Balancing the blesses

[Evilhomer]

I would rather have s9 and/or w9 on my vestals, i think air is not as good on them. In fact air is probably the weakest bless overall.

[B0rsuk]

I think fire bless is so strong because it's a perfect synergy. It increases chance to hit and damage dealt. It's stronger than just sum of the components.

Air9 bless is verrry strange. In my opinion it's not useful enough. It's basically a combo piece, because otherwise very few enemies can deal lightning damage. (does Smite/Holy Avenger deal lightning damage ? I'm trying to figure out hot to build a priest assassin). If I had a chance, it would replace Air9 with +3 precision. Sounds much more widely useful to me. It would be nice for casters and archers as well. And it fits air very well, too.

I don't like the idea of sacred troops because they often can deal with everything on their own. Wasn't this game supposed to be about combined arms, at least partially ?

Blood bless.... tell me, what distinguishes extra strength from simple +damage bonus of Fire or Death ? Not only is the blood bless weaker, but also bland. In theory, some units can throw javelins further (sun warriors), and commanders could use Fire Bola better. But the difference would be pretty marginal, I think.
Blood9 is a joke. You buy a (typically expensive) sacred unit and hope for it to die ? For a chance of cursing your enemy ? Because then your other units may hurt enemy more instead of simply killing them ? Ridiculous. It should either be made automatic (no MR), or replaced with Horror Mark.

I'd love to see sacred unit price scale depending on bless strength. This is because without a strong enough bless, sacred units are often not worth the price. I would like to use Black Hunters, but with 125 price and no bless it's ridiculous.
Does anyone know - once the rider is gone, does the Black Hunter still collect his large amount of money ? I mean, it's an animal...

[Teraswaerto]

There are big differences between the damage increase you get from Blood, Death and Fire. Flaming weapons cause an additional 6 armor piercing fire damage. It is not added to weapon's own damage roll. Death weapon works like Flaming, except not fire damage, armor negating and MR negates.

Protection, magic resistance, fire resistance all interact differently with the damage bonus from the bless. Imagine casting Weapons of Sharpness on units with +strength or units with an extra 6 damage armor piercing attack. Of course, the actual damage increase it biggest with fire almost always, as it also increases attack skill, but you can take some Fire for +attack, not always go to 9.

Blood is not that great a path IF you are just thinking about the bless, but for some nations taking high Blood on your pretender is still a good idea because Blood magic in general is so powerful. Blood 9 is weak though, as you don't need it that high for spells.

[Sombre]

I actually like Borsuk's idea about precision. It would make sacred battlemages a lot more interesting, that's for sure.

I also agree that the bonus you get at blood9 is pretty silly. I'd prefer to see something like a watered down blood vengeance based on morale or mr (obviously watered down quite a lot).

[thejeff]

The blood 9 bless is one of the worst. It's a little more useful if you apply it to one of the cheap mass-produced sacreds, flagellents or jaguar warriors (are there others?), instead of the standard expensive capital only units.
Still probably not worth it, though.

I wouldn't use Air on Shadow Vestals. They're ethereal and have shields. Arrows aren't a great threat. Again that's for the cheap unshielded sacreds, so they can survive to close and do damages. Astral's the same way. Practically doubles the lifespan of a flagellent, does almost nothing for giants.

Death does work with arrows, so I'd assume it works with spells as well. I had fun with W9D9 Ancestor Vessels. 2 volleys of affliction & fear causing arrows a round until they reach your lines, then they still face serious heavy cavalry.

Fire is nice, but it isn't always the best. With the heavier units, survivability is more important than more damage, so Water, Earth and/or Nature dominate.

I think they're pretty well balanced. At least they all have uses, even if some are more niche than others.

[B0rsuk]

Death bless and arrows
Does it really work ? I mean, you can perforate light infantry anyway. As for heavies, especially with shields, they're not likely to get more that 2-4 damage anyway. We know affliction chance is based on damage dealt compared to creature's max health. So 2 damage arrow isn't very likely to cause an affliction. How much does death compensate for this ?

Replacements for Blood9
1. I'd call it Pain Mirror. It would work much like Blood Vengeance, except it mirrors damage instead of redirecting it. Sacred unit still takes damage, it's just likely to cause automatic harm to attacker.

2. Hp increase ! For example max(3, totalhp/5). It would be roughly +15 percent extra health, or +3 hp, depending on which is higher. It would feel a bit like Earth bless, except it would help against some spells/poisons more. In cases where totalhp/5 is more than +3, it wouldn't matter much anyway because big high hp creatures usually have low protection.

3. How about Rotting instead of Curse/Horror Mark ? It wouldn't work at all against many creatures, but would cause serious harm to most living creatures.

Gandalf: unless it's a Horror Mark, Shroud of the Saint wouldn't be of much use on an assasin. I think regular Curse really isn't all that scary on a regular commander, or even priest or mage. He's not likely to go into melee.

Maxwilson: very interesting research. Also thanks for the Python code, I'm trying to learn the language because it puts fun back into programming for me.

Keep in mind that Fire/Death damage probably interacts much better with multiple attacks, because each attack gets +6 damage. As far as I know +1str = +1 damage, potentially.
Also, some of weapons have'strenght of the wielder not added' property. This is actually quite common. All kinds of sacred animals and cavalry have hoof, bite, peck etc attacks. Then there are strange wieldable weapons which don't benefit from extra strength. (20+6ap Lance is an overkill...)
Why is Sling a 'strength not added' weapon, anyway ?

Is the Lance wasted if it doesn't hit ? If true, Fire bless would be even more valuable.

I think that Fire reacts especially well with Water. Fire is a synergy with itself. Water is +50 percent attacks on average, and each of these attacks will get +6ap.

I would look into Earth bless, too. How about
+4 for units with 15+ protection total
+5 for units with total prot between 10 and 15
+6 for units with total prot between 1 and 10*

* total 0 prot means the unit doesn't wear any armor so Earth bless won't help.

[Endoperez]

Sling is a "strength not added" weapon because we there's no #clear command for weapons, and when I had time I didn't have Edi's list which shows all units armed with slings. I'd have modded it a long time ago otherwise.

#selectweapon 22
#clear
#name "Balearic sling"
#dmg -2
#att -2
#ammo 15
#range 33
#end

If I could remove the "strength not added" tag (e.g. with a non-existant #clear tag), this would do str-2 points of damage, so 8 (instead of 9 the sling currently does) in most cases. Enough experience would add to damage, the +str spells would add to damage, and the range is long enough to make slingers useful against archers.

As it is, the most I'll be able to do is a Jotun Slinger. In fact, I'll do that. You better go check the mods subforum.

[Baalz]

B0rsuk said:
Death bless and arrows
Does it really work ? I mean, you can perforate light infantry anyway. As for heavies, especially with shields, they're not likely to get more that 2-4 damage anyway. We know affliction chance is based on damage dealt compared to creature's max health. So 2 damage arrow isn't very likely to cause an affliction. How much does death compensate for this ?

[

Oh yeah, it works pretty good. If you have 400% affliction chance, then that 2 points of arrow damage to a 10 hp human is an 80% chance of an affliction.

[Evil Dave]

thejeff said:
Death does work with arrows

It does? Hm. Then either it's buggy, or the description is wrong, 'cause the description says:

Death Weapons (2 an+mr damage)
All enemies hit by a melee weapon will suffer extra damage from the death bless effect if they fail a magic resistance roll. The damage is magical and will be effective versus ethereal beings.

[MaxWilson]

I think the claim was that the affliction chance (not the 2 an,mr attack) does work with arrows, and possibly spells. In fact, we can check this.

[1 hour later]

It turns out that death blessings do affect both regular combat spells (Falling Fires) AND battlefield spells (Fire Storm).

I set up a battle between myself as Abysia (good battlefield spells) and Niefelheim (high hp, high chance of surviving wounds so we can see if afflictions hit).

#1. Personal battle spells. 2 Anointed of Rhuax, 30 PD, vs. 1 Niefel Jarl and 40 Jotun Huskarls. Abysia had a D9 blessing and nothing else. Both Anointed of Rhuax are scripted to <Falling Fires x2, Flame Eruption x3>. We compare the baseline scenario vs. a blessed scenario where there's an extra Anointed of Rhuax who does <Divine Blessing, Retreat>. I ran this five times for each scenario. I report the outcome from Niefelheim's perspective (victory/defeat, casualties, # of afflicted survivors).

Baseline:
1. Defeat, 26 killed, 1 afflicted
2. Victory, 24 killed, 4 afflicted
3. Victory, 10 killed, 8 afflicted
4. Defeat, 26 killed, 1 afflicted
5. Defeat, 19 killed, 4 afflicted

Abysia Blessed:
1. Defeat, 27 killed, 4 afflicted
2. Defeat, 20 killed, 7 afflicted
3. Defeat, 23 killed, 7 afflicted
4. Defeat, 24 killed, 7 afflicted
5. Victory, 24 killed, 7 afflicted

Clearly the death blessing is working. Many but not all of the casualties were dealt by the flame spells of the Anointed, so it makes sense that the number of afflicted isn't simply 450% in the blessed case (especially because the chance of an afflicted unit dying goes up). In the unblessed case, the only time 8 afflictions happen is when there are 30 survivors, a roughly 25% affliction rate. Compare this to 7 out of 16 survivors afflicted in a typical blessed case. This is a 43% affliction rate, clearly greater. The death blessing affects spells.

#2 Battlefield enchantments. I was really surprised to find that death blessings still worked on battlefield spells. I upped the number of Niefel Huskarls to 70, and used a single Anointed of Rhuax casting <Phoenix Power, Fire Storm, hold x3, Retreat>. As before, in the blessed scenario a second Anointed does <Divine Blessing, retreat>. The results were so clear that I only ran each scenario twice. Niefelheim always won, but got its army wrecked if death blessing was in effect.

Baseline:
1. Victory, 17 killed, 18 afflicted.
2. Victory, 18 killed, 13 afflicted.

Abysia Blessed:
1. Victory, 17 killed, 36 afflicted.
2. Victory, 8 killed, 42 afflicted.

Observe that if Abysia is blessed, fully 2/3 of the Niefel survivors are afflicted. I didn't count how many afflictions each one had, but my impression is that multiple afflictions were common. Even in the unblessed case, Niefelheim took many afflictions, but the blessing doubled or even tripled the affliction rate.

Does this make anyone re-evaluate the "best blessing" for magic-heavy nations?

-Max Wilson