Insane Difficulty: New Movement Speeds - Insane Difficulty

Here are the tables for movement speeds in the developing version:

Looks great, I am glad to see some changes made to the different movements.

High Sky always had such an advantage over everything, it was hard not to want to abuse it, similar to low sky. I am glad to see it a bit toned down, only other suggestion I could seeing it toned down more would be movement on snow mountains too. (The Large ones? Maybe both) Since it appears that the lowered movement over volcano stems from the fact that flying around an active volcano isn't wise. Maybe it could be applied to the Snow mountains too? Since flying in a snow storm in the mountains could cause for trouble.

I didn't know only Zombie Dragon's used Marsh! Still I am glad to see more over all variety in the movement types. I will be honest, in vanilla I hardly cared about movement speeds, as long as I had a couple of hard hitting High Sky units to keep enemies at bay.

I'm all for the nerf to Sky units, but I don't think I like having Hawkmen as fast as Griffons and Wyrms, or having Griffons and Wyrms as slow as Hawkmen, more like. I hated using Griffons and Wyrms, and without any speed boost at all, I really can't see using them for long. I'll have to see once I can try their new setup.

[EDIT] But since there are now at least a couple of old movement spaces free, how about tweaking Plains into separate specialties, like one version of Plains movement having a slight bonus to Mountains / Volcanoes (Perhaps for Evil Ones) and another version having a bonus to Snow (Paladins). It makes sense that Evil Ones and Paladins would fight a little better or worse over those terrains.

I was thinking about changing small unit fliers to only be able to carry 2 non-fliers on their back. Hence, you would need 2 of them in a unit to get Sky movement (otherwise, you get whatever movement had the next highest priority) and if one of them died, the unit would be grounded (unless one of the non-fliers died, too). How's that sound?

Sounds good, sir. Sounds good.

One of my goals is to make a player unit really feel the drop in combat performance that comes as a tradeoff for taking even the new, nerfed Sky movement, and that's pretty impossible to do if all it takes is one small flier to carry the whole group. I'm also going to nerf some of the Sky units a bit.

So how does it work as far as the bonus or penalty goes for fighting on each terrain. Is 4 neutral with anything lower being a penalty and anything higher being a bonus? Or is it not that direct of a correlation with movement speed?

It's all bonus. Damage dealt is muliplied by (20+move)/20 and damage received is multiplied by 20/(20+move). The Sky movement was outdated at this point, though, so I just updated it.

Just want to reaffirm that the hype train for this is real, Zombrero.

Keep up the good work, brother.

Does the defending team get a bonus when fighting on towns or do both teams just use their Caste/HQ movement and that's it?

Both teams always use the same terrain.

I've updated the move speeds to what they are currently, and include both in and out of battle move data. As you can see, fliers are significantly slower/weaker than the original (especially slower, they still fight decently well on any terrain) and water units move much faster. Forest, snow, and mountain move types have also gotten a bit of a boost. These will be continually tweaked to ensure there is reason to use all move types.

I'm taking a new pass at this to adjust some imbalances. The short version of what I'm doing is basically improving every movement type other than Plains, Slow, and Water/Ocean.

I'm 90% done with the adjustments, I'm just trying to decide how I want to handle the battle modifier on roads and cities. For each, I am looking at two options: (1) they could be advantageous to Plains movement type compared to other ground movement types by 1 point, or (2) they could be could be equal across all ground movement types.

I vote for a small increase in battle damage over others, but I'm fine with equal for all. I wouldn't mind a tiny decrease for large units in towns, either.

I'm pretty sold on giving Plains units an advantage over other land types on the road. Trying to thread the needle to fight in actual grass instead of on the road to get the Plains advantage feels pretty silly, and I don't think treating roads as a significantly distinct terrain from plains really adds anything substantive.

Towns are a tougher call, though, and I'm much more inclined to think all ground terrain types should fight equally well in them. I'm just going to roll with that, for now. I could always change it later if it doesn't feel right.

Alright, map and battle movement factors have been updated! The charts on this page now reflect those changes, and the next release of this hack will have them, as well. Some things to mention with this update:

-You may notice Water units have 4 less map movement than before nearly across the board. This is not actually a change, a bug was causing water units to have lower than expected movement, but the movement speeds that I gave them were based on this performance. So, I fixed the bug and reduced the speeds. They shouldn't feel much different.
-Flying units have 2 more speed across the board and got some better in-battle movement factors to boot. The nerfs flying units had received proved to be too much, relegating them to a fairly niche role. Testing indicates that the limitations I wanted to put on flying's utility can be achieved at this movement speed, so they don't need to be lower.
-Forest and Mountain movement types have their movement rates adjusted, mostly upgraded. In particular, they both now move considerably faster on their terrain of choice, and mountain movement type is now less punished on plains. It isn't all roses, however. Specialty types no longer move quite as fast as Plains units on roads.
-Plains units now have a terrain advantages on roads, not just strictly on plains. However, they no longer have a terrain advantages in cities, where all land types fight the same. It really didn't make much sense to me for plains units to have an advantage on cities inherently when they could be nestled in a forest, in mountains, or (especially) in a snow field.

I'm still not super satisfied with the way Low Sky works, but with movement speed calculation lying firmly on the critical execution path (meaning any additional processing time threatens to lag the game) my options are limited.

Also, one potential idea I do have for flying units in general would be to enhance their in-battle movement factor based on the percentage of your squad that is flying. Generally, a flying character tends to be a bit weaker than a ground unit, which is fine for the most part, but leaves little incentive to create a unit with multiple flying characters, and I'd like to change that.