Balancing the blesses
 

It would be nice to see all the blesses give equally powerful effects to sacred units.

As it stands now, I do not think many people would argue the e9 bless of 4 prot is equal to the f9 bless of magic weapon and fire damage.

I would guess a 9e bless of ironskin would be roughly comparable to the fire bless, except you have the vulnerability to lightning, which would make the bless less desirable against caleum, man, and vanaheim.

9 air, same as it is now, but with a 10 percent chance to shock attackers.

Maybe the astral 9 effect should be awe, rather than twist fate.

Just some ideas for balancing the bless effects.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I think it also needs to be kept in mind that some schools of magic are not as useful as others... for instance, most people would argue that the Water 9 bless is pretty amazing, but water magic itself is kind of meh. I hink there's a reason for that. The air bless isnt great, but then air magic is quite good.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I agree with john. the schools that have subpar blesses are also the schools with some of the best magic spells. I think the bless system is fine as is. Its just a tad overpowering when used with certain units in the game.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Yep, John raises a good point. I do sort of wish that the death and blood blesses were a tad more useful though. I like to play Mictlan with a Lord of the Night and the bless just ain't great.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Blesses are indeed unbalanced, but you pick a poor example. Water, Fire, and Earth are all pretty much the top level 9 picks. Astral level 9 is also decent on some chassis. It's Nature (the lower level bless makes up for it though), Death, Air, and especially Blood 9s that have problems.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

If you isolate the blesses and compare them against one another with no regard to other aspects of magic including available spells, I agree with quantum as far as how he ranks them.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

It's usually the synergies that cause the balancing issues, anyway -- like MOO2's Stargate + Warp Dissipator.

You can't really just balance bits by bit -- because the units and nations they're applied to aren't mirror images. Mictlan and the Ashen Empire respond very differently to blesses, to take extreme examples.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

There's a certain amount you can do just balancing bit by bit. For instance some units are clearly underpowered, to the extent that they are never built by anyone looking to win. These units can be improved and all it will increase is variety - it won't make a certain nation overpowered.

Not sure that theory can be applied to blesses though.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Playing around with fire, i do not see many weaknesses, very good bless, an enchantment that can turn archery fire into fire arrows, one that makes you immortal in combat, very powerful evocation magic(Falling Fire). Is all kinda useful. Water....well cleansing water was good vs undead. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I do not know many impressive spells for water yet... I rather go with fire. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Maybe a weakness of fire is, you can't forge any good armor with it.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Fire is clearly the best bless. E9 is not one of the best. 4 prot? That means zip really. Especially when you are being hit by f9 blessed troops with 2 attacks.

N9 is also very good, mostly because regen plus berserk is very powerful.

Water is good on some units that need the quickness.

Air needs help, earth needs help, Astral 9 needs help. never play blood , so no input there.

D9 is "ok" but d9<f9 imho.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I don't think fire 9 is clearly the best bless.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I'm rather torn on blesses.

OTOH, i hated Dom2s "build your SC" uberlevel gameplay. But i'm fearful Dom3 will be just a matter of spamming masses of the best 9/9 sacred troop by contrast.

I really do like how good sacreds, national troops, can beat all but the buffest SCs. It's just that they're really good against most everything else.

Maybe sleeping Pretenders need to sleep for two years instead of just one?

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I really don't understand why people are so bothered by sacred troops. On a properly sized map, because they can almost always only be produced in the capital, as the game wears on the blesses becomes less and less potent.

Sure starting out next to a guy with W9/F9 bless sucks when he blitzes you, but that's part of the game! He's giving up good scales, and early access to his pretender for some awesome early game units.

Jazzepi

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Don't blesses become obsolete as the game progresses? What's the difference between a W9 bless on a sacred unit and a Quickening spell on a regular army, except that the Quickening spell costs gems? B9 bless is similar to Strength of Giants (+4 Strength) except for the death curse, and S9 is somewhat similar to Will of the Fates (Twist Fate vs. Luck). There's no bless that's as good as Fog Warriors or Marble Warriors. Blesses are very easy to use and are great in the early game, but later on in the game the ability to cast battlefield enchantments on arbitrary units (either cheap chaff or powerful summons) should be just as good as a high bless[1] and costs zero design points.

-Max

[1] At least in set-piece battles. Blesses are less logistically cumbersome--casters and gems--and are probably better-suited to raiding parties than most battlefield enchantments are.

Edit: corrected misstatement about S9 bless/Sword of Aurgelmer.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

In terms of effect power, quickening is much better than the W9 bless. Quickening grants an extra action every turn and +3 att/def. the bless is only every other turn and you don't get the att/def bonus from quickness (just the +4 def from the low-level bless).

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

F9 and W9 are the blesses that are problematic. Attack and defence skills are very difficult to buff with spells- there are no easy ways at all. On top of that there are very few mass summons that have high attack. So, to take the classic example of W9 Vans, once you add 4 defense to their already formidable defensive skills and Glamor you end up with a troop type that cannot be countered with regular troops, and then they get the excellent ability of Quickness on top of that. Quickness is a multiplier- the more deadly the unit, the better Quickness is. Same deal to a lesser extent with F9, hitting more often is good, but it better if you also do more damage. Again, it's a multiplier.
And the real kicker is that they work so well together.

So as i see it, it's the pairing of the excellent, universally useful and near unique skill bonuses with two other excellent 9 bless powers that causes the alleged problem.

One way to fix it would be to leave the L9 powers be and replace the L4 effects with something less useful. The other way would be to replace Quickness with another power.

Having said all this, I'm not fully convinced the problem is really all that bad. I've played quite a few games and i have yet to actually encounter the much discussed 9W/9F bless on the field of battle.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Maybe spell path system should be like in aow1, taking fire paths exlude you from taking any water paths, death could exclude nature maybe and so on. Problem would be it would make the game less diverse. Onother solution would be to exclude just the blesses, or limit the game to just 1 single path9/10 bless along with minor blesses.

Depends how much people care for balance or more for diversity and RPG elements.

Just some suggestion as i do not really care about it so far as a w9/f9 costs a lot of design points, and that kind of powerplaying is pretty boring too, wonder where the reward is to see the game over screen more quickly.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

If your sacred has 13 prot, E9 should cut down the 6AP damage from flaming weapons by a *lot*. And cuts damage from spear using heavy infantry a lot too.

But both is even more fun.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Why don't you play the game the way it is first, discuss what may or may not work with some experienced players and maybe win some MP games? You can't be taken seriously when you haven't even played with every path and come in here spouting suggestions for "improving" the game.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I do not play blood for rp reasons, it has nothing to do with experience. And I have played a ton of mp games.

I also view that reply as a personal attack, rather than one addressing the merits of the argument.

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Earth bless is fine! 4 protection is good for your sacred soldiers and 4 reinvigoration (E9) helps your sacred mages a lot. It may be not the best early game bless but in middle/late game the reinvigoration for your hordes of mages is often much more important than a fire bless on some of your troops.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Addressing the fire 9 is obviously the best bless statement.

There are many situations where a nation would be served better by a different bless. A very obvious one that comes to mind is Niefelheim. I would argue that a fire bless is not needed on their sacred units. You would probably be better off with a water, nature or earth bless, or even a combination of these blesses.

This is an example of balance of blesses without taking into consideration the spell picks for each path which some people seem to be ignoring. If you cannot prove without a doubt that some blesses are overpowered compared to all the rest without taking spells into consideration, then surely you have no leg to stand on when comparing the blesses in the overall balance of the game.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Fire is not at all clearly the best bless.... Mostly it depends on what nation and what blessable unit you have available - if you need to make generalisations i would probably pick water as the number 1 bless. The weakest blesses are probably death, air and blood.

Astral 9 doesn't need help either, for certain units the mr is very good (demonic/undead) -and its pretty cheep with an oracle chassis and twist fate is added gravy on top.

For some reason you list earth as one of the weakest blesses when it's clearly one of the best - 4 more protection is not bad at all and the reinvig will help alot on those heavy armor blessables you probably are using (aswell as helping sacred mages).

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I think blood is fine. +strenght make little units swarm better bigger units. combine with water 9 and multiple attacks-weak sacred and they will do some damage.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

My feeling is that if we were to leave speculation out of this and run some sort of combat simulator, or a mod that lets two of the same nation go against each other with different blesses, F9 would win the lion's share of contests against any other single bless. But my feeling is also that in the absence of such clear proof, there's no reason for anyone to change his point of view.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

It depends on the nation you are playing, as to what lvl9+ bless is best.

However, blood, death and air blesses are weak compared to the others. With certain nations they do have there uses, a air bless with shadow vestels possibly for example.

Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I would rather have s9 and/or w9 on my vestals, i think air is not as good on them. In fact air is probably the weakest bless overall.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I think fire bless is so strong because it's a perfect synergy. It increases chance to hit and damage dealt. It's stronger than just sum of the components.

Air9 bless is verrry strange. In my opinion it's not useful enough. It's basically a combo piece, because otherwise very few enemies can deal lightning damage. (does Smite/Holy Avenger deal lightning damage ? I'm trying to figure out hot to build a priest assassin). If I had a chance, it would replace Air9 with +3 precision. Sounds much more widely useful to me. It would be nice for casters and archers as well. And it fits air very well, too.

I don't like the idea of sacred troops because they often can deal with everything on their own. Wasn't this game supposed to be about combined arms, at least partially ?

Blood bless.... tell me, what distinguishes extra strength from simple +damage bonus of Fire or Death ? Not only is the blood bless weaker, but also bland. In theory, some units can throw javelins further (sun warriors), and commanders could use Fire Bola better. But the difference would be pretty marginal, I think.
Blood9 is a joke. You buy a (typically expensive) sacred unit and hope for it to die ? For a chance of cursing your enemy ? Because then your other units may hurt enemy more instead of simply killing them ? Ridiculous. It should either be made automatic (no MR), or replaced with Horror Mark.

I'd love to see sacred unit price scale depending on bless strength. This is because without a strong enough bless, sacred units are often not worth the price. I would like to use Black Hunters, but with 125 price and no bless it's ridiculous.
Does anyone know - once the rider is gone, does the Black Hunter still collect his large amount of money ? I mean, it's an animal...

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

There are big differences between the damage increase you get from Blood, Death and Fire. Flaming weapons cause an additional 6 armor piercing fire damage. It is not added to weapon's own damage roll. Death weapon works like Flaming, except not fire damage, armor negating and MR negates.

Protection, magic resistance, fire resistance all interact differently with the damage bonus from the bless. Imagine casting Weapons of Sharpness on units with +strength or units with an extra 6 damage armor piercing attack. Of course, the actual damage increase it biggest with fire almost always, as it also increases attack skill, but you can take some Fire for +attack, not always go to 9.

Blood is not that great a path IF you are just thinking about the bless, but for some nations taking high Blood on your pretender is still a good idea because Blood magic in general is so powerful. Blood 9 is weak though, as you don't need it that high for spells.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I actually like Borsuk's idea about precision. It would make sacred battlemages a lot more interesting, that's for sure.

I also agree that the bonus you get at blood9 is pretty silly. I'd prefer to see something like a watered down blood vengeance based on morale or mr (obviously watered down quite a lot).

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

The blood 9 bless is one of the worst. It's a little more useful if you apply it to one of the cheap mass-produced sacreds, flagellents or jaguar warriors (are there others?), instead of the standard expensive capital only units.
Still probably not worth it, though.

I wouldn't use Air on Shadow Vestals. They're ethereal and have shields. Arrows aren't a great threat. Again that's for the cheap unshielded sacreds, so they can survive to close and do damages. Astral's the same way. Practically doubles the lifespan of a flagellent, does almost nothing for giants.

Death does work with arrows, so I'd assume it works with spells as well. I had fun with W9D9 Ancestor Vessels. 2 volleys of affliction & fear causing arrows a round until they reach your lines, then they still face serious heavy cavalry.

Fire is nice, but it isn't always the best. With the heavier units, survivability is more important than more damage, so Water, Earth and/or Nature dominate.

I think they're pretty well balanced. At least they all have uses, even if some are more niche than others.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Do Death weapons make the base weapons magical? Flaming weapons are not magical, only the wimpy fire strike is, so a fire bless is not useful against high-protection ethereal dudes. Depending on how Death works, that could make it better in some cases... Teraswaerto alluded to cases where a blood bless could be better than a fire bless. A water bless is especially nasty - with more than one or two blessed guys whacking at high speed against an enemy, the multiple-attack defense reduction will often do more to help them hit than the +4 to attack. Think, e.g., of Warriors of the Five Elements... With a water bless, each gets three attacks per turn; that's nine attacks coming out of a single square, for an average defense reduction per attack of -8 (divided amongst the number of different targets, of course). Ozelotls are even scarier.

I do wish blood had a slightly more interesting level-9 bless. Mostly, though, I think things are good; which blesses make sense is hugely a matter of circumstance (Air-9 isn't a terrible idea if you know you'll be starting next to Caelum, eh?) - yeah, yeah, blah blah blah...

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Life drain would fit as a B9 bonus (blood-drinking/soul drinking weapons, people), but it'd be far to powerful.

The problem that I have with the existing B9 bless is that it just doesn't make sense. At all. I'd like it to be something that fit with the magic path. Anything at all, no matter how trivial otherwise.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Blood9 causes horror marks too, but even more rarely than curse, probably because of an easier MR save.

Automatic curse plus horror mark with normal MR save would be interesting... annoying as hell for bladewind casters, SCs, superstrong sacreds... perhaps over the top.

And unthematic if it become popular for MA mictlan...

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Hmmm, I'm going to have to try that out. One thing I have found with the death bless is that the affliction bonus does effect missile weapons unlike the damage bonus for f/d level 9. If you have access to holy archers (they're fairly rare) a high death bless is pretty wicked as those little 1 and 2 point damages from the arrows make people's arms fall off! On top of the obvious advantage this gives you, you can imagine the uses for "fire and retreat"....

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A stay-bless shroud on an assassin would be very interesting also. Even if the assassination fails, you would be likely to inflict crippling damage to leaders far within the enemies territory.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Yep, this makes death bless rather nice if you can pull it off. If it works with sacred mages which are for more plentiful then this could seriously hurt. I rarely have a chance to test, MP is my usual test ground. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif Hence my spectecular battlefield successes and my hideous battlefield flops. It could have been kissblade who mentioned it, I forget now.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Fire and Death aren't a +damage. They're separate attacks, which means armor gets applied again (except that Death is AN,MR and fire is AP). Against a heavily-armored opponent (Prot 20 say), +4 to strength could increase your expected damage more than a separate 6AP fire attack. The following numbers are from a Monte Carlo sim, 2000 runs:

Str 12, Light Lance (3 dmg). Expected damage vs. Prot 20 0.548.
Str 16, Light Lance (3 dmg). Expected damage vs. Prot 20 1.8125.
Str 12, Light Lance (3 dmg) + 6 AP. Expected damage vs. Prot 20 1.322.

The fire bless is non-negligible but it's not as good as the Str +4, if we're not taking attack/defense into account. Expected damage over 2000 hits for the above-given Str 12, Light Lance fellow (Helhirdling):

Prot NoBless +4 Str Fire
1 13.95 18.05 20.18
2 12.84 17.08 18.70
3 11.88 16.19 17.57
4 11.18 15.29 15.93
5 10.26 14.04 14.95
6 9.12 12.74 13.56
7 8.31 11.87 12.14
8 7.37 11.05 10.35
9 6.33 10.18 9.92
10 5.55 9.34 8.19
11 4.90 8.40 7.40
12 4.06 7.23 6.33
13 3.32 6.58 5.42
14 2.73 5.48 4.31
15 2.15 4.72 3.83
16 1.74 3.96 3.00
17 1.27 3.38 2.59
18 0.98 2.75 2.01
19 0.73 2.21 1.60
20 0.46 1.66 1.36

For anything above Prot 8 or so, the fire attack is slightly inferior to the extra strength. To take the attack bonus into account, I simulated a couple of Helhirdlings (Str12,LightLance,Attack12) vs. a Wraith Lord (Def 15, Prot 22).

1 Helhirdling, no bless 0.0725
2 Helhirdlings, no bless 0.1895
1 Helhirdling, +4 str 0.1625
2 Helhirdlings, +4 str 0.6475
1 Helhirdling, F9 bless 0.4745
2 Helhirdlings, F9 bless 1.1065
1 Helhirdling, F4 bless and +4 str 0.392
2 Helhirdlings, F4 bless +4 str 0.971

Take these numbers with a grain of salt (I didn't do variance analysis or test for statistical significance), but it does seem clear that a fire bless's main advantage is indeed the synergy between the attack bonus and the damage bonus, and that against heavily-armored foes it's better to have high strength than an extra fire attack. This may suggest that Wraith Lords are best swarmed by Hoburg Militia under Strength of Giants, but don't try it--6 of them inflict only 0.308 damage per turn.

Python code attached.

-Max Wilson

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

P.S. About the black hunters--I didn't realize the rider stayed dead. I did a quick test game and killed off all of my army except for two spiders with dead riders. My upkeep was 0. I bought two new black hunters and my upkeep went up to 8. Interesting, no? Sacred units with zero upkeep and 55 hit points.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

P.P.S. 3 Att12 Hirdmen under Strength of Giants (Str15, Broadsword) would do 1.9755. This requires no bless at all but does as well as F9 on a per-man basis. I think what's happening is that strength of numbers cancels out the high defense, and SoG cancels out high Prot.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

To MaxWilson:-

Thanks for those tests, they are very interesting. Did you take the +4 to attack into account that F9 gives? Does F9 bless still do more damage overall because it hits more often because of the +4 attack or did your tests include the +4 attack and still find the B9 inflicted more damage?

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Fire bless can also be nice in that it is a magic attack and can go through/dispell things like ethereal/mistform.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Unfortunately they also only have a MR of 5. Don't try and use them against somebody with astral 4 mages and enslave mind researched, as I found out in one game.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Damn, knew it was too good to be true.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

In the first set of tests I just assumed 2000 hits, so attack didn't come into play. In the second set of tests I included the +4 attack from F9, the +2 from F2, and the -2 to defense from a second attacker. It was the attack bonus that made F9 clearly better than B9 vs. the Wraith Lords. Of course I forgot to take Etherealness into account, too.

-Max

P.S. You can treat the first set of tests as the limiting case vs. swarms of attackers. You can confidently say that +4 Str (from B9 or SoG) is better than an F9 bless against lone SCs of Prot 20, without Etherealness. The second set of tests, assuming one square vs. one square, is for large numbers of units where the battle front is roughly a line, as often happens. This doesn't necessarily mean equal numbers of units on both sides, but both sides have at least 20-30 units.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I'm pretty sure the following is right but I want a doublecheck:

Mistform is always totally useless for a supercombatant fighting nothing but Fire9 blessed sacreds.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

The Fire Bless is nice(and imho best) when you have a sacred with multiple attacks, especially against low hp ethereal units with high defense, such as MA Ermor.

Every bless has it uses in certain situations, because the game has almost infinite possibilities. But the Melee based
sacred, especially one with 2 or more attacks, fire just stands out. Hit more, hit for more damage, and you negate ethereal to a large degree.

Water bless is very good also, as is nature. I still think Astral, Death, Air, and Earth, in general, are not as useful.

Earth is obviously great for casters, but the 4 protection does not really help that much on low protection units. I like the theme of Earth, but would 8 protection put Earth on scale with Fire, water, and nature?

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I take a earth bless purely for the reinvigoration, the protection is just a nice bonus. Astral is a perfectly good bless as it is, twist of fate and +3 magic resistance are always useful. S9 magic path is probably the best path of magic in the game as well, for winning the end game.

Air is definetly the weakest, I like adding +3 precision for A9. The E9/A9 combo bless for strong magic nations would be cool.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

On units with high protection +4 prot can be good, the difference between 4 damage and 0 damage can be huge.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

And on units like knights of the chalice, black templar and living pillars the E4 bless can be a very nice bonus(4 extra prot on a unit with 10 prot is nice. 4 extra prot on a 20 prot unit is great. the reinvig helps these units and your sacred mages too).

Earth is a good bless for nations with tough sacreds/those who need reinvig(niefelheim being the obvious choice) and i also like astral on alot of sacreds(mictlans sacreds, flagellants, shadow vestals and sometimes lanka's sacreds)