31Mar13 Military Unit Production Time Adjustments

Actually, it's a question of recovering times, linked to production efforts. In a sustained war, that's all that counts: how many attack or def power can you produce over time. For cavalry prod for exemple, you cannot sustain a lot of sovs for unit production, since your weapons prod has to follow. For elven ranged and orcs spears, what was true before and even more true now that T1 is as/more beneficial than T2, is that due to cheaper weapon demands, you can afford more sovs for respectively your ranged/spears unit, and if you make some calculations (which i did some times ago) you can see that in terms of power/time, ranged/spears recovered faster than cavalry if the battle took place on a mountain/forest... and now this is more true than ever: you can put 180% sov bonus to your elven/orc T1 ranged/spear, and you dont have to put any sov for your weapon prod. If you ever lack of of spears/bows, you can buy them on the market they are cheap (it's less costy to have more taxe and buy those with your excedent gold, than having smaller taxes and put 90% sov for spears/bows and 90% for the units... which is still extremely interesting production time, and self sufficient method, though, compared to cavalry recovery). 

From what i calculated quickly, i would have an orc or an elf with 10 cities (7 food), i would produce 390k T1 orc spears a month or 200k T1 elven ranged a month, whitout much annoyment, while i would produce around 40k human T2 Cav a month, with a good deal of annoyment. 

If you compare these numbers in the case of systematic Cav attack on Mountains/forest against racial spears/ranged (which is often the case during a war), you would see that in terms of power/time on those terrains, racial Cav recovers more slowly than racial T1 spears/ranged. 

I didnt verify on Innoble's calculator, but as it was already the case before, now this observation is more stressed out due to diminishing of trainning times. 

Warmasters know that even if your starting unit pool size is very important, your recovering time is what makes the difference between 2 opposants of the initial same size. And it's very true in Illy, where wars last for months as we saw. 

Taking this in account and what i said above, i confirm that it's more prohibitive now to use Cav to break sieges. And then goes what we evoked about travel times, infantry, alliances territorilism, cavalry usefulness problematics.

Indeed, to re-organisate a whole alliance, that's quite a story and a challenge. 

But when you will be a regional alliance (well H? is already half regional), you will see you will not know what to do with your cavalry, other than threatening inexistant sailly forths or suiciding them with bad killing ratios and recovery times on mountains/forests. Cavalry should get useful for something else.

Yes, that's my main point, sorry ^^'.

You may use infantry to break sieges, but with new times the problem is the same than for cavalry: due to weapon furnitures difficulties (2 swords + 1 chain while they are produced by the same building), you wont be able to put as many sov for racial Inf units than for racial spears/ranged units. So in terms of recovery, Inf is also disavantaged compared to spears/ranged on mountains/forests.

And as attack power means defense ability, and defense power means offense ability, offensive gameplay is favored further and it's hard to defend against a siege, even if you are a territorial alliance, and i can't imagine for a non-territorial alliance. 

Well i think i detailled the current problematics enough now. 

 

It's a bit hidden in the first post, but the dev blog about the update goes into a lot of detail behind the thought process of the change.

GM Luna

Agree, but remember, cav is for defense, spears (and bows) are for offence. You use defensive units to siege and offensive to defend against siege. So this change in a way make long war like we just had, better for the offensive side of the game...