Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!

[rsolow]

I used some magic items to pump a mage to level Nature 3 so that I could enchant him with Dragon Master before I started summoning Ice Drakes. On later turns when I removed the magic items (and thus my Nature level dropped below 3), the Dragon Master enchantment was lost.

OK.....No problem -- just maintain Nature 3 and the Dragon Master enchantment will stay, right? Well, I really needed to remove that expensive Robe of the Magi that was pumping my mage to Nature 3 so I first equipted a Thistle Mace to pump my mage to Nature 4 and then removed the Robe to drop me back to Nature 3. Well, as soon as I removed the robe, my enchantment went "poof." I experimented a bit and it seems that the removal of any magic item (even one not pumping Nature) will cause the Dragon Master enchantment to disappear.

So, is this a bug or a feature?

[calmon]

Sounds like a bug for me.

The whole dragon master thing is very misterious. You need to research level 8 to get dragon master, you need a nature 3 mage and this one need at least 2 earth, water, fire or air magic to cast a summon drake/wyvern spell. And all you get for this tough requirements is 3 of a very useless creature. I did some tests, i wasn't able to get a simple independent province with 12 cave drakes which cost me 32 gems with dragon master or 96 without. Very pointless! Even with the balance mod (which do it in a research level 3 category).

[Ironhawk]

Yeah. I brought this up during the beta as well - the fact that the spell was too hard to research and had all the wrong paths. No comment from the devs tho.

Should be dropped to perhaps 1N. Then the fact that you also need 2F,E,A to actually summon a drake is less of a burden.

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

Bug: I had the same problem. Remove and item and DM disappears.

DM useless: Well, maybe. I find cheap wyverns of use as bodyguards; fire drakes are good artillery support for nations like Abyssia; cave drakes are good to mix in with your infantry.... Maybe a bit overpriced, even with DM. It might be a fundamental cost problem. Instead of 8 gmes, maybe 4 gems? Compare them to other summoned units. 8 is indeed expensive for what you get. 4 would be about right.

[Ironhawk]

Uh-Nu-Buh said:
Maybe a bit overpriced, even with DM. It might be a fundamental cost problem. Instead of 8 gmes, maybe 4 gems? Compare them to other summoned units. 8 is indeed expensive for what you get. 4 would be about right.

Drakes are technically overpriced due to thier ease of access in the spell tree. Decent summons that you can cast early, you know? In a game with hard research thier cost might make more sense. But then again, I think most people would probably just save thier gems anyway for later, more powerful spells if they had a choice. So perhaps they really are overpriced.

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

Ironhawk said:

Drakes are technically overpriced due to thier ease of access in the spell tree. Decent summons that you can cast early, you know? In a game with hard research thier cost might make more sense. But then again, I think most people would probably just save thier gems anyway for later, more powerful spells if they had a choice. So perhaps they really are overpriced.

You make two very good points. What about if we do away with Dragon Mastery altogether, and made the cost sliding, depending on the mage's levels of expertise? E.g. if you had +1 level than required, it takes -1 gem to cast.

That would be hard for us to implement, it would take a dev. However, we can approximate it with a mod that makes dragon summoning a 1+ spell, so a more able mage would summon 1+1 or 1+2 or 1+3 all for the same number of gems. E.g. a mage with relevant primary level at +2 would get 3 dragons. Or we could change it to be a 0+X spell, so +2 would get 2 dragons.... These should be easy mods, but they might cut the cost too drastically....

Instead, it might make sense to make DM a lower order spell. Or, have a few more summoning spells, so it would depend not just on the mage's level--but also on the research level:
-summon cave drake, Ex (not sure what x is exactly, and my manual is at home), 8 gems
-summon cave drake II, Ex+1, 6 gems
-summon cave drake III, Ex+2, 4 gems

This would be an easy mod too, I think.

Summary of alternatives:
1. make DM a lower order spell
2. get rid of DM. make summon dragon spells' gem cost sliding, based on level of mage.
3. do a mod that creates new summon dragon spells that summon multiple dragons based on mage's level.
4. do a mod that creates new summon dragon spells that cost less based on mage's level and level of research.

[Jarkko]

Btw, do the Sirrush (that are summoned with C'Tis national spell "Contact Sirrush") cound as dragons for DM?

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

Only the elemental drakes count for DM:
-wyvern
-cave drake
-ice dragon
-fire drake

Sirrush and Tarrasque do not count, nor do Iron Dragon constructions.