It's widely known and seen round in and round out that both fantasy routes aren't quite up to par with the normal routes, and therefore aren't used as heavily in top play. This is aimed to change that.
First of all I'd like to say a few things, because this could be a particularly long post depending how many of my points I make and how long I ramble. First of all, although everybody's comments and opinions are welcome, I'd especially like for those of you who have played these routes in the past couple of rounds to definitely point out some things. I'm making the sorc idea with my experience as the route. My vamp idea is purely from observation.
We'll start out with vampires as it's the one I have the least to say about.
Although I know how much people (I as well) hate it when people compare routes when saying something is underpowered or overpowered, I think many of you can agree on the similarities of the vampire and SA route. Almost every vamp masses vamps, and almost every SA masses SA's (well...that's not quite true, solo's often have assassins, but it's close).
Idea:
-Make vampires reveal either eta 2 or eta 1.
-Make vampires the SAME init as SA's.
-Remove vampire bribing ability.
Reasons:
-Stupid to have vampires reveal eta 3, with today's NBS popularity figuring out how many they have/could have is simple, defeating the purpose of stealth, and revealing eta 3 is a huge disadvantage, not an advantage especially in large planned attacks where they can see a real early on compared to fakes.
-Right now, the main reason why people think playing vampires is unviable is because SA utterly destroys it, and it's possibly/probably the most popular route in the game. If you compare the units 1 on 1, which I'm only doing because both routes are HEAVILY dependent on their punits, you should see a few things.
A) SA kills vampires retardedly easily
B) SA does slightly more health damage
C) SA is slightly harder to kill
D) Vampires do armor damage. This gives it a huge advantage attacking routes such as snipers and TL's. I consider SA a 'pretender' killer of TL's, probably the second most popular route, whilst vampires truly does destroy it.
In my opinion A,B,C 'balance' out and 'differentiate' the two routes significantly, along with the other units in the route differentiating them. If SA's and vamp's have the same init, SA's can't attack them and rape them, and vamp's can't attack SA and rape them. Seems like the best, and potentially only way to balance and make vampires viable, like every route should be. Differentiated, but good in their own way.
-Removing vampires bribing ability, I said this because of the insurance/bounty bug with vampires. Since Azzer seems unable to fix it properly, this seems like the best way to do it. It will remove 50%+ of the problems with converting, with only nanobots as the main concern. If converting stays, I recommend a price bump to ~60-62k, as LV's are epic, free flak.
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Sorcerer route
Option 1:
-Switch sorc development time with Iron golems
-Change witches to some viable unit to keep the route decent until sorc's come out (Potentially an apprentice type unit that fires all 3 ticks and targets LET/all)
-Make sorc's fire all 3 ticks and a 20% boost in both armour and health damge
-Give iron golems a special bonus against hippy/yob
Option 2:
-Switch sorc development time with Iron golems
-Change witches to some viable unit to keep the route decent until sorc's come out
-Increase sorc's fire power by 50% in both armour and health damage
-Give iron golems a special bonus against hippy/yob
Option 3:
-Make dragons fire all 3 ticks
-Increasing sorc's armor/health damage by ~10% (?)
Reasons:
(My bad, I'm not quite sure how to organize my thoughts, so I'm probably just going to throw them all out there in a semi-organized fashion.)
-When I was going to play the Sorc route last round, my plan was to use IG/sorc combination. I wasn't even planning on getting dragons, because I thought sorc's were strong. If you're under the same impression, let me be the first to tell you, you are incorrect. Not to compare routes, but to put in to perspective, sorc's does approximately the same armor damage per cost as strikers, and fires MUCH, MUCH later. It also has the disadvantage of HAVING to have Iron Golems to have ANY chance of targetting LET. Not only does this screw up any perception that sorc's do decent damage per cost, and is only inferior to strikers in comparison by firing late, but IG's don't always even allow sorc's to fire on LET. This is almost always screwed up even when you're attacking by your target having hippy/yob/sd's/sgt's/hooligans/whatever else you can think of that could flak LET that isn't gardeners (which iron golems do a surprisingly good job killing). Of course, sorc's also don't fire last tick. Sounding stupidly underpowered yet?
-The sorc route is known as the route that can't kill much but can't be killed by much. I disagree. TL utterly rapes it, RPG rapes it, mass CW rapes it, any sort of RPG/striker/SA/vampire combination rapes it. What exactly can it attack? In my experience, very little. PoM's, puppets, and poorly set up people such as robo's without CW's. Not a whole lot. In most circumstances, even though dragons do a ton of damage they aren't able to zero someone in 1 tick, and the fact that they don't fire middle tick means they will get to fire THREE ticks, which is just a retarded amount of damage received.
-The easiest way to fix this is to just make it a p-unit required route like SA/VD/extremists are. Ignore making sorc's better, make them just a stepping stone at the beginning to an even more awesome unit, dragons. Just make them fire all 3 ticks, and I think they'll be used MUCH more often. It's like the robo route, but all in 1 unit and slightly easier to kill. I was always under the impression that dragons didnt fire mid tick because Azzer wanted to mess with the new R/M/C battle system.
-If you don't want to make it dependent on dragons, and you want to stick with the heavily differentiated and unique sorc/ig thing, that's a bit more tricky. When sorc's come out, they're pretty awesome for a few days until everybody is actually developed. The only thing stopping them from being super duper is the fact that they can be last ticked. Making them come out at the same time as they do now, with a damage boost, AND not being able to be last ticked is just a recipe for disaster. And you can't really buff them any other other than a huge damage boost or a small damage boost and firing all 3 ticks. Making the unit come out later is the best and only option.
-How to make sorc's come out later but make the route survivable/viable until then? Change witches to something to keep the route alive. I'm not quite sure what. I'd say something like a sorc unit to keep with the routes theme, something like **/**/**/** LET/ALL and fires extremely late (apprentice time) and all 3 ticks.
I know I have a lot more thoughts/reasons/examples than this, I'll post them as I think of them.
First of all I'd like to say a few things, because this could be a particularly long post depending how many of my points I make and how long I ramble. First of all, although everybody's comments and opinions are welcome, I'd especially like for those of you who have played these routes in the past couple of rounds to definitely point out some things. I'm making the sorc idea with my experience as the route. My vamp idea is purely from observation.
We'll start out with vampires as it's the one I have the least to say about.
Although I know how much people (I as well) hate it when people compare routes when saying something is underpowered or overpowered, I think many of you can agree on the similarities of the vampire and SA route. Almost every vamp masses vamps, and almost every SA masses SA's (well...that's not quite true, solo's often have assassins, but it's close).
Idea:
-Make vampires reveal either eta 2 or eta 1.
-Make vampires the SAME init as SA's.
-Remove vampire bribing ability.
Reasons:
-Stupid to have vampires reveal eta 3, with today's NBS popularity figuring out how many they have/could have is simple, defeating the purpose of stealth, and revealing eta 3 is a huge disadvantage, not an advantage especially in large planned attacks where they can see a real early on compared to fakes.
-Right now, the main reason why people think playing vampires is unviable is because SA utterly destroys it, and it's possibly/probably the most popular route in the game. If you compare the units 1 on 1, which I'm only doing because both routes are HEAVILY dependent on their punits, you should see a few things.
A) SA kills vampires retardedly easily
B) SA does slightly more health damage
C) SA is slightly harder to kill
D) Vampires do armor damage. This gives it a huge advantage attacking routes such as snipers and TL's. I consider SA a 'pretender' killer of TL's, probably the second most popular route, whilst vampires truly does destroy it.
In my opinion A,B,C 'balance' out and 'differentiate' the two routes significantly, along with the other units in the route differentiating them. If SA's and vamp's have the same init, SA's can't attack them and rape them, and vamp's can't attack SA and rape them. Seems like the best, and potentially only way to balance and make vampires viable, like every route should be. Differentiated, but good in their own way.
-Removing vampires bribing ability, I said this because of the insurance/bounty bug with vampires. Since Azzer seems unable to fix it properly, this seems like the best way to do it. It will remove 50%+ of the problems with converting, with only nanobots as the main concern. If converting stays, I recommend a price bump to ~60-62k, as LV's are epic, free flak.
-------------------
Sorcerer route
Option 1:
-Switch sorc development time with Iron golems
-Change witches to some viable unit to keep the route decent until sorc's come out (Potentially an apprentice type unit that fires all 3 ticks and targets LET/all)
-Make sorc's fire all 3 ticks and a 20% boost in both armour and health damge
-Give iron golems a special bonus against hippy/yob
Option 2:
-Switch sorc development time with Iron golems
-Change witches to some viable unit to keep the route decent until sorc's come out
-Increase sorc's fire power by 50% in both armour and health damage
-Give iron golems a special bonus against hippy/yob
Option 3:
-Make dragons fire all 3 ticks
-Increasing sorc's armor/health damage by ~10% (?)
Reasons:
(My bad, I'm not quite sure how to organize my thoughts, so I'm probably just going to throw them all out there in a semi-organized fashion.)
-When I was going to play the Sorc route last round, my plan was to use IG/sorc combination. I wasn't even planning on getting dragons, because I thought sorc's were strong. If you're under the same impression, let me be the first to tell you, you are incorrect. Not to compare routes, but to put in to perspective, sorc's does approximately the same armor damage per cost as strikers, and fires MUCH, MUCH later. It also has the disadvantage of HAVING to have Iron Golems to have ANY chance of targetting LET. Not only does this screw up any perception that sorc's do decent damage per cost, and is only inferior to strikers in comparison by firing late, but IG's don't always even allow sorc's to fire on LET. This is almost always screwed up even when you're attacking by your target having hippy/yob/sd's/sgt's/hooligans/whatever else you can think of that could flak LET that isn't gardeners (which iron golems do a surprisingly good job killing). Of course, sorc's also don't fire last tick. Sounding stupidly underpowered yet?
-The sorc route is known as the route that can't kill much but can't be killed by much. I disagree. TL utterly rapes it, RPG rapes it, mass CW rapes it, any sort of RPG/striker/SA/vampire combination rapes it. What exactly can it attack? In my experience, very little. PoM's, puppets, and poorly set up people such as robo's without CW's. Not a whole lot. In most circumstances, even though dragons do a ton of damage they aren't able to zero someone in 1 tick, and the fact that they don't fire middle tick means they will get to fire THREE ticks, which is just a retarded amount of damage received.
-The easiest way to fix this is to just make it a p-unit required route like SA/VD/extremists are. Ignore making sorc's better, make them just a stepping stone at the beginning to an even more awesome unit, dragons. Just make them fire all 3 ticks, and I think they'll be used MUCH more often. It's like the robo route, but all in 1 unit and slightly easier to kill. I was always under the impression that dragons didnt fire mid tick because Azzer wanted to mess with the new R/M/C battle system.
-If you don't want to make it dependent on dragons, and you want to stick with the heavily differentiated and unique sorc/ig thing, that's a bit more tricky. When sorc's come out, they're pretty awesome for a few days until everybody is actually developed. The only thing stopping them from being super duper is the fact that they can be last ticked. Making them come out at the same time as they do now, with a damage boost, AND not being able to be last ticked is just a recipe for disaster. And you can't really buff them any other other than a huge damage boost or a small damage boost and firing all 3 ticks. Making the unit come out later is the best and only option.
-How to make sorc's come out later but make the route survivable/viable until then? Change witches to something to keep the route alive. I'm not quite sure what. I'd say something like a sorc unit to keep with the routes theme, something like **/**/**/** LET/ALL and fires extremely late (apprentice time) and all 3 ticks.
I know I have a lot more thoughts/reasons/examples than this, I'll post them as I think of them.
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They are the only good unit in the route! I don't think that the route would become over powered if dragons fired on middle tick. 
