Bionerd Mar 5 @ 1:49pm
Part 1 of Comment (sorry in advance I'm trying to provide some detailed feedback):
Some praise, critiques/suggestions and requests at least mostly in that order:

Praise: Thank you for making this! A lot of the comment on why you made it (such as orange/red strategic weapons having way too high attack are right on target and most importantly titanium and glassteel no longer feel likr they are only useful for making buildings in the late game!

Critiques: Quest gears feels overpowered. I like the fact that you tried to make it so that green/purple gear isn't the absolute best and that once you have that you shouldn't use anything else and yes all the quest gear requires searching around for it and that is an added cost for using it. However quest gear is strictly better than non-quest gear and this means their is less strategy invovled with it (just pick the quest gear that you have and try to build it around a theme and you will probably have a good hero without much if any thought).

Bionerd Mar 5 @ 1:47pm
Part 2 of Comment:
-->Suggested Fix: Balance quest gear by making it cost significantly more. In generally having a more powerful troops is better than having more weaker troops (ofc the numbers of each matter a lot for this) since you can only start out with so many troops on the field (8+hero is max I believe) and only so many reinforcements can come in. Also fielding more groups on the world map costs additional resources for each additional group. Because of this even if more powerful gear is less efficient in terms of gains vs. resources it would still be worth using, but as long as this isn't too one sided there are strategic choices to be made about which to use (regular strategic or quest).

Bionerd Mar 5 @ 1:47pm
Part 3:
--->Implementation of the above: I suggest first balancing the cost around tier 3 strategic purple/green gear. Make quest gear (with the exception of utility gear) all cost the same number of strategic resources and make that cost somewhere between 1.5x and 2x the cost of tier 3 strategic purple/green gear (in terms of number of resources). So say a tier 3 purple 2h weapon costs 20 strategic resources (if I remember its somewhere around there), make the quest versions of 2h weapons all cost 30, all cost 35 or all cost 40 (dependent on where you feel the balance is appropriate) strategic resources. That said later game resources are harder to get so to balance the costs also make lower era resource gear cost gold. Something like 10gold/strategic resource spent for blue/yellow and 5gold/strategic resource spent for orange/red.

Bionerd Mar 5 @ 1:47pm
Part 4:
---->Exception: Some quest gear serves more of a utility roll. Gear that adds bonuses to movement/vision for instance and not a lot of combat stats is the type of gear that makes for interesting strategic choices and also that doesn't need to cost a lot. Afterall, the main cost of this gear is not being able to use more powerful (stat/combat ability wise) gear in that slot. There is a glassteel quest helm you added (gives +1 move on units) that is a great example of this type of gear. It still has some decent stat boosts, but nothing broken and its main advantage is the utility.
An aside: Not a mechanical critique, but flavor wise I feel like gear giving bonuses to movement might be more appropriate as boots and that perhaps a helm should give a vision bonus instead?

Bionerd Mar 5 @ 1:47pm
Part 5 of comment:
--->Advantages of this system: Right now getting blue/yellow quest gear early on is a huge advantage because they come with stat bonuses of late game gear and are quite affordable. This makes it so that any player who gets quest gear should (and most likely will) put it on almost all of their heros (even governors that they aren't really especting to see combat) and on account of that this player will have a major advantage over the one who didn't get quest gear. The above suggestion while not entirely fixing this will help a lot. It will be hard to field lots of quest gear, especially early on. So while a player may have a few elite combatants that are very hard to take down they won't be swarming their opponents with them unless they are doing very well (in which case that is fine).

Bionerd Mar 5 @ 1:46pm
Part 7 of Comment:
Thank you very much for making the mod, as said (or at least thought before) it's awesome!
Sorry for the very long post but I wanted to give some detailed feedback with the hope of helping you improve you. :)

Also let me know if any part of this is confusing, I am regrettably rather tired atm. (Also my apologies if there are typos, I will come back and edit it later but it might be a few days).

Originally posted by ninakoru:

[author] Mar 5 @ 3:06pm
And if you think about it... They are not able alone to change the tide of a game dramatically, obtaining the tier 3 palladian weapons or armor for example would have an inmensely more impact in the game.

Why? a great hero usually doesn't add enough power to change the tide of a battle. If you are in tier 3 iron and got attacked with an army of tier 1 palladian/adamantian weapons and tier 1 dust gear, chances your hero with an quest gear or two item won't make that much of a difference, and you will lose anyways.

Insignias have much better impact on armies, and new tiers of weapons/armors. Quest gear is considered Tier 4 gear, and is a reward, the cost should not be phohibitive, as the reward is finding the items, not being able to equip it.

As another comparison, you can get 40 mithrite/hyperium from a single ruin, whithout quest. That reward could give you more benefit than any quest gear in many situations.

ninakoru [author] Mar 5 @ 3:06pm
Hi, you have the discussion tab precisely for this type of suggestions. :)

First of all I welcome every critique and suggestion, I like to see different points of view.

If you think about it, I took a lot of work to balance all strategic items, with minor tweaks here and there, and all of a sudden, I came with OP hero gear.

You have really OP gear on the vanilla (and still they're OP), think of the green dual axe (Stiletto of the delvers), the red and orange bows, the purple staff, the shard of icarael (palladian sword), or the purple sword, starblade. They have stats similar to tier 2 giear of their strategic PLUS 100% divided entra stats, each one of them. The bonuses from tier 3 hyperium/mythrite head/greaves combined are 80% to stats, so these weapons are truly OP.

Originally posted by ninakoru:

[author] Mar 5 @ 3:06pm
And if you think about it... They are not able alone to change the tide of a game dramatically, obtaining the tier 3 palladian weapons or armor for example would have an inmensely more impact in the game.

Certainly those would, but a lot of the quest gear can be obtained quite a bit earlier (like eras 1-3) while I'm fairly certain quests for tier 3 palladian don't start showing up until era 4 at the earliest.

Originally posted by ninakoru:

Why? a great hero usually doesn't add enough power to change the tide of a battle. If you are in tier 3 iron and got attacked with an army of tier 1 palladian/adamantian weapons and tier 1 dust gear, chances your hero with an quest gear or two item won't make that much of a difference, and you will lose anyways.

I would say this depends on play style and other mods in use. For instance with the mod that expands hero skills a well geared broken lords hero is quite hard to take down... like it can solo 16 units at once if their army composition isn't good for dealing with it (not without your mod as well, but with it, yeah.. it's scary). In addition to that I tend to run hero heavy armies (even without your mod) so hero specific gear actually goes quite a ways for me.

Originally posted by ninakoru:

Insignias have much better impact on armies, and new tiers of weapons/armors. Quest gear is considered Tier 4 gear, and is a reward, the cost should not be phohibitive, as the reward is finding the items, not being able to equip it.

What I was trying to get at in my comment wasn't that it should be prohibitive to run it on a hero, but it shouldn't be so cheap that there isn't a reason to run it on all your heros (including governors not boarding enemies who more likely than not won't see combat).

Originally posted by ninakoru:

As another comparison, you can get 40 mithrite/hyperium from a single ruin, whithout quest. That reward could give you more benefit than any quest gear in many situations.

That depends a lot on the situation/game settings. Certainly it can be true, especially for smaller games/maps. But on large scale games (especially with limited win conditions and slow pacing) 40 mithrite/hyperium starts to matter less than being able to equip 20+ heros with uber gear for relatively little.

ninakoru [author] Mar 5 @ 3:06pm
Hi, you have the discussion tab precisely for this type of suggestions. :)

First of all I welcome every critique and suggestion, I like to see different points of view.

If you think about it, I took a lot of work to balance all strategic items, with minor tweaks here and there, and all of a sudden, I came with OP hero gear.

Originally posted by ninakoru:

You have really OP gear on the vanilla (and still they're OP), think of the green dual axe (Stiletto of the delvers), the red and orange bows, the purple staff, the shard of icarael (palladian sword), or the purple sword, starblade. They have stats similar to tier 2 giear of their strategic PLUS 100% divided entra stats, each one of them. The bonuses from tier 3 hyperium/mythrite head/greaves combined are 80% to stats, so these weapons are truly OP.

Definitely not disagreeing with that, it's just that you had done such a wonderful job of improving the base gear that I was hoping you might do so for the OP hero gear as well. :)

In any case, if you aren't interested I think I might mess around with trying to balance hero gear. I mostly thought I'd see if you liked the idea first since you had a mod along those lines up already.

Also, despite my preference differences I think it's great mod and thank you for spending the time on it and posting it here. :)

Originally posted by Bionerd:

Originally posted by ninakoru:

[author] Mar 5 @ 3:06pm
And if you think about it... They are not able alone to change the tide of a game dramatically, obtaining the tier 3 palladian weapons or armor for example would have an inmensely more impact in the game.

Certainly those would, but a lot of the quest gear can be obtained quite a bit earlier (like eras 1-3) while I'm fairly certain quests for tier 3 palladian don't start showing up until era 4 at the earliest.

For example in my most recent game I got and equip a breakwall on turn 5, (note this is on a very slow game progression. Empire plans are only once every 40 turns). The stat boosts amount to around +60% damage and defense at that point and it also gives block 3 and sharp sense 3. Effectively this hero is going to be just about immune to ranged attacks and hard to hit in melee until about turn 40 (about the time players will start hitting era 2). Uping the cost wouldn't prevent me from using it but it would make it harder to put it on quite this early, I might have to wait until turn 10-15? Also if I get another piece of quest gear and put it on in the next few turns (which has happened in similar situations) I could probably rush one of my opponents capitals (which I started near) before they had a chance to expand or pump out defensive troops (unless they started the game and decided to make a troop right away). In fact... just to see if I can I might try to do that with just the breakwall equip hero and my starting troops...

Well, please understand I cannot set any standard for hero gear thinking that it may be OP along with X mod. My 'standard' was the already OP quest (tier4) weapons. I like how you feel when you get one of those weapons and also are able to equip it into one of your commander heroes.

To equip breakwall on turn 5 you need also to get the titanium from the ruins and yeah, you will feel your hero stronger but I can't see how is game-changing. Is just luck just as getting 10 wine on turn 0 before setting, giving you +30% fids for 20 turns. Having wine on your starting region is also a great strike of luck in most situations.

I love 4x and I came from the civilization series: I was impressed on the big bonuses you get in this game everywhere, and at first I told me it was just wrong and is terribly unbalanced, but once you get the hang of the game, those big bonuses everywhere are OK because, well, you have access to lots of them everywhere and is how the game is designed. To me the only out of the window bonuses are some military related.

Fair enough and sorry if anything came across as me having a major issue with the mod. In general I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to things that I think are really good already and often get a bit pedantic with regards to them. My apologies for that.

On a different but not entirely unrelated note, I'm considering making a mod or two to tweak some stuff including some gear balancing, (haven't looked into the code just yet so I'm not sure how up to it I'll be). Basically I like the game a lot and don't have any issues with single player but feel like its a lot luck heavier and strategy over tactics focused than I would like for multiplayer so I've been looking for mods to tweak that for playing it with friends. Would you mind if I borrowed some of the code you used in your mod (crediting you for it of course, if I both end up doing so and posting the mods for other people to use if they are so inclined)?

I am also a bit perfectionist, no worries. And my thoughts on how to make the modding are not set on stone, I think you you're partially right in your conclusions, I may split this mod in three (dust-powered, item balance, quest items) anyways: more modular so people can just take the features they like.

Sure, no problem. Take whatever you like. Proper credit is enough. If you need help at modding just ask me, I'm quite experienced modding this game, and I could save you huge amounts of time :)