PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)

[Knai]

Originally Posted by thejeff

I don't see that as the problem with PD. At least in MP.

It's not that some nations have really good PD and some really bad PD, compensating for other strengths and weaknesses. It's that spme nations have mostly useless PD and some have completely useless PD. To the point that the common advice in MP games is not to waste money on more than a couple points of PD. Enough to stop the weakest raiders, Call of the Winds or the like.

More than that, even for the good PD nations, and it still just gets killed by a raiding thug and your investment is lost.
So PD, which is a theoretically cool feature, really isn't used.

If anything an overall boost in PD is needed, not a better balancing of the different nations PD.

That would be problematic for SP though, where it's already fairly common to buy a ton of PD in chokepoints for the AI to beat itself against.

But this is just a symptom of the magic system being critical, and rending magic as less powerful removes some of the draw from the game. SCs can do what they do because of spells and magic items, raw stats only go so far, and while Fear, Awe, Blood Vengeance, and natural regeneration extend it dramatically, it is the spells that truly make it powerful.

Take the Harbinger. It is a respectable SC in the mid game, and relies heavily on a few spells. Mistform is by far the most important, but Blessing usually helps quite a bit as well, and there are methods of Harbinger use that also take advantage of Shock Wave.

Then there are the big battlefield spells. Flaming Arrows, Wind Guide, and Darkness are probably the biggest ones here, and they turn a fight to a huge extent, then there are counters to them. Giving PD access to these would make things much less strategic, and allocating gems to PD is more micromanagement nobody wants to deal with.