There was some talk a while back about how "special" units would require some sort of mana expenditure. You can't simply make "paladins", you have to design a unit and then imbue it with some sort of power to make it special. Its safe to assume that the pinnacle of "elite" troops would all have some sort of magic investment. It doesn't matter what form that invesment takes, it could be magic weapons, magic buff spells or what have you.

The power we use to fund that investment comes from a finite source. This is what makes it an investment versus an expendature. Everything we have heard to date about "essense" and all that details how players will invest or hoard this power as they see fit. If you spend all of your power making a titanic killer stack, there is nothing stopping me from gathering up an equal amount of power and casting magic spells that nuke your stack from orbit. In that way "essense" or whatever you want to call it should be self balancing. Power spent in one way can be countered by power spent in another.

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At this point its hard to argue for one side or the other. We just don't have enough info.

Did any of the devs ever mention that special units would require some sort of mana expenditure? I have never seen such a statement... I've seen lots of speculation and hoping on our part about that, but to my knowledge (and I'm kind of obsessed with checking these forums ) there has been zero confirmation. Additionally, based on what we've been told so far, it looks like essence and mana are going to be two separate things, with essence being the much more valuable one. If that impression is right, then there is a huge difference between troops that require a mana expenditure vs. troops that require an essence expenditure.

I think that in general, essence will (or should) be something you invest in things that you intend to be permanent fixtures of your kingdom - like your channeler, heroes, settlements, items, miscellaneous bonuses to your kingdom, etc; while mana would be used for things like strengthening your military, casting spells, the kinds of things that are either one-time uses, constant upkeep or things that don't tend to last long (like individual soldiers).

Well quite frankly, we don't know how finite or infinite essence will be. It may be something that increases with time, meaning that it would be no more finite than mana, or gold (but it would probably be scarcer). And you should look up 'investment' because your sentence using it doesn't really make sense  ... An investment is merely an expenditure of resources to make a profit, or more generally, an appreciation in value. Whether you spend gold to train troops, or mana or essence, it is still (usually) an investment - you spend some resources to recieve a 'finished product' that is more valuable to you than the initial resources.

The rest of your paragraph, I agree with you. And actually, it just made me think a little harder about the subject. The example given a while back about use of essence was that one player could choose to dilute his channeler's essence into several settlements, kickstarting expansion and allowing for higher military/tech production, while another channeler might horde essence; and a conflict between the two would be balanced - large, advanced military with a weak channeler vs. small army but powerful channeler. In either case the investment of essence goes into something permanent - the channeler is obviously permanent because if you lose your channeler you lose the game; but even the investment into settlements is pretty permanent - even if some of your settlements are conquered, or razed, you could still take them back and rebuild - the land would still be habitable thanks to your past expenditure of essence to make it so.

But then, let's say you can invest essence directly into military units, resulting in really powerful soldiers. The major difference with this scenario is that the investment would not be into something permanent. In large-scale battles, you will almost always lose some troops in every battle, even if you have a huge advantage. This means that over time, your investment will be whittled away until all that essence is gone for good. To me, this would mean a third scenario to frogboy's above: a small army (about the same size as the essence horder's) of very powerful units, even more powerful than the army of the essence disperser's large, advanced military. In this situation, it doesn't balance out as simply; but rather, the player with the essence-imbued military obtains a short-term advantage in return for a long-term disadvantage.

That was kind of my point. We don't have enough information to go about making it seem like we know things we don't know. We can argue and discuss and hope all we want about what we want the game to be, but it just rubbed me wrong that you stated something that's never been even remotely confirmed as if it were.

Pigeon, stop saying words!

I'm sorry I'm sick and can hardly get out of bed. I'm so bored and grumpy

One way of doing stack of doom limits.

Require stacks to have generals, which have command ratings.  Generals cost gold, and you can only have so many talented generals.  High-end units can take multiple unit slots.  Generals have special abilities which go to their troops.

Generals can also become insubordinate and rebel.

But small elites should have downsides as well.  Assassins, mass numbers.

With command, i am thinking something like the Kohan regiment system, but much more complicated.

Well yes, a whole unit of setlers in MoM is represented by a single wagon with tons of health that makes it durable enough to run away.

But most units of soldiers were only abstracted in the logistic sense. What you see on the table is what you get. A unit of paladins missing one member is a unit of paladins with one casualty. That one missing paladin doesn't signify a 25% reduction in strength, it just means you started with 4 and now one of them is dead.

AoW was kind of confusing because every single unit was a single figure. Since an archer is only one guy on the table and he can only shoot one target at a time its a safe assumption that he is alone.

Civ4 on the other hand was abstracted out the wazoo. The visual representations of units were just window dressing, the actual unit stats controlled how they fought. This leads to a lot of strange fights, such as war elephants defeating battle tanks.

Hey, I got two pity karma for being sick!

*hatches devious plot*

comenow, I can't imagine you worked that hard to become sick.

Heroes of Might and magic did that too, except with a little number in the corner (its like, "hey!  500 peasents can't fit on that hex tile, don't lie to me game"  )

What do you consider "a time" in a turn based game?   Is a single archer really only able to shoot 1 arrow in the amount if time it takes for an army to walk whatever their move distance is?  You have to suspend disbeif and such.  imagination can let you do anything!   Besides, often when at a distance of more than like 20 meters, archers did volleys that could potentially rain on several targets, I think thats a bit messy for a game like this, so you just have to let such things slide.  I don't need real life in my escapism.

No, most likely it would have just been a pain to implement archers in any other way than that, and so that's the way they did it. In AoW I've successfully sieged cities with just a couple archers and swordsmen. Quite frankly, 3 or 4 armed individuals wouldn't have a chance of conquering a city with a population of several hundred or more, even if the entire population were unarmed. To me, that says that the visual display of military units is abstracted - and so is their functionality.

I vote that 1 arrow from a hero is more accurate than 20 arrows from random bums.  I mean, they are heroes.   They are the kinds of people that put pebbles through the skulls of giants with 1 shot, when a whole army couldn't do it.

There's two meanings for "killer stack" here.

There's the AoW2 style killer stack, where each stack is limited to 8 units and you can only bring a certain number into combat (depending on how close together they are). In this case once you tech up enough, it makes no sense at all to make weaker units. Why make 8 Archers when you can make 8 Dread Reapers instead? One of those stacks has absolutely no chance against the other.

That's the real problem with this style. Since every unit counts as 1 unit, and the limit is 8 units, top tier units are always better. If you factored in costs it'd be more like 8 Dread Reapers vs 40 Archers, which isn't quite so bad.

The other style is the Civ 4 "put a zillion units into one stack" style. Civ doesn't let you battle the entire armies together at once, but I still like how it turns out better then the AoW2 style. Sure you can build some expensive Knights/Catapults, but I built twice as many cheaper Macemen/Pikemen/Longbowmen. Swarm tactics can work in this case, but the few elite units style also works.

However they do it, what I'd like to see them avoid is arbitrary size limits that punish non-elite units. In my AoW2 example, if Dread Reapers took up 4 "supply" (to match their cost), you'd see stacks that were closer to being even no matter which method you choose to take. But a limit of 8 where a peasant using a pitchfork and an all powerful super unit both count as 1 just makes anything but the super unit a waste of time.