Game balance issues, again...

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Arcane Nexus also harvests an unknown amount of gems as "ambient energy"

The baseline seems to be less than 10 astral power (approximately, probably an openended 2d6 really, or something like that)

I ran some controlled tests (I controlled all gem use in the game) putting up 200 gem globals and did not notice a significant increase in the baseline astral power I still saw the usual 2,3,5,8,4,13,3,5,4,5 kickbacks from the ambient energy the next ten rounds.

As such I doubt that there is any significant impact on the ambient energy from global enchantments, unless it is something that would only kick in at extremely high energy levels, which I have not tested. That would not make all that much sense from a game-balance perspective, but it would certainly be a neat synergy.

More likely, the players are just using gems like mad in your game - but you would know that better than I. If you make a copy of the savegame in the current situation, you can run controlled tests when the game is finished and tell us whether the extremely high gem cost globals increase the ambient energy.

Remember, when the monthly message text says "The Arcane Nexus has absorbed magic power equal to X astral gems.", that means that X non-astral non-blood gems generated the power for the nexus. It does not mean you get X astral gems. You only get x/4 astral gems in your lab, not X. (Sorry if I am belabouring the obvious here)

[ March 20, 2004, 09:21: Message edited by: Peter Ebbesen ]