New mod: Nephilim

shovah · #1 August 3rd, 2006, 08:08 PM

Doing that with national troops would (or could) solve the problem but the thing is, it only does it to one nation in your mod making their nationals superior to others.

Amos · #2 August 3rd, 2006, 08:22 PM

Try playing a game against Nephilim (You cant use Ermor obviously). If you are able to win against them with a regular nation then they only need small tweaks. If you cant win then they are broken and I'll try to fix them.

Lowered Soul Lens ammo to 3 shots.

shovah · #3 August 3rd, 2006, 09:41 PM

Seeing as most of us can beat almost any nation using another nation that test isnt really fair, for 1 the ai is really bad at using summons and keeping up a blood dominion, 2 the ai would mis-use the units, causing huge friendly fire casualties with soul lens and would use gate keepers with troops, causing him to rout. The ai is generally quite poor and when given a mod to use is even worse. You could up the soul lens to 5 ammo, enough to justify the 25 resource cost but low enough not to be too deadly/cause massive friendly casualties(it should have stopped firing by the time troops reach combat)

Amos · #4 August 3rd, 2006, 09:58 PM

You didnt like 3 shots? I thought even the slowest units could reach the enemy in 4-6 turns. I'm thinking of making their accuracy higher now that the range is so short. I know its basically tweaking but it could be a major change in the way you use the Bonded. I seem to be swaying from one extreme to another in terms of balance. I wish there was an absolute set of pricing rules. I made the accuracy so low as a way of offsetting their massive damage. Any ideas? I changed Soul Javelin and Soul Lens to armor piercing, lowered their damage to 0, gave them back magic (just didnt feel right them without magic) and set Lens ammo to 5 shots. They should get their damage from str.
As for Gate Keeper, lowered his strategic movement from 3 to 1. Will it lower his usefulness? He is a defender and not a fast strategic unit.

thejeff · #5 August 4th, 2006, 09:06 AM

The Gate Keepers can be used as defenders, but they are really SCs. Cutting their movement will make it harder to get them to the front, but if they spend most of their time taking provinces that won't make much difference.

Late game they're vulnerable: minimal slots no elemental resistance, but in early game they rule. Normal armies can't touch them, they can solo L9 indies without worries. They'd be a real threat in an early rush. What would you use to stop them with around turn 5?

In my test game, one of them just took a solo Wyrm. It was against the AI, so the Wyrm was unbuffed, but still...

shovah · #6 August 4th, 2006, 01:13 PM

Yea, they rock in a rush. I pummeled an impossible ermor by rushing with around 3-4 of them while mass producing arcebuses in my capitol (which had 175 resources a turn). Quickly surrounded the ulmish capitol, built a fortess on every province around it, put a gatekeeper in each on patrol and then later when i had thousands of gold cranked the pd up to 60 and removed the keepers. I killed the ulmish god so many times, an e9 wyrm ended up as an e2 wyrm, then i just slammed my pretender and 200 arcebuses into his capitol and watched the fireworks.

Amos · #7 August 4th, 2006, 04:00 PM

The nation should be played at 1 Death scale. That way you will soon find yourself short on money.
Are the Gate Keepers and Arcebuses the only units you use? In the next version I'm going to remove the site with resources, its too unbalancing.
I'll think what to do about Gate Keepers to make them less SCish at the beginning of the game.