Beta 3 Demon

[Pillager]

I'm not entirely sure about the exact abilities of the beta 3 demon...but I do know that they are strong, fast and appear to ignore city walls. After seeing them in action, I'm beginning to think they may be somewhat over-powered.

[piranha]

It ignore walls, doesn't give that bonus to its allies even if it looks like that on the mouse over info. It also have +1 attack so it better to attack it than being attacked by it .

Did you experience something unusually annoying? I used demons a bit and faced demons but haven't really been able to say that they are unbalanced.

[KGB]

Piranha,

They are overpowering on small maps. The kind of 2 player maps you are designing and that many players want to play for a fast 1-1 game.

You can easily get offered a couple of demons on Turn 2-3 if you save a lot of your initial gold, snag gold from a ruin and pillage a city or two. Those flying demons then rush the other player where they can reach their cities on turns 4-5 and simply raze a player out of the game. There is no defense against this unit before turn 10 because players simply don't have time to produce units and Elves cost *way* too much.

Ideally in Beta4 the ignore walls skill is going to a Sand Worm and the Demon is getting the Banding/Horde bonus instead.

Beyond that, to make small maps viable, I suggest that you adjust the allies so that before turn 12 it is impossible to get flying allies. This prevents the early rush from invalidating all the smaller maps. That still leaves Elementals/Medusa/Wizards/Devils as allies before turn 12 and after turn 12 all flying allies (Dragons/Archons/Demons) would be available in addition to the ground based ones.

KGB

[Pillager]

I like the 'ignores city walls' ability, I just don't think it belongs on a fast, flying unit. Also, having an attack bonus on a fast flyer is far better than the same bonus on a slow walking unit.

The demon is pretty much the perfect flying raider. A lone demon has a good chance of defeating any light-moderately defended city (IE 1-5 1 turners). It can then use its mobility to escape retaliation.

Elves are no longer the 'swiss army knife' utility units they once were, but are still quite expensive. I think that this change has increased the value of all fliers in beta3.

[piranha]

Plan is to give that bonus to the sand worm in beta4.

What is the hoarding-banding thing?

Ok, perhaps lowering the price on elves will help also. But I guess thats true that you can rush like that on small maps.

[KGB]

Piranha,

Banding/Horde/Swarm. Any of those names will do. The idea is that a unit gets a +1 strength bonus from every additional like unit in the stack. So lets say you made the Demon a 3 turn, 5 strength unit with a +3 swarm bonus. Then 1 Demon is 5 strength. 2 Demons are 6 strength, 3 Demons are 7 strength, 4 Demons are 8 strength and 5+ Demons are 8 strength. Thus one lone Demon is relatively weak but a group of them together becomes powerful. Note: These units still get their other bonus's added on top of that so 4 Demons could reach 13 strength if the stack had a +5 bonus from command/stack bonus's.

Elves would be fine at 250 gold. They are slight better than Hv Infantry thanks to their extra move, bonus in woods, bonus vs fliers. I think Lt Cavalry could also drop to a 250 cost.

And yes you can always rush with strong flying units on small maps. That tends to mean small maps are unplayable for ladder type games. In DLR maps could range from 32x32 all the way to 150x150. Because of early flying allies no map size under 100x100 was ever used for ladder matches and the standard map for top ranked matches (between players ranked 1-10) was the max map size. So not allowing early flying allies will go a long way toward making smaller maps viable for games.

Right now on the smaller maps (anything smaller than High Seas Combat) the best strategy is to take a Dreadlord on turn 1 and buy a bat in the capitol so you have 3 strength bats when attacking). You still have 600-1000 gold left. Rush to a ruin with the Dreadlord and pillage any city that makes slow move units like Dwarves/Pikemen). I often on turn 2/3 have 1200+ gold. With a bit of luck you get a hero + 2 Demons on turn 2-4. Rush the enemy and raze his cities.

KGB