Greetings, Warlords

Darklords Rising turns 25 this year. At the height of its popularity, the Warlords series has been considered a peer of Heroes of Might and Magic. Sadly, while the latter has an enduring fan community even for the older games, Warlords 3 has mostly sunk into obscurity.

I've been tinkering with the available modding tools for a while, and I've decided that for its 25th anniversary in August, I'm going to release an overhaul mod, to maybe give the old game a little shot in the arm, and give long-time fans an excuse to delve into it again.

My goals:

-Rebalance all the units in the game. For many, that means only recalibrating their gold cost and some light touches, others will be changed significantly. Outliers that used to dominate competitive multiplayer will be nerfed, many more which were unplayed will be buffed. Abilities that were only introduced in DLR or its 1.01 patch will be a bit more widespread. The intent here isn't to make every unit competitive, but to make all at least playable and not be made obsolete by another, cheaper unit.

- Rework the heroes from the ground up, drawing on lessons from the K4 and X multiplayer mods. This will be major work, and balancing them will be tricky and probably dependent on how much feedback I get. My starting point is to have a common xp chart and AP progression for all heroes, that may get tweaked later on.

- Some light tweaks to the default.rul ruleset. Greater XP rewards for hard quests, and fixed mana crystal rewards from ruins to eliminate the feast-or-famine randomness.

-Comprehensive gold cost standardization across all items, without changing any of their effects. Among other things, the gold cost determines which items are affected by the Shatter and Create Item spells, so this is a necessary step.

-Lastly, it seems possible to modify the 8x8 different default army sets for playing random maps. Once I'm happy with the unit and hero changes, I aim to recreate those 64 army sets to provide for default sides that are both thematic and balanced, with every unit and hero class being well-represented across the board.

I won't be modifying the existing campaigns and scenarios directly, but the goal is that replaying them with the new units and heroes will give you more interesting options for stack building and hero selection. There's no intention to include new art or create new units outright, and the end result will probably not be very compatible with the Stormheim mod, as far as balance and unit costs are concerned.

I will be posting updates and my thoughts on game balance as I go along, both here and at a few other places, to hopefully get some feedback. I've never been a part of the multiplayer community back in the day, but I'd be especially interested to hear from those who were. I don't expect anyone is still playing Warlords 3 multiplayer competitively these days, but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong. Multiplayer isn't the main concern of my mod, but I want it to be a better experience than vanilla DLR for anyone who wants to try it.

Farewell, Warlords. Until we meet again.

Let's talk about basic human infantry; Light Infantry, Heavy Infantry, Pikemen, Peasants and Barbarians.

Light Infantry and Heavy Infantry have been staples since Warlords 1. Originally, they have a significant difference in strength, 3 and 5, and heavy infantry took 2 turns to build. In Warlords 2, the strength difference shrunk to 2 and 3, and in Warlords 2 Deluxe both now only cost 1 turn to build, leaving the gold cost as the the main difference.

The Light Infantry statline is mostly fine. A 2/2 unit with 18 movement. (18 movement is also the default for all heroes in my current plan). To give them a bit of distinction, I'm increasing View to 3 and buffing their medals chance. Both to represent a unit with good discipline, mobility and situational awareness. (Medals chance will be its own subject at some point.) I've decided to take 25 gold/turn as my ballpark figure for city income (including sites), and as my baseline cheap combat unit, I'm taking a single city's gold income as the cost to set up production for them. If I kept 50 gold, all other units with similar stats would need to have their cost raised to similar levels.

Now compare Peasants. In vanilla, they have an absurdly low gold cost of 1, while their statline becomes 4/2 once they have their full banding bonus. They completely outclass light infantry and even vanilla heavy infantry on all fronts. Thematically, Peasants represent an even cheaper combat unit than Light Infantry, practically untrained and unequipped, so they need to have worse stats. I'm keeping the 2 hp, but 1 strength is too low to be justified. My solution is 1 strength with banding reduced to +1. A single peasant is weaker than light infantry, two or more match it but will never outclass it. Movement gets reduced to 16. They can no longer keep up with starting heroes, but are still practically equal to light infantry as cheap garrison troops. View and medal chance is worse, and my price tag for them is 15 gold.

That's my basic approach. Arguably, with those changes, neither might be worth a unit slot in a competitive army list, but as I said, that's not the primary concern, at least for now.

I like Pikemen as designed. With 3 hp, they have half again the staying power of light infantry, and can absorb a trample attack. Field +1 makes them cost effective on the move, but gives no advantage in attacking or defending cities. 16 movent is a fair downgrade from light infantry in turn. Here, I only want to adjust the gold cost.

The problem comes when comparing them to Heavy Infantry. They have the same movement, and 3/2 vs 2/3 is not really a significant difference. In Warlords 1, Heavy Infantry was comparable t o Dwarf Infantry, which sits at the top of 1 turn combat units in DLR. A 4/2 statline would be comparable to the Dwarfs' 3/3, but is already in the 2 turn range in DLR (Orogs). So my approach is to give heavy infantry a city +1 combat bonus, while reducing movement to 15. Now they and pikemen have clearly different niches, and they justify a price tag similar to dwarfs. In theory, they become the staple expensive 1 turn garrison unit.

Barbarians are fast, hardy, brave but undisciplined outdoorsmen that justify their movement 20, hills move bonus, view 3 and banding +2. However, I don't want them to outclass heavy infantry with a similar 4/2 statline but faster movement, so I'm reducing their starting strength to 1. Lone barbarians can be outfought by light infantry, but they're better in numbers, with 3/2 stats at a fairly low gold cost. I'm thinking ~50 for now.

While i'm at it, I'll also include a write up of Skeletons. In vanilla, the have an absurdly high cost for their statline at 75, which is a remnant of having once had Fear +1 instead of Warding +2. but even then, it arguably wasn't justified. Skeletons also make up the lowest tier Necromancy unit. I like Necromancy as an ability, even though it's not very practical to use. It deserves a buff compared to Renown and summoning spells, and the only way to do that is to buff the units it creates. So for Skeletons, I'm changing them to 3/1 from 2/1. That's still weaker than the 2/2 of light infantry and peasants, which justifies them being the cheapest unit in my mod, at a cost of 10 gold.

Sounds like a very interesting project! I like your proposed rebalances to the standard infantry units - I had noticed and been bothered by the odd discrepancies in their costs/abilities.

Thanks! I haven't gotten much feedback here, but I'm also posting on the Warlords reddit and warlorders.com, if you want to follow the discussions. KGB over at warlorders is one of the OG Warlords 3 competitive ladder players, so his views have been especially helpful.

I'm still on track to have a first playtesting release out by August. It probably won't include rebalanced heroes yet, but it should have a first pass on all regular units in the game.

Some news! I've done my first draft of going over all the units in the game. If you want to have a look and comment, here's a link to the spreadsheet.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT1TCyGUks5UEIKySY2zXPN-eBmqntg7w_rPe5_NhU7cEPeUJaEhka1-WAWjEnx8ozw6C-z0jE5XKgJ/pubhtml

WOW, this is fantastic news. Thanks so much for the hard work.
You're right about everything in regards to all infantry from what I've seen so far, the changes are justified. You can win/lose based merely on whether or not you have any of the OP infantry, when I played with my friends in school, either pikemen or H/infantry were essential and without them it was 1 sided.

Sorry for the lack of news over more than a year. A few weeks ago, I started working on it again, and well...

https://www.moddb.com/mods/25th-anniversary-project

It's now in a shape where I've been happy to publish it, and wait for some feedback to roll in.

You can play all campaigns and scenarios with rebalanced units and heroes and new spells. I also plan to changed the army sets for random maps significantly, but that's a while away.

For now, enjoy!