[quote=quantum_mechani;684751]
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About leprosy and black death- while they are superb at screwing somebody over they are less useful for the ultimate goal of winning. Strategies evolving around them take simply too long to come to fruition, and in black death's case ruins your spoils as well. As far as destroying armies leprosy is many times less scary than other options the late game can lob at them (any battlefield damage spell, flames from the sky). And for the purposes of any reasonable length conflict, the effect can be 90% offset simply by castings of astral healing... of course once the war is over having lots of diseased things is a mm nightmare. Given that, it will probably be 8 gems next version.
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Flames From the Sky is 50 gems. For this, it tends to kill less units outright, than Leprosy will Disease. The overland kill spells are HP+Prot dependent, while Leprosy is only an MR check - many more later game and elite units can survive multiple fire/ice bombardments, and yet still more than likely die to the first penetration boosted Leprosy that touches them. The spell truly is a bargain at 10D, I've seen it used to great effect multiple times now - including the current situation, where it is being entirely abused at 5D/cast.....
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For example, with a strong Blood income, over 14 turns you can make a raw Empowerment + Booster (total = 68 slaves w/hammer) outperform base batch spell casting. So if you get Blood started early, and take a long view, even a nation without cheap B+? mages can do better with the single casts at 2 slaves per demon. Even 3/demon isn't too bad, it's not until they cost at least 4 apiece that it's just not worth it in a reasonable amount of time.
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The problem with this analysis is that it totally ignores mage time, which is the critical factor far more than 2-3 slaves difference.
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It hardly ignores mage time. To cast the big batch spells usually requires you to use your pretender, a summoned Demon Lord, or a special hero, and the use of artifact boosters. Building just 1 castle where you pump out cheapo low path demon spammers allows your big guys to do other things. For a little bit of gold and effort, you've allowed someone to exchange 7 nearly useless little no name mages, for the use of their most powerful mages. I'd do that in a heartbeat any chance I got. Dropping the cast from 7 to 2 makes that choice feasible, and economical - and it makes it virtually impossible to boost the single caster high enough to justify using the batch spell over the single spam.
Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.41
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