I didn´t know players with more than 2.000 hours AoW are supposed to be beginners

Talked with blackcat, he has interest in this game, maybe ask him and add him manual, not know, maybe he thought i do it for him.

Count me in :-)

And regarding MC. I remember that in the previous AoW titles MC strategies were less important (at least in AoW1) also due to alignment and racial differences which caused significant morale penalties. Maybe we could add a permanent morale penalty to converted units? This could allow some differentiation between classes as well: Charm/Seduce/befriend - higher upkeep only, Convert - morale penalty and slightly higher upkeep (I see it as forced conversion), control undead - upkeep + mana cost. Or something else. 

chiveicrook joined !!

And a fourth could be that since they are using the Mind Control Snowballing technique to win their games they do not want it to be nerfed in any way !

Yes, MC is still an issue and if it was me, we'd focus on it more, but the result of the poll about the direction for the balance mod didn't put it as priority #1. So that's why I want to 1/ increase additional upkeep to 50% and 2/ remove the "high-value" targets such as Trolls and Ogres.
Then you hit a second big issue that I've been complaining about for a very very long time but alone... the fact that you get too much income from clearing sites, which indeed means the economy does not mean anything. It's great that you agree with me on that, it's one more person who will support changes on that. For v1.23, I plan to propose changes to nerf that because it's cleary a VERY BIG issue for the tournament, as top players can still snowball very hard and very fast and even though we don't see kills at turn 10 or before, the power surge still happen between turn 10 and 20 and it's too fast. We need to move it back by 10 turns.

I think that you're actually experienced enough to discuss balance now! Please check that when you have time and give feedback on the changes listed there: https://docs.google.com/docum... (it's a shortlist of priority changes or changes that could be dropped)

As to why other experienced players didn't report the issue... many reasons! Laziness is one. Another is that many very good players actually do not push the game to its limits and so do not see these very strong stuff. A third is that few people are really involved in trying to improve balance so even if they think something is wrong, they do not report it.

@Hiliadan I understand the second proposal you mentioned as an acknowledgement that there are still balance issues with the MC ability, and the proposal could be a step to try and fix this situation.

I for my part report such issues as I experience them, I wonder however why this particular issue was not reported earlier by more experienced players than me, as it is quite obvious.

My strategy to (ab)use the mind control ability with the rogue was to research bards as fast as possible, then build 2, and during that time to complement my research with Guerilla Tactics from the Partisan specialization, and then attack the site with an army containing the two bards, and if the controlling failed, retreat, and repeat. That is not what I would call sophisticated.

And having thus 1, then 2, then 3 Mind Controlled units made site clearing very easy, and thanks to the treasure found in the sites the extra maintenance cost was never a problem.

Less active and less experienced!

I'm confident it will fill up fast enough but if it doesn't, I can send a few PM, I'm sure many players who have played only a few games will be interested, but just doesn't know that game is open.

I still think there is an argument to be made that without mind controlling leaders/heroes it will be a vastly different game, more focusing on your racial units, so from that perspective its a nice change!

I will gladly join this match if there is still free spots early next week. But for now I will let players with less active games get before me in the que!

If you give that example, you should be happy with the 2nd proposal I made here: http://aow.triumph.net/forums... (we'll come back to it in further versions of the balance mod)
But if you think it's still unbalanced, you should report it more actively so that we can fix it. If you don't say it, it won't change.

Though I doubt many players can achieve mind controlling a Troll by turn 10. Especially beginners... But by turn 20, yeah, for sure.

Yes we will be using the blance mod, and no I do not think it is quite enough to balance the mind controlling classes vs the other classes. What other ability allows a player to have a troll or any equivalent big tank in his army before turn 10 ? And from there to snowball by exploring site after site, adding still more powerful units to his army ? One or two MC T3 units in the beginning of the game are more than enough to make a significant difference.

You'll be using the balance mod, right?
It's a bit surprising and disappointing for the balance mod if people still feel the need to organize games without mind control classes. The last time we had such games was a long time ago before we nerfed the strength of MC, before we added the extra upkeep, prevented T4 MC, etc.

But I have in mind to increase the upkeep to +50% (currently it's +25%), we'll see later if the community approves or not.