To unpack that a little:

-Changes to View based on 5 as the default for scouting units, 4 for other high perception ones.
-A pretty comprehensive overhaul of PPDC units, with a couple of exceptions. Ghouls and Plague Carriers get toned down a bit, Curse units get matched to Banshees, Bashee and Giant Bee movement reduced.
-Since my changes to the Cockatrice already made it a buffed version of the SH Basilisk, I turned the Basilisk into a tough T3 unit.
-The Hydra is hero stack viable, but slow.
-The Wyvern gets turned into a T3 unit, but keeps equal poison/turn to the buffed Hydra.
-I reverted the Unicorn changes for now.
-If we have a T3 Morale 3 unit, a T2 Morale 2 unit is back on the table. However, it's the Pegasus now, which is more expensive than the old EC.
-Eagles stay the T3 flying Morale 2 unit, but Griffons get a role suited for raiding the backfield with Chaos 1.
-Elven Lords and Cavalry get a Field bonus from their role as cavalry, rather than the less useful elven Woods bonus. Lords are more combat focused than Unicorns now, but I'm unconvinced this really gives them a niche.
-Spectres join the faster-than-dragons niche.
-Movement buffs for Trolls and Slayer Knights.

I've left the Lamia and Beholder untouched for now. I don't think Curse is a good fit for the Beholder, and I think we've got Curse covered pretty well already. Assassin might be an option for all their instant death attacks.
According to Trolloc, the Lamia is a little too good on the efficiency curve, but I'd like to hear your opinions on her.

I'm fairly happy with Giants and Minotaurs relative to each other, but the Dwarf Mutants need something more to compensate for their slow movement. I'm considering either City+1 or Chaos 3.

Revision 220716:

Ghouls: Disease 2, Cost 150, Upkeep 2
Scouts: View 5
Giant Bats: View 5
Elven Infantry: View 4
Giant Bees: Movement 20, Upkeep 5
Goblins: View 5
Elven Archers: View 4
Dwarf Runners: View 4
Dryads: View 4
Mummies: Movement 15
Harpies: Curse 5
Elven Cavalry: C.Bonus Field +1
Plague Carriers: Disease 6
Pegasi: Morale +2
Light Cavalry: View 5
Wights: Curse 4
Elven Lords: Strength 7, C.Bonus Field +2, View 4
Griffons: Chaos 1
Eagles: View 5
Iceguard: View 4
Trolls: Move 18
Moonguard: View 4
Elephants: Trample 1
Fire Demons: C.Bonus City +1
Spectres: Curse 8, Movement 30, Cost 900
Unicorns: Strength 6, Turns 3, Upkeep 5
Slayer Knights: Move 18
Undead Dragon: Curse 6
Silver Dragons: Strength 8, Medal 20, Cost 1100

Straw Golem: Hp 1, C.Bonus City +1, Cost 120, Upkeep 1
Rovers: View 5
Vampire Bat: Move 24, View 4, Cost 110, Upkeep 3, Setup 70
Banshee: Strength 3, Move 20, Medal 40
Outriders: View 5
Basilisk: Paralysis 8, Strength 6, Hp 3, C.Bonus City +1, View 1, Medal 25, Cost 650, Turns 3, Setup 400
Hydra: Poison 8, Medal 15
Wyvern: Strength 6, C.Bonus +1 Woods, Move 24, View 2, Medal 30, Cost 800, Turns 3, Upkeep 8, Setup 600

KGB wrote:


Do you know if units have a chance to detect invisible stacks, similar to discovering hidden ruins? If so, I could see having an invisible scout. But if the only way to detect them is to run into them, or sweep the area for cursor changes, I'd rather not include invisibility on units.

The most obvious balancing consequence to keeping Banshees at Curse 3 would be to upgrade all the other Curse units.

Harpies: Curse 5, and they need to move faster than Banshees. 24 for them, 20 for the Banshees?
Wights: Curse 4
Spectres: Curse 8
Undead Dragons: Curse 6

That looks feasible to me, or do you think it's too inflationary? I actually like that Curse (3),4,6,8 all result in a 96% chance in "optimal" stacks, unless you include an additional unit.

I thought I'd spin this off into a separate thread.

Tier 1:

Banshees - they are absolutely useful as is, but with Curse 3, they completely throw all other Curse units out of whack. The only way they don't make Harpies obsolete would require them to cost at least 50% more than Harpies, despite being a T1 unit. So, are they still useful as Curse 2? Undead for sure.

Gnomes - way undercosted compared to Dwarf Infantry. They fight as well as Dwarves, are as fast as Barbarians, have pathfinding and scout view...
The core design to keep here is a 3hp unit with Banding. Something in between Dwarf Infantry and Dwarven Runners.

Halfling Braves - dirt cheap, super-fast, scouting, pathfinding... I can see them as light infantry with pathfinding, and maybe some warding. But the cost still needs to be higher.

Rovers - I absolutely see the niche for a cheap Missile 1 skirmisher. Str 2 without any terrain bonus, 1 hp, move 20.

Straw Golems - I like the idea of a cheap T1 trample unit. 1hp, to make them a glass cannon similar to the Sasquatch.

Sylphs - a flying scout with good hp. Imp without Lightning. There's room here for a special, I'd also give them Group Warding, like Scouts. Maybe make them a T2 unit with Morale +1. Being an Elemental means they classify as Demon.

Vampire Bats - they need to be a bit slower than regular Giant Bats, maybe with poorer View too. A fast, flying assassin is nice, but I have made Group Warding fairly accessible. Maybe give them Str 2?

I've written earlier about my thoughts on View - View is capped at 7, and you still need to have room for Watchtowers and View/Grp View spells to have an impact.

I don't see unit movement as harshly as you. It's a good data point to keep in mind that faster units may need to be more expensive, so you can't afford to create an army list exclusively of fast units, unless you're willing to accept that these units will be weaker in combat and have less strong stack bonuses. Still interesting to see how you assess Ice>Fire Demons.

I have now completed the write-up of all SH units in the spreadsheet. I've also made separate rows for Trolloc's modifications to them. If I understand it correctly, his changes never caught on, and I don't think his modification still exists as a download anywhere. But it's interesting to see what a competitive player considered to be the balance concerns with the SH units, back then.

I wonder which tool he used to give units a slayer +3 ability. Molotov's editor doesn't seem to be able to do it. But this isn't something I would want to repeat, anyway. He also included a lot of poorly fitting subtypes to high tier units, to make the slayer ability more useful.

A couple more thoughts on 'experimental' abilities that could be put on SH units. I don't know if there's a full list of which hero abilities can also be used by units. These are just what I could think of, I may have missed some.

Group Warding: If any unit has Group Warding 2, it should be a dragon. I think this would be an interesting alternative for the Royal Dragon.

Group Acid & Lightning: Since I presume they would stack with spells, I can't see going higher than 1. Acid is a fit for Cthulhu, aka the Leviathan, while the Warlocks are the obvious choice for Lightning.

Necromancy only works on the attack, but I see this more as a gimmick for non-hero stacks than can mop up weak cities. I'd change the Undead Horde into a T3 unit with Necromancy 2, now that Wights are buffed a bit.

Life Drain I think is too strong to be put on units. At best, it would have to be on a dragon, but none of the SH ones fit thematically.

I haven't adjusted the stats yet, but with a buffed Undead Beast as a viable Red Dragon substitute, it seems fair to move Slayer Knights, Demons, etc down to 1000 gold. I agree that Red Dragons need to be more expensive again. I do think Green and Red Dragons should have the same cost, as various heroes will have affordable access to either Morale or Leadership.

Fire Demons always seemed like a strong unit for their tier to me. I'm surprised they didn't see much use outside of summoning. Or maybe it is because their stats are good enough for the front line, so you don't need to rearrange them like Archons?

I'm starting to believe I need to address SH units at the same time as I rebalance vanilla tiers, not at some point in the future. I've written earlier that I see Emerald and Brass Dragons as providing 95% of the utility of the bigger dragons, at only 80% of the cost. So their price needs to go up, at the very least equal to the Undead Beast. Str 8 for them is an interesting semi-cosmetic nerf; I have considered reducing their movement to 24 to give the full dragons a slight edge in comparison.

If Fire Elementals are viable competitively but Demons aren't quite, it's hard to justify them having the same cost. Maybe the Elementals need to stay at 1100 then, while Demons get the same tier as Slayer Knights.

I started including SH units in the spreadsheet, and I think I have a write-up of Trolloc's edits to them somewhere in the files I got from you. I may include those as separate rows, or maybe comment on his changes in the notes column.

I haven't taken a closer look yet, but one thing that jumped out is how many units have 5 or 6 view - I've capped view at 4 for scouting units in my mod, so the same would need to apply to the SH units. That said, there's nothing wrong with having a dozen different T1 & T2 scouting units to choose from, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.

What I was wondering was if +1 Fortify would be an improvement over +3 Morale for the Silver Dragons. But I'll leave them as is for now.

Anomander has suggested a blanket increase for dragons' gold costs. I'm not opposed to that in principle. But the dragons I consider most undercosted are some of the Stormheim ones.

But to move on to T4 units, I want to talk about the Ally3 tier. I.e. units that cost more than 1000 gold, yet aren't dragons. The official patch which remodeled the army list unit costs changed a bunch of units, but left others in place, often with little rhyme or reason that I can see.

I think the best place to start is the Undead Beasts. In ROH, these were the only units other than dragons in T5. I've made some further changes since the first draft - hp to 4, move to 22, cost to 1300. I think Undead Beasts should be at the highest end of this tier.

Comparing them to the other vanilla Chaos 4 unit, Slayer Knights, I think these should be cheapened to 1000 or less. Str 8 is a big advantage over 7, and they're also slow. When you add heroes with items and spells, the difference between a 3 and 4 negative stack bonus is far less impactful than between 2 and 3. So I have a hard time deciding on which side of the equation Fire Demons should fall. Of all the vanilla Chaos units, these seem to be the most min/maxed ones, with original stats.

I've slowed down Fire Elementals a lot and buffed their Chaos to 3 too. I quite deliberately want them to be a faster, weaker, flying alternative to Fire Demons, but the question is what a good price difference between these two units should be, with my changes. I think either both of them should be eligible for Ally2, or neither.

KGB wrote:


Then the last hypothetical I want to indulge in in this regard is what the usefulness of +1 Fortify Silver Dragons would be. That ability already exists on the Iceguard, but they don't quite have the stats and movement for a hero stack.

Anomander Rake wrote:


Yes, the Frost Dragon has the same ability and would need to be changed. It's also very expensive, 2000, for some reason. So I suppose the question is, are there balance concerns that warrant this high price?

The obvious is that the value of Fortify depends on how easy or difficult access to high Siege is, similar to our previous discussion about Fear and Chaos.

KGB has pointed out that I haven't included a fast Siege unit, which could make the Thief mandatory for everyone. A good and affordable Fortify unit would exacerbate that. I've sketched out that Alchemists and Wizards will get a Siege spell, and SH has some faster Siege units, so there's that.

Here's a thought: How would your assessment change if Silver Dragons gave +2 Fortify instead of +3 Morale? There'd be some unique synergy with heroes that can cheaply upgrade Morale themselves, and/or have a Fortify spell.

I'm not so comfortable with more radical changes, but this keeps it as a stack bonus unit, but now its ability is unique instead of being matched by cheaper units.

[quote="KGB" post=3878]Hannibal Rex wrote:


The Summoner has 4 units, Necromancer 5, and the Alchemist and Priest 1 each. My main thought was to give the Necromancer summons that don't overlap (as much) with Necromancy, but I'll have to limit or shelve that. I understand now why his summons and necromancy units are the same. I also wanted to add Nightmares to the Summoner, to cover all non-Elemental demon units.

But it's not a bad thing that you can't go overboard with custom summoning spells.

For the Blue Dragon, I like that it allows you to experiment with a Disease & Life Steal army set, that can (at least hypothetically) reduce a lot of units to one hp and instant-kill them with lightning. I'll leave it at 1750 gold for now, but might reduce that further to 1650. It's still a powerful ability, but its drawbacks should be reflected in the cost.

For the Silver Dragon, for now I'll file it under 'balanced, but non-competitive'.

I like some of your more radical ideas, but I'll be more willing to be experimental, such as implementing abilities that only heroes have in vanilla on units, once I get to tweaking the Stormheim units.

KGB wrote:


That's a really important limitation; do you know if this applies to all summoned units, or only those which aren't in the summoner's army set? Or in any player's army set? I probably need to rethink some ideas for summoning spells, but that's fine.

Anomander Rake wrote:


Yeah, I'm undecided. If you don't know, the original Warlords took a lot of inspiration from a D&D Dragonlance board game, and Dragonlance famously had knights riding and fighting on dragons.

boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/709/dragons-glory

The spell would be in the range of 18 mana and 4AP to learn, so a much heftier investment than the Priest's.

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. So I will address your feedback once we get to those tiers. 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. As KGB pointed out, 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? (Anomander has pointed out that that's not really a competitive strategy.)
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.

KGB wrote:


I'm going to tackle this piecemeal, so this is just the start.

Looking at the T1 missile units, here's what my thoughts are: Archers are the default missile unit. Given how essential missiles are vs flyers, these were over-buffed with the price reduction. All missile units should be fairly expensive just for the chance to outright kill all flyers and most other units on a lucky roll. Maybe making them cost an even 100 would be a good template to balance other units around them.

Elven Archers, I've been mulling over a couple of different options to balance them. Thematically, it just doesn't make sense to me that they're slower than humans while all other elves are faster. I considered making them a T2 str 4 unit, but then they'd have to be balanced against Centaurs. Reducing their missiles to 3 makes them a faster, glass cannon variant of Halflings. That's my current preferred solution.

Halflings are interesting as a decent T1 missile unit that can't get instant killed by lightning. That's pretty much it for them.

Dwarf Crossbows are another tricky issue. Thematically, dwarves are expensive, elite troops for their tier, but in the metrics that matter - strength, missiles, movement - they're equal or worse to Halflings. I already had City +1 as a buff to Gnoll Crossbows, and I think specialization for siege warfare makes thematic sense for crossbowmen if you look at historical examples like pavise use and increasingly heavier crossbows and arbalests; so this way, dwarves' missile attacks are at least equal to regular Archers in the most common battles. I still want to keep dwarves more expensive than halflings, if possible. This may be a good case where tweaking the medal chance makes a bit of a difference. Medals don't work on missile attacks, but with 3 hp, dwarves get a bunch of regular rolls too.

I love how Ballistae are handled stat-wise, even if it's not competitive. A single-shot glass cannon, that's cost-effective in cities. Essentially turning them into a T2 8/2 unit is a cure that to me looks worse than the disease. I can tinker with price and medal chance a bit more, but I want to keep it intact as a concept. The thing about 1 hp units is that they're generally cost-effective against trample, at least in theory. And they also benefit disproportionately from weapon master sites or Mighty Feast.

Regarding Centaurs, since vanilla DLR has no horse archers at all, these guys fill that gap. There's some speculation that the mythological Greek centaurs originated from the Greeks' first contact with nomadic horse archers from the steppes north of the Black Sea. Be that as it may, I do think buffing them to be better on fields, which are a more common battlefield than forests, is warranted. Maybe they don't need to lose the Forest movement bonus. IIRC, there's this oddity with the vanilla stats that some units have a movement bonus for Forest, while others have Woods, but only the former gets used on random maps.

The only remaining vanilla missile unit are Moonies, for whom the only potential change I'd make is raising their cost a bit.

Thanks for the second opinions, Anomander. I find it especially interesting when the two of you disagree about something.

I still won't be able to post a long reply today, but as a heads-up, I've done a reformatting on the third tab of the spreadsheet that makes it much easier to compare units of the same tier.

Haven't figured out yet how to make the sheet sortable, but that should be less pressing now.

KGB, I don't know how soon I'll be able to give you the long reply your post deserves, but I wanted to let you know right away how much I appreciate your detailed critique.

One major point is that really needs serious consideration what kind of stats and abilities warrant a 1100 - 1400 price tag.

In vanilla, Undead Beasts pretty much have the strongest sub-dragon stat line at 8/3 with 20 movement. In RoH, they were the only units beside Dragons that took 5 turns to build. I kept the price, but reduced the build time.
Generally, Chaos seems to be priced higher than Fear on units, probably because heroes who can reach Leadership 4+ are more widely available than access to Morale 4+, and, of course, killing heroes is more valuable than killing morale-based non-hero stacks. So maybe the 1600 for Reds is warranted.

In SH, the Emerald and Brass Dragons give you (what I would estimate) 95% of the capability for 80% of the price, which is obviously a bargain, but not good game balance.

KGB wrote:


You're absolutely right, this was getting too convoluted for me to expect anyone to keep up with my proposed changes. But today's the day I got done with my first rough draft, and here are the entire changes in a google sheet:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1...6C-z0jE5XKgJ/pubhtml

Click on the 25th Anniversary Project tab to have a look. I hope it's readable - I originally started this sheet to track the differences between Reign of Heroes, DLR and the patches. Maybe I should delete those rows in the 25AP tab to make it simpler?