The human/warrior kerfuffle

• Introduction

As of this writing, warrior is the most popular personality and human is the more popular race. Human/warrior is by far the most popular race/pers combo, beating former no-brainers like Halfling/Rogue and Faery/Mystic. Almost 25% of all provinces are human/warrior, in fact. Human/warrior is OP, I think we can all agree on that.

But why, exactly? I bet most of you will say "well, the 8-point ospecs, DUH" and… yes, they're pretty good.

But I think we should keep them.

• Diagnosis

The thing about human/warrior is not just that they have impossibly high offenses – it's that they're too durable. You can have as high or even higher offenses with Orc or undead, but Orcs are especially vulnerable to T/Ms and Undeads are lousy thieves. Plus elites are expensive. Humans, too, are poor mages and you can usually fireball them almost to death – but with ≈43% less wages, who cares? I have seen human provinces with 200 peons that kept on fighting, their offense barely dented. They just had to cut their wages to 50% and receive some small aid from their teammates – 500k gc can make a province run for an entire day. Hell, if you got some thieves –and humans usually do– you can probably just steal to stay alive and running.

And of course, there's the ospec losses from attacking… which are meaningless, because you get credits to train more units and because you need 25% less specs to get to a certain offense, which means they die 25% slower (you lose offense points at the same rate, sure, but you're losing less bodies overall).

Add to that the OME bonus and the human science bonus and you've got an unstoppable force.

Quote:

---

Compare this with other race options for warrior. Halflings get ≈10-15% more pop, which is more or less the ratio in which human/warrior ospecs are better than other/human ospecs (8/7 ≈ 115%). You get weaker ospecs, sure, but you can have more of them, so it evens out. Furthermore, since halflers have extra strong mercs/prisoners, you can theoretically have a larger offense as halfling than as a human, even when using ospecs.

As of this writing, there are 8 halfling/warriors. EIGHT. Why? Probably because they get no hospitals, or because you need to pay about 50% (more units, more wages per unit) more to keep that larger offense, or simply because you need to pay for more units (nevermind that you can actually fit them). They are much more fragile as attackers (plus they're more popular as thieves), so people don't flock to them.

Avian/warrior is another good option. You don't get more ospecs per acre, as halflings – but you do get bloodlust, which is a 20% boost. 7*1.2 = 8.4, which is stronger than humans' 8-point ospecs. Humans get stables, yes, but avians can build training grounds… roughly, you can have the same offense with Avian or Human. And avians attack faster! Plus they get stronger dspecs, so you can train less of those and more ospecs or you can sit behind a stronger defense. Sounds good, right?

As of this writing, there are 7 avian/warriors. SEVEN. Why? They do get hospitals, but they also get +10% losses (≈+30 with BL), and that attrition rate happens at a faster rate because of the faster attack times. You're gonna lose offense and you're gonna lose it fast – and you'll have to train it all back, unlike with humans who get 2 points for free with stables. There's a reason why Cleric is the most popular Avian choice – people don't like losing units.

Elf/Warrior is another pretty good option. +10% military offense means you get ≈7.7-point ospecs, which is pretty close to humans' 8 points. And with Elves, unlike humans, you can actually dab in spellcasting, even if it's just in a support role for your teammates. It's a more rounded option.

So how many Elf/Warriors are out there? 16. More than halfling and avian combined, I'll give you that, but about 500 less than human/warriors. Why? Because you don't get a science bonus and you don't get a wage bonus that stacks with warrior. Also, because you're slightly more vulnerable to ambushes, I guess. I'm honestly surprised that Elf/Warrior wasn't a more popular choice, but there you go.

---

• Solutions

So, what do we do?

People like warrior, but it needs some toning down. I suggest:

• taking away their +10% OME (redundant) and wage bonus
• KEEPING the +1 ospec

Why? Because it gives people a different attacking option, something other than going with elites. You want elites? You pick War Hero. Warrior is for the brute force attackers.

What about human? I suggest:

• swapping specs with Avian
• giving them an offensive-minded elite

Why did humans get the extra strong ospec? It makes no sense from a fantasy standpoint and frankly, it makes no sense from a gameplay point of view, either. Stronger defenses, on the other hand, makes a bit more sense from a gaming – since humans are such lousy mages, it prevents them from becoming an OP T/M, but it's still a military bonus that goes along their reduced wages. Plus, in medieval times (which is more or less the setting of this game) warfare was a usually defensive affair.
As a compensation, their knights should get more attack (and less defense), like they used to have. A 7/4 unit would be ok.

Avian/warrior gets the 8-point ospec. But they get no stables to further boost them plus their higher casualty rate. They would need a further penalty, which should be one (and only one) of the following:

• Take away their ambush protections (or don't – I ambush avians just to kill more troops, I don't care about the land)
• Give them a further battle gains penalty
• Give them larger losses outright
• Take away their birth rate bonus.

Let them be the glass cannon attackers, the T/M breakers – strong on paper, but a challenge to maintain.

Halfling is fine as it is. I don't think people will flock to them as attackers.

Elves lose dungeons. It's a small offensive penalty, barely a blip.

That's my suggestion. In short:
– don't take away +1 ospecs from warrior
– do take them away from humans, give to avians
– make avians (even more) fragile

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Easier solutions to the problem you diagnose would be to give current Human a population nerf, or--my preferred solution, I think--put the "no hospitals" nerf on them. Allowing such a pop-efficient race to have such good sustain is a mess for sheezy in the neezy.

They would be easier, but:
– Faery already has a pop nerf, and I'm not too fond of using the same penalty twice.
– No hospitals isn't a large penalty when you are sending less units to match a certain offense. Yes, I know I said that it *is* a large penalty when talking about halflings – but that's because they need to send 15% more ospecs, which means 15% more losses on each attack (on units, not on offense points) – not to mention any losses on defense, especially with Town Watch on.

As a matter of fact, I'm currently warring a KD that has one human/warrior and he has 0% hospitals. I checked on the intel site, to see former KD's we've dealt with and out of 15 Hu/Wa that we got surveys from, 5 had hospitals – hardly a must-have building, apparently.

Well, that is interesting. It might be in part because Humans can retrain OSpecs easier so they don't care about losing troops as much as a Dwarf or Orc might. But not running hospitals on an attacker, especially a non-cleric attacker, seems a little nuts.

I would take the pop nerf away from Faery and put it on human for sure.

Or an intriguing possibility is give Human -5% military efficiency. Kind of seems schizophrenic when giving them the OSpec boost, I know, but I like the swirliness.

Orcs do have hospitals, almost universally. Training back those elites is really expensive.

-5% military effectiveness would have the side effect of making them (even) harder to ambush. It’s not a bad idea, though. Maybe a birth rate penalty could work too – after all, it’s hard to replace losses when you simply don’t have enough men to draft.

And faery without a pop penalty would be OP. They’d need to have some other sort of penalty instead.

I agree Faery would need to be nerfed some without the population penalty. I rather liked the income penalty on Faery, though I get how that is frustrating when giving them TOG also. The simplest nerf for them might be bumping up their elite nw. Come to think of it, Faery should get the -5% military efficiency and humans should get the pop nerf. Yeargh.

Are humans really too strong though, looking at the top war kingdoms, they're there, but hardly over represented. They're easy to play sure, but other races bring specific strengths that help in war, it's a trade-off that's especially visible in warring kingdoms.

It’s not just the top KD’s playing the game, though.

There are other combinations that work great as attackers (the other races i mentioned with warrior, human/war hero, orc/something), sure. But human/warrior works just as well as those, while being much easier to play – and from a sheer game experience standpoint it’s no fun facing KDs where every third province has the same build. You simply can’t have a fourth of all provinces being one of 64 possible choices.

I think human warrior isn't too brain dead easy, I think good vs bad players are obvious on any composition.

They are strong as all frick for sure, but, orc tact is throwing down with high gains and higher potential offense. Extra kills extra speed. I think it's not until this last couple weeks where the science is really pushing humans up in strength. Fae beat humans in defense and offense, losing only on generals really, but neither fae or human are getting quadded anyways.

It's not just a matter of strength (as I mentioned), though. It's also the resilience and the simplicity.

Orc/tact has more offense, gains and attack speed – but they have expensive elites, they're easier to ambush, and you can hurt them more with sabotage. They also require a carefully tuned build comprising barracks, hospitals, watchtowers, stables and maybe armories (at the very least, during EOWCF, to rebuild the elites). There are 62 Orc/tact, which is nothing to scoff at but it's also a ninth of the amount of human/warriors out there.

Fae can also get more offense and especially defense than human, but that -10% pop and the amount of spells you need to rely on to get that means you also have to juggle a bunch of different buildings (towers, guilds, hospitals, watchtowers?) to get the most out of them. There are 44 Faery attackers (27 WH, 17 Warrior, unsurprisingly 0 tact) which is, again, respectable but a minuscule fraction of the human/warrior provinces.

With human/warrior, you just build whatever, train ospecs and go nuts. No hospitals needed, no barracks (they help, sure), no armories. I've seen all sorts of human/warrior builds: from this guy with 30% forts and training grounds and zero stables, to an A/t with 5 tpa and 10% TD, to lots of people with libraries and schools. There are a gazillion ways to play human/warrior because there's a huge margin of error that other personalities simply don't have.

But listen, we can argue this all we want. The bottom line is: a fifth of all provinces has picked a single pers/race and that makes for a boring game. End of.