JF: Unit Design, Production and Maintenance

Note: This is some idea feedback that was inspired by reading the journal of the game. I currently never played the beta yet.

This thread talks about unit design and production. Most of these thought are based according to what I have seen in the journal picture and my game experience with master of magic.

One of the problem I had with master of magic is that creating and army takes a huge amount of time making it very hard to react to a declaration of war. I remember placing 3 cities building units in 3 turns which took me 9 turns (9 month in game play, to build an army). Then you had to move your unit to destination which took a few dozen of turns (another 2 year) to finally start attacking your ennemy. But you also have to think about replacing casualties and make sure they would catch up your front army in time. ANyways, here is what I propose.

Training time: First I suggest that all units, what ever their strength has a training time of 1 month. Optionally the player could train them an extra month for the unit to gain an extra level of experience if you support experience levels.

Experience: Experience system should be managable by itself. I hate in Civ IV the new abilities allowing you to micromanage each unit you produce. If unit gain experience after time or battle and it gives it "to-hit" bonus, that's fine with me. But I don't want to manage the level upping of each of my units. Else I would rather have no exp and only give exp to heroes.

Parallel Production: You should be able to train units and produce buildings at the same time. It's Ok that the unit training eats a bit of your production because you need to produce the equipment. But it should not prevent you from making buildings. So you should have 2 queue: units and buildings. Units like catapults would require more production points since most of it is machinery. Stonger units should only get an higher gold maintenance.

The way I would do the math is that a unit need a number of production point which is pretty low. If a small city does not have the minimum to build the unit (or at least twice the required value would be better (ex: need 20 points to build a 10 point unit)) the city cannot build the unit at all. Else you reduce you production level by the points required by the unit. For ex: if you have 30 production and the unit requires 10, you production levels drops to 20 which will be given to your building in production.

Predesigned Units: Designing unit is fun but it should be done outside the game especially for multiplayer games because it adds a lot of downtime to the game if a player design a unit. Else you could give the option to players to design their units after they have pushed the "next turn" button and waiting for the other players to finish.

Movement: Unit movement in MOM is very long. For master of magic, I would have speed up the units to:

Infantry: 2 square

Cavalry 3 square

Flying Infantry: 3 square

Flying Cavalry: 5 square

In age of wonders, they had the idea of placing an high value on movement which makes it easier to divide and multiply. For example, I think Infantry moved by 24, and cavalry by 36. Each type of terrain consumed a certain amount of points giving you more variations and preventing you to deal with half points.

Personnally, I really prefer point to point movement like in Koei style of game (Romance of the 3 kingdom, gemfire, etc). The only problem with a game like MOM is that the map is built during the game, so the connections are created during the game.