else.

Fine. I'll try to explain it without separation then.

Weapon X does 10000 damage. All other weapons do 100 damage max. Is weapon X overpowered? Of course.

Now someone adds weapon Y that does 3 million damage. Does this mean weapon X is no longer overpowered? No. It just means weapon Y is even more overpowered than X.

But that's the logic you are using. You are claiming lightning hammer is not overpowered, even tho it is significantly more powerful than other similar weapons available to the player, just because there is something even more powerful in the game. That logic i can't agree with.

I say all weapons of similar tier available to the player should be equally powerful overall, and each of them should be more powerful than others in a specific situation(such as a banishing mace against elementals), so that every weapon's existence in the game is justified. If one weapon is a clearly dominant choice in most scenarios(and especially if that weapon is very easy to obtain), then that weapon is overpowered and needs a nerf(regardless of whether it is the lightning hammer or something else).

P.S By the way the above does not mean lightning hammer needs to be removed or even have its stats changed. All that's necessary is changing it's availability. For instance it would fit well at the end of the magical forging research chain(maybe with increased crystal cost), or as a treasure from a tough high level dungeon.

I'd personally vote for having all magic weapons scale with unit level. Something definitely needs to change though, the weapon isn't necessarily overpowered in the grand scheme of things, but it's pretty consistently the best (or nearly) option throughout the game, and certainly always so for normal units compared to other tech melee weapons.

Agreed.  This is what I was trying to say but with many words could not get across apparently.  I tried to suggest that adding armor to the tech tree that reduces the the hammers power is a better way to deal with it because it brings more purpose to research.  

I may be wrong but the lightening hammer at most does +4 maybe +5 for units. It is only champions that get the big +damage.  During the game the champion will most likely find something that is better.  The usefulness of the hammer really depends on the type or number of champions that you have.  This does make the unit better, but I don't believe this makes the unit 100 times better.

There is no difference. The damage of the hammer depends on the level of the unit using it. If it seems that it has bigger damage for champions then that's because your champions usually have a higher level than normal units.

It is hard to find something better. Any weapon that does lots of damage usually has a high level requirement, but when you meet that requirement the level you now have boosts the hammer's damage so the other weapon is no longer more powerful. For example there is one weapon in the game(much more rare than the hammer) that has level requirement of 12 to use. When you are level 11, hammer is better(since you cant use the new weapon yet). At level 12, you replace the hammer with the new weapon - but as soon as you hit level 13, the hammer becomes better again.

(And of course it does not make the unit 100 time better, that was just an artifical example i made to bring the point across)

You're wrong.  I tend to play long games with most of my units coming out of a single, maxxed-out, fortress.  Level 4 or 5 (depending on race) is where my units start their careers, thanks to +level bonuses from fortress buildings, it's not where they top out.  By the time the game ends, I tend to have a stack of trained units running around with levels in the upper teens, maybe even 20.  You really don't want to get smacked by a seven-man company with +20 lightning damage per figure...  (But, then, you probably won't.  The companies of archers dealing 30+ damage per figure will probably finish you off before the lightning hammers have the chance to hit you.)

At that point anything goes. You have AoE strategic spells to wipe out stacks of doom with, even in tactical your heroes should be able to deal with stacks like that. I think people are throwing the balance word around in here too much. Can you counter those lightning hammer stacks? Yes, easily. Hell if it's *that* much of a problem, add some lightning resist items to the item pool to build from. So it's not really a balance issue at all. The design SD seems to be going with is powerful stuff beats powerful stuff, and thats the fun really. You want stuff to to much damage and be fun. A watered down game like the one proposed here isn't what I want at least.

I've beaten AI up to Insane without ever using those hammers. (you get far better weapons from farming monsters really) And to be fair, if AI made such stacks against me, I would be happy to accept the challenge

Sometimes I win because I've found better items, gotten better champions, found better city spots, more quickly.  Sometimes the AI does.  Personally, I like it that way, and I don't want to see things nuked out of interest in balancing the game into one even, grey plain.

You mean you don't use mounts and charge on your lightning hammer units?

The AI doesn't "counter" anything, or know how to use any specific weapon, let alone keep their own units alive long enough for it to matter, so that would be totally pointless. Adding lightning resist to every piece of armor so the AI would benefit from it would just end up screwing up lightning mages and every other weapon with lightning damage.

I don't think you understand what balance means. "A weapon can be countered" is not the same as "a weapon is balanced".

Because its late and i can't think of a more appropriate example, i'll use a FPS one. Imagine a weapon that kills any player in one shot, regardless of where you hit him, while all other weapons require dozens of hits to score a kill, and everything else between them(range, rate of fire, etc.) is equal. Is such a weapon balanced? Of course not. But according to your logic, it is, because a player using such a weapon is not immune to death, he can still be defeated, he can still be 'countered'.

Such a weapon is not unbalanced because it cannot be countered, it is unbalanced because it is out of balance with other weapons that are in the game.

Yep, all true, and I love SD's (apparent) design decision.  Getting crazy and completely over-the-top is great fun.  Although I got a bit sidetracked, my real point wasn't "there's a lot of OP stuff", but rather "You don't think trained units ever get above level 4 or 5?  That's nuts - build them in the right city and they start at level 4 or 5!"

Maybe I'm still to new (22 hours put into the game) but i have to disagree with this post. As of now i have 4 champions(Lv13-15 range) my sov included and all are equipped with better or more appropriate  weapons from quests/battle victorys. 2 of my champions have swords with 42 damage, The other has a staff with +spell dmg because she is caster focused and my sov is weilding a Bow that technically is less dmg than lighting hammer but benefits my character more because of the range and the traits i have taken.

  As of now in my 3rd or so playthrough i feel Lightning hammers should not be changed, It gives you that early advantage but later on , In my playthrough at least it became obsolete. 

*** NOTE I am playing the game on beginner so that may be playing a huge part in me obtaining the +42 dmg swords, One of which was acquired from the"enter the tournament quest "*****