The question for me is what the systemic problems are here. Is it a problem that factions have to conquer settlements at the start to set up their economy and fight for them before they can build up their castle economy? I wouldn't say so, that's actually what we wanted. The focus of the game is meant to shift over time, starting with the settlements and then slowly moving to the fortress as the main point of contention. A lategame fortress should produce enough that you actually have to siege it, and for that siege to be exciting the defender must still have a chance to win if he plays well. On the other hand of course you shouldn't be able to bunker from the start because then the game stops being dynamic, which is why we tried this new system of fortress economy being strong overall, but also expensive and not as efficient on a production per cost level. The idea is that you have to conquer settlements to get started, but later on outposts and fortresses emerge as more valuable targets (note that outposts have the same powerful but expensive economy as the fortress, so there's still a significant part of the economy outside the fortress).
First, thanks for the response!
Now what I will say to this is that in 4.0, the very first English release of the mod that made me absolutely fall in love with it, the economy system allowed people to get enough money to survive in a siege. I know because I did it plenty of times against my friends, and that might not have been competitive but we were still playing as good as we could. Now, moving on to the updates released, when I really DID start playing competitively on Tunngle and such, once again I was frequently able to get enough of an economy to defend if my enemy got map control. So my question is this: if the old system worked fine, why change it? I know that your aim is to get people to try and defend in a siege, but the fact is that a lot of people just can't be bothered. Sadly, a lot of people don't like long drawn out games like myself and a few others, and just want to quickly finish a game in 10 or 20 minutes. If the economy system hadn't been changed, there wouldn't be any need at all to nerf either Rohan or Mordor, which brings me back to my point, why change something that works fine?
So I'd say the main problem here is the fact that two factions, Rohan and Mordor, can put out so much manpower in the early part of the game that no other faction can compete with it. That can never be healthy for gameplay, regardless of the economy system. We want early fights for farms, and we want them to be interesting with both the attacker and defender having a chance. That seems to require weakening Rohan's and Mordor's early spam to a more reasonable level. In Rohan's case, this will probably have to go along with compensating lategame buffs like a dismount for the Royal Guard. In Mordor's case I'm not so sure, they already have quite a few very powerful late game options after all.
Mordor doesn't need any nerfs to their orc spam, that is how they are meant to be played, with extreme aggression. The difference between Mordor and Rohan is Mordor actually has extremely good late game units, while Rohan really doesn't. Instead of just making Royal guard better, Rohan needs a new unit or abilities to contend with pike spam, and there have been many suggestions for this. Ranging from making the Military Camp Rohirrim stronger, to adding new cavalry units that can resist pikes better, to making abilities that reduce pike damage. Of course, you could also add some elite infantry units, but since you(the Edain team) have stated that you want Rohan to be a cavalry faction, which really makes quite a lot of sense in their lore, something should be done to help their cavalry more appealing late game, over peasant spam. Also, this is a little off topic, but I think the best way to help Isengard survive early game would be to simply reduce the cost and recruitment time of Scouts, and also make them a little weaker, along with reducing the cost of the Wildmen Hut and Wildmen themselves. I would say scouts should be 200, Wildmen Hut should be 250 like all other external buildings, wildmen should be 150 and wildmen axe throwers should be 250, and finally torches upgrade should be 100 for normal wildmen, 150 for axe throwers. Now, these units should be about as good as a peasant spam, with scouts being a little stronger, Torches should make Widlmen about as good as Drafted Peasants.
Why are Gondor soldiers useless later, by the way? Upgrades are there precisely to let units like them stay relevant throughout the game.
Useless as compared to the other units Gondor can get. Gondor Soldiers with upgrades are much weaker than say Tower Guards or Rangers, even the fiefdom troops are better. I would define their uselessness as thus: A full Gondor army made up of basic swordsmen and archers is much easier to kill, and much weaker, than a full army of tower guards and rangers.
The cavalry change was not meant as a nerf, it's an experimental entirely new system. Previous feedback has been that cavalry can't even get rid of basic archers because their trample deals to little damage and if they stick around in melee to finish the job they get murdered. Now, Rohirrim kill Gondor archers by trampling them once. It follows quite naturally though that one group of Rohirrim shouldn't be able to oneshot entire armies of archers, hence the stronger slowdown. The details of this can easily be adjusted, but I think it's potentially a more interesting system than being able to trample lots of units with one group while dealing little damage to each of them.
I never intended to imply that I thought the cavalry change was a nerf, what I said was that it was a double edged sword. It has made cavalry next to useless against Gondor, Isengard and Dwarves, while making them extremely strong and useful against Mordor, Rohan and the forthcoming Lothlorien. I personally think a happy medium should be found, where cavalry can instakill archers by trampling, and deal heavy damage to swordsmen, but also be able to trample pikes without instantly dying. I really like the new slowdown mechanics, and I think they fit well. The current system, both damage and trample deceleration, is really the same as vanilla BFME. I didn't have a problem with this, just the hero nerf and economy system. Also, I don't know who said cavalry dies if they stick around for melee, that's how I beat people as Rohan in my early days of the mod, trample once then melee it out.
Heroes are still stronger than they were with the release of 4.0, we just took back a part of a recent and quite significant. That is because we got feedback that people were simply spamming heroes and there wasn't much you can do about that. I've also heard from some very proficient players that even with the new economy and the hero nerf, Gondor can still sit back in its base, get enough money to spam heroes from just their internal structures and beat the enemy with that. This is part of what makes this balancing job so difficult: We don't have a playerbase of hundreds of thousands of people to analyze general patterns, and we often get very different feedback from playgroups that play the game in different ways.
Well, I will just say this, my games against Gondor are rarely a hero rush situation. Usually, the Gondor player fights to try and keep outer map control, spamming weak Gondor Soldiers, and this costs them the game. I myself don't spam heroes either as any faction until I have a reasonably strong army, because even before they were nerfed in 4.1.2 they weren't as good as an army, at least in my view. To my knowledge, hero spamming only happened with Rohan, Gondor and Dwarves, and that was only when statues were 100 and could give 50% off. With the new(excellent) changes to the heroic statues, I never saw another player hero rush again. I also understand that you probably get lots of different feedback from different sources, but I'm going to stick to my guns on this one, I think the only heroes that needed a bit of a nerf were Dwarves. In this new update, just fighting in large scale battles will get heroes killed, even if they are in the middle of your army and all your enemies heroes are dead. The lack of health substantially decreases their role. Maybe instead of weakening their health, you could weaken their armor against other heroes? That way you could get your heroes to participate in big epic battles without dying just from the normal units.
Nice to have a serious discussion about this with a team member, I hope you'll continue the discussion
