Hello there!
This is a really interesting discussion and I’d like to share some thoughts about healing and regeneration.
I agree with you when you say that healing and wells are a problem right now. As Fabian explained in his post (
https://modding-union.com/index.php/topic,31984.msg479010.html#msg479010) wells allow the player to regenerate his army or some units (like cav) after a fight. This makes him loose almost no units while his opponent, who cant’t heal up his forces, needs to invest money in rebuilding his units.
So the question is: How can we balance healing in Edain?
In order to answer this question I think it can be worth looking at other RTS games to see how they deal with healing.
The prime example for a RTS game is StarCraft2. SC2 however has a significant difference to Edain: It uses only single units – you don’t have battalions like in BFME. This means when you take a fight with, let’s say 15 marines and you loose 10 of them, then these 10 marines are dead. You can’t regenerate them, all you can do is heal up those who survived the fight.
For Edain this would mean that wells only heal wounded soldiers but don’t regenerate fallen members of the battalion. So if you take a fight with 15 Gondor soldiers and only 5 of them survive you can only heal these 5 men back to full hp, but you can’t regenerate the fallen ones. While that wouldn’t be too bad balance wise (“evil factions” don’t have wells anyway), it would make wells extremely unviable.
But there is another RTS game, even a game using battalion-based units, that is played competitively. This game is Company of Heroes2. In CoH2 your infantry is made of so called squads with between four and six members and the game also allows the player to regenerate his squads. However, regenerating fallen soldiers costs money!
I think this could be a way to balance wells and regeneration in Edain.
It would just work like Kmogon suggested in his first option:
Wells would only heal the wounded men of the battalions nearby, without regenerating fallen men. However they would also have an active “ability”. At the cost of a certain amount of resources the well would start to regenerate fallen members of the battalions for a short amount of time (e.g. 30 sec). After 30sec you can activate the ability again (by paying money) and so on.
In my opinion it should be cheaper to regenerate a battalion than to buy a new one, or at least it shouldn't be more expensive. This means the cost needs to be adjusted depending on the faction (one “round” of regeneration should be more expensive for Imladris than for Rohan).
I think this kind of rework for wells would balance them, but they wouldn’t be unviable.
Another important step to balance wells would be the removal of the “in combat healing”. Right now fighting an army near a well (for example a Rohan assembly point) is nearly impossible, since hostile units are constantly healed and regenerated. With removing the in combat healing it would be way easier to counter an offensive assembly point or an outpost with a well. At the same time wells on outposts and assembly points would still be useful. Their ability to heal and regenerate (at the cost of money) units near the front is very powerful.
Another positive effect of reworking wells would be that banners are more attractive. When regenerating units at a well costs money, banners will be more efficient in the long run.
Now my question is, first of all, is it even possible to make regenerating units at a well cost money, and second of all, what do you think about the idea?
One last note: In case I’m missing an important detail in my comparison of healing to other games please tell me
best regards,
Seleukos I.