[Graeme Dice]

TheSelfishGene said:
So Wrathful skies is fair?

It's definetly powerful. It can also be defended against if you plan for it.

I've beaten Wrathful Sky casters in a multiplayer game (an Air Queen), but it cost me my whole army of devils (which are hardly weak units themselves).

Did you not have any rings of tamed lightning?

Utterdark is fair? Its the big red WIN GAME button.

If someone casts Utterdark, they had better have put a huge number of death gems into it, or else it's going to only last a turn. That huge number of death gems could have been used in any number of other ways.

False Horror is fair? Wow, its -10 fatigue and 1 path;

It also is only useful as a delaying tactic to keep the air mages from being overrun by high MR, lightning immune commanders.

dragonflies take -100 fatigue and 1 nature gem.

Dragonflies are nature magic, which has useful summons, unlike air magic.

Vine Ogres are fair?

They are more than fair. They are cannon fodder that can't stand up to anything approaching serious opposition.

I mean they cost the same as Vine Men, how could you even defend them?

They require a nature 3 mage to spend an entire turn. That's not quite the same cost as vine men.

(aside from being almost the only Nature thing worth a flip in Multi).

Lamia's are certainly a better use of your gems than vine ogres. They actually have a chance to defeat fully equipped SCs, unlike vine ogres, which perform worse than barbarians.

5 gems for a Scorpion is fine; 10 gems for a Undead, 20 armor, 42hp, Bane Blade thug is NOT fine.

That it has a bane blade is immaterial because a bane blade is not really a useful weapon. A unit with 42 hp and 20 armour will only survive a single turn against 20 or so units with the ability to achieve more than 20 damage. (Barbarians and all other two-handed weapon wielders.)

Its not that the previous summons is bad, its that things like the Banelord are simply too good.

A banelord is nothing special unless you spend three times his summoning cost on equipment. At that point, he can still be killed by elite national troops if you set him up to defend against elemental magic and cover his lousy MR, or by magic if you set him up to not be defeated (easily) by elite units.

Please take into context this thread's purpose: to rebalance mages.

Mages are already almost too expensive in most cases, so they really don't need to be made even more so.

You can change balance more towards summons or more towards conventional troops - common knowledge is that, basically, all conventional troops are crap, its only a matter of time when.

It's unfortunate that "common knowledge" doesn't match up with "actual gameplay".

Because everyone wants to spam temples and castles, that 'when' is pretty damn soon after the start of the game.

If you define turn 40-60 as "pretty soon", then yes, it is pretty soon.

I ban WISH, you spam GHOST RIDERS, or whatever.

If you can't defend against ghost rider attacks, then you've probably spent most of the game turtling and avoiding confrontation, and have already lost the expansion race before turn 20. All the high-level spells do is bring the game to a conclusion before turn 150.