So I've been thinking awhile, reading a bunch of forum posts and what not, and basically there are alot of problems with alot of things. Now I could write essays on each of the various issues I've found but for now I am just going to focus on the one that I find rather irritating is how units/heros/monsters/whatever work. So focusing on that I asked myself why are these things such a mess? The answer I came up with is their stats: how they interact and how (much) they change through leveling. Once I narrowed it down to this everything suddenly made sense. Units are a mess because their stats are a mess, and good god are their stats a mess... It's like someone decided to throw together D&D and disgaea stats and hoped it would all sort of stick togther somehow. In short, to whoever designed the stats if you were on drugs when you thought them up, where can I get some cause that shit must be awesome (this was fully intended to be silly/humorous and hopefully not too insulting).

Anyway, people are probably saying some version of "If you are such a smartass why don't you come up with something better". In which I will respond with "thats what I'm about to do". This is probably going to be long so bear with me...

3 main ideas for change:

First off what should happen is most of the more abstract stats like attack and defense should be tied directly to a base stat like strength and while I realize this is basically already in place I will clarify what I mean shortly.

Second there needs to be a seperate stat for damage. Including it as part of the attack rating was rather silly...

Third minimize the bonuses from everything. Basically for things like items reduce the increases they give to as low as you can while still making it obvious that a sword is an improvement over a club. As it is now there are huge differences between weapons/armor when there really isn't that much of a need for it.

Stats:

Now with those 3 ideas in mind comes the fun part. How the hell is this going to work/fix anything? Alright so let me first explain how I think stats should be tied together.

Strength should be tied to attack and damage obviously but how it should work is every 2 points of strength increases attack by 1 and every 5 points increases damage by 1. I'll explain a bit later how damage is the more valuable stat here and why it should be slower to increase.

Dexterity should be tied to dodge and initiative. For every 2 points of dexterity dodge increases by 1 and every 5 points initiative increases by 1.

Intelligence should be tied to accuracy and spell mastery. Basically same again 2 points of intelligence increases accuracy and spell mastery by 1. At this point people are probably asking why intelligence and accuracy when logically (haha logic in games...) it should be tied to dexterity? The reason is because if both accuracy and dodge are tied to the same stat that would putting too much power in one stat as if you somehow get really crazy dex you would be able to hit anyone while at the same time being difficult to hit.

That leaves Constitution to be tied to defense and hit points. Every point of constitution means the creature gets 1 hit point, every 2 points increases defense by 1. How this will work for multiple unit armies is to multiply the number of people in the army by its constitution so a 4 person army with 5 con will have 20 hp.

ok, so what about crit chance and spell resistance, why are they the bastard children here? Simply put the reason I would like them to be seperate from the rest is because other than maybe them increasing from levels I would rather leave them up to being affected purely by traits/items so that as such by taking a trait that increases them you can turn into something more useful than they are currently. Otherwise units have little access to it so this way those that do take a trait can have a unique if situational advantage over those that don't.

Items:

Items... possibly one of the biggest offenders in game balance currently. How do you bring them more in line with everything else? Simple really, minimize their bonus stats to bring them more in line with natural stat growth. As it is currently, items essentially define how powerful most heroes are and as it can be easy to acquire powerful items early on, heroes (especially melee focused ones) thus become more powerful and everything sort of snowballs from there. Now what do I mean by minimize their bonus? Basically a club gives +1 attack the next step up on the warfare tree might give +2-3 attack, the next step might give 3-4 attack with +1 damage and so on. Now with a damage stat you can have a little more variety in how weapons work so for example you can make hammers have moderate attack low accuracy but high damage and so on. Works similarly with armor.

What this all turns into:

Attack vs Defense and why there should be a Damage stat:
As you can likely guess attack and defense counter each other but where does damage come in? How I see it is if a creatures attack is equal to its opponents defense there should be a set number to base damage off of as right now if a 100 attack hits a 100 defense it still will do about 40-60(exaggeratted for effect) or something damage which pretty much makes defense close to meaningless the higher the two stats get. This leads to another problem which is with crazy damage units need even more ridiculous hp to survive it which is the cause of the insane hp growth units get. With a set damage stat it will be easier to balance damage to hp and will hopefully have less crazy and pointlessly large numbers flying around. So if attack and defence just cancel each other out whats the point of getting excessive attack or defense? Well to give them a little more meaning should one exceed the other lets say for example every 3 points of attack or defense in excess a unit has over its opponents it increases or decreases its damage range by 1. So if a unit with 25 attack and 5 damage hits a unit with 10 defense it will deal 5-10 damage. Or if it was 10 attack vs 25 defense it would deal 0-5 damage. As you can probably tell it is still similar to what is in place already but the main point is that with damage as a seperate stat you can compare hp to it directly instead of throwing around wild guesses about what would be a good number when dealing with attack ratings.

Dodge vs Accuracy:
Not much to change here really. How I would like it to be is that there is a base 60-70% chance to hit the opponent + or - 3% for each point of difference between the two stats. Thats pretty much it, move along.

Levels vs Everything:
Levels should no longer directly affect hp gain as hp now has a stat to directly oppose it. Instead for army units it should just increase each base stat(strength etc.) by one and for heroes it will have no other effect than giving them their next ability pick unless of course they have a +1/level ability which will proceed as normal. This sounds pretty simple but with how everything else is set up this is actually a major change. The main thing here is that army units will have their base stats increase slightly as the lvl up meaning that more experienced armies will have an actual if somewhat slight edge over new recruits other than massive hp differences.

Armies vs Heroes:
While biggest change to these two will be that level doesnt directly affect their hp this really does make a big difference in how they will work.
The advantage to using heroes will be potentially high stat growth as well as magic/abilities and items however those not focused on melee will likely turn out to be rather squishy.
The advantage to armies will be lots of hp and potentially high damage but very slow stat growth meaning they won't change too much which isn't much of a change really...
How does this change anything really? I'd like to think that this will make armies necessary in the mid to late game especially for clearing wildlands and such.

Wrap Up:

I'm getting tired of typing so lets summarize this shit. Basically the idea is to reduce everything to smaller numbers then match them to a direct opposite so they interact better thus making them easier to understand and balance against each other.

I realize while these ideas are likely not perfect and seem minor I'd like to think they can make a big difference. Also as I made no mention of a cap of any sort hopefully I can get better feedback to improve it than "caps suck because fuck you thats why".