Black vs Blue. In my experience, they are quite equivalent. Blue are a litle cheaper but Black maybe a little more useful. I'm not sure about utility. For example there is item to lightning but there aren't to acid. I don't think they need improvement. I use both equally.
Movement improvement to 30 won't make a difference. Movement is important to reach a certain level. For example 24-26 is important because a lot of the strongest units have that level (also Lords have so much after a slight boost or spells).
By the way Silver Dragon is the only useless dragon. Because we have cheaper units with 3 morale (and 3/4 turn) and better Dragon with 4.
Fear and Chaos - both must have.

and I agree with that.
Golden Dragon is standard and the most wanted dragon at the start. Gives the best chance for a quick and successful start. Due to the prevalence of +1 items, morale is also difficult to replace in lords armies.

This will make the Paladin unrivaled. I'm also not sure about the story's legitimacy of the solution.

I think that all dragons are playable except Silver ones. Brass/Emerald are little more useful than Green/Red. The dragons are very good and shouldn't be cheaper. They might even be more expensive. We play with 4 dragons in the standard army set. I even have one with five and it's great.

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.

You have to be very careful giving heroes the ability to summon more units. I found there is a limit of 15 units in a 'neutral set' that you can't see (Steve told me when I was trying to figure out why units were not appearing). The summoned / necromancy units go into this 15. What happens if you exceed that is some units won't appear (the first 15 that are asked for appear the rest don't). Necromancy uses up something like 5 slots (Skeletons, Wights, Wraiths, Undead Beasts, Undead Dragons) and a Summoner hero can use another 5 with his spells etc. So it's easy to exceed 15 between all players because so many heroes summon units (golems, archons etc).

KGB

Returning to Dragons:

Silver Dragon - This is another excellent candidate to turn into a Group Warding unit that could be used in a hero stack. You could change to Group Warding +1 and reduce the cost to 1100 and the Silver retains it's flavor as a protector type dragon from Dragonlance. Or Group Warding +2 and make it cost 1500.

Gold Dragon - I would not make it Morale +5. It's meant for early expansion and then to reach +5 with a morale item on heroes that don't have Morale spells.

Black vs Blue - Because of the bug NO serious player plays Blues. I never see them used at all. If someone is taking Battle Dragons in Ally 4 it's always Blacks because of the bug. There are 2 things you can do. (1) You can just accept the bug renders Blues useless vs Blacks and make them a bit cheaper (1600) because of the Bug. (2) You could go for a radical fix and change Blacks to be Group Acid +2 and lower the cost to 1700 range. This gets rid of the Black vs Blue direct combat issue and opens up possibilities of using Blacks with other Acid units like your Worms to get strong Acid attack stacks or paired with the Monks group acid spell etc.

The other dragons (Undead + Stormheim ones) are probably OK as they are. If you get around to balancing Stormheim ones too, I'd probably lower the Brass/Emerand Dragons strength to 8 so that they needed a Bless to get to 9 strength but that's a conversation for another day.

KGB

Returning to Chaos vs Fear:

Fear is much more valuable than Chaos. That's because there are so many units in the game that come with +3 or +4 morale and there are none that come with Leadership. So a starting Green Dragon is much more useful than a starting Red dragon when facing neutrals.

It's also much more common to see Morale +4 than Leadership +4 in hero stacks. Again because it's easy to get a +3 Morale unit and find a morale +1 item or a morale +1 spell to reach +4 or reach +5 Morale with a +1 item and +1 spell.

But the hardest thing to do is counter a hero stack with +5 leadership. You either need a Chaos hero or one of the few units with Chaos +4 (plus item) / Chaos +5. I believe the reason the big Chaos units cost so much (Red more than Green) is because of how hard it is to reach +4/+5 Leadership and the idea was that it should be worth something if you worked hard to build up a hero to +5 leadership therefore it should be hard to counter it so the few units that can do it, cost a LOT.

In game where Stormheim units are not allowed, I often go without a Red Dragon or +4 Chaos unit and just live with getting Chaos from a Barb or a spell if I need it, but I would never ever go without a Green (or Brass if allowed) dragon because you will always encounter multiple enemy stacks with Morale +3 or larger.

KGB

Anomander Rake wrote:


A 1 army start explains why you love Gold dragons and why you consider having 4 dragons in your set.

Competitive online play (1 vs 1) always uses 3000 point starts to eliminate bad luck and always uses non-hidden maps so players can choose capitals close to lots of cities (again to eliminate bad luck). In those games you typically start with 10-25 units and conquer the map quickly (esp ruins and mana cities). That's where the teleport heroes are really valuable because a Rush tactic can work because the hoard of units on turn 1 means you conquer lots of neutral for mana and for places to teleport into.

You are right that hero battles decide things. Unless a city full of Assassin units does so first which is why trap cities that can kill heroes are so important.

KGB

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.

Ok, I'm not seourios player.
I use blue dragons regularly. Always with Wizard and in an army set with 5 dragons (Black is too expensive). Sometimes depending on how many points I have in the army set.
It's not common that your blue dragon will meet a black dragon anyway.
If I saw a need for change here, it would be only marginal.

Agree.
Anyway you must have both of these features. Always.

Understand but you miss a lot of fun. We prefer more fun (hidden map must be) and at most repetition of the game. Anyway, we have a rule of 1 load on request in turns 1-3 against bad luck.


Good idea but at second option this dragon should be more expensive.


Agree.

Hannibal Rex wrote:


It only applies to armies that aren't in the summoners or necromancers army sets. So if you have Fire Demons in your army set then summoning Fire Demons doesn't use up 1 of the 15 neutral slots.

The problem is as a hero designer you have no idea whether an army will be in someones army set. So you have to design for worst case. It can get really bad in solo games vs 7 AI's because now there are 32 potential heroes (4 per player) so the odds you reach all 15 slots gets really high if you have a lot of heroes who can summon units.

I would suggest having no more than 15 units across all your heroes. The Summoner and Necromancer use up a lot of slots (like 11 total) so you only get 4 more for the rest of your heroes. Or you have to cut down what the Summoner can summon (there is no way to change Necromancy)

KGB

Anomander Rake wrote:


There really aren't any more competitive Ladder games played any more. But when there were, no one ever used Blues because of the bug. In fun games, of course you can use Blues especially since you know your friend and can guess he won't use Blacks



I've played a lot of these types of games with friends. They are definitely different and fun to play especially with hidden maps. We usually use the 1-4 army start to get more Dragons and reduce bad luck if one dies early.

We also use game options like 'Battle of the Titans' to start everyone with a L10 hero.

There are a lot of fun ways to play DLR. That's one of the challenges of balancing heroes and units. Things that work well in one kind of game don't work at all in others. So the goal should be to make sure each unit can be used in at least some kind of game option (hidden, non-hidden, PBEM, 1 army start, 3000 point start, solo vs 7 AI's etc). That's why I'm suggesting some radical things for this 25th anniversary project in hopes to make units usable in some games.

KGB