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Better Greenskin Research

Are you frustrated that your 160 goblin spear unit offers more offensive, defensive, and overall utility than an orc boy unit? No more will orcs suffer from CA's obvious goblin bias! This mod adds additional orc-only bonuses throughout the Greenskin tech tree to offer better parity between goblin units and orc units.




24 May 2020: Released

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This mod adds additonal bonuses throughout the Greenskin tech tree that affect orc units. With the recent Greenskin update and Paunch DLC you may have noticed that goblins get a lot of love. Benefits from the DLC heavily focus on them which makes sense as Paunch is a goblin. However, the universal tech tree really showers goblins in upgrades! At face value this makes sense, as goblins are pretty weak. But, unfortunately, the abundance of upgrades has power-creeped Goblins significantly, to the point that fully upgraded goblins essentially invalidate fully upgraded boys.

One of the images is a spreadsheet tallying the total upgrades available to each race. So, lets compare vanilla Goblins Spear Infantry with Orc Boys infantry with all research unlocked.

• Goblins will have a total of 32 armor (with a better missile resistance from their better shield) compared to the Orc boys' 30. Goblins have better armor than an orc. I mean, sure. They're smaller and all but would orcs really give better armor to goblins? I don't buy it.
  
• Goblins will have a total of 55 leadership compared to Orc Boys' 63... which is still a net gain because there used to be a 10 leadership gap between units, but through research this gap diminishes to 7 leadership points.
  
• Goblins will have a total Melee Attack of 28, compared to the Boys having 30! Note that a vanilla Boy has a MA of 28. So through research a goblin has the literal same MA as a vanilla orc.
  
• On top of this, all Goblins get vanguard deployment, get -25% upkeep (which will stack with the other universal 10% upkeep reduction in the tech tree), a healthy speed increase, 5% physical resistance, 10% replenishment, and a good chunk of missile strength.
  
• Orcs get an admittedly nice 20% boost in weapon strength, but this is their only benefit.
  
• The "Better Arrer Heads" gives goblins and night goblins better arrows and more ammo. But not orc boys. What, they don't use the same arrows? This sounds like a more generic upgrade than something that should be limited to goblins, especially since goblins get additional research that further increases their missile strength and is focused solely on goblins.

So rather than nerfing goblins, lets add some extra tech bonuses to orc units so there's some parity. The spreadsheet image shows what vanilla orc units earned through tech upgrades and what they do with this mod enabled.

The extra bonuses are added throughout the tech tree at research nodes that make relative narrative sense (matches with the flavor text). For example, Researching Big 'Un Bullies and Bigga n' Betta Bosses provides leadership to orc units.

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• Note that these extra benefits, with the exception of melee attack and morale, affect ALL orc units. This includes boys, boar riders of all types, savage orcs of all types, and black orcs. This is because these bonuses use new custom effects, but plug into an existing unit set that covers all orc units ("grn_orcs"). So, if you have a mod that adds an orc unit and it adds that unit to the vanilla grn_orcs unit set this mod will apply to it.
  
• If you're searching for this plugin after download its called FarceOrcTech

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Q: Is this compatible with [mod]?
A: This mod should be compatible with everything that does not change the research nodes for the orc research tree. It only adds to the research tree, without modifying the tree itself.

Q: I use [inset mod here] that adds orc units. Would they benefit from this mod?
A: As mentioned in the notes, this mod applies its bonuses to a specific greenskin unit set which contains all orc units. Adding units to this vanilla unit set is easy and does not incur create compatibility issues. But whether that mod creator took the time to add their unit to the unit set is unknown to me.