How to mod Angels to not be wimps.

[Boron]

Cainehill said:

I wonder if you've ever seen a tartarian in the game? The typical one has 150-250 HPs, making it almost impossible for the angel to kill in 1 hit. The tartarians on the other hand only have to hit the angel once, and also have a variety of magic paths they can use.

In addition, you say "if you run a fire 9/10 bless" : well, yes, _IF_ you do. How many people run fire blessings for the effect on angels? And even with an unholy, er, holy, attack rating, the angels still die like holy flies to many forms of attack, especially magical.

You didn't include the costs .
1 angel costs about 4-7 pearls depending how much you think the archangel alone is worth .
1 Tartarian costs normally 10 deathgems + 20 nature for GoR + at least 40 gems for equipment .

With Zen's change with +4 to attack the normal angel with fire 5 bless would have an attack of 24 without experience .
So the 6 angels who are worth about 30 pearls would have a not too bad chance to get 2-3 hits in the first combat round and each hit would do 26x3 + 2d6 oe ap damage .
Against tartarians this is not a big chance but at least a chance and banelords at least would be defeated easily cause there 1 hit is enough normally .

[Cohen]

Personally all the Angels are underpowered, from Virtue, to the smallest Angel of the Host.
I'm going to adjust their stats in my mod in fact.

[Huzurdaddi]

I'm fully confident that Zen's mod will address Angels. They will not be uber units but hopefully they will on a cost basis whoop devils.

[Cainehill]

And Cohen's mod will also, probably by giving them 50 HPs and Fire-4.

[Vynd]

I like the idea of making Angels stronger. But another possibility would be to simply make them cheaper, either by reducing the gems/magic paths necessary to summon them, or by increasing the number that you get from the spells.

Sometthing else to consider is that Angels compare poorly to Devils because Devils are too strong, not because Angels are too weak. Heck, I'd rather see Devils weakened than Angels strengthened.

[Jack Simth]

Perhaps all that is needed is to make angles as hoardable as devils are - give the archangles a summon allies command that produces unit angles.

[Huzurdaddi]

Perhaps all that is needed is to make angles as hoardable as devils are - give the archangles a summon allies command that produces unit angles.

Well the Last thing I would like to see if hoards of angels roaming the landsscape.

I would also not want to see people using angel to whomp on human armies, that's just not horribly thematic.

Sadly there is no way ( currently ) to mod new holy weapons which could potentially fix the suitation.

The changes already proposed ( attack buff like +4, longer length weapons although I don't know why that works at all!, and a few more HP) should help considerably.

What I would be looking for is angels who are very cost effective aginst evil forces yet not cost effective against humans.

What I also want to avoid is the current rut I am in where if I see an SC who is a devil/undead I summon up on Bane Lord ( since they are so damn nice and cheap, and they have 19 str ) and give him a holy weapon and let him one hit the SC. It works, but I don't find it thematic that I prefer to give holy weapons to undead ... sounds a little weird to me!

[Boron]

Huzurdaddi said:
Well the Last thing I would like to see if hoards of angels roaming the landsscape.

I would also not want to see people using angel to whomp on human armies, that's just not horribly thematic.

That's quite thematic . The angels just kill all the heathens like in Dogma .
So they just do their job and you can't say they do something bad . They only kill the heathens and the evil ppl

[Soapyfrog]

So Angels should be very powerful but few (expensive), whereas devils are many (cheap) but Angels eat their lunch.

[Boron]

More serious i have i think a not too bad idea :

Vynd's and Jack Simth's suggestions are very nice but iirc not doable with the current modding commands .

So my new suggestion : It seems you can't mod a weapon yet to triple damage vs undead e.g. .

So give them as Zen said higher attack rating but instead a herald lance as built in weapon and a bit higher hp .

My unblessed new angel would look then like the following :
Weapon herald lance ,total attack of 17-20 , total defence at 12-13 , hp 25 - 30 .

This way he would hit a devil with 16 defense with 54,8% with 17 attack , with 79,7% with 20 attack .
Then the herald lance would result in 19 x 3 + 2d6 oe damage vs. 8 protection +2d6 oe from the devil .

Voila , a dead devil . If you run a quickness blessing the angel should be quite horrible against devils and without he would still kill normally 1-2 devils before he dies because with 25 - 30 hp he should survive one devil at least .

With the herald lance he would not do much damage against normal troops though so normal troops would be a counter to angels while the angel would be a counter to devils and finally the circle is closed with devils as a good counter to normal troops .


The biggest problem is though that you get 6 angels + 1 leader for 50 astral while you will have normally way higher numbers of devils/FoDs as opponents .
100 pearls = 250 blood via wish and soul contract is very popular so i think normally a typical encounter is 1 angel vs 3-4 devils .
If you alter the defence of the angel though then he gets way too good against normal troops as Huzurdaddi says and this should be avoided .
Perhaps Awe should be removed and replaced by something more useful against devils .
Really hard to make them fit because you have to keep in mind that they can get blessed and if their defense is too high together with awe they will rock normal troops as well .