[Jasper]

I like that Star Fires has been toned down, as IMHO it's power was way out of line with it's level of research, skill requirement, power, low fatigue cost, no resitance, no MR save, everything. Astral shouldn't have the best evocations IMHO.

Still, I do fear that Super Combatants are a bit more powerfull. It seems to me there are several problems behind this:

1st, the blood summoning engine is still out of whack, with a ridiculous income possible out of a single province. It's output should scale with the sight frequency, should give fewer slaves on average, and there should be a hard ceilling.

One idea is to have blood slave stem from hidden sites representing "blood lines" that you have to find, with one blood mage able to enter each site each month to get it's payoff. Another is to just let one mage blood hunt in each province.


2nd, The combination of good defense, protection, luck, etherealness, Life Stealing and Regeneration. None of these things by themselves are really a problem, but their synergy is great.

Protection has enough counters I think it's fine as is, although I would like to see the accuracy and damage of missiles increased (along with cheaper light troops, and one unit per space).

Defenses in the 30-40 range are easy to come by. This could be offset by lower defense by 2 per attack instead of one, especially if the highest skill attacker were saved for Last. In particular this would help deal with Tramplers.

Luck. It's good that giving luck to others is now higher research, but perhaps it just shouldn't be possible? Barring that, make it take Astral 3+ to cast.

Etherealness. Perhaps there could be some low to mid level spells that give a group of soldiers magic weapons with minor effects?

Life Draining. Make life drain increase strength and fatigue, rather than health and fatigue. Very much in line with Elric, etc.

Regeneration. Seems fine to me, especially since without it the incidence of fluke afflictions is way to high.

My aim here is to keep Super combatants viable, but to make it much more risky to field them alone. Then, one defense against them would always be to strip them of their bodyguards.


3rd, one of the primary threats of a Super Combatant Pretender is an early rush, where the Pretender sits on your only castle. If you allowed games with more extensive starting positions there would be both more defense against this, and less damage done.


4th... Well, that's probably way more than enough . ;-)