Fabius

I think the Aura should be restricted to melee infantry and champions and not include ranged Infantry as I don't think centurions were leading velites persay. But I could be wrong in that regard.

That is quite the impressive list, I like the swordsmen techs especially.

Fertile Crescent sounds good

An interesting idea, why Seleucids?

ah I see, I did not know that was a thing.

nobody uses walls at all, not even stone walls. And hilariously enough this is the first alpha since A23 where I have used walls and had them play important rolls in multiple battles. I think players are so not used to seeing walls that when they do see them they sort of freak out. And now we have functional catapults to deal with rams again. Still, siege walls are nice as an alternative solution, if you have no stone you can still wall stuff using wood. It is a pity though they lost one point of crush armour, used to be 4 but then became the generic 3. Is great for wood maps like Ardennes, the broken terrain can really be played for advantage. maybe could make siege walls phase 2 as well?

Why not put some focus on allied troops? Apparently Rome was using regular legions drawn from Rome as a province and then Allied legions drawn from other areas nearby. You could use this to bring on other troops to fill in gaps assuming they weren't all just carbon copies of each other.

the main problem is the only unit that actually effectively works on walls are archers since they have the longest range. Skirmishers are useless and slingers are mildly better.

I hesitate to ask what ddosing is, but I am curious now, what is it?

One thing I would love to see is a return of the Roman mule and see it used to once again move scorpions around instead of them being pulled in little carts like everyone else.

It could be used as a staging point to finally add in centurions as a trainable unit from it, that would be very nice. Though centurions are I think their own little debate at this point. Some unique techs would be awesome, maybe some kind of vision upgrade, Romans did like their outposts and signal towers. I guess having the full siege roster might be a bit much on top of a training roster of similar length to all have in one place. So I am definitely fine with other functionalities. Like those mentioned above.

I see. I remember they complained we were using them as impromptu siege workshops and so bypassing the need for a fortress and proceeded to ruin it, which struck me as rather much like punishing the player for being creative with things. I used that as often as I could, not just for siege, when I realised it had veteran spearmen I always made some camps somewhere on my back line so I could make use of those veterans. All in all I would love the old camp with the complete original training roster of hastati, triari and Equites(veteran equites maybe?) with all the siege as well. It wont make the siege workshop a redundancy either as that still can be placed back home.

Why is there a metal cost anyway? fortresses cost wood and stone, so why does this have a metal component? Why not just make it 200 stone and 400 wood?

Cataphracts are line breakers not light infantry hunters, historically they tired extremely quickly so not at all ideal for light infantry hunting. They should be good against melee infantry, so high hack armour, and definitely slower.

Something to be aware off is that if we drop melee cavalry health we should do something about ranged cavalry health, do we want ranged and melee champions both having the same size health pool?

They haven't, they have the usual double sword cav stats plus 1 extra armour on both hack and pierce. the damage is just double the sword cavs, there has been no change except a loss of 1 hack armour and a gain of 1 pierce armour in A24 i think it was. I will also point out that by the same logic champion lancers should have 11 hack armour since regular lancers have 5 and doubled that gives 10 and add 1 for a total of 11. And if that sounds scary it should. likewise the champ lancer damage is just regular lancer damage doubled.

Not at all, you get enough champion cavalry of the consular or heavy lancer variety and you can eradicate a ranged army in less time than it took to make said ranged army, this has and always will be one of the primary functions of cavalry, squishing light infantry into the earth.

This I concur on. the biggest culprits being Persia and Selucia since they can get extra health with the war horses tech. And then after that comes Rome. Perhaps a reduction in health for champion cavalry might be helpful? they already have double the health pool of a full veteran melee cavalry I don't think it would hurt to much to knock of 10%.

well they do have diverse melee options, but their ranged section is anything but diverse

There is only one faction with champion sword cavalry and that's Rome, and is arguably the best thing they have going for them currently. And its not the only strong melee champion cavalry either, Seleucid cataphracts can stop Consular quite well, so can Persian Bactrian lancers, which is reasonable given the anti cav bonus of lancers. Also they can destroy everything else too. That being said, I do think citizen spearmen should have more utility against heavy cavalry, maybe a simple multiplier increase would help, go from 3X to 4X. Or a slower 3.5X. You could make it a blacksmith upgrade as well.

I have some ideas for Rome. The senate house: A unique building that could either give some kind of aura or have some special technologies, maybe some either or technologies, eg pick this or that but not both, like the Seleucid traditional and reform armies. It was suggested to me to have the option to sacrifice a hero in it for a temporary buff, wrath at Caesars assassination essentially. Another use might be as means to gain a second chance at recruiting a hero. The sacred geese of Rome: either a technology similar to sibylline books that gives 10-15% vision range, either just for temples or for civic buildings or just everything. Or a literal war goose like the gallic war dog, geese literally defending Rome is humorous if not historical. Extraordinari being able to swap between sword and javelin.

Resources are not equal in value, metal is not available in large quantities like wood and food, and its required for a lot of important things such as phasing to third, blacksmith upgrades, siege, champions, mercs, heroes.

1. They are throwaway units in that they cost food and the way you used them was to get a bunch and put them on hyper aggressive in your battle line, then you left them to do their thing. 2. Metal is used a great deal and is a "scarce" resource, though I dare say that depends on the maps you play, some maps are more metal rich than others. 3. True, the cost is cheaper on paper, but is it really so in reality? The opportunity cost seems quite significant. 4. That is apparently true, but subject still to the availability of mines. What is more, the number of consistent farmers will almost always exceed your metal gatherers unless you have two or three mines to work at once which would be usually out of the question unless you had massive map control or are playing a variation of gold rush. Going back to opportunity cost, healers will rarely feature late game since why get 6 healers when you can get a ram instead which ultimately has more game ending potential.

Metal is already a necessary resource with high value, is it really helpful to require for something as mundane as a healer? The idea of paying metal for a throwaway unit is not very appealing.

I just noticed that healers now have a metal cost attached, why is that?