Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Its not just raiding cold-based nations. Wolven Winter means that Cold-3 can be applied to any province during the magic phase, say preceeding assault by a thug/SC with teleport or ct. At that point Zmey become so many wasted gems. Heat scales cannot be applied so easily, and Cold-3 can be generated predictably and on-demand with Wolven Winter.

I don't think this is true. I ran some tests with two wolven winter casters at the top of the order and two at the bottom with a cloud trapezing angel in the middle and the battle that was fought in the magic phase did not reflect the shift in temperature.

Originally Posted by shatner

The point is the Zmey is an extraordinary raiding unit which skirts the line between heavy thug and SC. It flies, has three lives, very high protection, does AoE fire damage on top of 4 high strength attacks (so one is likely to connect even when the foe is ethereal AND fire immune).

No question it has a nice set of abilities and is a good raiding unit. But in addition to the things it has, it is also missing some important things like full slots (in particular hand slots) and any kind of magic (aside from the 10% chance of F1). The lack of magic does have one benefit in that you don't have a buffing phase and can go right to the attack but overall having magic would be helpful as you might be able to use spells rather than magic items to cover some vulnerabilities. The lack of hand slots is very significant in that it means you don't have magic, armor piercing weapons (aside from the fire breath which is easy for an opposing thug to counter) and you don't have a shield and just in general can't swap out weapons depending on the opposition.

Originally Posted by shatner

Finally, fire gems suffer from fewer viable outlets than other gem-types. The main uses for fire gems are forging fire-spam items, lightless lanterns or used as an ingredient for non-fire gear (firebrands, gold shields, rune breakers, etc.). That makes saving up for an awesome summon like the Zmey a very easy decision to make. If the Zmey cost death gems or earth gems instead, I'd be more hesitant to weaken it, but not fire gems.

I've never bought into this line of reasoning. It seems too much like saying if a path has powerful things it can have more powerful things but if a path has weak things you can't add something powerful because it might get used too much. Seems to me it would be better to add a bit more to the weak path to provide more options. And as regards fire, if you have a strong F income and reach late game you'll switch to ember lords anyway.

Originally Posted by shatner

Second off, when your opponent does cast Wolven Winter on you (possibly twice if the province had heat scales) they still need to teleport, cloud trapeze or remote attack with something that can kill a Zmey. And sure, in a Cold-3 province, that really just means surviving 7+ rounds of combat after which the creature will be crit to death. But even then you are talking about employing a high moral, fire immune, ethereal/high hp monster with A2 or S3. That requires gems and mage-turns of preparation to ready. At that point, your opponent is reacting to you tearing up his backfield, teleporting his thugs into his own former provinces instead of doing something proactive like raiding you.

In cold-3 I'd say all you need is enough chaff to do the job. Skelly spam should work nicely. And you don't have to teleport someone in to deal with him. Use conventional movement: a force to retake the province and another couple randomly moving about to fight him - eventually he should run into them. And of course you can try the traditional mind hunts. You'll need three successful hunts to get a kill but if the zmey doesn't have an AoMR that's feasible. And even if you don't get three successes you can knock off one or more heads, weakening the zmey. Also, while they have good MR if they don't have an AoMR or luck pendant they are very vulnerable to spammed MR resist spells on the battlefield.

Originally Posted by earcaraxe

i'd like to add, that the player with the zmey also can counter the counter: "my zmey is here, so next turn there will be wolven winter and his cloud trapezing something, so i teleport my anti SC there", etc etc. What i state is, that its not an automatic loss of a zmey to send him raiding, even the opponent has the aforementioned tools.

Sure, you can always up the ante by sending in reinforcements to try to destroy the expected counterattack but this is no different than with any other raider/SC that doesn't have an escape route planned (stealth, returning).

Originally Posted by shatner

I think the change is both thematically appropriate and mechanically balanced.

Really, if zmey are too powerful for the cost/research level (and I'd like to see more evidence of this first) it seems like this could be easily solved by bumping up their cost a bit (and it just went up 5 gems in any case). To me this is preferable to crippling them in cold dominion. I agree with Squirrelloid that the game's cold-blooded penalties are just too harsh and not in any way balanced.