Definitely some interesting ideas, reminds me of that map I played when I was younger vs computers
where grunts shot cannon balls and ogers shot gryphon flames, it was pretty cool. Took me 5 hours to beat Lol.
One of the best and simplest ways to balance the races would be to give humans the ability to make a church at hold. Ogres would have to adopt a more defensive posture for mid game and humans could expand their map control enough to hopefully set the pieces for the lust stage where they don't have worry about securing an expansion and would be better positioned to start a mage bomb factory or a secondary temple dedicated to invis attacks. Would also ensure saps and fliers would be utilized and present for late game for humans. This would allow humans to better use anti DK with Polymorph to pick off dks and exorcism. And since churches would pretty much get built every human game, it would by extension make gryphons much more formidable at the lust stage!
Exorcism should be 1000, Polymorph should maybe be 1500 and slow should have better range. If you can begin slow sooner with a couple mages with healing paladins that provides some pretty good parity for a lust attack it would come down to who have better micro.
For orcs, the only tweaks . You could make skeletons faster and maybe a little stronger, so you dk an exp with farmed in dks, if the guys not paying attention skeletons could take out every farmed in dk real quick . That way it becomes a useful strategic spell instead of just something people use to clown people once they've taken the map. You could make runes 150 mana, since most ogers seem to die before they hit 200, u usually have to lust them constantly in a balanced game. This could also serve an effective counter to invisible mages in certain paths since we are making humans stronger. Another idea is Berserker regeneration, perhaps this spell could give Dragons regeneration!!! Healing are able to heal gryphons so this would allow for you to strike then hide your dragon until Puff has managed to recover!!!
Exciting stuff gentlemen!! Lol maybe I won't retire if we can add extra dimensions like this. You know how Diablo2 generates a unique Labyrinth each time so no level is ever the same? Imagine if there was an option to create a custom pud each time so gimmick cook book strats were less prevalent while adding a certain mystery that required unique approaches & scouting each time. Obviously there would be constraints for distances, choke points, hops, triple chop points to create your own chokes or chop ins. Random X range of oil making smith and fort protection more vital, farm in points gold size. Certain exps have X squares vulnerable to dk rank or some mines with in cat reach, scarcity... Basically look at the top 25 Maps and identify what elements make them so lovable and try to replicate those concepts at random intervals through out the map!
