A note about the future

[SnRolls]

Im waiting for the crossbowman

[Corhax]

Cool guys! Good work.

[Makagulfazel]

I can understand the cavalry players becoming upset, but I think this change will be for the good of the mod. The bot cavalry are exploitable, making them unintentionally easier than units below them. Great foresight on allowing discussion before rolling out this massive change.

<3

[Ryu]

Great news guys . I'm dieing to play as a Skirmisher since i was waiting for a fast runner class hehehe. Now we only need OneEye's evil cloning ability for Skirmishers to be complete ninjas lol. Also some secret stuff you say, now what they can be hmm... Anways, i can't wait for the new patch .

[Fingus]

I am angry.

[Huscarlton Banks]

And thus, nobody ever saw the magnificent donator pony in its natural habitat ever again.  :'(

Oh well, at least we get new classes which sound interesting, and we won't get swarmed by knights or mounted warriors anymore.

[Kong Ming]

Thanks for all your hard work on this mod.  I'm always curious to see what the next patch holds.  As a devoted archer, I'd like to make one observation.  I love that crossbowman will be a legitimate class, and I can't wait to see how they fit in.  I caution slightly, however, the desire to separate the two classes by creating a disparity in accuracy.  "Accuracy" is a troublesome concept in video games.  In theory, accuracy should be almost entirely dependent on the skill of the shooter.  In real life, expert archers, snipers, riflemen, etc. are more accurate because of their skill with the weapon, with minor uncontrollable elements (wind for example) being minimized at the top levels of ability.  In most video games however (including M&B), it ends up being an abstract concept, introducing a total randomness to a player's shot, regardless of the skill of the player.  I find this idea frustrating in general.  It's not dissimilar to glancing blows for melee players.  Instances in the game where the player did what was correct, but a random factor intervened and they failed anyway.  Some games address this by adding "gun wobble" and recoil.  Obviously there is nothing like this in M&B, and instead we have the somewhat over-simplified "accuracy".

I played a great deal of cRPG in the early days, and they also tried a similar idea between archers and crossbowmen.  In my personal opinion, it made archery a lot less fun.  For this reason, I would just like to mention that flight speed is another stat that is often over-looked as a balancing element, but one that I feel is much better for the task.  Slower flight speed has no effect on accuracy per se, but it can make landing a shot accurately much more difficult.  It is a way of making the task harder for the shooter without randomly punishing them for no reason with "inaccuracy".  Making crossbows a slower but more powerful weapon, with a significantly faster flight speed, and allowing bows to be less damaging and higher rate of fire, but slower flight speed, would still create the effect of making the crossbow easier to snipe with, without making the bow a frustratingly random weapon (sorry that was a LOT of commas).  Just food for thought. I'm sure I'll be excited to see your work, whatever your decision on this issue.  Thanks again!

[OneEyE]

Well i saw it coming. But what will happen with the swadian lance, thunder lance, the donator pony, the ugly foreign beast, the fearsome knight helm? You will rename mounted warriors to unmounted warriors?  ;D

[Diablo]

Sorry if this was missed before, but I'm just wondering.

I'd like to assume skirmisher will be getting the foot knight's polearms such as halberd/poleaxe, as it was mentioned they were the 'new' polearm class, but how will this balance with commando? Skirmishers are generally light troops, so will this be made up in weapon proficiencies/powerstrike? Will infantry get nerfed slightly in powerstrike and such to balance out the point of skirmisher? As it seems kindof pointless to go pure skirmisher if commando is just going to be flat out better in all regards.

I'm also curious as to what happens to cavalry xp, will it be transferred to another class's xp or will it go into assist xp? I'd like to think converting all cavalry xp for players into assist might be a better way of handling it.

[HOS_Rai_Rai]

Sad to hear about cav goinh :S Sad panda....

Seeing they are the elite of Swadian army, the most fear'd

But yes., overpowerd or useless is not funny either., but couldnt u just remove lances ? Swords and sheilds., a 2 handed on foot ? Something like that ?