The core of this mod is to make the wage of your army depend on their true power, rather than unit tiers. To achieve this goal, the models for wage, damage, and price have been overhauled. Balance (personally preferred) is achieved when the three models are fine-tuned in association with each other. The default setting is recommended for maximum balance, nevertheless, a lot of options are provided for configuration. Especially, you can disable a part of the mod to improve compatibility. 

The major effects of this mod:

• Recalculated simulation battle strength. The original game calculates the strength, manifested by the color bar on the top of the screen before a battle, according to the level of units rather than their equipment and skills. It is far from accurate. As a result, in order to ensure victory, you may prefer to fight every battle in person instead of sending your armies, even if your enemy is much weaker. Also, the inaccurate strength fails in predicting the winner, which affects the AI's behaviors. This mod provides a new formula to calculate the strength. I make the new formula a lot more accurate than the old one by hours and hours of experimental battles.
• Adjusted wage. Weak units are cheaper, and strong units are much more expensive. The wages scale quadratically with the simulation battle strength of the units. In the default settings, the wage for an imperial archer is 1, for an imperial trained infantryman is 24, for an imperial legionary is 81, and for an imperial elite cataphract, the most expensive unit, is 254. The wage for units in garrison (also in your clan member's parties) is halved in order that you can prepare an elite army when there's no war and support them with your treasury for an expedition. 
• Improved armors. This has been done in a lot of other mods. The difficulty of balancing armors is that if armors are too strong, it takes so long time to finish a battle, especially when mounted units are involved. Also, if archers do too little damage to armored units, people wouldn't like to keep them especially when two hundred imperial elite cataphracts are affordable. I attempt to properly set the effect of armor, which means proper battle time and that a knight can't beat a hundred archers, though 50 imperial veteran infantryman with shields can kill 200 imperial archers, and horse archers can no longer dominate any battle except sieges, but they are still strong. Nevertheless, you will feel the difference between cut, piece, and blunt damage. The cut is most efficient against units without armor. And if you are facing a heavily armored unit, you need to rush and thrust or raise your hammer. The deadly long glaive is still powerful, but now it can't kill a heavily armored unit in one blow without a speed bonus. 
• Adjusted item prices. I change the formula for calculating the tier of weapons and armors, which is used in the new price formula, and also in the new simulation battle strength. 
• A new physical model for swing and thrust blow magnitudes. Probably you don't know, that the damage of a weapon is not a given value, but it is calculated from the physical properties of the weapon such as the center of mass and the inertia, which are in turn determined by the materials from which the weapon is crafted from. In fact, EVERY WEAPON IS A CRAFTED WEAPON. I feel the effort of the game makers, who attempt to make the battle more realistic, however, the mechanism is poorly implemented so that I would never know it if I didn't read the code. As a physicist, I try to make their effort count by providing a more realistic model for swing and thrust. The effect is subtle in gameplay. You may or may not feel it. The most apparent effect is the change of the sweet spot for swinging, the point at which your weapon blows out the max damage. In reality, you don't expect you can break armor with a cut using your sword tip. The sweet spot is now pulled towards your hand, which means you need to approach your opponent for higher damage, which also put yourself into danger. Another apparent effect is the increased speed bonus. 
  
  

The minor effect:

• The air friction for missiles is reduced. In the original game, arrows are too weak when hitting a faraway enemy due to friction. Now that the armors are made stronger, I believe it's better to make arrows more effective in the distance. You can change the friction freely in the file 'managed_core_parameters.xml'.
• Stun period is now determined by the impacted momentum rather than the damage, and thrusting is now better at stunning than swinging. We know it's easier to push down a person from his front rather than his sides. 
• From 1.3.0, the recruitment cost is five days' wage (configurable). It affects the upgrade cost, which is the difference between the two recruitment costs. 
  
  

Known problem:
The true simulation battle strength should be nonlinear, however, nonlinearity seems impossible to achieve in the game. Nonlinearity means although a trained infantry can beat three looters one by one, he may not survive when three looters come together. Moreover, a horse archer may have the same strength rating as a melee horseman who he can't beat, but the horse archer will be more efficient in dealing with an infantryman. So the strength prediction will never become perfectly accurate, but still much more accurate than the original one. I made my best to balance the strength in the linear region, in the sense that when we're having a fight between two large groups of melee units, the prediction will be probably correct. 

Installation:
Like most other mods, simply put the folder 'WDPBalancing' into the folder 'Module' of the game. 

Configuration:
From 1.2.0, the mod becomes configurable. Configuration can be done by changing the values in the file 'config.xml'.
From 1.3.0, a lot of options are provided. Read 'config.xml' for details. 

Compatibility:
The 1.3.1 mod is compatible with the 1.4.1 game.
The mod uses the Harmony Library. It might be incompatible with other mods changing wage, damage, or price. Specifically, you can find the patched methods in 'PatchedMethods.txt'.
From 1.2.0, the mod is divided into three parts, the wage model, the damage model, and the price model. You can disable any of them to dramatically increase the compatibility at the cost of losing balance, however, the balance can be restored to some extent by configuration. 
I thank people who report bugs or crashes. 

Future Goals:
I'm waiting for your suggestion.  

Recommended Mod:
Improved AI Troops : This mod gives more (or less) daily XP to AI units than the vanilla game. As a result, AI parties become stronger (or weaker).


If you like this mod, please consider a donation.