Riflemen feel just fine btw. They're on-par with the Guns of the Empire firearm infantry, which is also balanced quite well against other factions.

Haven't tested them yet, I have a separate mod for ballistae (Sylvania faction)

Speaking of separate mods, it might be worth looking into setting up Mod Configuration Tool settings in your mod to enable/disable specific units from being recruited on the campaign map. The Expanded Roster or any of Graetor's unit mods should all give you examples of how to properly set something like that up.

It would allow someone in my circumstance of having more control over the kind of units AI armies are recruiting, and would also allow someone who might not want to play with or against the hero units added by this mod to personalize their campaign that way.

I love my custom steam tank, man.

Skirmished against an auto-generated Kislev army, I'm wondering if my ballista are a bit strong for their price in my list. I might bump up their cost maybe. Anyways, I had two units of ballista almost destroy a custom tank before it could finally disable their guns, brought it down to 35 hit points. I was expecting to lose the tank, and the battle.
the mad lad had other plans
Thanks to AI being too stupid to not shoot at the impenetrable front shield, it hung on to those 35 hit points like a honey badger on a lion's unmentionables and proceeded to MASSACRE everything in front of it while my remaining line and back line infantry supported it, keeping everything away from its vulnerable sides and rear.

Wondering if I should touch up Rifleman hit points a little more, but they do have solid accuracy, DPS, and range, even if still shorter than dedicated range their volleys can be comically destructive.

Wow you are still updating this :>
Thanks you

Got caught up with tinkering with my units in AI skirmishes. Did a number of changes after feeling some of my units were behind or lacking in some ways.

Increased hit points of Riflemen a tiny bit and Musketeers a lot. Musketeers should be able to withstand an amount of ranged fire now. Musketeers didn't have the hit points to justify their role in a battle line and their absence of DPS, and accuracy. Riflemen can maybe tolerate being in melee for a while, but still fold under fire.

Touched up elite units (Guards, Foot Knights) hit points, they kept getting burned down first (still a problem, just maybe less so now) in Skirmish. Foot Knights especially got a melee glow up.

Grenadier damage was comically bad. Increased it, and added a contact effect that reduces accuracy and reload speed. Their role is to cripple enemy ranged units so line infantry can hold against melee infantry a little more safely with ranged being their intentional weakness, giving a bit of synergy.

Life has kept me rather busy in many ways, but I have put out a quick update to include shielding for the skirmish mages. I want to get back to playing with them when I am next able. Been taking care of IRL business and helping community things with another game.

Yeah, that's true. Right now they're basically grenadiers, mine or outriders, but with some more mobility and better melee stats. I'll be playing around with them, might figure out some nice spells for them to have.
Once upon a time I had them with different ammo types, but an update kind of broke my ammo type setup and I haven't figured out how to properly implement it yet. They could switch to long range projectiles with a slowing debuff, AoE that reduces effectiveness of shields and armor, and a "siegebolt" that was slow, very short range, and awkward to use on anything but a gate to bust it down or a monster to obliterate it.
So I'll be tinkering with them from time to time when I'm in my packfile.

Currently they just sit in a role that most of the Order factions already have occupied, and occupied very well. I was able to recruit them into a Bretonnian army and they were very nice there, since (unmodded) Bretonnia lacks good skirmish or ranged firepower, though, I could get those kinds of units through a military ally as well.

They’re okay at frontline support, for the empire there’s not a ton of incentive to take them over Outrider Grenadiers, since both can fire on the move and deal strong AoE damage at the right angle.

Outriders, though, are Large and much faster, so naturally more versatile (and they have the added benefit of being cavalry, which can displace enemies through charging them).

I’d like to see some bound spells, or maybe a magical aura or something to make them stick out as a more defensive alternative to outriders. I’d also point out that for frontline aoe support, they’re now competing with the other Grenadiers as well.

Yeah, when you put it that way, perhaps I've not really built them up for that. Short range, area effect, weakness to range, like they're more made for supporting the main line while the riflemen are much better at sniping enemy ranged and cavalry better for hitting the enemy back line as I think you're saying?

I wonder if I really want to rebuild them for this or just rename them?

Giving them some shield may help their ability to skirmish around the frontline, but I don't think it will do much good for them against ranged units. Their problem is that they have a much shorter range than other ranged units, and a smaller unit count that is unarmored and counts as infantry. They play pretty much right into every ranged units' strengths, making them very unfavorable for skirmishing the backline.

another thing I thought could be worthwhile is granting them 360* missile block, with a 20-35% missile block chance. This could help them a lot more with surviving archer volleys, whilst on the move.

Alternatively, and maybe little more thematic, giving them forward-facing missile deflection in a ~70m radius could allow them to actually battle archers head-on instead, but open up their flanks to ranged units if they're positioned poorly.

Aaah, that's some good feedback, Spoon, thanks. Mages go down a bit too fast. I could up the model count as you mentioned with some damage adjustments, or just up their health.
or... huh, idea. I could experiment with the shielding mechanic that Tzeentch units use.
Upping their AP damage sounds like a good place to go as well. A single target damage burst to drop on a high value target with some limited use resource sounds like an interesting and appropriate thing to suit them up with.

finally, even with those critiques, it's awesome to see fireballs flying over the empire's rifle or late-medieval battle lines. I'd really like to see some human variants of these "spellcasters." Even a direct copy stats-wise to the current Asur mages for a formation of Bright wizards, and then giving the Asur some battle abilities (even something simple, where the mages all channel together to unleash a cooldown or battle-limited, single-target, high-damage fireball to give them some good anti-monster potential) would be super cool!

regardless, this mod is absolutely going into my quintessential unit mod picks, I don't think I'll ever play an Empire game again without a line of infantry and carbine cavalry!

(ps, the ranged units in this mod pair very well with the Empire Dwarfs of the "Dwarves of Legend" mod, the human riflemen can shoot right over the dwarves into the enemy)

even as a supporting ranged infantry unit, I haven't been able to get them to work very well in battles where the enemy has any sort of ranged coverage. These guys go down too quickly in the face of archer or gunfire. I have gotten some success using them to flank around a locked melee frontline and hitting the flanks of the frontline for some surprisingly effective chip damage, and if this is their intended role I'd definitely rebalance their damage to favor AP the slightest bit more (9--> ~15?).

The asur skirmish mages are really cool! You'd think that there'd be more mods with similar concepts floating around lol. I have found them to be somewhat weak, though. Their effectiveness as a skirmish unit is weakened pretty severely by their small numbers, the moment the enemy turns any ranged units on them, they go down very quickly.

Their role is also contested pretty heavily by Outrider Grenadiers, who can accomplish the exact same task but faster, and for much, much cheaper.

Other AoE ranged units also outclass them in DPS, and other places too, such as displacement (which the skirmish mages lack entirely) or contact effects.

I can't suggest much outside of maybe increasing the number of models in the unit to compensate (with the exact same stats as now, it'd push their DPS over their competitors'), or increase their range and increase their AP explosive damage (whether for more total dmg per projectile, or shifting 36 base/9 ap to 26/19).

Strange. I would hope I'm not missing the tier 4 barracks entries for my units, I'll check that next chance I get.

I am running a mod + submod that could possibly (but doubtfully) be related: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2869542954&searchtext=shazbot

You lose the ability to recruit units from the Tier 3 barracks (ie Rifleman, Colonel) once you upgrade to Tier 4

Oh dear. I'll look at it.

war wagon hellblasters(canistershot) has crewmen floating in and out of the wagon

All right, I think it should at least not be crashing. Let me know if anything else crops up, I've gotta fix my RPFM and stuff. Midnight at the moment though, so bedtime for me.

... i do not understand at all what is amiss with the record returning the error, or why this is crashing now when I didn't change it at all in the course of updating.

i spoke too soon.
Fortunately, I'm actually getting a proper return error so I have a better idea of what to look for.

It would probably be helpful if I were to open and re-save the version that's on live instead of the one in my backup folders. That might help just a bit.
There we go, we should be up to date and it should be operational now.

Thanks!

Steam page doesn't seem to want to update. Gonna keep trying.

update please.

Sorry about that, I was busy at the moment and completely forgot to reply. 6.0 compatible? I am... not sure.

Is this 6.0 compatible?

I can't use the holding tears emoji here so here's this instead

At the minimum you already have me as a fan :>

I'm in a lot of Discord servers as it is. if I get that kinda motivation again, but I'm not so sure.

What I want you to do is to create a discord channel so that you have a small chat group to build on

Yeah, the long load times were at least part of why I did eventually lose interest in actually playing

Wait you played the game on HDD before @@
Are you kiddin me you are a chad

oh my gosh guuuuyyysss
I finally got a solid state drive. Hopefully I can get sort of back into actually playing this game without loading in and out of campaigns and battles taking 15+ minutes

Yep. Maybe I *kind of* get this one; having a tier and steps seems like it might be a bit less vague than just the number.

So....CA still like messing with the codes

Oh I see. They changed the unit quality value from a simple integer, you know like 2 or 10, and made it a text string. Interesting.
And the Repeater Riflemen seemed to have been using the wrong animation set. Having them fire in six round bursts was funny, but they seem to just burn through ammo magdumping on dead bodies.
Should be working now.

shoot
I see the crash. At least I get a detailed error report now. Okay, I can look into this.

Crash here too

I am awake. Ah, update time. I set it back up, let me know if something has gone awry with the update.

Can you update please getting error message saying your mod is causing a crash.Thanks

Doe this need updating?

Oh, huh. I guess if that works then. Thanks for playing with my army dudes <3

@Earth Thank you so much for updating!

I unsubbed and subbed again and I got the units now, and I just loaded in a running campaign.
@Helion Have you tried Resubbing?

I dont really understand either

Still nothing for Elspeth? Hm. Does she use different buildings for recruiting or something?
Being unable to check myself in game leaves me potentially in the dark on some things.