Arveanor

From a gameplay perspective, Spam units are going to be a pretty essential early unit. Mordor can spam orcs, Moria can spam goblins, Isengard has scouts, Rohan has peasants, etc. This gives them a good advantage early game. They can defend well enough and more importantly, they can deal a fair amount of damage. However, Elves are borderline overpowered as is. They have a lot of powerful heroes, powerful units and some pretty good upgrades. Why bother giving them a spam unit? Force the Elven player to make some choices early game. Do I build some archers and a hero? Or do I build a third barracks, stable, and a good hero? Put the Elven player on edge. Imo, elves are a late game faction. Takes a while to save up for all those heroes and awesome upgrades. So why not give them a bit of a disadvantage early game?

Each faction should have a distinct advantage and disadvantage. For Dwarves? It's the lack of Cavalry and Heroes. For Mordor? It's the lack of any real early game power. Give Elves a distinct early game disadvantage.

Kraft, while I'm all for various advantages and disadvantages, you simply can not realistically give any faction a true early game disadvantage, because with all this mod's attempt to kill the rush, it has really only slowed the rush, rather then killing it. By being weaker during the early stages of the game, the elves will automatically be weaker in the later stages, as they will not have as great an economy, and will be working to come from behind as they try to build stronger units for more, using less resources, and then trying to keep those strong units alive against a well established enemy army.

A well equipped peasant wouldn't pose much danger in fact probably less than a poorly armed Elvan civilian.

I know how elves are superior fighting units, so I agree that they should be strong, but a drafted peasant, equipped with armor, a weapon, and a shield, would still probably kill an elven noncom. I just really don't see the elf being able to easily bypass the formidable defense of a large shield, armor, and a wildly swinging blade or axe, sure if its a fair fight with even equipment, or if the elf can hide and come from behind, the elf will definitely win, but in a one on one fight, where the man has proper equipment, and the elf has a dagger, I have to put my vote on the man.

I don't think the spam units are supposed to be traditionally spam units in the fact they can be a near infinite supply. They are supposed to be cheap and quickly produce-able units. Only Mordor, Moria, and Isengard can I see having a true infinite supply seeing as how they literally make soldiers out of pits without end. They could easily just make disposable troops without much burden on their economy. For most other factions having workers not working after some time should realistically cause an income problem.

Sometimes, quite often, actually, realism must be sacrificed in games in order to preserve the spirit or balance of the game, Do you want to sit around for months waiting for a fullsized barracks to be completed? Me either. I understand these comparisons aren't exact, but I'm just trying to make a point here, realism doesn't always work, and we know that we can't take this mod too far, we can't make it too complex. If players have a damaged income while defending their base, they are going to have the issue of fighting an uphill battle as the odds continue to get worse, even if its a stalemate. Generating resources could probably be seen as the number one goal of this game, everything else is centered around it, and when pulling out a few pathetic guys in a last-ditch attempt to save your base results in the loss of 90% of your income, even if your economy had been twice as strong as your opponents, you'd be working out of a whopping 20% of your opponents income, this is not a recipe for success, it basically assumes that if you are attacked, and if you have to call in additional troops for defense, then you will lose. A spam unit needs to be cheap, by nature, but when that spam unit costs 15% of your total economy, they very rapidly become as expensive as a top rate hero, so how does this help anyone?

Now let me try once again to give a point I threw out there earlier.

Explain to me how elves can possibly have an unlimited supply of powerful warriors but a tiny supply of gardeners/farmers? this makes no sense

Now think about it, the elves can, with the exception of CP, which governs most everything, deploy an infinite supply of troops that are highly trained with incredible armor. I'm talking about sentries, swordsman, lancers, and various flavors of archers. Why do you think that a dwindling race needs to have a limited supply of farmers and other civilian types, but have a limitless flow of the aforementioned soldiers?

bananas, you have some awesome ideas that are really cool, but this one just is not practical, which is actually kind of sad, as some realism can be a refreshing thing.


Edit: sorry about the massive wall of text.

Ummmmmmmmmm yes. but, and this is a very very large but, it also enables mordor to waste their resources at a ridiculous pace. This power is one of the few that has more limitations then the upgrade points necessary to purchase it and the CD timer. Now, I do believe mordor is OP, their just too easy to dominate with, but I honestly don't think changing the points on this spell would effect, well, anything. Early in the game, if your fighting a tough battle for map control, by the time you've got 10 spell points, your actually building orcs about as fast as you can afford them, so this spell helps very little, except in those key situations where you lose your whole army which you have neglected to build up in so long, really what this spell does is says, "Hey, you screwed up, big time, and although you'll actually do nothing but build orcs, if you like, I'll let you do just that." Essentially with this spell you can get a headstart at rebuilding your massive, living wall of orcs, which is absolutely essential to mordor, 'cause if you take that away from the, their very, very weak.

However, late in the game, when resources are stockpiled to insane levels, this spell does in fact allow players to near instantly amass huge hordes of orcs, but again, this is greatly limited by a pre-existing factor: CP limit. Unless you have some way to speed up the process of your orcs dying(if it aint fast enough already), then you'll probably not have the room in your army to make much use of this, unless, of course something very large and powerful wipes out most of your army, which, if your doing an orc spam, is highly unlikely. So in the case of the late game, this spell actually gives you a free army, only your still paying for it, it just kinda comes really really fast. But if your enemy has some magical way to destroy that many orcs that quickly, I bet they've got a CD timer as well, but this just means that their ability to destroy your orcs is balanced by your ability to mass produce orcs.

As it turns out I believe that this spell is one of the fairest aspects of mordor, and one that fits in incredibly well, I don't know if the dev team counted on all of these factors from the get go, but they certainly work in favor of a smooth and balanced game... mod... edition... beta... thing you guys rock

I'm pretty sure a more dynamic system would be in order than that, like one offering different resistances/bonuses, rather than just armor/speed. I honestly don't have a lot of examples here but something like that would probably work well, It's certainly something that would be nice to see.

Which is better really isn't the question. But which is better to use against certain things. Ex: Which is better? Uruk Warriors, or Uruk pikeman? All depends who they are fighting. Against infantry Uruk warriors are far superior to Uruk pikeman. However against cavalry the opposite is the case.

So neither is truly better then the other. You just have to figure out what its best use is.

I'm holding back all the urges say something a jerk might say, but I'll do my best to explain nicely that I'm referring to the difference between the two types of orc swordsmen, where you were referencing pikemen vs swordsmen.

And if your wondering why I would even have jerk-ish urges, well it's probably because I've played with pros(I was never as good as them so I won't claim that) and was pretty good myself, the pikes vs swords issue was like second nature and anyone who didn't realize these sorts of things as well as many others was looked down upon greatly, those who might lecture me who couldn't back that lecture up with a 1v1 smackdown on myself, were looked down upon further.

So really its just a bit of my past coming out, but don't worry, I perfectly understand where the confusion comes in on that one, which is why I have to make myself nice, after all you were trying to help

Sounds awesome but there's one serious flaw with mordor's spire. Namely without touching anything related to the MotE Mordor is OP, so giving them this thing wouldn't help one bit, even with the pitiful excuse of balancing by cost.

And if you think I'm whining because mordor destroys me I'm not, in fact I know their OP simply because after destroying my friend a few times with a orc spam I've realized why it works so well.

He uses isen so his uruk-hai start at like 400 and by the time upgrades are applied their over 1k. I can build 9-10 gorgoroth orc hordes for that amount and build them faster if I use multiple pits, where's the balance in that? my orcs will rip through his uruk's like paper, not to mention their primarily a meat shield for the atk trolls and nazgul.