Balancing Wrathful Skies

[tinkthank]

I think JO's point should be taken more seriously.

Very early in the dom2 manual (dont have it with me, cant quote, but I will paraphrase), we can read in the section "Choosing A Nation" that some nations will have certain advantages over others, but by using proper strategy, a balance should able to be obtained. I think this is a very important vision.

It would be foolish to want to make, for example, Air Magic non-advantageous. But it would even more foolish to implement a feature which is either a no-brainer (since this will reduce the *fun* of the game, if nothing else, and that is more tragic than any maximizer's nightmare) or for which there is no plausible counter.

If it turns out that WC is good against so many things that using national troops is foolish, or that it is risk-free in that it is just too good an investment, then it seems that it is imbalanced. It would be obviously imbalanced if there is nothing which can be done against it whatsoever in many contexts.
If it turns out to be the case that if you invest in large forces of national troops backed up with strong spellcasters of your nation who have researched excellent spells, and that with these forces you are unable to beat back a few evocation-6 casters whose implementation cost a fraction of yours -- even if you successfully utilize the counters available for you -- then this seems sad to me.

Wrath Skies requires Evoc. 6 and Construction 4, but you can even forget Construction 4 if you summon storms yourself and go with Alteration 1 for resist lightning. It is easy and relatively risk-free to cast. If you lose some mages -- then so be it, there are more where those came from.

It seems to me that for such a minimal risk investment, the spell is simply too cheap. It should either be harder to cast (require a4 or a5) or require more gems or both, as well as being an evoc-6 spell. I think there should also be a way to counter the storm aspect of it (see my original post).

I think this, used for other contexts in dom2, would make the game simply more *fun*, because more options are open, and this game has LOTS of options. I dont care as much about winning or losing as much as having fun.
In other words, despite claims to the opposite that the spell is not over-effective (which may be true), I still feel that by changing it, the game would be optimized by making it more variable and hence more fun.