Conceptual Balance Series (Mod)

[PDF]

Alexti,
I agree with you, things change when global battlefields spells come into play - in my experience it's rather after turn 40 (but I'm in peaceful Old Europe, so maybe .. ).
But when this happens Caelum gets no special drawback - their mages won't survive RoS (does Mistform not protect ?), but neither will most other mages and troops : if Caelians have SG/IC/TC they won't be scratched.
Same goes for most global BF spells, once they're in summons are needed.

[The Panther]

I did not intend for this to be a nerf Caelum post. Sorry about that. Everybody seems happy with Caelum being one of the most powerful races, as I found out in my nerf-Caelum post. So be it.

What I did intend is for the devs (or the folks doing the mods?) to hopefully fix the flying imbalance. Because land troops cannot go over even one friendly province to attack an enemy, flying troops should also be prohibited from doing this too. Ergo - flying is far superior to walking by a much too wide of a margin. Especially the flying SCs, which is a huge problem for nearly all races.

For the Dice man: you are correct. My frozen heart was how I killed the Ulm Black Knights, not the giants. I remember this now, watching the knights frozen in place while they died. It sure all runs together after a while!

[archaeolept]

well, look - technically this thread is about Zen's conceptual balance mod

now, the mod does not address flying, whether or not flying is overpowered. But the caelum problem resides in a combination of synergistic effects: flying + false horrors + wrath, for the most part (exceptionally cheap mages, able to easily get by w/ the watchtowers and sloth-3, also). Zen's mod at least cuts out false horror spam and makes wrathful skies more difficult to cast. both of these, in and of themselves, help balance out the problems. (the scale mod should also end up making caelum pay a bit more for taking sloth -3 as well).

[The Panther]

I am glad you brought this up, for I have been meaning to ask about that.

Does Zen's mods truly cut out the false horror spam? What is to prevent the Seraphs from still casting quickness followed by 4 false horrors anyway, even at 30- fatigue? The only difference I could see is that the AI will rarely cast any more horrors at the higher fatigue cost after the script ends. But they don't much cast horrors anyway, frequently preferring for whatever stupid reason to cast phantasimal warriors instead.

Has anyone tested this with the spell mod?

[alexti]

PDF said:
Alexti,
I agree with you, things change when global battlefields spells come into play - in my experience it's rather after turn 40 (but I'm in peaceful Old Europe, so maybe .. ).

RoS is Evo-7, FH is Alt-6, so they're not too far apart. If I have some Pythium/Arco/Caelum neighbour I'd prioritize RoS to have a counter if they attack me. In this case I'll have it much earlier than turn 40 (turn 25-30). If I have other enemies I may postpone this research.

PDF said:
But when this happens Caelum gets no special drawback - their mages won't survive RoS (does Mistform not protect ?), but neither will most other mages and troops : if Caelians have SG/IC/TC they won't be scratched.
Same goes for most global BF spells, once they're in summons are needed.

Mistform helps to some extent (if one has time to cast it). I'm not sure what "strong hit" is, but multiple RoS are still nasty. I haven't really tested it, but from past experience I'd guess that mage has 10-20% per RoS to get killed. And heavy troops are ok in RoS, so any army that primarily rely on heavy melee troops is reasonable safe from RoS, opponents won't probably cast RoS to kill couple of support mages and few units. In many ways Pythium and Arco are similar to Caelum. They all have deadly and easily dying mages.