Mod: Black Tome of Alisophocus / Blessing Hot Fix

[DrPraetorious]

On blood spells - I agree with you for the AI, but I don't want to add something that breaks the game for players. Which position do you think needs it the most?

When I do national spells for blood positions I can certainly make some of them blood-based and fatigue < 100.

Agartha can certainly get fungus spells - and definitely needs more nationals. I'm trying to bias them towards MA, though - which is a weak position, relative to LA and EA.

[Wauthan]

Hmmm... Positions? As in levels? Then I would argue that level 4, 6 and 8 could use an extra spell.

Blood/Fire and Blood/Astral is well represented and should not be boosted further.

Blood/Water and Blood/Earth are on par with few but solid summoning spells.

Blood/Nature got the craptastic Crossbreeding and Dark Vines spells. Blood/Death is suprisingly lacking any "Ultimate unholy power" spell considering the combination of dark magic. Blood/Air has only the somewhat suspect Storm Demons.

My suggestion is thus to add a weak Blood/Nature plant, fungus or transformation combat spell at level 4 (Feeblemind effect?).

An area effect Blood/Air combat spell at level 6 (random teleportation of a group of enemies?).

A powerful Blood/Death combat spell at level 8. I have no idea what would be appropriate though. Possibly a combination of several lowlevel effects into one mighty "rips your intestines out and strangles you with them" type of spell. Kills one target and scares the living daylights out of everyone around it perhaps? Or turns a group of enemies into allied low tier undead?

[DrPraetorious]

Position = nation, sorry.

Unfortunately, although spells like what you describe are *possible*, they are not currently *modable* because we can't do secondary effects - so, a spell that kills a bunch of people and then summons undead isn't possible.

I think Dark Vines is a great spell. Maybe not on a par with Summon Ice Devil, but still very effective, especially for Jotunheim. You can set ten Gygjas to spam that spell and really bring on the pain.

Blood/death is definitely a short suit that needs more spells. Vampires are just dreadful.

I was thinking of bringing over the combat summons I already wrote up for Padmassa and making them universally available. Most of them are blood/death.

I'll add some blood/nature spells to Pangaea and some nature/death or nature/astral spells to Agartha with the fungus theme. Feeblemind is a good idea.

[Wauthan]

Dark Vines with Jotunheim? Hmmm... That might be the only combination I haven't tried yet so I readily confess that I might have missjudged Dark Vines. They just didn't seem on par with other available bloodsummons.

I sort of assumed that my suggestions were unfeasible. I simply couldn't come up with appropriate spelleffects so I tried to obfuscate my answer with wishful thinking. Hopefully with time more options will open up for inspired modders.

[Nick_K]

Is an elemental battle summon that doesn't require gems really balanced? I thought the gem costs were added after dominions1 because they were considered abusable

[DrPraetorious]

Such a spell would almost certainly be unbalancing if you gave it to *everyone* - although see below.

In this context, you have to consider the nation(s) that get it, and the research level where it arrives. Is it unbalancing for Marverni to be able to conjure elementals off of a NNA caster, which it doesn't get? If the best thing you can get out of your God - or a powerful, expensive independent caster like an Enchantress - is a lesser air elemental every turn, I'm not impressed.

I'd been planning to give the same spell to Man - for the specific purpose of making the (not, frankly, very useful) Mother of Avalon a little fiercer. It might be ungamebalancing, though - Man is not exactly a weak position!

Peronally, I think they went somewhat overboard nerfing the elemental summons. I never cast them. Same story with elemental horde - it costs so much fatigue that a mid-level death caster can only zap it once - if he instead spams a lower level undead summoning spell, he gets the same number of undead without spending any gems.

But playtest it a bit and if you think it's unbalancing let me know. These spells are intended to improve game balance as well as to be thematic, if they don't improve game balance there are plenty of spells I could add instead.

[DrPraetorious]

Okay - I'm encountering problems with spells that run effect 23 on all friendly, sacred magic beings (these spells would be given to ME Agartha.)

The spell that gives Soul Vortex works fine.

The spell that gives Mossbody, or Regrowth, or both, does not. It doesn't do anything, it can be cast multiple times per turn, and it triggers unusual AI behavior.

When I can get these bugs worked out (or when I give up and change what the spells do, which is likely) I'll have a new version of the mod to post.