Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Cripes, a commander can have 334 hit points, 20% regeneration, 30 morale, 21 protection, ethereality, zero fatigue gain, a vine shield, and an ELIXIR OF LIFE and still die from it! After the dead ones have already "routed"!

I guess I need to use charcoal shields instead, from now on. Or some kind of berserker suit. :(

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Oh and my commander wasn't automatically killed by the turn limit, I think. She routed... albeit at about turn 75. So I guess this isn't even due to that turn-limit bug I see being discussed in this other thread! (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com//showthread.php?t=35670)

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

OH and this is a unit whose description says she never sleeps. WHAT ABOUT THAT

Well, I don't expect to add too much to that other thread, or convince anybody of anything who wasn't convinced by it. I do not like this spell much, though!

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

...Okay yeah the issue is covered pretty thoroughly in that other thread. Dudes agree, more or less, that Vengeance of the Dead is cheap in a surprising and ugly way, but that it's either balanced, or only mildly overpowered. One thing I have to add, though: For people who haven't been playing the game forever, the spell is very overpowered, because although those people could counter it if they knew how, they won't know how, as I didn't. Even if they think about the problem, they'll expect their tough commander to win the fight, not realizing that fricking Dead Ones don't flee when routing. THAT is a bug. The spell may or may not be too powerful, but it is powerful in so surprising a way that against many players it may as well be too powerful.

I think maybe I will make a list of things like this to warn players of my games about, before the game starts! The list will probably only have this item in it for a long time, maybe forever. :)

Also, this idea (by kasnavada) probably won't ever be implemented but it's awesome:

...except I'd prefer a somewhat more severe penalty than 0 experience (though a high price on the spell might suffice), but basically it's an awesome and entertaining idea. :)

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Tbh nearly everyone finds this out the hard way unless they read a lot of threads. Don't sweat it so much. It's somewhat OPed currently, but its mr-resists so loading up on MR gear can protect you.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

It isn't necessarily OP, it is a counter only to SCs with massive amounts of kills; it's sort of the paper against the rock of super-SCness.

and even then it is still MR resists.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

My players will not find out the hard way.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

If your SC has astral and you expect it to be VoDed - you can script 'Returning'. Otherwise fire shields and fire brands help.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Not if you don't know about the extreme harshness and (arguable) bugginess of the routing rules in this spell's battles! Of course I'd do that stuff NOW, but, see, that unit I just lost has been with me for a year. This isn't Starcraft or something, where you lose your awesome unit that you love and then start a new game twenty minutes later and build a new awesome unit! People should be expected to roll with the punches most of the time, yes, but not ALL the time--not when they're as nasty and cheap as this!

A dude in the thread linked below (which, again, covers most of this in great detail) claims that even living (as opposed to undead) immortals can be permanently killed by this spell! THAT I would not expect--not as a new player, not even as a person who's been playing for years.

So, this problem warrants a pre-game warning. :)

(Part of the reason why I'm keen on this "warning" idea is that, now that I know how crazily harsh Vengeance of the Dead can be, I'm going to start casting it more against my own enemies! And if I don't warn them first, I'll feel like a jerk.)

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Cool idea bro? Tbh I don't really see why you feel the need to rant about this for 3 hours.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Haha talking to forum people! Is there anyplace that isn't infected by 4chan's nihilism?

Well, I think if two-hour turns a few times a week are okay, then a three-hour rant, a few times per year, is okay too.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

lol okay then, troll away :D

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I firmly believe that the ghosts killed in previous VOTD encounters should *not* mount up as brand new kills for the purposes of further VOTDs.

Come to think of it, stuff like soulless (their name kinda screams of it), longdead and many other undead, lifeless and/or mechanical units shouldn't produce vengeful spirits by any stretch of imagination.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Meh, plenty of ways to die if you lose a MR check. Plenty of ways without that to. By design dominions has lots of ways to stop units from being practically unkillable. You could complain about how unfair it is that your pretender got magic dueled or you can just realize that's the risk of taking a low astral guy. VotD is the same thing IMO, just one of the many things you may run into that'll bite you if you've got too many eggs in one basket. VotD starts looking a lot less OP when you think about the fact that its a lot easier to get a mage who can teleport in and spam 3-4 soul slays before returning - which is way more effective in most situations and costs about the same pearls.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Aw and here I had been hoping that she would die to a doom horror after all the horror marks I gave her! Can we expect a mummy? :)

(all assuming of course that the unit you lost is who I think it is...)

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

The difference I am pointing out is that all those other spells function in ways that can be understood pretty easily by somebody who merely reads their descriptions and sees each one used a couple of times, whereas Vengeance of the Dead's power to kill via weird turn-limit and routing rules is undocumented (within the game, anyway), mechanically inconsistent with seemingly related effects in other parts of the game, and somewhat inconsistent, too, with the game's fiction. It's a trap!

Yes I am talking about it in a way that makes it seem like a bigger deal than it is--for one thing, my unit wasn't all THAT important. But we have to magnify small things, in order to examine them in detail!

She would have killed a Doom Horror, I think! Well, if not for premature routing. I will definitely pay more attention to the Flesh Eater and suchlike, in the future!

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Try to arrange to give her The Ark, which will kill essentially unlimited amounts of undead and will thus allow you to survive multiple failed VotD MR checks.

-Max

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I'm surprised you spent a year building up one unit. Dom3 is a wargame, individual units are always expendable and die in great whacking lots. VotD is a lot less nasty than Petrify, for example.

-Max

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

i think its to help against the early SC rush.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

There's an easy way to find out. Locate the combat where she died, and kill off all the undead with Shift-'K' and add in "Abomination of Desolation", "Slave To Unreason", or "Eater of Gods" with Shift-'U'. Kurgi is the most fun IMHO because most of his defenses are meager (Prot 7 IIRC), but Blood Vengeance +7 makes up for a lot.

-Max

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

It is now, for me, because I know how it works now. But see I knew how Petrify worked before I ever cast it, because the spell's description says how it works!

I know most of my units are supposed to die, and I know a fair number of them will and probably should die stupidly, even. I had an extremely powerful and important commander get mind hunted, in my last game, just before the big Fire Storm he'd been ordered to cast, and without that fire, all his important, powerful friends couldn't beat the attacking army, so they died too. That hurt me much more than this will! And if I'd thought things through more thoroughly, I could have predicted and prevented that mind hunt without a lot of trouble, so it was pretty stupid that it happened. But that incident didn't get any forum thread! Stupid deaths are normal. This is an ugly, fiction-breaking death, arguably caused by a bug. It should not be normal.

(making it sound like a great big deal again)

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

see that's what makes dominions fun!

it's just like life: things work unexpectedly, and we just redefine 'bugs' as 'features' (VotD is only one amongst many many examples).

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Hm well I don't find Nagot gik fel or whatever very fun!

But this Vengeance of the Dead thing does make a much better "feature" than a random crash does, it's true.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I've never tried to cast the spell in game, but the literal reading of the manual suggests that it's an insta-death spell, MR saves ("The commander in that province who has killed the most units in combat has a chance of being killed in a nightmare by the souls of his victims. The target can escape by making a successful magic resistance roll"). What is the spell description in-game?

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

In terms of game fiction VotD is not bad. The literature has plenty of examples of people sucked into magical nightmares, where if they cannot emerge in time they will die/be lost forever in the dream. Same thing here; if you can't beat your nightmare in 75 turns, then you are lost forever.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

It should be rebranded "Suddenly, the previous Pantokrator has returned and kicked everybody out into the void" :)

Could be a S9D9, conj9 ritual even, a nasty last resort for somebody about to bite the dust.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

That's true, it kinda makes sense for the spell to have two ways to kill: by directly killing the target in the fight, and thus subverting their belief in their own life so severely that said life ends--or by distracting the target long enough that they can never find their way back to wakefulness. There's some poetry to that.

But the description doesn't say anything about that, and it's just as easy to imagine the target surviving long enough to awaken, too. Especially if every measure of the battle's progress indicates very clearly that the target has been winning! Judging only from the fiction, and not from the normal mechanical rules of battles, you could easily expect either outcome, I guess.

But how silly is it to think that, after beating 280 out of 300 dead ones, a commander would suddenly become unable to awaken, just because a magical alarm clock went off RIGHT THEN! That's not so poetic. Maybe I will try to make a mod that somehow or another causes Dead Ones to turn into super-strong Horrors at turn 74, ha! Then at least you wouldn't have to feel badly about the extra ten rounds you didn't get. Your commander would go down in style, instead of ignominiously collapsing amidst a bunch of stupid Soulless-looking things!

Hm, I intended that as a joke, but I wonder whether there's really a way to do it. :)

Yes, that's the spirit! It's a dramatic game, everything must be dramatic.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Also, Carcator is teh awesome against VotD. Because of the "compounding souls" issue though, eventually you're going to have to suck it up an get some MR.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

What happens if you cast undead mastery during VotD? Do you get to bring your new dead ones back home with you after you control them all?

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Sorry for the inconvenience. The only issue I see with VotD is that the undead number increases as you cast more of them, which is why I won't spam that spell against a single province or commander. Still, it's magic resistable, unlike teleport+magic duel+returning, which is often very efficient at taking outt super golems or even pretenders.
The routing rules are clearly spelt in the manual I believe. However, I agree that they are annoying.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I don't really see much issue in the "kill count doubling" with VotD. Sure, it's unthematic, but the amount of mage-time and pearls that your opponent has to put to get through competetive mr twice or thrice is simply staggering. In that case, I'd say that the SC did his job by taking so much of opponent's resources, especially in this post-clam era.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I don't think many people are complaining about it being unbalanced, but it's counter intuitive and feels completely unfair when you're on the end of it. The effect doesn't match the flavour and the way it kills you feels buggy/stupid.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

The manual says the attacking side routs after fifty rounds and dies after 75. It also says a routing unit flees or dissolves, unless it can't, due to berserking or paralysis or some such.

Dead Ones rout at 50, but they don't flee or dissolve, even though they're undead and mindless. And according to the people in the other thread I linked, they don't die at 75--instead, the defending unit dies then. This contradicts the manual, I think... I didn't reread the whole thing just now, but I don't think that's in there. Also, I'm taking the other thread at its word, since my unit didn't die at 75, but instead routed at about that time (which seems awfully suspicious nonetheless, but whatever).

Normal routing rules are very annoying sometimes, but they give you 25 turns in which to get away. During assassination, a different and much more unpleasant set of rules is in place (according to that other thread).

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I think what it is is that both sides rout at turn 75. I don't know whether that is what happened in the case of your game, but unless my memory is failing me that is what usually happens after 75 turns.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Oh wait are you saying you cast the spell? Haha well good job then. It's not your fault it's so annoying!

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Well, the Dead Ones I saw "routed" at turn 50--you could see in their defense-rating details that they were routing--but they didn't flee or dissolve.

If both sides rout during an assassination due to some hard limit, then this problem is still there. The defender will probably reach the edge of the field before all the remaining Dead Ones do, and will therefore receive a boring, surprising, almost inescapable death as its reward for lasting 75 turns against an army.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

IIRC, attacker routs at 50 turns, defender at 75, autokill at 100. I'm less sure about the autokill.

The difference during assassinations is that there's no place to route to , so you can't survive routing.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Huh, that does fit my experience better. Maybe that's what the people in the other thread meant about losing the defender at round 75. I'd thought they meant autokill, but routing kills the defender almost as reliably as autokill, when the attacker can "rout" without fleeing or dissolving.

I'd been thinking this could become significant in ordinary assassinations too--if the defender was killed at 75, then the attacker would only need to keep them still until then in order to succeed at assassinating. But the attacker routs at 50, so that wouldn't really work unless the attacker were berserk or unconscious. So, you could send in an Abysian Slayer with a barkskin amulet and... oh boy it'd be hard to keep the target still, when the assassin must also be unconscious in order to succeed! But maybe a berserk assassin could succeed by this rout. It'd be pretty sketchy though. I guess this is why I never heard anybody complain about defenders automatically dying at round 75 during assassinations... except in the context of Vengeance of the Dead, where the attackers never ever give up.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

It's also pretty uncommon in a normal assassination to not have one side or the other dead or fleeing long before turn 50.

It would be a pretty odd situation. You'd need to be completely invulnerable to your enemy to last long enough. And he have to be invulnerable to anything you could equip yourself with or why bother.

Knocking yourself out with your own aura probably won't work, since you'll hit 200 and start taking damage.
A berserk, blinking assassin with 2 Life Long Protections and very low movement (crippled?) might stay out of the way long enough to trigger the defender's route even if the imps couldn't scratch him. Probably wouldn't work, but it would be fun to watch.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

That seems like a good house rule, actually. Like you can cast the spell as many times as you want but not more than once per province per turn. Still doesnt get around compounding kills, but it would at least give the enemy a chance to react before the compounding kicks in. Instead of slamming them with like 4 at once which would be like an assured kill unless the SC just happened to be geared for it.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

He's an SC. He's geared for it.

MR gear at least, which means 4 isn't an assured kill, since most of them probably won't take.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I've been in a battle that due to a lack of adequate scripting ended up with two guys who couldn't touch each other. This was against the AI so I played around with it a bit and there's no question, it was always a stalemate.

One guy kept summoning junk, the other guy kept frying the junk before it closed. This kept up until the autorout kicked in--neither side having been hit for a single point of damage.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I RAN INTO THIS AGAIN AND IT MADE ME MAD AGAIN

Not via Vengeance of the Dead though. I've gotten used to that. But somehow the unforgettable loss of my most unkillable commander to that spell still didn't teach me that basically the same rules apply in normal battles too: If the battle is too big to be finished in time, then even the winners are liable to flee, and when trolls, fatigue-making spells, and Army of Lead are involved, there's a decent chance that it's gonna be that big.

So, even demiliches in friendly dominion will get scared and run away from the things that they are totally succeeding at killing (but not quickly enough). And then perhaps they will flee into an enemy province (maybe still in friendly dominion!) and invisibly, permanently die. I AM ANGRY ABOUT THIS okay I feel better now.

The simple solution is of course to prepare a good escape route. I kinda wish there weren't a simple solution, because these routing rules are really quite bad, and if they were truly game-breaking (instead of just one more subtle but extremely important detail one must learn the hard way and then remember forever in order to become excellent at this game) then maybe the problem would get fixed. (N.B.: My problem here, as with Vengeance of the Dead, is not that the painful lesson is painful, but that in these few cases it is ugly, nonintuitive, fiction-breaking, and seemingly easy to fix.)

Well, there's always the possibility that an eccentric billionaire will come along, purchase the source from Illwinter, and release it on SourceForge. Hey, with open-ended die rolls anything can happen. :)

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

:D Actually I think this most recent case was a simple fear based route and not 50 turn limit. :)

Assuming of course you're talking about our most recent epic battle...

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Fearful demiliches in friendly dominion?

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

I just tried to count the rounds, and got to about 70 before the heavy routing began. At any rate, I claim that a routing system that allows the thing that happened to happen is broken.

That said, I guess it is only consistently and severely broken for huge battles. So another decent solution is to play on smaller maps... which I intend to do in the future. :)

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Routing on it's many forms is a serious pain. It can happen due to moral break or turn limit and sometimes it's just ridicoulous.

Recent example (Sharivar), Army full of SCs and ~1k undead chaff.
The usual buffs take place (AoG, WotF, fog warriors etc...). undead can't be killed fast enough for SCs to see action. turn limit comes, my army routes although it's much stronger than the lone SC it was facing.
Now, if opponent complements that by cutting off retreat route. Well, that's when things get real ugly.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Hi,

I just wanted to say I don't really play Dominions anymore. I'm a lurker in these forums. But I really enjoyed Bananadine's ranting, especially the "several posts in a row" thing. You've made my day :-). And yes, I agree the mechanics of the spell are awkward, misleading and unintuitive. That there are other ways to kill SC's (more effective, less effective...) is not the point. The point is incorrect description.

Re: Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!
 

Many have lost dozens of SC's from the auto-kill design flaw. Many have requested an adjustable battlefield turn setting because computers are so fast and powerful while continuing to improve. There's several methods in which the developers could properly fix this issue:
1) an adjustable battlefield turn setting
* because we want to watch those battles which last 140 turns instead of auto-kill at turn_75 !

2) change the auto-kill into auto-retreat thus the battle still instantly ends on turn_75 and forces unit(s) to appear in neighboring provinces.

3) Battle ends with attacker(s) sitting on top of the province yet not owning the province and defenders underneath. Basically the same as what happens when a stealthy unit is within an enemy province yet no stealth thus forcing the battle to continue next turn.


All we can do is keep praying Illwinter can provide us one of these fixes.... until then our beloved SC's will continue to have meaningless and unfair deaths.