Re: Ward cumulativity
 

So powerful it was insane. All the Wards were available early (Enchantment 4-5 IIRC) and affected the whole battlefield.

Not for an entire army, I agree. But full resistance should still be available to leaders who can cast partial resistance buffs on themselves: like Phoenix Power or Elemental Fortitude.

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

If full battlefield resistance is never going to be available, then I'd like to see full battlefield damage spells toned down somehow. Wrathful Skies in particular is so easy to cast at such a low level of research (relatively speaking, in both cases) that if I'm up against anyone with Air magic I feel like I have to design my whole strategy around it.

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

check out zen's spell mod. it makes the battlefield damage spells more difficult to cast.

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Would it make sense to leave bens non-stackable, but make local area wards stackable with ben as multiplication? So it would be possible to reach max of 75% resistance by casting ben and area spell on the target units.

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Well, there goes my idea of making some of my troops immune to Wrathful Skies. I was going to use Thunder Ward plus Gaia's Blessing. Once Wrathful Skies showed up, my armies became (almost) useless, which is a shame. Making my leaders immune to lightning is easy enough, but I want to move armies around and not just leaders.

I think Gaia's Blessing is so expensive in terms of research level, casting level, fatigue and gems that it ought to stack with other resistances. As it is now, is it really worth it to cast?

Also, I noticed that Gaia's blessing does not stack with the Robe of Calius the Druid. Should it? Does anyone know if it stacks with Elemental Armor?

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

I find it pretty weird how resistances stack: Having 50% and another 50% should not give 100%, but merely 75%. Go into any shop and buy something with 50% off and haggle to get another 25% off, which leaves you with a total of 62.5% off (0.5 * 0.75 = 0.375 = 1 - 0.625 = 62.5%). I think the usual way of stacking such percentage reductions should be by multiplying them...

BTW, do natural resistances always stack with anything else (e.g. the 50% poison resistance of C'tis troops)?

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Good point.

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

A simple solution to this would be to have some intermediate steps in terms of spells sizes. Cause right now the progression is:

Single target
area 1 target
area 3-4 target
entire battlefield

Why not move things like Wrathful Skies and other battlefield effect spells to level 8 or 9. Then put in an intermediate step of attack spells that have an area of effect of say 5-8. You'd probably have to tone the damage down a tad (so it didnt wipe out whole squads at a stroke) and give it some good fatigue. That done tho I think it could be effective without being unbalancing.

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Shimmering Fields already exists. It just is harder to cast than Wrathful Wkies, so it's not casted as often.

Do you mean something like it, or a more powerful variant of the "cloud"-spells, something that works for many turns? Maybe even to the end of the battle? If so, remember that your own units would run after the remaining enemy army throught those clouds...

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Oh, I should mention that while multiplying resistances is easy percentage math, modelling susceptibility still offers some choice:

1. We turn all percentages x% into a float via ((100-x)/100) and multiply them up to gain the resulting factor to apply to the resistable damage value.
This works as it does now: 25% resistance reduces the resistable damage by a quarter, while 25% susceptibility (= -25% resistance) adds another quarter to the damage. Yet unlike now, both do not cancel each other out: 0.75 * 1.25 = 0.9375, so resistance always outweighs susceptibility somewhat. This is natural percentage-math, and one might want it that way, but maybe some players might find it counterintuitive. On the other hand, having two resistances of 20% and 30% do not yield a total of 50% resistance anyway now (which is intended here after all!), so one would not expect 50% susceptibility to be cancelled out by them anyway (0,7*0,8*1,5=0,56*1,5=0,84)...

2. Another sensible way to model susceptibility might be the following: model susceptibility by taking the reciprocal value of the resistance factor, i.e. (100/(100-x)). So now a total of x% suceptibility exactly cancels out a total of x% resistance. But the percentage would then mean something different for susceptibility as compared to now:
20-point susceptibility adds +25%damage,
25-point susceptibility adds +33%damage,
33-point susceptibility adds +50%damage,
50-point susceptibility adds +100%damage,
100-point susceptibility means immediate death upon a single point of that damage (consider a petroleum-based-elemental getting struck by a fire dart). (Maybe as a side-effect this mechanism could also be used to model weapons like the ethereal crossbow or elf bane).
Note that this is sensible: 100% resistance make a creature totally immuny, so 100% susceptibility ought to make a creature totally vulnerable to that energy type! So I would prefer the latter model, although it turns suceptibility numbers into something other than percentage values.


I just wanted to point these simple things out - it's not the math that is difficult here, it's the mathematic modelling that matters!