Satyr Hoplite/Steel Hoplites and Centaur Steel Cataphracts seem to be overpriced upgrades for what they offer. The only difference between a Satyr Warrior and a Hoplite is that he loses forest stealth (arguably important) and gain 1 armor. To steel, one more.

Meanwhile, Centaur Warrior to Bronze Cataphract not only gets armor, but also a lance charge, making it a far more impressive upgrade because he actually got a brand new tool. However, steel, once more, just 1 armor.

My suggestion: give Bronze Hoplite +1 health and Steel +2. Give the Steel Cataphract +1 or +2 health. After all, you would expect a slightly more impressive survivability bonus from a complete bronze panoply than a mere 1 armor, so if even more armor can cause balance problems (it probably will), go and give them a bit of health to illustrate better survivability. Same principle applies to steel.

Also, a less gameplay/practical suggestion, a Centaur arms instructor that trains your troops and perhaps could serve as smithy for all troops (still limited to location, capping at bronze). Inspired by Chiron, with the whole ferrying troops to a place and then slowly upgrading them gimmick, a general smithy/weapons instructor could be really handy.

Nice! That seems like a good suggestion if the differences between upgraded units are that underwhelming.

Found what I think is a bug with the new Centaur commander. I was ferrying untrained centaurs and and found he has the remarkable ability to trans their gender. It seems centaurs are valid targets for the Centaur Cataphracts and the Centauride Cataphracts rituals.

You are correct! Thank you very much for catching and flagging. Must have been moving a little too quickly with the copy pasting. Steel Cataphract ritual has a similar issue too. Both will be fixed in next update.

This is one race whose early turns are still terribly punishing.

They do have a lv. 2 caster to compensate for their teeny tiny starting army. But it's difficult to field your dryad and one rank of basic satrys without risking a game-ending caster death. One lucky moose or archer can easily ruin your run on turn 2.

They also have access to freespawns right away! But relying on a single grove's freespawns to open up new possibilities is pretty impractical.

If you like the feel current setup, raising the starting army from 5 warriors and 5 javelinists to 7 and 7 would be a small change that still leaves them with one of the weaker starting armies.

If you feel like they could use a serious buff, I would consider replacing some of the starting troops with centaurs, and replacing the satyr commander with a Centaur commander or even a Hierophantide.

This has been a very recent topic of discussion in the discord with some folks going to great lengths to run long tests and crunch the numbers of what the spawn rates actually are, and with other balance/overhaul mods adding in very generous increases to the spawn rates with I think some going as high as doubling all spawns across the board.

I was planning on giving a +1 to the spawn rates of the "bronze armored" commanders and removing the spawn boost from the "steel armored" commanders to further specialize their roles. I do think that a modest increase in the starting army is a good measure that can help smooth out the difficulty of the early game that won't later scale up. I'll test an increase to Satyrs or swapping in a few centaurides. I'm hesitant to go as far as including a centaur/minotaur commander from the get go, as I think "unlocking" those 2 races in the early-mid game is a fun progression.

A couple of notes on the capricorn stuff:

Sacred Pool: currently hydromancy. But consider if Mysticism wouldn't fit better?

Oceanus Disciple becomes Aquatic Oceanus Disciple on water. What if this form gets Hydromancy 2--or perhaps Hydro1/Forest 1. Deepen his niche.

While I do find that Hydromancy can tend to be a bit overused due to it being the defacto school for anything aquatic themed, I'll need to double check the Mysticism list as it might lean a bit too "anti-undead".

As long as there isn't weirdness caused by learning/unlearning the school this seems like a nice nuance to add.

I have been playing the class a lot lately. Funny seeing my first comment is 2 years old. Time flies.

I find upgrading satyrs a bit of a waste of time, and unlike last time, I don't think I have a good solution for it. The reason is that with as much as Centaur Commander and a Keeper you can get enough centaurs and minotaurs that probably offer more value than twice the number of satyrs, which is what they cost.

Satyrs are not bad troops, and all their upgrades in a vacuum are good. It's just that (upgraded) minotaurs and centaurs are so good that it feels like a waste of opportunity to upgrade satyrs at all, and you're better off using them raw as decent chaff.

Interestingly that makes capricorns pretty nice better baseline they have spears so they're even better chaff than satyrs.

Only solution I could come up would be to reduce spawn of minotaurs and centaurs but I don't think anyone wants a nerf for this class. Perhaps experiment with changing satyr upgrade to 10 figure for 40 gold and 16/32 iron so you can get more of them faster slighter cheaper?

Something weird is going on with the rolls. All my Pans promote to either Pandemonic or Apostate, I never see an Elder. I also never saw a Blood Bull.

Satyrs promoting in higher batches is an interesting idea to help distinguish them among the roster. I'm thinking their base citadel promotions can be kept in batches of 5, but their steel armored commander ritual promotions can be upped to batches of 10.

There's no changes to Pans currently and when I tried a quick test I got an Elder Pan on my 1st attempt. I think this might be a case of strange luck with your promotions.

Blood bulls is a different story, that was added in Guildmaster update and this mod uses a tweaked version of the Blood Orgy ritual so it didn't receive the new chance for a Blood Bull. That's likely something I'll end up integrating, but it might need a little balance consideration with my changes to the rituals cost.

I realized now something I thought was a balance decision might actually be an error. The class is missing Major Animal Summoning.

Edit: I was going to suggest keeping the fur tier satyrs at 5 to not slow the class further.

The omission of Major Animal summoning was an intentional change. The core game handled this overlap with Druid by giving the Dryad Queen a small malus of +25 to the cost. At that time I was buffing the Dryad Queen in other areas and decided to remove that as a small nerf while also pushing the gameplay to rely more on their unique rituals/mechanics and not have overlap with other classes but at an inferior cost-benefit ratio,

Overall if you think this hurts the class too much I'd probably first want to explore how other areas could be strengthened before revisiting adding that overlap with Druid back in.

Looking forward, Dryad Queen might be the class that so far I'm planning on changing the least. I think this is due in part to their gameplay already being rather nuanced and not really requiring the addition of more objectives or quirks.

Some minor additions I do have planned:

Buff the spawn boosting rate of the "bronze tier" commanders and special commanders like Dryads + Pans, remove spawn boosting from "steel tier". These already have established niches of: Bronze excels at boosting, Steel boosts rate that units can be promoted via rituals and I'd like to lean into that further. I've seen other mods/discussions conclude that Dryad Queen needs significantly higher spawn rates, I'm going to take the middle ground of slight boosts across the board (and a stronger starting army overall) but not go as far as to double all spawn rates.

Add a few unique features to each of the various Pan promotions and add a 4th Capricorn themed Pan promotion. Drop Berserker from the Elder Pan, perhaps all the promoted Pans to make investing in them more worthwhile.

Minor buffs on a few of the unique summons. Add Forest Stealth to Grove Guards. Move Nymphs to the back line and add lvl 1 spell casting.

Give fully promoted Groves temple status so they boost promotion rates of commanders as an added benefit.

The larger batches of Satyr promotions from their Steel Commanders as previously mentioned/suggested.

I find the Dryad a joy to play, and don't find her particularly weak, so I really don't think you need to tune her out further excluding doing some experimental stuff I particularly can't imagine.

I agree with removing Major Animal Summoning. Unlike the Druid, the Dryad have an actual decent backline. The large animals would mean you probably would want to save your Satyrs for snipers, and would make keeping a healthy frontline to protect your centaur bows trivial. Without it, you can put your stationed spawning dryads and hierophants to manufacture lesser animals, but I find a waste of resources compared to the very useful and arguably necessary Call of Gaia.

I think the Dryad differs from the Druid in that she's a far worse summoner (Druid can pay half to get better stuff than her) but a far better warlord, not only with fantastic troops and good gold income (not because she gains extra but because she spends so little), but also having a much easier time spreading her force into effective raiding units (namely, summoning Pans to lead forest invisible armies of other Call of Gaia units and your t1 upgrades). She can also get a pretty good God for cheap (Gaia at 1000 herbs). But she have a far worse time summoning actual monsters (Servants of Gaia have it's uses but it is not the spammable spell, Call of Gaia is), lacks the mobility and defensive kit, and the recruitment of your magical commanders feels worse than the Druid getting apprentices.

I have no opinion on the spawning of Bronzes because I try to replace them if I can with the whites. Last game I had a lot of guys to go around;

Grove Guards with forest stealth is pretty nice. They feel out, and you couldn't take them with your Pans for stealthy armies. In a line of Minotaurs (steel, because otherwise is a waste), they felt really lacking.

Pan having Berserker is indeed its main weakness. I think the Elder losing is neat but, as I told you, I had trouble getting these. But it would suck to have the class permanently hamstringed by their non glass mages being berserkers forever.

Rest is all nice, I would just like to say that, in my opinion, Satyrs are the ugly redhead child of the class. Why bother with Snipers when you have centaurides? Why bother with hoplites when you have minotaurs and cataphracts? Everything else quickly feels very plentiful (specially as Hierophants are probably at least twice as common as Dryads if not more) and any resources spent on Satyrs feel like a wasted opportunity. Maybe the larger batches would fix it, I don't know.