Honestly I am in favor of no changes at all!
We dont need the game to be balanced to have fun on war2.
Everyone knows it is not balanced and it is not that big of an imbalance in itself.
You can always play the same race as your opponent if you want perfect balance and it also provides a way to play with a handicap against someone else it can be an additional source of fun
Right now I would say it is the least important thing I would go for if I was to spend effort making the game better:
I would rather have people work on implementing:
-> A match-making queue for 1v1 and premade teams based on elo.
Like they have in war3 or starcraft 2.
-> A real spectate mode with 2 or 3 minutes delay that does not impact the real game speed so if watcher lags players do not feel it.
The idea would be to do what insight does but instead of writing to a file send the data to the watchers that would then store the data to the buffer and play it something around these lines.
-> Some real team wins conditions meaning that if you loose all your buildings but one player have you allied and still has units you are not defeated until no player alive have you allied. (no more need to care for that stupid last building)
-> Some handicap options in lobby like war3 or starcraft, allowing you to set a handicap for yourself that would make your units have a lower maximum health in game based on that handicap setting.
The last thing id change is the balance honestly because this would not be necessarily a straight upgrade from what we have already.
But if really there is no way around it and we already considered all of the above I would go for small targeted changes so that all spells and units get used more often instead of just ignored in most situations:
- fix balista bug
- lust mana cost increase to 80 or 100 or more if not enough up to 128 so that ogres cannot always re-lust right away giving humans a chance to kite since the spell should mostly be used to break chokes and walls.
- heal mana cost decrease to 2 per hp healed or less (so that it actually freaking heals)
- Adjust human spells costs and research times to orcs's costs.
- Double fireball's damages or make it two times cheaper so that it is worth using in some situations.
- Make polymorph cost 125 at most because you have to pay for it and it is nowhere near an as good a nuke as coil is.
- invisibility also forces you to have mages sitting at home and will most of the time not have the same impact as haste so id make its mana cost only twice the one of haste at 100
- Make skeletons benefit upgrades or slightly buff them because they are just a waste at the moment they serve no strategical purpose and they could have one.
- flameshield mana cost to 50 instead of 80 would also help making that spell more worth using.
- Unholy armor to 125 mana like polymorph for more ease of use
For the mechanics maybe heal and slow targetting could work like coil meaning snap to the closest unit but honestly id be fine if we kept the game intact mechanically speaking aside from the ballista's bug.
But yeah as I said that'd be my last concern and changing the balance would also require us to test a lot and make sure the game still plays the same and is getting better not worse.
