Those of you who not only have time to play the beta, but also want to try out some balance ideas, this is the mod for you. If walls of text are more your speed, I even have a link to one of those: https://forums.elementalgame.com/422630

That pretty much sums up what I think about the new balance changes with regards to weapons and armor. Armor is too high. My solution is to raise weapon values to compensate. The challenge is that this is making unarmored units die in one hit. So I raised Hp across the board to make units survive for longer. If you still think unarmored units die too easily, watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osTQrJ_axfc Not all that accurate, but the basic ideas are there. No armor means you will not be getting much more than one hit against an armored opponent. 

What does that mean for my mod? It means that the AI needs to start using Leather and Chain. It means that I need to make lots of unit designs to make sure the AI can train better units after each new tech is mastered. It means that wages need to be lower and training times higher. This will mean that unarmored units will flood the early game and more armored units will cost more gildar and take longer to train. Magic is kind of a wildcard when talking about realism vs. gameplay. I have tried to give magic a defensive advantage. Each magical weapon is a mundane weapon with magical attributes. This means they will be faster, lighter, have special damage when compared to their mundane counterpart. 

Abilities have been beefed up to make heroes more competitive at higher levels. Citylevelup bonuses have been redesigned to be more interesting and specialize cities more. All improvements have been changed, though not as much as the last mod. You may want to play on slower tech paces if you felt the midgame was borderline too fast. There are more Research options now, but they come with trade offs. 

Expansion now increases Unrest. Outposts and Cities. So if you want to expand, you need to reduce Unrest. There are buildings for this or you can reduce taxes. Wages for units are 30% of vanilla, so money can be invested more in shop items and rush buying. I have yet to finish the level 5 bonuses, but at level 4, you will see some incentives to build up instead of out. In general, the AI will not expand as much either. Please let us know if the AI is spamming still.

Spells have been balanced a bit. Mana Blast now uses 20% of your Mana. All spells now correctly use the targets they should be using. AoE's will ignore your own units. All damage spells can be resisted, so Spell Resistance can help you avoid magical attacks.

The devs seem to want city differentiation this month, so if you think of any Faction Buildings that make sense, tell me and I will make them for testing. Magnar and Gilden are pretty solid. I would like to testers to suggest about the others. They are slower to balance things the way I want it. This kind of mod is mostly about trying out new ideas and balancing old ones.

I will post videos of examples:

Older Videos:

Test 1

Test 2: Monsters are deadly business

Test 3: Cities can now defend themselves

Test 4: Ire of Karavox

Newer Videos:

City Defense

Karavox and the Army of Crystalline Entities

City Defense II

Yithril Attacks!

I recommend playing each faction on fast tech pace and making a new unit design for each new tech as appropriate. It is the only way to get the AI factions to use good units. I will put up a link so you can use my units. Please post your unit designs as you go through each faction. The vanilla units are just sad.

Enjoy:

Elemental Balance v3.912.01

How to install:

First thing you need to do is add -localdataonly at the end of the file path for your shortcut. To do this, right click on any shortcut you have made for the game and click Properties. In the Target box there is a file path. At the end, add a space and type -localdataonly. Now download the link below and unzip it. In the file is the original xml file and the modded one, labeled Test. Take all the ones with Test in the name and copy them into FallenEnchantress/Data/English (except CoreImprovementsTest and ArtImprovementsTest, those go in the Improvements Folder there). Now delete the core files that my files are replacing. The backup copies are in the folder you downloaded. It is important to always have the original backup and a backup of your mod files as they may be erased by updates by the devs. To summarize, you just put the modded files in the game folder and got rid of the originals so that the game will read the modded ones. You added -localdataonly to the end of the file path for the desktop shortcut, allowing the game to see your computer's xml instead of the ones on the server. You should now be ready to play a new game that is much more fun!

The unit designs go in your user folder under the subfolder Units. You and the AI can use them!

Notice, there are no longer any of the vanilla units such as Defender or Spear Maiden or Scout. You must add the unit in the Unit folder to your Unit folder. This is located in something like C:\Users\Username\MyGames\Fallen Enchantress\Units. Or where ever your user files are stored. The vanilla units are breaking the game right now, so this complication has become necessary. 

Rules:

Don't post bugs in FE Support when using a mod. We have a special thread for mod bugs.

Remember to put the original files back before updating and keep a copy of the modded files. Many things change from one version to the next. Better to keep things as the devs expect them to be. 

Do post new ideas and problems you encounter here. The whole point of this is to give some parallel feedback on what you think works and what doesn't. Then we can present that to the devs and see what they think.

Do ask questions. I am more than happy to teach anyone that cares how to mod these files to their personal liking. I can also help if this is your first time adding a core mod to the game.

Might want to start on easier settings. The game is so much more challenging now. I may need to think about AI help if it turns out they can't handle the monsters.