I also agree this has to change, personally I like the bodyguard (champ+squad of units linking and unlinking) feature as it adds a whole new set of possibilities to make champions even more interesting. 

There seems to be a disconnect here for me.

I was thinking that the enemies were going to get stronger over time, not in relation to my adventuring tech.  Maybe it's not, but seems that as I focused on Adventuring, the world became a more dangerous place.  Almost seems counter-intuitive in that I feel compelled to focus on military before adventuring otherwise I'm doomed to die a quick and painful death.

I guess I was hoping that I could focus on questing - be the adventurous soul who wanders the lands, ignoring the responsibilities of being a leader and ruling over my people.  My people continue with their menial lives awaiting my return to hear of my tales of adventure.

That is what I do. It should work like this, the more you push back monsters, the more powerful they get. In other words, as your cities grow and cover more area the monsters become increasingly more powerful. Therefore you need to raise your military and defend while it gets progressively more difficult. Because as of right now, I just research warfare a lot first, and then just slowly do the adventure research and I always come out ahead, there isn't any difficulty with that approach.

It really depends on your strategy. You only need military tech up to the point you can get reasonable equipment for your heroes - for the most part you can get by with two handed weapons and plate, provided you dip into the magic tree to pick up enchanted equipment at some point. If you do focus on questing odds are you'll end up finding far better equipment than you can buy anyway.

 I think the only real issue in that regard is that if you want to focus on questing you really need a sovereign designed for combat, and to recruit as many 'warrior' NPC's as possible. Note too that it's not only the creatures which get more dangerous - you'll also see better NPC's wandering around as you increase the adventure tech too.

This strikes me as being a lot like the flagships from Galciv, which kept being billed as 'with enough exploration upgrades, they'll be godly!' but which kept winding up totally outgunned before a third of the game had progressed.  Hopefully a little more oomph will be given to unique units in future updates.

I don't mind having to pay for that oomph; sticking some jackass in armor on a horse and calling him your champion is probably not in and of itself sufficient to let him beat twenty guys in the road.  But if I research some upgrades and buy him some nice stuff, I'd want him to be worth the effort invested in him!

I already see one big advantage that squads can get versus lone units even with separate attacks/defense rolls:

- have the squads roll all its attacks before the attacked unit/squad can counter-attack
- in defense, all unit in the squad counter-attack

3 separates pikemen attacking a big animal ?
pikeman 1 attack -> 1st animal counter-attack
pikeman 2 attack -> 2nd animal counter-attack
pikeman 3 attack -> 3rd animal counter-attack

A pikemen party of 3 attacking the same animal ?
party does 3 separate pikemen attacks -> 1st and only counter-attack

First advantage: you get to do all your attacks before the target counter, meaning more chance to kill it before he counter-attack
Second advantage: only one counter-attack from a lone monster/hero

Opposite situation: a big animal versus 3 pikemen

Attack versus lone pikemen 1 -> pikemen 1 counter attack (if still alive)

Attack versus pikemen party -> the full party counter attack (3 attack total if all are still alive)

And if you want to use this system but have a way to kill several units in a target squads when attacking with a dragon without needing special abilities, you can have excees damage follow to the next unit in the squad, with maybe another defense roll to reduce this damage

Exemple:

Dragon with 50 attack power attacks a squad with 10 defense and 10 hits points per unit:
attack roll: 37 versus defense roll 8 -> hit for 29 damage, the first unit is killed, still 19 damages to assign
-> new defense roll 6, another unit killed, still 3 damage to assign (19 - 6 (def roll) -10 (damage assigned to kill another unit))
-> last defense roll 7, the last 3 damage points are cancelled by the defense

With a good attack roll the dragon has killed 2 units in the squad.
If the dragon has only rolled 6 on his attack roll, bu he has the potential to kill several targets most of the time.

Now suppose the dragon has 30 defense and is attacked be a party of 3 units with 15 attack
-> first attack 11 versus defense 21 => miss
-> 2nd attack 3 versus defense 18 => miss
-> 3rd attack 14 versus defense 7 => hit for 7 damage

Note that the dragon has clearly the advantage here, but it is normal, it's a dragon versus a small party of soldiers with half his base attack and 1/3 his base defense, he should not be in danger from such an opponent in a normal situation. But add a fewx other squads like this one and the dragon will be damaged, and maybe killed.

I see champions as the "generals" for my armies. I think they should be a little bit more powerful than a soldier statwise but no where near the sovereign. I also think they should "Learn" MINOR skills as they level. They should have access to SLIGHTLY more powerfull equipment than a soldier. The spell "Imbue essence" that makes a toon a spell caster should be limited but make a champion a little more powerful stawise than most OTHER champions.

Thus it would be:

Most powerfull>>>> 1.Sovereign   2.Champion with essence   3.Champion   4. Soldier <<<< Least powerfull

But like in reality 1000 #4's might make the enemy go #2 in their pants

This is what they did in master of magic.

With good armor, a hero (aka champion) could have better armor (absorbtion) than the maximum damage of the units components.

For example my hero could have armor 8, and the spearman unit might have 8 soldiers, each with a 1-6 damage attack, which gets rolled 8 times. But the 8 absorbtions applied to each 1-6 damage, and of course the hero doesnt get hit.

This makes your dragon with a 20 attack considerably more devastating than a 5 man unit each with attack 4.

This system was pretty close to perfect. Why it wasnt duplicated for elemental, who knows.

(waits for the inevitable "but this isnt MOM" replies)

tbh i find something improved in elementa compared to mom

dont forget in mom you could kill champions with a single spell and sometimes attack

I agree that it would be nice to have groups of soldiers treated as groups of individuals rather than single units.

I'm also unsure about the way attack and defense currently works. It's ok, but there's quite a lot of randomness there. It doesn't matter much early on, but if you have two heroes fighting each other, and both have say 50 attack and 50 defense, unless they have around 50+ HP, one of them is going to die very quickly. Surely you should get say a tenth of your defense value automatically, and then roll the rest, just to mitigate the luck somewhat. This would make you invincible to weak attack units if you have good defense, but maybe you could make it so that if a unit would have dealt damage, but hit this automatic defense, they deal one damage instead of whatever they would have done, so weak units stand a small chance at chipping away at stronger units.

i remember frogboy saying the system was actually like that

there had to be "parts" which grants a fixed amount of defense no matter  what

im going on memory and also dunno if it will be in the release

Personally, I think the most realistic option for the late game (where you start getting stacks of units that is), is to allow champions to "join" them as a leader, similar to how it's done in Warhammer. Basically you would have an option for your champion to merge with a unit, which would then do one of two things. Allow the champion to attack as part of the unit without running so much risk of taking an one-hit kill from a stack, or simply give some pretty hefty "leadership" bonuses to the stack he's joined.

Unfortunately, I don't know how possible that is with the current code.

A note about attack and defense roll variance :

In Master of Magic, each "sword" is a roll with a base 30% chance to do 1 damage, and each shield a roll with 30% chance to negate one physical damage
(With some units/magic items increasing the 30% chance, each "+1 to unit" increasing this chance by a flat 10%)

This means that an unit with 10 attack versus one with 3 defence will on average do 3 damage, with one negated by the defense roll.

This both reduce extreme rolls (a dragon even with 30 swords will almost never do 30 damage, but it will be almost assured to do at least 5-10 against most opponents)

For what I understand, in Elemental, each roll is a linear chance between 0/1 and your attack/defence value, so a unit with a defense of 50 has as much chance to roll a 1 than a 50 or any value between, and the same is true with the attack roll.

Merit/Advantage: it prevent high defense units to be immune to low attack ones
Flaw/disadvantage: very high variance/random impact, making even high level units/heroes killeable with a bad defense roll or two and making tactical combat more random.

I prefer the MoM version, as with the default 30% chance a unit with 3 swords can still damage sometimes another with 10 shields, it's only with extreme values that the system seams to break (a hero with 20+ def. is more or less immune from most normal units attacks, except for illusion attacks (phantom varriors), armor-piercing or negating attack, high attack units and creature such as other heroes, dragons, etc ...)

Note that it is hard to have a hero with such high defense (and almost impossible with some heroes chassis like some spellcasters), and the game limit you to 6 heroes, you will probably only have one or two like that, and it will already be near the end of the game. Moreover, one invicible hero can still be killed with the appropriate spells (or by dispelling some of his defense spells making him much less invicible), and a hero cannot be everywhere at once, so armies are still usefull to defend your cities or raze the cities.

But I'm not opposed to the elemental system, provided that at least something be done to the current squad rules.

I've been chewing through 6 man groups of enemies thanks to the ridiculous arcane armour. Seriously, around 300 gp for 40 defence with no drawbacks ...

There are a lot of useful comments about how to make champions effective while in an army with regular military units - that's fine. But I think something needs to be done so that you can send 1-2 adventurers out of your cities alone and know that they won't die. I don't expect that they will conquer enemy cities, but they should be able to survive in the wild.

thats a good option to have a less randomic system

but from the ACTUAL elemental i dont think very portable

i mean creatures have 40 50 attack/defense

also dont think stardock RIGHT NOW is going to change completely the combat system

so i think its a better idea to suggest small changes

the point of mom was correct anyway

But this isn't MOM and personally I don't like Heroes/Champions being the beall endall unit of destruction in these games. Too many games like MOM and AOW and HOMM use the Hero/Champion method of overpowering them. I'm glad these Heroes/Champions can be stomped. I'm tired of games where it ends up with whoever got the most experience and powered up a champion/hero and wins the game by slaughtering everything in their path. Plus the fact if you were idiot enough to lose him/her then it was game over for you because you wouldn't have enough time to build another one up. The Sovereign of this game should be the ONLY all powerful beall endall character. The final battle should be between anyones sovereign and their army an another players sovereign and their army. When the battle is over and the air has cleared the loser is out of the game, no more building up, no more sneaking around, it's kaput, over, you're out.

So please Stardock, Brad et al don't turn this game into another hero/champion contest. Just make them playable and useful but not over the top extreme beall endall types like the other games have done. Cap them if you have to to a certain point and power but make them unique in the powers they do have.

Champions right now might be able to keep up with offense/defense using the very best gear but without HP to back it up, the randomness of the combat damage will most certainly kill them.

I ran into some monsters with 28 attack and 10 or so defense, both of my champions had 60ish defense, nearly double the attack skill of the monster. Both of my champions died because they got hit for 12, something that wouldn't have even scratched the creatures dealing the damage. It took a lot of battles and gold to even get them to level 5-6 with the gear they had.

you can boots hp, i usually do it once or twice at start to avoid random deaths for unlucky hits

Even if you spent every point on HP they're still not going to approach the level of creatures that through random BS will still smack them down in 1-2 hits. Even with double the defense rating they were consistently being hit for 10-12 damage. At best 6 levels of hp boosting might give you the ability to take two of those strikes, maybe 3 if you're lucky. Of course if you can still wear infinite rings and necklaces you could just spend thousands of gold on items per champion just to keep them from imploding when somebody looks at them. That of course would be moronic, you'd be better served just making troops with the gold instead.

the point is the first champions are not that strong

but later champions indeed ARE

you cant take a first champion you met and paid 50 grow like a demigod

but sure you can find later  some very good fighter with enough hp to survive some tough fight

See that's what makes the system silly. Why bother taking the time to level up characters when you'll just have to replace them with new guys you find later on? It makes those initial champions pretty worthless because despite having great stats earned from the many battles they've fought in, they now become worthless because HP just doesn't scale on the champions well. It takes quite a bit of combat to raise the levels of champions and your sov, all of that shouldn't be for naught.

It's not just about how much you paid to recruit a hero 100 turns ago, it's about the time and effort you spend developing your heroes.  I'm certainly not advocating "Sword Saint"-style champions that can cut through armies but allowing the combat-focused heroes you invested in to at least be able to contribute to and survive later-game combat isn't that bad, is it?

The point is that a bunch of peasants with clubs, even if their are 100 of them, aren't going to one-shot something like a Shrill, Dragon, or Elemental Lord.

Not unless they all have REALLY Big Hammers and get REALLY Lucky

basically, you need good weapons to pierce good armor. Attack shouldn't stack. Nuff said.

actually, I bought about 20 amulets of attack for my Snathi daughter-in-law, and boosted her to 4800 attack (she had maybe 190 defense?)

the best part? She had 10 combat speed, and I gave her a longbow