Balancing Wrathful Skies

[Boron]

@ Tinktank ( quoting would be too long ) :

You are not argumenting for the games sake but only for your preffered playstyle .

You love national troops but wrathful skies is just a good counter vs. national troops .
There is the really obvious solution of SCs against this though . And there are enough good summoned troops that can withstand wrathful skies long enough .

Because of supplyissues you will rarely have big enough national troop armies anyways that wrathful skies can really hurt you !

If you have e.g. 60 national troops , e.g. as marignon 30 x-bows and 30 flaggelants + 2 mages leading them this force costs you approximately 1000 gold to recruit .

The wrathful sky user has some difficulties :
If he uses cloud trapeze he can't bring with him an army .
But if you do this then he is alone and he is the attacker and could very likely be killed in the first battle round by your troops .

Furthermore you have to invest 20 airgems for a staff of storms most likely .

The wrathful skies is not the problem . As long as you don't have an army more worth then about 1000 gold using wrathful skies against you is not cost effective .
In early-midgame you rarely have greater armies and in lategame you have countertroops + SCs en masse anyways like mech men , tartarians , whatever .


Have you really played a mp game so far where wrathful skies ruined your game or do you just speculate like i did some months before with my "invincible" vampirehoard idea which turned out in practice as garbage ?

[Turin]

huh? how is killing an army worth 1k gold not cost effective?
For example to take out that marignon army I would stick a bottle of living water(so that the mage doesn´t retreat), a ring of tamed lighning and a robe of missile protection(or boots of quickness to cast air shield yourself) on the wrather and position him in the back so he is unreachable by the mages.The crossbowmen won´t hit with halved precision and only half of them firing. The flagellants will be busy with the waterelemental if they even come that far.

You stick the staff of storms on another cloudtrapezing mage, scripted to retreat.
So for 8 gems and the time investment of two mages I can kill your army worth 1k gold. Sounds like a very nice deal to me.

And this is even without considering things like immortal pretenders casting wrath, or hard to kill units like airqueens.

wrathful skies doesn´t ruin the game, it just makes it not cost effective to build national armys after the first 15-20 turns. And that means that lots of the individual nation´s flavor gets lost.

[Chazar]

Turin said:
You stick the staff of storms on another cloudtrapezing mage, scripted to retreat.
So for 8 gems and the time investment of two mages I can kill your army worth 1k gold. Sounds like a very nice deal to me.

Question: Where exactly does the staff of storms-bearer retreat to after cloud trapezing?
Code:

---

Cloud Trapeze:              3 gems

Storm:                      1 gem

Staff of Storm:            20 gems

Ring of tamed Lighting:     5 gems

Copper Plate:               5 gems

Living Clouds:              3 gems 

21 Black Hawks:             5 gems

Wrathful Skies:             2 gems



Fires from Afar:           10 gems

---

So if you use Wrathful Skies aggressively with nowhere to retreat, it is quite a little gem investment: You must bring along an expensive Staff of Storms, for otherwise all flyers present at the defensive side will easily wipe out the mages before they can even cast storm! Even if you bring a couple of decoy air mages (1000 Gold = 4-9 mages), which in turn increases the investment for cloud trapezing! So a sensible distant attack with two mages will cost about 300 gold and 41 gems = 2*3(CT) + 20(SoS) + 2*5(CP) + 2(WS) + 3(LC), not counting gems (or path-boosters) possibly required to make a mage casting wrathful skies (Air3, 200 fatigue)!

A naked AirQueen costs 50 air gems and is reusable after destroying one army...

What is the expected damage of four castings of Fires from Afar against non-abysians?

So I do not think that Wrathful Skies is too powerful: Just try out to rely on it and see where that ends! Sure, you can destroy an army with seemingly nothing by using it, but the cost-effectiveness results from the fact that your opponent will never rebuilt that army because he thinks that wrathful skies is so powerful. I use Wrathful Skies once or twice and then I rely on the fear that it invokes!

However, I do agree that Storm Warriors and similar spells should yield a bit more than 50% protection, say 60-70% and should stack differently (see earlier post somewhere else). Same is true for most other protection types...

Another thing that bugs me are those small area protection spells. Why isnt there anything in between 'battlefield' and 'area 1+'? I think that a capable air mage should be able to shield a group of 20 archers with, say 65% protection, with a single spell...

[tinkthank]

Chazar said:
So I do not think that Wrathful Skies is too powerful: Just try out to rely on it and see where that ends! Sure, you can destroy an army with seemingly nothing by using it, but the cost-effectiveness results from the fact that your opponent will never rebuilt that army because he thinks that wrathful skies is so powerful.

But I think this is just the point. Jeffr just said it very well: Because Wrathful Skies exists as it does, there is a strong disincentive to produce armies of national troops. This is not a "problem" from a balance perspective, since you can make something else (as Boron does) but from a "fun" perspective, which is in my opinion even more important: Viable, multifaceted options with which this game is overabundant become suboptimal, and that reduces the number of competetive strategies, and that is -- for me and obviously quite a few other players -- *less fun* if we are also interested in winning. Yes, WC can be dealt with; but doing so hampers a lot of the goodness of this excellent game and may potentially turn it into a less good one.

[Chazar]

No! Just keep on building those armies and keep on running against the enemy! It might be depressive, but you should grinde them down. One cannot defend every single province at once and wrathing squads are limited by the available gems. For 1000gp you can produce quite a nice number of troops (in case of a sensible productivity scale). Does wrathful skies protect against Ashen Empire in a long run? Propably not, and neither against hordes of average men at arms backed up by few better units...

PS: I think the problem really is that people are just too afraid to loose/use all those affectionately built little neat toy soldiers, even though it would be sensible to do so!

[tinkthank]

I'd like to think as you do, but I can't.

Once the initial investment has been made (3 or 4 Staffs of Storms, with Vanheim these are automatically forged with hammers, a couple of Air mages, perhaps some path-boosters, and AQ if you want) there is an exceptionally small diminishing return to continue to cast WC. 3 or 4 WC raiding-parties (and note: they dont *have* to Cloud Trapeze in; in fact, they are usually quite more devastating if they use normal movement, since then no normal army can move on top of them during the movement phase -- also note that some of the more conspicuous WC casters are also exceptionally stealthy (Van, Man LoT)) will be able to raze more than you can produce, and they need 6-8 air gems per turn. It is very difficult to make armies to match that. Almost any nation will have 8 airgems per turn by midgame, and an Air nation will often have a lot more than that.
So although I would like to continue to beat my head against a wall in a fun way, I will eventually run out of money while my opponent will fail to run out of air gems.

Also, I was taking what you said (what I quoted) very seriously: He who meets a WC-spammer will, as you say yourself, no longer build those armies. Schade!

[Boron]

tinkthank said:
I'd like to think as you do, but I can't.

Once the initial investment has been made (3 or 4 Staffs of Storms, with Vanheim these are automatically forged with hammers, a couple of Air mages, perhaps some path-boosters, and AQ if you want) there is an exceptionally small diminishing return to continue to cast WC. 3 or 4 WC raiding-parties (and note: they dont *have* to Cloud Trapeze in; in fact, they are usually quite more devastating if they use normal movement, since then no normal army can move on top of them during the movement phase -- also note that some of the more conspicuous WC casters are also exceptionally stealthy (Van, Man LoT)) will be able to raze more than you can produce, and they need 6-8 air gems per turn. It is very difficult to make armies to match that. Almost any nation will have 8 airgems per turn by midgame, and an Air nation will often have a lot more than that.
So although I would like to continue to beat my head against a wall in a fun way, I will eventually run out of money while my opponent will fail to run out of air gems.

Also, I was taking what you said (what I quoted) very seriously: He who meets a WC-spammer will, as you say yourself, no longer build those armies. Schade!

No Chazar is right imo . Normally there is plenty of money available . 100 fire gems give you between 1500-4500 money . By early lategame you will have 100 fever fetishes .

So just keep storming with e.g. 10 armies of 30 flaggellants or pikeneers and 20 x-bows and 1 or 2 inquisitors almost every turn . Such an army costs about 600-700 gold but can overcome small obstacles and maybe even thugs .
Firegems and thus money is in much higher quantities available then airgems in a normal game .

As Chazar says Wrathful skies is still quite an investment .

[Turin]

Chazar said:

Question: Where exactly does the staff of storms-bearer retreat to after cloud trapezing?

umm why would you want to cloud trapeze in the middle of nowhere in the enemys mainland? I´d just let him pay upkeep for that army and wait till he moves it to my border and is a threat to me. It´s obviously no problem then to retreat.

to point out how ridicolously powerful wrathful skies is:
in the game "god is a bullet" c´tis invaded me with a force consisting of about 120 vine ogres 40 mages(lamia queens and shamans mostly), 50 longdead archers, 20 fairies and 4 tartarian titans. He has the gift of health up, so his troops were extra beefy even after entering my doinion.
So I did three things to greet him:
I cast flames from the sky(20 fire gems) , it killed 39 units.
I cast murdering winter(30 watergems) which killed 19 units

I cloud trapezed my wrathful skies caster in(4 air gems).
When the battle started 16 fairies,20 archers, 12 mages and a few vine ogres were already dead from the artillery spells. The battle lasted 5 turns(until his forces had reached my caster and triggered his ritual of returning) . During that short time wrathful skies killed 17 mages 23 archers and a few vineogres. His mages had mostly 15-20 hp due to the goh effect.

So the lvl 6 spell was far more powerful than the other two artillery spells(note that the battle resolved last, so there wasn´t as much to kill for wc) and it cost only 5 air gems.

What could c´tis do to avoid such a disaster?
1) Equip every mage with lighning immune items. This however is very expensive and it would hurt even more to lose them due to other battlefield killing spells.
2) only field scs like his tartarians. This however means the game winner is the one who has the better scs, which is pretty boring.

Of course your point is valid, that if you use wrathful skies in the worst way possible(aggressively while losing all the equipment) , then it might be a big gem investment.
This doesn´t prove however, that the spell is not overpowered.

[alexti]

Turin said:
to point out how ridicolously powerful wrathful skies is:
in the game "god is a bullet" c´tis invaded me with a force consisting of about 120 vine ogres 40 mages(lamia queens and shamans mostly), 50 longdead archers, 20 fairies and 4 tartarian titans. He has the gift of health up, so his troops were extra beefy even after entering my doinion.
So I did three things to greet him:
I cast flames from the sky(20 fire gems) , it killed 39 units.
I cast murdering winter(30 watergems) which killed 19 units

I cloud trapezed my wrathful skies caster in(4 air gems).
When the battle started 16 fairies,20 archers, 12 mages and a few vine ogres were already dead from the artillery spells. The battle lasted 5 turns(until his forces had reached my caster and triggered his ritual of returning) . During that short time wrathful skies killed 17 mages 23 archers and a few vineogres. His mages had mostly 15-20 hp due to the goh effect.

So the lvl 6 spell was far more powerful than the other two artillery spells(note that the battle resolved last, so there wasn´t as much to kill for wc) and it cost only 5 air gems.

What could c´tis do to avoid such a disaster?
1) Equip every mage with lighning immune items. This however is very expensive and it would hurt even more to lose them due to other battlefield killing spells.
2) only field scs like his tartarians. This however means the game winner is the one who has the better scs, which is pretty boring.

What was the battle plan of the C'tis army? I can't figure out what was planned. Why were there 40 mages? and longdead archers with faeries? What would happen if somebody RoS-ed that army?

[Turin]

the battle plan was probably to build up mass communions(most of them were c´tis shamans). He had a titan scripted to army of lead vs RoS, the fairys were probably just leftovers from a fairy queen, the archers were there for the banefire effect.

RoS would be a good counter as well as wrathful skies, but it hits only once and his mages had mostly 15-20 hp from the gift of health.