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Originally Posted by Burnsaber
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Originally Posted by Squirrelloid
The Traverse the Sea spell being the same level as gateway and requiring W5 compared to Gateway's S4, while being more limited in effect, is really poor design. Yes, its 3 gems cheaper, but that doesn't even begin to make up for a more limited ability to use it. Now it has some advantages over gateway, but is still strictly inferior to astral travel. (Honestly, Astral Travel is too high level as it is, because by the time you have it, you don't care about armies anymore).
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Stritcly inferior to Astral Travel? Astral Travel is researchlevel 9 and costs 25 astral gems. It's not a valid comparison. |
My point was such a boost wouldn't make it too powerful.
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And for why it's harder to cast than Gateway, it's because the spell, althought necessary is sort counterinituative to this mod number #1 goal: to make access to water easier. There is no way for a land nation to attack UW if the uw-nation can just use these spells to cheaply teleport an army on the magic phase at the path of the invading army.
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So, you take a bunch of sucky nations (Oceania, Atlantis), and then you make it easier to attack them, but it isn't acceptable to let them actually defend themselves?
They'd have to know exactly where they were being attacked to use it thusly. And considering land nations can generally duplicate that effect (admittedly on a somewhat smaller scale) with strategic move 2 or even 3 (cavalry)... it really doesn't seem unreasonable to allow a larger effect when that effect requires gems, a mage turn casting, and a mage who can lead the army in the first place, gems spent on boosters, and having dedicated the RPs to acquiring it (and sufficient construction). Especially since water nations will often have more border territories than land nations because there is less water and its often strung out along the land (which they may or may not hold or be able to hold).
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With W5 it can't be reached without boosters, requiring both thaumathurgy and construction research (there are some expections,like MA Atlantis and EA Oceania). The intention of the spell is to allow movement in UW over that non-moddable 1 province restriction. It is costed and pathed for that use.
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So basically water nations can't have nice things?
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Originally Posted by Squirrelloid
Why not give it the same limitation as the Ride the Currents - must be to a friendly province (without the lab requirement).
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Well, if people deem it that unusable, I might consider it. But this spell does something quite new, I first want to see how the 'conservative' version works before turbo-charging it.
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Oh, it'll be used. Only because water nations will be so desperate for *anything* that they'll have to pony up and use it. That doesn't make it not a really poorly balanced spell that takes too much investment of mage time, research, and gems for what it does. Its just most water nations *don't have any other choice* but to try to use it.
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As for you comparisons to Gateway and other astral travel spells:
1) Remember that these cost water gems. With gem gens out of the picture water gems will be perhaps the most useless gems in the game. If you can use the water version over the astral version, you will likely do so.
2) Water nations are a lot better at water magic than astral. (expect for R'lyeh, of course)
3) Water magic is a *lot* easier and cheaper to boost than astral magic.
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1) Irrelevant. Most water nations are stuck with water income - you're basically penalizing them (again) for being a water nation. (Also, its not like water doesn't have perfectly playable summons for the midgame when this spell might actually be useful).
2) Still irrelevant. Its pretty easy to get an S2 mage to S4 for gateway. You take ES on your pretender if you don't have ES naturally for crystal coin, especially if you've got astral to want the coin. W2 mages aren't really boostable to W5 in any reasonable way. MA oceania has a mere 1/4 of their casters who can reasonably be boosted high enough (W3 + 2 boosters, all their mages are W2 + 1/4 of ?100%), and doing so takes *construction 6*. EA Atlantis is no better off. Natural S3+ mages are a lot less rare than W4+ mages.
3) Sure, 2 boosters cost more gems for astral than water (20s 10e vs. 20w), but S2 is a lot more common for astral nations than W3 is even for many water nations, and boosting S is a lot better than boosting W. And astral has the RoS and RoW for even more boosting options - not that they're cheap, but you can do it. Water has... a unique trident?
And we're talking about access to a spell that even without the lab limitation is still vastly more limited in the long term than gateway, since at some point that water nation needs to traverse the land if it expects to win.
As written, the spell is more useful for EA Rlyeh than nations who actually need it like MA Oceania and EA Atlantis. That's just silly.