Poll: morale and routing

[Cheezeninja]

Sheap said:
This seems like it is turning into "I want immortality nerfed because it annoys me." If it were really that strong, everyone would play immortal pretenders, but in reality other than Abysia, Caelum and Ermor, it is rare.

Immortal pretenders pay, on average, roughly 70 points for the privilege. The fact that Abysia, Caelum and Ermor have more points to spend and can afford it is certainly not a coincidence. Immortal non-pretender units cost 50-100% more than comparable non-immortals. Not to mention that immortals that die still lose all their equipment (except for pretenders, this is often more valuable than the unit itself), can still get afflictions (whether they die or not), which don't heal right away, still lose the battle, and get sent back to the home province, which may or may not be conveniently located. And if you're not fighting in friendly dominion, immortality doesn't do anything except raise your price.

In reality, Esben's proposal doesn't fix anything, it just creates another problem that obscures the current one by forcing it on everyone. Instead of having strange routing behavior, we will have problems of "my SC should be able to fight this force by himself, but he can't because he hasn't brought his militia with him." And then anti-SC combat tactics, instead of revolving around defeating the SC, will instead revolve around killing his scrubs so he has to flee. This is not an improvement.

Edit: On the subject of human pretenders, the reason we don't see them in MP is because the Ghost King is too good. For a seven path rainbow mage, the GK costs you about 90-110 points over a human in chassis and path costs, has 2 points more dominion, and starts with death magic. The dominion and death magic alone nearly make up for this increased cost, and you've then basically got the GK's exceptional fighting skills for free, instead of legendary human wimpiness. From a pure power standpoint the only "human" that competes with the GK is the Skratti. For humans to be viable in MP, their "secondary skills" (gem generation, research bonus, whatever) need to be a LOT stronger, or they need to get significantly more starting magic (I'm talking 3-4 points in a single path here), or the GK needs to get worse, or some combination of these. Strong starting magic in particular paths could also help distinguish humans from each other.

With the GK out of the equation, humans become the only way to gain magical diversity, and become a lot more interesting. Although whether their searching/forging ability makes up for the lack of a good starting (titan/undead) SC, is debatable.

I'd have to agree with all of this. What Esben's suggestion would do is replace one strange and slightly irrational dynamic with another. Sure commander + group dynamics would make more sense now, but instead of attacking the SC everyones strategy would basically revolve entirely around getting rid of his chaff. This would give an ENOURMOUS advantage to the nations that can spit chaff (Caelum, Ermor, Ctis..) As they can simply spit chaff long enough to tie the SC up and kill or route his troops, then the SC splits too. With some creative cloud trapeezing or ghost riders he has nowhere to go too and you now have a dead SC, without ever actually having to deal with him. It would almost completly re-define the dynamic of the game and the balance therein, as major strategies like wrathing would now be almost useless.

The game IS balanced right now, and well. One little change like this will NOT bring the AI up to par because the AI's still going to be ignorant of so many other strategies (ghost riders, castling, vampire spam, clam hoarding).

I definetly dont think a major re-define of the game dynamic is justified because a few people dont like the way combat plays out, plenty of other people DO like the system and you'd be forcing this change on them. I'd be all for an optional mod that does this, but thats about as far as i'd want to go.

oh, and i second the motion of buffing up the human pretenders, i personally would like to see each one of them start with 2 in 2 seperate paths, making them double bless contenders which currently only fire and astral really have.


[edit] Nevermind the cloud trapez'ing part, as the proposed patch would all but eliminate its offensive capabilities.