Conceptual Balance Mod 1.41

[quantum_mechani]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

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.....

Firstly, Flames from the Sky has been 35 gems in every version of Dom3, including every CB version. Secondly, the spell can be stacked in one turn to kill even higher hp things. Thirdly, for the most part the things that escape other artillery also laugh off leprosy. You also seem to be saying failing the mr check = death which is an extreme exaggeration. It's a rare situation you don't have healing spells to prolong the effected units almost indefinitely, or access to some kind of healing to solve the problem completely.

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

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.

It would indeed make a lot of sense to just build a fort, pump mages there to use the low level spells. Except, people are _already_ generally putting the maximum amount of gold they can into produceing mages. Which means that in general, sacrificing a bunch of mages for that is going to put you far behind in research of where you would be, and all the demons you can muster are probably not going to be a big help if you are behind in research. It's especially compounded if you already are using up a significant portion of your mages to sustain a blood economy.

Of course, as I was saying, once research is done, the whole situation changes. Suddenly you are rolling in more mage time than you know what to do with. So I certainly see the problem with the spells, I just do not see it being any kind of issue in the early/middle game (which is where they should be being cast). The real issue is that mage time goes almost instantaneously from being indispensable to almost worthless, it's very hard to make the spells account for both stages.