31Mar13 Military Unit Production Time Adjustments

I read it all, and still don't like the way they did it. Probably it is more about "how easy it was to code" than any other consideration.

As many people already pointed at, this makes offensive siege even easier than before. And on the long run cavalry will not keep pace with reconstruction times of defensive units (which will be used for offence). I don't think this is what we need in this game, at all.

Spears are the real winner in this change for defense and swords for offence. 

So I would like to have an option to switch to dwarf or orc.

To me , this change is bigger than you think.

Got a great laugh out of this one.

Actually i think there are ways to make this issue less important. I thought i would keep it for me and my alliance... but i also want to give solutions for balance and bring solutions for defending against siege, so...

Some ideas, but im sure the new changes can permit much more:

The collective work: as an orc, you can focus on producing T1 spears. Then you can use your forge and produce swords for your dwarves mates, instead of producing chain for your T2 spears. 

As an orc, you can also have some towns for T1 spears and some towns for T2 infantry, produce the swords for urslelf in the T1 spears cities and the chain in the T2 sword ones (less effective than sharing with dwarves, but it gives you more fighting options, individually).

A dwarf can hardly make a combination T2 Inf/Spear, unless it's T1 spears which just got more interesting. Same combination possible with T2 Inf/T1 ranged, specilising cities weapons prod accordingly. You'd produce less Inf but would have less issues to get the weapons for them. Of course, if your orc/elven mates give you the swords you need... and that you give your overproduced spears to orcs, etc... well it gets very interesting.

Same for Human who could make a Cav/Inf combination and get eventually some swords from orcs/elven mates who build T1 racial units. Actually Elves could also produce saddles for humans, instead of producing leather for temselves...

There are surely many other interesting combinations/cooperations.

Well, all that to say that the fact that some T1 units are getting interesting to produce may permit to balance/facilitate some units producion, notely Infantry, if players are cooperative enough (or through market availability/price lowerings). And then have a bigger and faster rebuildable Infantry pool. 

So i vanish for the moment my problematic about Infantry compared recovering issues, as the current release may permit more weapons availability for them. 

Though it doesnt solve the Cav usefulness issue :p

About what is bold, you actually produce 4.3 T1 orc spear while you produce 1 T2 human cav in the mean time (and i dont speak even about advantage on sov for units production given to spears, due to almost inexistant weapons demands... cause then it would be around 9 T1 orc spear for 1 knight, if you compare the overall prod of spear based maxed orc and a cav based maxed human). And as said already T1 orc spears are even better than T2 overall, in terms of power given per time. And they cost almost nothing compared to the T2 version. 

You talk about moving speed, and T1 are indeed faster than T2, and cav are still the very fastest units. But during a war, the speed of your def units doesnt matter so much: when you set a siege, you have all your time and can coordinate the launching times of the various def armies, for them to land on the said spot at the said time, so that movement speed for def units isnt an issue. 

Also, whatever your speed is, if you attack a siege camp, you can anticipate your loss by starting to build few units during the travel, so that your recovery doesnt suffer of your speed.

So using the moving speed factor as to compare the recovery times isn't really relevant. 

Cav are still very fast and can reach some squares before others do. But during a war, they will then mostly be used to break sieges (generally on mountains/forests) due to that fact... but as def units recovers even faster than before, when you do so you are more than ever making a non efficient move as def units will recover way faster than you. So when you do so, you are wasting your knights against the defense, it's a desperate default move. 

As i already said, i think it's logical for cavalry to be less and less efficient on mountains/forests, but if you deeply think about it you wont really often be able to use the power of your knights in good conditions during a war (meaning on plains/small hills). You can't use Cav against sailly forths as noone use this, you can't inflict damage to a city with direct cav attack. Cavalry permit to threaten the plains so that people will avoid to defend on those, but you will rarely use your cav on plains during a war.