What if footman made those AROUND them Faster? that way they would be more useful in like 10 different ways! Firstly having a footman is pointless once you can make them archers/Knights because they run way head of the group take a ton of damage other die or healers have to waste time healing them and not the tank.
If they made others faster you could have them all partoling the town making all units faster WHILE patroling! that way they dont have to be in a huddled group and would actually be better for them to just walk around or defend certain areas so that villagers can escape to safety!
Also having Herbalists Auto using potions would be awesome instead of having to click on them every 5 mins.
What if the footman speed bonus was applied to all nearby militia? That may even things out and even promote people keeping a few footman around even late game!
frankly speaking, I don’t quite like the direct “magical aura” way of applying bonus.
e.g. apply a +speed aura to unit or nearby or whatever.
But if it can be simulated one level below, I would bite.
e.g. Footman don’t have magic aura that increases speed directly.
But footman (esp experience ones), gives a boost to morale and dedication.
Morale and dedication then produces a bonus to speed (and will do so even if the morale and dedication is influenced by other things than footman). Perhaps we can even have a hording factor, where influences from footmen in a group will overlap and create a stronger emergent bonus, all “automatically” simulated.
End result? still the same.
But we don’t have a footman specific magic aura.
What we have instead is a simple system that gives a bonus based on morale/etc, which can be interacted with by other factors.
I somehow never noticed that it was a magic aura giving the buffs to footmen! If that’s the case a small change to the writing of the buff would be most welcome. I know it’s a game and it’s a game with magic but I personally would like melee units to remain mostly un-magic based for now unless lore changes dictacte other wise
The way I see it, the boosts are less a “magical aura” and more of a “proximity effect”. Basically, if you had to go sword-to-sword with an ugly beast of an ogre, and you had a big burly dude in heavy plate armor carrying a decent shield and longsword charging into battle alongside you, you’d feel a lot more confident than if you simply had another scrawny dude with simple armor and a spear instead.
In this way, I think it’d make more sense to either give knights another “aura” that keeps all other units fairly close (“Let’s stick with this guy, he looks like a much bigger threat. Maybe they won’t notice us.”) or give footmen a (toggle-able) skill that allows them to stay close to other units in the same group as them (“They can’t possibly kill us all right?”).
Maybe that’s just my own interpretation of things. After all, I am the kind of guy that if given the choice between throwing fire, shooting arrows, and weilding a sword and shield, I’m going to carefully weigh my options between sword and bow while ignoring the magic entirely.
actually, when I mention “magical” in post above, I don’t mean the magic as in settings/background. I meant the effect being explicitly coded for the case (and just for the case).
instead, I was hoping that there will be a more general system of food consumption/digestion whatever, that will result in similar effect as a consequence which is decoupled from the act of eating itself. This allows cases like new food types (even those added by mods) which define their constituents (e.g. animal/plant proteins/starch, vitamins/fiber) to be processed by the system above, possibly adjusted by hearthling specific characteristics (e.g. some hearthlings have faster metabolism, but use up stored food faster, others are not so efficient, but have a larger “food capacity” etc).
regarding food achievement, I don’t mind it being a pure achievement (with no in-game effects), but I’ll drop the bonuses, which is immersion breaking. If there are to be bonuses, such as balanced diet, or penalty, say for mal-nutritient, it should be a proper effects from a simulation/system, not an achievement.
Maybe when a footman maxes out on their advancement, and has killed a large number of enemies they could become a “hero”, and then they give a proximity boost to those around them?