How is the unit balance?

[Arkanin]

Hi everyone,

Right now, I'm downloading SS for the first time. I wanted to ask all of you some questions about how the mod was designed / balanced. If any of you have time to answer these, it is greatly appreciated.

1.) This is very important to me. Have the deadliness settings been changed? I do not want a mod that slows down combat a great deal. I had this problem with Darthmod, where a single soldier would die every 10 seconds or so in a normal infantry battle. Realistic or not, this is the big question for me & I find greatly reducing combat speed to detract a lot from my enjoyment of the gameplay.
2.) Has SS changed unit costs / upkeep costs a great deal?
3.) Have cavalry / archers / infantry in particular been nerfed or improved on the whole? Has game balance shifted in a certain direction?
4.) How hard is this mod? I enjoy my mods to be a struggle for survival, for reference I do not find Europa Barbarorum RTW VH/VH campaigns to be satisfactorily hard.
5.) If it's not hard enough, is there a simple way for me to scale the difficulty up, say, by editing a script? I really want to make my game HARD!
6.) Has the combat system in general been changed a great deal?

Thanks in advance!

[Shabby_Ronin]

umm if you dont find eb a challenge on vh/vh you should be...well, i dont even know what to say actually

[Arkanin]

umm if you dont find eb a challenge on vh/vh you should be...well, i dont even know what to say actually

It definitely takes effort, I'm not sure if that makes it a challenge, but most of the EB campaigns described as very hard / "impossible" on VH/VH just take a little ingenuity to get out of the early game alive, good micromanagement and strategy, a LOT of changes on the first turn often , and the rest is not too bad. There are some that are very hard though it would be awesome to experience that level of difficulty after the early turns, as it stands, I tend to use house rules. I play a lot of RTS / strategy games, though, I have played vanilla RTW multiplayer competitively and can consistently beat Civ4 on about Emperor (which really isn't that great) and play it on Immortal now, which is actually a long way from deity which the good players play.

What would be nice is a way to make the world "go berserk" after about 30 turns, as that would sort of counteract the critical mass and thereby loss of difficulty that is so easy to build up in RTW games. Maybe even dynamically scale AI aggressiveness and to a small extent AI power as a function of how big, powerful, and wealthy your empire has become. Anyway... I really like this mod. Any suggestions about where to edit 1.) files, 2.) scripts to raise difficulty on this topic would be appreciated.

Maybe I will make something sinister and realease it. By the way, I really like Stainless Steel's balance right now, it seems excellent.

[Quark]

Arkanin
1. Combat slower - Yes
2. Yes - see RC thread http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=149832
3. :hmmm: some might say yes, but really they have been 'historically balanced'
4. Play Templars. My opinion is that it can be made harder, but thats why myself and others have done some mods for SS, as not everyone likes this. Have a look for Unit Limits BYG III, garrioson scripts, Field Costs. Or just ask for what you want to add.
6. :hmmm: Yes, I think, not really sure what you mean.