some balance questions

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by apoger:
>1 Resistances are harder to come by. Most items no longer provide 100% resistance. Resistances are important to supercombatants

Most items?
Rings of frost/fire/tamed lightning seem to offer the same immunity as before.
The elemental armor gets a user all the immunities.

What items are we talking about?


>2 While mages where a good counter against supercombatants, their site searching and forging of magical items where also a vital part in decking out supercombatants. So if mages are harder to come by this will also affect the effectiveness of the supercombtants, not only the effectiveness of counters against them.

A bit harder to make items versus a massive lack of counters... still comes out in favor of the super combatants.

Also plenty of super combatants need few if any items.


>3 The high end bloodsummons are more expensive, there are demon combating spells and items.

While the blood summons are higher cost, you must also account for the fact that the gold economy is much weaker in Dom II. As such everything is more expensive, the blood summons are only keeping pace.

In Dom I blood magic was completely out of hand. In Dom II the non-blood nations can't get into blood easy since they can no longer use SDR's, however the blood nations are just as abusive if not more. I have found blood hunting easier in Dom II than Dom I. I predict it will be a major issue in multiplayer.

I only have the demo so I can't check items well. At level 4 construction there are no anti-demon weapons. The only anti-demon spell I can find is 'banish demon', but that requires blood skill, so not much help there. Might I ask what demon items and spells you are refering to above?


>4 Fire shields and astral shields are slightly toned down.

Slightly being the operative term.


>5 Some units commonly used as supercombatants now has additional suspectibilities. Such as Arch Devils taking extra damage from cold etc.

1- Arch Devils were never popular super combatants.

2- If an AD had a ring of frost...


>6 And Lastly if the magically endowed pretender is the supercombatant that is fielded it is not so bad, first of all he is expensive to loose,

This is the crux of why the situation is bad.
Players will need to use super pretenders to compete. When they encounter each other one will die. It's not just expensive, it's NOT FUN. Players will lose their pretender and quit in frustration. We play for fun. The trend I anticipate is not fun (super combatant battle arena).


>secondly he is only one,

One good super pretender is enough to steam roll independent provinces and powerfull enough to blow away 95% of conventional armies.

One is enough.
One is needed.
In multi-play without your 'one' I predict a swift demise.


>thirdly it is ever so much more appropriate with a pretender supercombatant actually able to cast a few spells compared to the magically impaired pretenders often encountered in dom 1.

It depends how you look at it.

If you think of your pretender as a person that walks around a battlefield and zaps troops, then yes a pretender with magic is a sight to see.
However the "impaired" pretender with little personal magic are 'magical' or 'divine' by virtue of their ability to mold the world by their dominion. That's plenty "godly", in my opinion.

The only items giving 100% resistance where originally intended o be the rings, for some reason I do not recall the elemental armor also kept its 100% resistance. Fire brand and the dragon armors and the burning pearl are items that now give 50% resistance, there are more but these are the one I can think of at the top of my head.

The tuning of the fireshield does have a notiecable effect, the lucky grunts landing an occasional blow without being fried by the fireshield occasionally get a high open ended damage roll.

Well Ice devils are susceptible to fire. I do not recall how susceptibility interacts with resistance but it well might be that the sysceptibility reduces the resistance, Ill check it out.

The problem with pretenders and magic in dom 1 wasn't that they occasionally were magically deficient, the problem was that to play competitively you were discouraged to invest magic in your pretender, this was never an intention. It is one thing for a Manticore or Wyrm to rampage around with no magic, it is another for a Great mother to be out magicked by a common druid.

[Pocus]

Originally posted by apoger:
>I tested a bit Abysia. Wow... blood slaves everywhere!

The new mini-warlock is amazing.

>With several Ice Devils (I dont know there exact stats, what I know is that some are less fit for battle than the doms I incarnations)

You can't have Ice Devils if you are using the demo. Perhaps you were using frost fiends? The ID are research level 5.

no I was speaking of ID, I cant recruit them in the demo (this is why I was saying I didnt knew their exact stats), but I know something like 6 are available, with a tempering mechanism that they function like global enchants (dismissable).

What I see, is that with hundred of blood slaves in stock, Abysia, and to a lesser extent other blood nations, will have no problems fielding several super combattants. The problem of SC domination is then perhaps worse in doms II compared to doms I because only an handful of nations will be able to field them, and the non blood nations will be forced to field their pretender as SC too , so to counter act a bit the 'problem'.

we will see with retail, but it does no harm to discuss the supposed problem before...

edit : Alex you can see their stats. I have not done that, because I dont want to spoil the fun of discovery for me, but the #commander command is not interdicted in the demo.

[ October 30, 2003, 07:10: Message edited by: Pocus ]

[Calanor]

Originally posted by Jasper:
One idea is to have blood slave stem from hidden sites representing "blood lines" that you have to find, with one blood mage able to enter each site each month to get it's payoff. Another is to just let one mage blood hunt in each province.

One blood hunting mage per province sounds like a good solution, IMO.

3rd, one of the primary threats of a Super Combatant Pretender is an early rush, where the Pretender sits on your only castle. If you allowed games with more extensive starting positions there would be both more defense against this, and less damage done.

Starting positions are defined in the map file. Or rather, the provinces where you can't start is defined there. This should allow mappers to make sure that no side start too close to another one (assuming that this was what you meant?).

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Calanor:
One blood hunting mage per province sounds like a good solution, IMO.

Hmmm... I don't like that too much... it sounds artificial. I'm thinking that each turn, each province gets a hard cap on blood slaves, of ((2d6*)+(population)/2000). And each blood slave taken reduces the population by 1, or 5, or 1d6 (not 1d6*). You can search with as many commanders as you want, but there will only be so many slaves to find per turn per province... so you would avoid using too many commanders in a given province.

-Cherry

[Pocus]

the Pythium battle deacon rose in price, from 80 to 90 gp. I wonder what motivated the change?

Can someone tell me how he is supposed to be used by the way? A prot 12 priest is fine, but I prefer a theurg mage/priest for the same price, any time.

I would have though, on the contrary, that he would be tweaked down to the 50-60 range (compare it to an indep priest, not armored, but costing 40).

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Pocus:
the Pythium battle deacon rose in price, from 80 to 90 gp. I wonder what motivated the change?

Can someone tell me how he is supposed to be used by the way? A prot 12 priest is fine, but I prefer a theurg mage/priest for the same price, any time.

I would have though, on the contrary, that he would be tweaked down to the 50-60 range (compare it to an indep priest, not armored, but costing 40).

Equip them with a cheap magic weapon (Enchanted Sword, Sword of Sharpness, whatever), bless and go kill things. The new bless effects can be better for this if your god has enough magic, so he's more expensive.

I agree that he suffers by comparison to the theurg acolyte, though. Theurg acolytes are one of the most cost-effective researchers in the game (sacred halves their upkeep), especially in a magic scale.

Pythium doesn't really have that much need for priests on the battlefield anyway - they have standards. (Except vs. undead/demons, or when using sacred troops.) Frankly my only concern about seeing something of Pythium get weaker/more expensive is "will it be enough to knock them down to a level with the other nations".

Indeed, some priests seem overpriced now (others have mentioned the hierodule got a price hike - why? Cheapness was her only asset. Now she's only useful in Miasma, or at the very beginning of the game when you don't have any other temples.)

[Psitticine]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Calanor:
One blood hunting mage per province sounds like a good solution, IMO.

Hmmm... I don't like that too much... it sounds artificial. I'm thinking that each turn, each province gets a hard cap on blood slaves, of ((2d6*)+(population)/2000). And each blood slave taken reduces the population by 1, or 5, or 1d6 (not 1d6*). You can search with as many commanders as you want, but there will only be so many slaves to find per turn per province... so you would avoid using too many commanders in a given province.

-Cherry

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Provinces already do have a cap on how many slaves can be taken, based on their population and current unrest level.

That second part can be the more important part. Blood hunting causes unrest in itself, and the more people doing it, the more unrest. That makes the hunt progressively harder and, eventually, fruitless until you bring the unrest down.

You can't rely on patrolling to curb unless you want to kill off your tax base and, in this case, your supply of new slaves. You just have to (temporarily) cut your taxes and wait for the masses to calm down again. If you "over-hunt" a province, it can totally destroy its value for a good while.

You can only squeeze so much blood out of the turnips . . .