Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

I couldn't disagree more. I don't know what *unrealistic* has to do with an imaginary game with blood sacrifice, magic, and unicorns.

While I think your ideas of new spells are great, I would still be opposed to removing the autokill. Have you ever tried killing a properly kitted chayot, grigory, or regenerating sphinx? It can be bloody hard. One of the tactics I *like* to do is to get them to berserk and auto kill them.

I can equally argue that the problem is not the time limits - its wrong to leave unrealistic and autokill SP's!

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

It's also a game about land, peasants, government, taxes, religion, and spears. The game is unrealistic and realistic, to great extents both.

People naturally care about consistency, so when a superhero that can survive being trampled by ten elephants during a fire storm gets killed by an invisible clock, dudes are annoyed. People naturally care about drama, so, well, same thing. I think consistency and drama are more relevant here than realism is.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

If logical consistency doesn't matter in a game, why don't we make it so that the army that routs first always wins the battle, more powerful spells cost less gems, and building temples decrease your dominion?

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

I don't know about consistent, in the hard sense everything can be made consistent, but having some sort of realism that you can relate too is important.
I.e. ok, we have unicorns but everything works the way we're used to makes (maybe) a good unicorn game. But we have unicorns so we are unrealistic anyway so humans reproduce through laying eggs and then throwing the eggs into the wastebin and making children the normal way (what, why eggs then? Rule 7-3i of course) and the law of ant-ropy states that the world will be gradually filled by ropes... I'm still wondering if these mushrooms were edible...

It's unrealistic in the first place to have a rout occur exactly on round 50 (that's about 5 minutes of combat) or any other fixed round for that. Quite simply put why would a soldier who is totally uninjured or fatigued and all his comrades are so too suddenly decide to run away and leave his wife and daughter to demon summoners?
There would be better ways to prevent endless battles (icrease fatigue by 5 on round 50, by 10 by round 75 by 15 by round 100 ..., let an SC rout if he's too worn out and not berserk...). Of course the AI taking over after round 5 and SCs being so strong would be even more of a problem but then you change that...

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

The word your looking for is not realism, but verisimilitude. The rules of the game should obey their own internal self-consistency. A time-limit that arbitrarily kills units that would otherwise be invulnerable isn't particularly consistent. It is definitely necessary to have some point where battles end though, as otherwise it's possible that some combinations could run indefinitely. Two feebleminded sacred statues staring each other down for example.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

The game is in fact extremely realistic - it's just that no-one ever noticed that all units in the game are members of the New Amalgamated Union of Gribblies, Humanoids, Thugs and Yetis (NAUGHTY). Among the NAUGHTY Articles are extremely strict rules on the duration of melee activities any NAUGHTY Member takes part in over any given month. The NAUGHTY rules specify exactly how long the attacking and defending sides can stay involved in combat, and punishment for breaching said rules is carried out on the spot. This is why attacking armies leave so promptly - they're actually going off for the union-mandated tea break.

Pretenders beware - argue with the unions and the NAUGHTY people will come and get you!

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Gregstroms point is exactly.. on point.

You could arbitrarily say that combat makes the world unstable and that each round increases the likelihood of death.

Now, if it were me, I'd have horrors show up increasing in numbers and severity. But I have no problem abstracting that part of the equation.

I mean, if you think about it, no one has complained that undead simply go poof. Why should you complain therefor if an SC goes poof?

similarly you don't complain that we abstract the turns - the entire months turn is abstracted to one click. We don't see the armies progressing.

The preeminent question is a balance question, not a versimilitude question.

If you are really saying that you can't stand the versimilitude (vs wanting to make sc's more powerful) then you would be fine with any solution that kept the 75 turn limit autokill, so long as it had a reasonable backstory.

And I don't think that is really what anyone is saying. I think they are just using the versimilitude gripe as a way of attacking the turn limit.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Its perfectly plausible to rationalize an autokill at some fixed time - ie, units eventually are too fatigued to fight, undead units need to replenish their dark energy or whatever, etc... So after some number of rounds they simply collapse or shut down and the defenders can do what they will (since they control the land).

The game has rules. Autokill is one of them. Its a perfectly balanced rule, especially since the rules are designed to give the attacker a fair shake at leaving before it happens by auto-routing. The *only* issue is that the game won't let the attackers route if the defenders have already routed. To avoid this, there are two alternatives: (1) let both sides route, (2) instead of auto-killing the attacker, auto-kill the side that routed (keeping auto-route for the attacker at turn 50 - presumption for the defender).

As a game rule issue, that's the end of the discussion.

Once we start talking about removing autokill because its 'unrealistic', we start playing with game balance (autokill is often the only way to kill a pimped-out SC), which means we have to try and make lots of other changes and that leads nowhere good (and probably means we have to do things like remove enc. 0 from the game and/or make SCs a lot weaker - possibly eliminating the role entirely). We have to start rebalancing some spells and abilities (berzerk becomes stupidly powerful without autokill). Removing autokill is not a fix, it forces a total game redesign.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Is it actually true that attackers can't route if defenders have already routed?

I know I've seen the reverse recently. Attackers route, then defenders.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Particular squads can rout from both sides, but once one side has globally routed (you see the 'x's forces have routed' message) the other side cannot globally rout, and may not be able to trigger unit routs (not sure about the second).

Auto-route is a global rout, and thus fails if the defenders have globally routed.