Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

I used some magic items to pump a mage to level Nature 3 so that I could enchant him with Dragon Master before I started summoning Ice Drakes. On later turns when I removed the magic items (and thus my Nature level dropped below 3), the Dragon Master enchantment was lost.

OK.....No problem -- just maintain Nature 3 and the Dragon Master enchantment will stay, right? Well, I really needed to remove that expensive Robe of the Magi that was pumping my mage to Nature 3 so I first equipted a Thistle Mace to pump my mage to Nature 4 and then removed the Robe to drop me back to Nature 3. Well, as soon as I removed the robe, my enchantment went "poof." I experimented a bit and it seems that the removal of any magic item (even one not pumping Nature) will cause the Dragon Master enchantment to disappear.

So, is this a bug or a feature?

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

Sounds like a bug for me.

The whole dragon master thing is very misterious. You need to research level 8 to get dragon master, you need a nature 3 mage and this one need at least 2 earth, water, fire or air magic to cast a summon drake/wyvern spell. And all you get for this tough requirements is 3 of a very useless creature. I did some tests, i wasn't able to get a simple independent province with 12 cave drakes which cost me 32 gems with dragon master or 96 without. Very pointless! Even with the balance mod (which do it in a research level 3 category).

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

Yeah. I brought this up during the beta as well - the fact that the spell was too hard to research and had all the wrong paths. No comment from the devs tho.

Should be dropped to perhaps 1N. Then the fact that you also need 2F,E,A to actually summon a drake is less of a burden.

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

Bug: I had the same problem. Remove and item and DM disappears.

DM useless: Well, maybe. I find cheap wyverns of use as bodyguards; fire drakes are good artillery support for nations like Abyssia; cave drakes are good to mix in with your infantry.... Maybe a bit overpriced, even with DM. It might be a fundamental cost problem. Instead of 8 gmes, maybe 4 gems? Compare them to other summoned units. 8 is indeed expensive for what you get. 4 would be about right.

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

Btw, do the Sirrush (that are summoned with C'Tis national spell "Contact Sirrush") cound as dragons for DM?

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

Drakes are technically overpriced due to thier ease of access in the spell tree. Decent summons that you can cast early, you know? In a game with hard research thier cost might make more sense. But then again, I think most people would probably just save thier gems anyway for later, more powerful spells if they had a choice. So perhaps they really are overpriced.

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

Only the elemental drakes count for DM:
-wyvern
-cave drake
-ice dragon
-fire drake

Sirrush and Tarrasque do not count, nor do Iron Dragon constructions.

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

You make two very good points. What about if we do away with Dragon Mastery altogether, and made the cost sliding, depending on the mage's levels of expertise? E.g. if you had +1 level than required, it takes -1 gem to cast.

That would be hard for us to implement, it would take a dev. However, we can approximate it with a mod that makes dragon summoning a 1+ spell, so a more able mage would summon 1+1 or 1+2 or 1+3 all for the same number of gems. E.g. a mage with relevant primary level at +2 would get 3 dragons. Or we could change it to be a 0+X spell, so +2 would get 2 dragons.... These should be easy mods, but they might cut the cost too drastically....

Instead, it might make sense to make DM a lower order spell. Or, have a few more summoning spells, so it would depend not just on the mage's level--but also on the research level:
-summon cave drake, Ex (not sure what x is exactly, and my manual is at home), 8 gems
-summon cave drake II, Ex+1, 6 gems
-summon cave drake III, Ex+2, 4 gems

This would be an easy mod too, I think.

Summary of alternatives:
1. make DM a lower order spell
2. get rid of DM. make summon dragon spells' gem cost sliding, based on level of mage.
3. do a mod that creates new summon dragon spells that summon multiple dragons based on mage's level.
4. do a mod that creates new summon dragon spells that cost less based on mage's level and level of research.

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

I can confirm the bug.

There's also the option of making Dragon Master Nature 1 spell with the bonus scaling with caster's level. 1 + 1 per level of the casting mage would be more interesting. Nat 2 caster would reach the same bonus of 2, N4-5 would reach VERY nice bonus of 3-4.

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

does DM boost lamias as well?

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

While I am in favor of dropping the cost of the spell to 1N, I think that making it 1+ effects is a bad idea. If it is 1+ effects, you run the very real risk of someone taking an A2N9 pretender or something and spamming out 8 wyverns a turn for an effective cost of like 1 gem each. Far too powerful.

IMO, dropping it just 1N is enough, given that there are a handful of mages with 1N and some other interesting path that could summon a drake. Dropping each drake spell cost by 2 gems might not hurt either? A balance has to be found b/w making Dragon Master not suck and not allowing for extremely efficient Drake Factories to be set up.

Re: Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!
 

The easiest approach to the drakes being too expensive is to, well, make them less expensive. That's pretty straightforward with the spell modding tools, isn't it?

Bring back the drakes...
 

Dragon Master/drakes does need tweaking, if I am playing seriously in MP, I would never consider casting them, neither from reading this thread would anyone else.

I say go for the easy options:-

Drakes - lower to 4 gem cost.
Dragon Master - Just lower it to Enchantment 5, not too hard to research too, keep it at N3. Its very, very easy to get a N3 mage.

C'mon...lets bring drakes back into Dom 3 and not leave them as a useless feature, bit of fluff no one bothers with.

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

Meglobob - how easy is it to get a N3 mage that can also summon Drakes (an element at lvl two)? Much harder. Finding a mage with some skills in an element and a nature pick is much easier.

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

Oh yea! Was thinking it was a global enchantment, its even more rubbish than I thought...in that case why not change dragon master to a global enchantment. It would be a good spell then...

Like drakes, try this...
 

Anyone out there who likes drakes and would like to have a army of them, try this:-

Play La Agartha, have order 3, productivity 3. Then recruit cave knights, 100 gold, 35 resources. Those are cave drakes with riders. Once the rider dies, you then get left with a cave drake, cool.

I am on turn 20 in a MP, I have 5 squads of 1xBlind fighter leader, each with 40 blindfighters and 10 cave knights each. So thats 50 cave knights that if killed once then become 50 cave drakes, needing to be killed again, thats fun... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

Changing DM to a global won't make it any better--it just makes it exclusive.

Unless you mean that once global it would be in effect for all of your Nation's mages, then it would be a bit better. However, you'd have to make it much much more expensive, and it could be dispelled.... I think the cons outweigh the pros here.

I still like my 4 ideas, plus curtadams' idea of just cutting dragon summoning costs to 6 or 4.... curtadams' idea is the easiest to implement, for sure. The devs could do it for the next patch, or it could easily be done in a mod (From what I have read. I have not modded spells yet.)

Endoperez's iteration sounds good. Perhaps even too good! Every time I like a mod idea, it turns out to be too powerful. I have learned to trust my instincts, and choose the opposite of them for Dom mods ;-)

Anybody want to try a short game with one or more of these mods thrown in to see which one works best, or worst, or whatever?

Also, maybe we should compare gem costs of dragon summoning with other approximately powerful critters.

Currently:
12 cave drakes=12casts*8gems=96gems E2 Conj2
36 cave drakes=12casts*8gems=96gems E2 Conj2 + DM N3 Ench8
96 clockwork horrors=8casts*12gems=96gems E2 Const5
200 longdead horsemen=10casts*10gems=100gems D3 Ench5

12 cave drakes would get swamped and utterly destroyed by 96 clockwork horrors or 200 longdead horsemen.

36 cave drakes would get swamped and utterly destroyed as well, I think. If we lower cave drakes to a gem cost of 6 or even 4 and employ the Endoperez Iteration of DM it would be (again an N3 mage):
36 cave drakes=12casts*4gems=48 gems total

This is much much better for the cave drakes. 36 cave drakes might very well take on 48 clockwork horrors. I am tempted to think they would win the majority of the time. Morale might be a problem for them.

100 longdead horsemen might swamp 36 cave drakes, or they might not.

Can someone do a quickie experiment to see how 36 cave drakes do against 100 and 200 longdead horsemen, and 96 and 48 clockwork horrors?

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

Maybe I am just a poor player but I often use Fire drakes with abysia to act as artillery. They tend to work very well for me. Still a little expensive though.
I would never use a cave drake however because they dont have a breath weapon.

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

I was planning on using Ice Drakes with my Frost Giants.

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

I think this spell would work well as a Pretender ability, as in say a rainbow mage Dragon Master-kindof like the druid and vine ogres or the mother of monsters special ability. If you got 3 instead of 1 per casting, it would solve the problem, providing you had the right Pretender. If it could then be multiplied by casting the spell, so much the better for later in the game. Maybe even a Dragon Queen Pretender?

Also, why aren't there more powerful dragons than drakes that this spell is affecting? I mean dragons are supposed to be awesome and terrible, and the best you get are a couple of extra drakes? It just doesn't evoke the name "Dragon Mastery"

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

And if they do make some changes to the Dragon Master or Drakews in general, I hope they update the sprites for the drakes. In contrast to many of the new sprites, they look out-of-place and a bit wierd. I don't know if it's just me but they look a lot less refined and a bit lower-res than the other sprites.

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

Yeah, I could see some new creatures--you have the drakes and wyverns and what have you, and then you have the bigger dragons.... Maybe make drakes be young dragons, and the new critters be full adults.

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

drakes, wyverns, draconians, sirrugh, and maybe sea serpents, off the top of my head, those are the dragon-summons. if the spell encompassed all of those, I think everyone would be satisfied, except possibly the balance-lawyers. I'd personally also include the Tarrasque, since it definitely is a dragon. Again, the balance-lawyers would probably have my head, but it's what the spell's definition says it does. "Dragon" is a hard thing to define, mythologically. Maybe it could be balanced out.

Re: Bring back the drakes...
 

Ok, I've been hoping somebody else would jump on this, but it looks like we are all talking about the weather without anyone doing anything. Bunch of lazy so and sos.

I am finishing up my current Magoserium mod. I will do the Dragon Power mod next. Here is what I am proposing to do in MY Dragon Power mod. Others are welcome to do their own mods if they don't like mine, or they can submit their beefs or change requests to me (I like feedback.) One of the first things we need to change is the name of the mod. Blech.

1. keep base spells the way they are. They are low-level, gem expensive, an early way to get a quick jump in power at the expense of gems. They sacrifice finesse for power. I likey.
2. make more advanced versions that cost less, and/or summon more drakes.
3. make more powerful dragons, and the spells to summon them.

I will start a thread in the Mod forums wrt this. Look for it in a day or two with the first version of the mod.