So I was thinking about how AoW1 PBEMs have some balance issues, for example Elephants and Air Galleys, Archers being vastly better than Swordsmen, Dragon Ships being completely superior to the other two warships, and probably about a dozen t3s/t1 specials being egregiously weak. Many spells are too overpriced to ever see much use, and magic is further undermined by one level of Spellcasting having the same levelup point cost as 4 DEF. (sadly that last one cannot be addressed directly)

While I do think I've addressed these issues reasonably well in my Sword and Sorcery mod, that mod also has a fair few changes which are a bit wacky - for example, I'm planning to change the Galley into the Salamander Galley, which will have fire immunity instead of Sailing, so that it can be used to travel lava rivers of the underground, instead of water. So it's not just a balance mod, but something else, that people don't necessarily want - something that changes the experience, and has many thematic changes that aren't necessary at all.

So what if we come together to make a mod that only makes a small number of simple changes, to make more units and spells viable in the average PBEM? Something that won't have any wacky or biased changes that some people disagree with?

The way we could do it is basically that people post in this thread what the most stupidly overpowered units are and how they can be weakened a bit, and what the most pathetic, unusable units are, and how they could be salvaged a bit. In contrast to less conservative mods which throw around ability changes and stat changes everywhere, we could mostly use gold cost changes, with a smaller number of stat changes. People could propose changes, and only the ones which are unanimously approved could be implemented, leading to a mod that's slightly better than the TS136 ruleset, without being very different - without any downsides.

Or alternatively, would people be happy to play in the more wacky and wide-ranging mod that I've made, or perhaps the older ones like Warlock's?

Games and skill level:

Pure chance: rolling dice (good for a ten minute laugh)

Games of attrition: Risk (long drawn out and you know who wins and loses 3 hours before its over)

Games of attrition with unit choice: Axis and Allies (long drawn out but you know the outcome 1 hour before its over)

Games with several ways to win: Settlers of Catan (variability and snowballing)

Snowballing is a good feature in games, and AoW1-TS136 has a good rhythm of exploration-expansion-building conflict- and then snowballing elements that allow weaknesses to be exploited. The fact that heroes become super-weapons is a good thing and allows for faster wrap-up and pay-off for early game investments. Warlock has great additions with items and heroes, but gimping the unique asymmetries just feels like you're taking a Settlers of Catan level game and bringing it back down to Axis and Allies.

If you want to make AoW1 more interesting, you need to figure out a way to make the AI compute all automatic combat as though it were tactical. In tactical, we flank packs of 8 archers and reposition to force them either to change position or potentially hit allies in the crossfire. In automatic, it acts as though there are no terrain elements and no poor positioning of units. The archers get their strange advantage by virtue of the oddities in auto-combat. If you want to properly fix the weak swordsman problem, the solution is correcting auto-combat.

I agree that I actually prefer TS136 heroes to Warlock's - though I'd certainly like to alter the levelup costs.

It might be practical to figure out how to edit ability values and hero levelup, by comparing the differences between basegame and Warlock's versions of AoWEPACK.dpl in a hex editor

However, editing how autocombat works is very unlikely to happen, for that to happen we probably need a programmer somewhere in the world to become an AoW1 fan and for Triumph to release the source code - so I'll stick to stat changes. And in any case, I don't think making auto-combat emulate tactical combat would necessarily be a good thing, if the tactical combat is only run by AI anyway. The more I think on it, the more I actually like the extra 1-2 shots archers get at the start of a battle, because that's a very logical advantage for them to have - it's a radical asymmetry, which I like in games. THe problem is that swordsmen have no asymmetric advantage to oppose it. Even in tactical combat, archers are still a bit overpowered compared to swordsmen, because Archery 4/2 is slightly better than Strike 4/3, and because all their other stats are just as good. I really don't think archers should have the same HP and DEF as swordsmen. Elephants have the best combat stats of any t1 unit, maybe drawn with the Pony Rider. They have arguably the best map mobility of any t1 - some others can swim, or walk on mountains, or have forestry, but 30 MV with Wall Crushing is strong. They even compare well to t2 cavalry - they have 2 less ATK, 2 less MV, but they cost less maintenance, train faster, don't need a 2hex+ upgraded city, and need less xp to level while conceding less xp on death.

Having wallcrushing, especially on a fairly fast-moving unit, is one of the strongest abilities in the game, and Elephants would still be an ok unit without it. They'd be weaker than Pony Riders, which are one of the best t1s. I don't want to make them weaker in terms of their stats or abilities, because being so beefy and crushing walls is obviously thematic - but they should at the very least be the special, installable t1 unit, instead of the Scorpion.

Hey! I have a question for you guys. Do any of you know how to run the game (AOW1)? I have been trying to run it for 5 or 6 years, but every time the game simply crashes or the mapviewer is crashing the game. What can I do to solve this?

This is the patch for the Showscene crash fix. First link is where you can read about it, second link is the download itself.

https://github.com/int19h/aow-patch/blob/master/README.md
https://github.com/int19h/aow-patch/files/999989/AoW_MapViewer.ShowScene_patch.zip

Just to be on the safe side, I would also advise setting aow.exe, AoWEd.exe (if you plan on using it) and AoWSetup.exe to 'run as administrator' and to compatibility mode for Windows 7, and to reduced colour mode 16-bit, though I'm not sure which of these are actually necessary.

I play the game on windows 10 now but I think it worked for me on previous windows too. Let me know if this works, though if it doesn't I can't think of anything else.

Ah wonderful! I got it to work, you were a great help! Though now I only need to fix the Cheat codes part, which I still cannot get to work

I think you just need to put "beatrice" in quotes. maybe with a hyphen? before aow.exe in this box https://i.imgur.com/wmflIyQ.png
But that's just off the top of my head, I've never bothered myself.

I have tried that since the 90's, but I still don't know how to do it. I have tried and put beatrice and beatrix in the command line, but it has never worked once for me. There are no video tutorials, so I cannot see how it is done either. I have completed the game many times, but I have never gotten the cheats to work, which is kinda annoying.

I just whipped up a quick video showing how to do it - easier than typing out a comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OULSWX6secY

I totally agree that having so much movement speed + wallcrushing is very powerful, but 3/3/3/3 stats is really not that great compared to higher level units (It's also worth mentioning that T1 Azrac swordsmen only have 1 DEF). I seriously think the only reason the elephant SEEMS so strong with having 3/3/3/3 is because of it's 30 movement speed. Lower that to the same speed as an infantry unit (because realistically Elephants are not faster than humans) and you have a regular unit that isn't overpowered compared to other T1 units and isn't in line with T2 cavalry.

No need to make them special (crippling the Azrac ability to break down walls without wasting an extra turn of production first), just need to reduce the elephant movement speed.

That's an interesting point about Elephants being realistically more like a 24-28 movespeed unit. From what I've just looked up online, they seem to be able to charge at the same speed as a human infantryman. However, they've been observed travelling 50 miles in a day in Africa, between water sources. But I think they do that a lot more easily and regularly than a human can do 50 miles in a day - that's a double marathon, and the human world record for distance covered on foot in a day is 122.7 miles. I just found claims on the internet that they can walk 195 km in a day, which is just short of the human world record - and of course that's just an observation in the wild, not someone obsessively attempting a record like the human. So I suspect the Elephant's 30 movespeed might actually be very sensible on the strategic map. I'm not expert but I wouldn't be surprised if their walking pattern is relatively similar to ours - both animals are much better long-distance walkers than most species.

Movespeed reduction strikes me as a bit of a homogenising change to make - likely rather more damaging to Azrac uniqueness than moving the Elephant to Special; and I also feel that the Elephant is definitely the Azrac special unit with a small s, so their not having the big S is weird. But I will also admit I'm biased, since I've been thinking of 30 movespeed as the specific elephant movespeed for a long time, since almost nothing else has that value - so changing it would irritate me. Thanks for your thoughts though, I will mull on it.

Holy moly! I did it! It took me more than 10 years to do that. Thank you so much! :DD

If only it were possible to have a different movement speed on the strategic map than in combat...

This might be possible with the "slowed" effect from that ooze / mud spell. Combat-only states can be added to units and will only take effect in combat (with some weird exceptions that apply the effects only when the status is started in combat such as Decay).

In my mod, I had gimped the air-galley by 4 movement points. I find it actually causes a negative player experience. One of the reasons that Masters of Magic would never work as a good PBEM multiplayer is because you can only move a hex or two a turn (and games easily take 200+ turns). Keeping that in mind, in AoW we should be increasing movement, not decreasing. Especially in consideration for larger maps that take more time to explore (especially in maps with inverted terrain where underground slows units). Imagine if all units had a +4 move boost. Would the game be better or worse? My hunch is better. I wouldn't gimp elephant movespeed.

Edit: I get an error when trying to add slow to items or units using DevEd. Does anyone have a work around?