Ward cumulativity
 

What are cumulativity rules for various battlefield protection spells? For example, Gaia's blessing and Thunder Ward. Or any other combination. Are some of them cumulative? And are they cumulative with the items?

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

I believe partial resistances are cumulative, regardless of where they come from.

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Elemental Fortitude, at least, doesn't seem to stack with others. Eg, Elemental Fortitude + Storm Warriors don't grant 100% shock resistance.

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Sorry, the spells are ben's. Ben's give 50% res. Ben's don't stack with ben's. Other partial or full resistances are are fx'es. Fx'es do stack. Thus 75% will stack with 50%, but two 50% will probably not.

This is a residual effect of poor planning. We were not aware that there were to be so many effects and resistances etc when the first game was made. Spell effects are made in a different manner than later effects. The code is quite tangled up and there are several ad hoc solutions. The introduction of the partial resistances is the culprit (one of them).

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Are you cleaning that bit of code up and straightening it out for Dom3? It'd be nice if everything worked predictably, but I know it might be a lot to ask.

Edi

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

yes, code cleaning, interface cleaning, AI cleaning, let the great spring sweep begin!

I hate to do that myself http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

How much SR does Thunder Ward give anyway? And if some wards stack and others don't, what works to give an army 100% SR?

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

nothing, as far as i can tell. I haven't actually ever used gaia's blessing, so i'm not sure though.

lvl 9 air blessing on sacred troops + thunder ward would work.

thunder ward, will of the fates, and mass regen usually works as a stop gap however http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Ouch, another reason why Wrathful Skies is so good and national troops useless.

Since the wards were evidently meant to stack, could we have it fixed in a not too distant patch please?

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

Meant to stack? No way. There is nothing as horrible as an immune army http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

It is more fun to destroy then to protect. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Also battles do end if death is common and immunity is rare.

In dom1 there were 100% res spells. They were considered too powerful. I'm starting to believe 50% might be to little, but I wouldn't want 100% res to be as easily accessible as in dom1.

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!

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

I also want to comment further on that matter that I think that attaining at most 99% resistance through stacking spells and items is much more in accordance with the open-ended die rolls used throughout dom2: 99% makes a unit almost immune, but there still is a chance of a high open-ended roll to score, and it would distinguish units with a native 100% immunity from troops boosted by mere items and spells (which should never give full 100% resistance,imho). (A realisic value for a high-end stacking would be something like 75%*50%*50%=93,75% just to have some example numbers.)

With the second model, debuffing spells which give susceptibility as proposed in the Wishlist thread by deccan (and in this forum somewhere else by someone else quite sometime before), would thus be a good possibility without removing innate 100% immunities, which also makes sense in my opinion: For example, you might reduce or remove an AirQueens FireResistance given to her my a mere magical ring with a hypothetical debuff-spell, but you cannot make here vulnerable to lightning, since this is her very essence...

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

No opinions at all? Am I too far off already? Is this totally useless? [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Cold.gif[/img]

I am still unsure which way I would model susceptibility if resistances where to be multiplied instead of adding up...

Re: Ward cumulativity
 

This sounds like a great idea to me.