update for persian mod

[titi]

I played several games with the persian faction now and I think especially in Multiplayer mode the persian faction is very weak in the end.
This is why I decided to start with something battlemachine like ....
I thought of a (ground)dragon which is a morph of the magician throwing fire.
What do you think?

[Mark]

Its a little hard to see, (that is why i use blender render), but looks very good.  Are you going to release it soon?

[ElimiNator]

What about the elephant?
Looks good.

[titi]

The Elephant? Yes thats something I have to try too, but it has no range weapons and I don't know how to integrate one.
But I will try this too.

Release date for the blender model and the g3ds of the dragon?
 Very soon, but skeleton and animations are complely missing yet
Release date for a new megapack version eventually including the dragon?
 Not very soon ( some month ), I want to finish the egypt mod first. Probably I release a patch for the V4.

[ElimiNator]

The Elephant? Yes thats something I have to try too, but it has no range weapons.

You already have a elephant and an archer is siting on his back!

[titi]

That's true, but it doesn't feels like a strong attack when a small arrow hits a battlemachine. Of course you can you can setup such a thing in the xmls, but it will not be very intuitively for the players.
But the first thing I will try is a upgrade for the elephants armor! If he lasts longer it's a real threat for the battlemachines.
I will also try an upgrade for the magician which upgrades his attack and armor or I will improve the genie or whatever.
Any ideas?
The dragon was only something I wanted to model but its really not clear if I use it in persian mod or not.

[ElimiNator]

You could make the elephant pick up rocks with his trunk and fling them, or squirt water?

[Mark]

Or maybe it could, like how it was used in reality, just have lethal attack.  Diordorus wrote about Alexander the Great's Indian campaigns against king Porus:

"And Porus, gathering forty beasts around him, drove at the enemy with the whole mass of his elephants and inflicted grievous losses."

Obviously, War Elephants were quite useful if they were able to crush the macedonian syntagma of the same army that, at the Battle of Issus only lost 450 while slaying 100,000 persians, despite the macedonians and their greek allies being largely outnumbered.

P.S. Just in case you were impressed, I did not know that quote, I actually typed it from a book I am reading about Alexander the Great. 

Case in point, I am confused as to why the war elephant was not extremely powerful in the first place.

[modman]

Yes, if morale was a feature in Glest, the Persian Elephants would be killer to morale.

You could make the elephant pick up rocks with his trunk and fling them, or squirt water?

Yes, it is a well known fact that water is very dangerous.

I would probably stick to what you have now, titi.  Maybe there could be an upgrade like "Elephant Grass" which makes the unit better and also produces them faster.

[John.d.h]

You could replace the archer on the elephant's back with something stronger, like a cannon or ballista for anti-air attacks, and of course his melee attack should be strong enough on its own against ground units.

[Platyhelminth]

I tryed persians and I think that they are very strong, If you associate the elephant with the flying carpet then you have exelent results. I tryed this in multiplayer. in IRC.

the only thing that force you to avoid a pure elephant army is the norseman crossbow, it does devastating damages to elephants. That is why you need flying capets which deal with crossbow and have an excelent rate of fire.

when dangerous units are killed then elephants kill everything else. They are unbeatable in contact combat. But I imagin that if a norseman protect the crossbows with strong anti air, things might be difficult for the persian. but even if all carpets die but succeded in their mission (destroying crossbows) the final result should be favorable to persians.

Personnaly I think that the real faction whitch under-effective is indans. they have no strong ground units.

[modman]

Wow, that's really insightful!  When we  a final release candidate for Dark Magic, it would be cool if you would test...

I like John.d.h's idea, because then the unit will be an effective unit alone.  In addition, are the carpet and elephant's move speeds similar, or really different?

[Platyhelminth]

Titi, if you want to add a ground dragon unit may be it should be more crossbow like (the norseman crossbow) or catapult like than battle-machine like.

To equilibrate, each faction should have an equivalent to the crossbow, or crossbow should be removed. Because even by doing my best it is extremly hard to deal with crossbow without having crossbow myself.

The flying carpet is realy slow to produce. that force me to make 7 tent ...

[Omega]

Personnaly I think that the real faction whitch under-effective is indans. they have no strong ground units.

This might explain my string of losses...

I personally LOVE the persians, and it's the only megapack faction I use these days (I like all the others, but this is so much better, and since we can currently only control 1 faction at a time [must petition to change this] its a simple enough decision). The way I see it, ever faction should have some sort of equivilant to all the other faction's powerful units. If one faction has a powerful air unit, they all do. If one faction has a long range unit with fast attacks, they all should have one. If one faction has a super weapon/hero/one-hit-kill unit/etc; they all should have one.

See where I'm going?

[gameboy]

That sucks, u need variation, without that there's no big deal in choosing a faction, all of 'em will be the same.

[titi]

Thank you all for the great feedback!

I like Johnd.h. idea very much and I must admit to platyhelminth that the production of flying carpets is too slow.
If we( my sons and I ) have a playing session next time, I will try to modify some things. Let's see what happens.

[Platyhelminth]

play vs one norseman CPU ultra or more by using persian. You won't be able to come up to his base by ground because of crossbows and you won't be able to come up by air because of thors/valkyrie/trees .

Give an impact damage to your dragon and crossbow problem is easily solved. or may be not ...

I will try to edit xml files to add the the tech catapult in persian faction to see if that helps.

[titi]

The problem is that persian is very strong in the beginning! Especially if a ressource faking cpu-ultra is playing it!
But in the end it is as you said. So we must enshure that these upgrades/units  or whatever are only reachable after a long period!

[Omega]

Hmm, yes you do need variation, though you need units to be balanced, even if secretly. For example, a unit that casts a powerful magic spell may look nothing like a giant ballista, but they can still be balanced to towards each other, all in stats, range, and attack types. I think every faction should have at least one of each attack type.