[suggestion] Prefer MoM/King's Bounty style sovereign

The hardest part of a conquest victory is defending your conquest.  After a while, it starts to feel like playing Whack-A-Mole. 

It would be great if horses could greatly increase strategic speed and not nerf the heck out of some classes like archers.

Try to mod the army movement speeds and double them all see if that helps your preference?

BTW; I suffer from neither these problems but I tend to dig myself in, let the computer destroy all his best stuff on me and then come out for a bit of fresh air. I either use a dragon or a heavy armor unit for damage absorption and archers to kill all off all before they reach the archers. Then i take those leveled archers and heavy armor and go take a juicy city from them. Meanwhile I dig in again whilst I build 4 archer armies in each city and thenn on to the next. Never fails; but it is a game of patience.

How do you get a hold of a dragon?

I've heard of the possible Dragon (as reward) via Curgen's Hold,

and then there are the Drakes, Ophidians, and Naga that can be built with Serpent's Pact civ trait ...

But what is this about Dragons?

MOM solved it with free moving enchanted roads.  AOWSM solved it with teleport gates between cities (that the AI understood and could use, too).

Well... If it breathes fire and sweeps it's tail then it's a dragon in my book... Even if they are named Drake. This game I've got a forest Drake (doesnt breath fire, just sweeps it tail) and last game I had 2 blue drakes which both spit fire and swept their tails. I got them through building their nests.

There is nothing to solve.

I could also suggest building teleport gates at cities as an endgame building, but the *other* guy in the forums will go bezerk reading about allowing more accessible teleportation.

You must understand that in strategy games you must split your units and/or post garrisons to defend you holdings. If you feel cheated that you must do this then you have to switch genres, preferably to rpgs, where all your units are always in one spot. I also believe that the reason for this confusion is the fact that MoM has rpg elements.

Ah I see. I thought you meant a true dragon with wings as well

--> and there are a few true dragons in game, yet the only ones I found were under the command of Waerloga the Dragon Lord.

(btw Waerloga the Dragon lord as an endgame boss is pretty ... AWESOME!!)

Aerion/DrAtomic, I think you're focusing on one aspect of my point.  Even having a sovereign being able to teleport doesn't replace the ability to cast spells in defense of a city.  If the AI played as well as a human, I doubt that any city defenses would hold against a blizzard with a +10 initiative sovereign.  The only thing keeping me from roflstomping every city is how long it takes to get there.

What's frustrating is having a city well-shielded from other people having a wandering monster stroll in and my militia get wiped because I can't spend any of the 1000+ mana I have.  REX is already sufficiently punished by the lower growth from prestige.  I can't imagine running an empire and leaving expensive guards in every city. 

All they need is an Engage command for units, so that they ride out and meet any enemies that fall within their sight range automatically. I do believe the Civs have this. It's super handy for outposts and resources defense.

Easy fix: implement missile turrets.

Replace tactical battles with a tower defense minigame.

I also loved the defensive statues, we could have more of that. in a tiered fashion.

Must agree about the movement speeds, sometimes it's just too slow. I really think the game would benefit from some civilization style (build-able) roads. That being said, Elemental's "Engines" are horses... as much as I hate using horses.

Lol. Forest Drake got pathetic stats. My midgame leather horseman are better in any way then those.