[Graeme Dice]

quantum_mechani said:
Graeme does make a good point about Ulm ME, I may have to consider nerfing a bit differntly.

I'd suggest not nerfing it at all. Battlefield magic needs to be able to ensure that a mage can kill, at an absolute minimum, his gold cost in troops, or else you might as well not bother researching it. To be truly balanced with respect to research costs, it should enable a mage to kill many times his gold cost in troops.

You may be right that cutting the number of effects would be less annoying to people, but I don't think this change is actually less extreme power wise than half the effects.

Of course it's a more extreme nerf. For one thing, it means that I would never cast the spell in any battle, ever. It's not like the spell needed it. I would have suggested halfing the fatigue cost on it and most battlefield spells to make them actually worthwhile.

I don't see why the research nerf is worse.

I don't see why any nerf is necessary at all. It can kill a maximum of three troops per turn, for a spell that requires a capital only mage or massive horde of communicants for every nation that can cast it. That means that you need to cast it multiple times a battle for it to pay for itself.

This is a change I knew would not go down easily. I'm not absolutly committed too it, but I would like people to give it a try before deciding it sucks. I think the benefits from better magic diversity can outweigh the seemingly minor annoyance.

It's not a seemingly minor annoyance, it's a game killer. Nor does it promote diversity. What it actually does is restrict the site searching spells to those few nations that have native level 3 path mages. Everyone else gets the joy of manually moving mages around the map.

I hope everyone keeps in mind, as I said in the first post, these are not final changes, they are things to try.

Thing is, most of the changes really aren't worth trying. I can tell just by looking at the spells that I won't be casting blade wind ever, nor will I be casting the site searching spells.

Some changes you may find imbalancing, so try them out, and then convince me. Even better, suggest other ways to acomplish the same goal.

I'd suggest starting from the Dom2 mod, rather than trying to further nerf magic down to useless levels.