Dear Brad....I am wondering about that picture what you drew.
Units will only have weapon/armor/helmet slots? That is _NOT_ enough. What about slots / number of arms for example? Even a simple human should be able to hold a shield and a 1h weapon or a 2h weapon. What if a creature will have 4 or more arms?
Also even if we are talking about normal soldiers, and not heroes, there should be an additional slot for leg armors...
Brad has already stated that the picture wasn't the full representation of the unit creation screen. While I'd also love to see a really detailed screen where I could put on pauldrons, arms, hands, boots and legs, the question remains: How will the Tactical Combat system work? Will there be benefits for having less armoured units? Will there be movement/attack speed/dodge speed stats? If it's simply HP and Attack then you might as well keep it simple, as sad a panda that makes me.
Quoting Tamren, reply 25I hope that we will be able to mod the weapons to be a bit more realistic. A cutlass and a machete are both swords but one works more like an axe and the other one cuts like a chefs knife. The difference between them would not be huge but would be very important when you get down to the 1 vs 1 combat scale. [...]
There's nothing to say that all swords are swords. There could very well be different kinds of swords, although I see very little reason to actually extend it beyond a number of base sets.
I basicly want to have everyone take a step back, breathe, and loudly ask themselves "We want this, but does this actually add something to the game?"
Luckmann has a good point. Also if anyone played the RPG "Evil Islands" you had a bunch of base weapon/armour types and you would put better and better building materials into these base blueprints to make the product better/different. So you find a longsword blueprint. Putting in stone will make a pretty crude looking implement, but put in something really sexy like Meteroite Ore into it and it becomes an awesome tool of destruction.
So, as for resources: why not have a bunch of different materials be on the same level so that if you have no access to metal deposits, you can hunt demons for their bones which might not do as much damage but could be enchanted better: make up lack in damage with slight magical kick. Or have the bones come with a slight magical attack as standard.
We already know that SD intend to have us improve weapons in small steps, so what about having a few base models of weapons that have different stats. So for example: We have a one handed axe that does more damage than 1-handed swords but have slower attack speed. Also having 1/2handed weapons would be nice (but that's most likely already planned). So they are different but not better than each other. Player can use personal preference to decide what sort of weapon he wants to follow and tech up.
Problem: this also limits the player: going for one handed axes would exclude other types of weapons.
Maybe as you research One-Handed Axes there would be milestones where new axe types would be unlocked to give a bit more flexibility?