Conceptual Balance Mod 1.41

[iceboy]

Is it me or do some of the heroes and pretenders need balancing with all of the troops they spawn? Such as the Lord of the Gates with all of the shades it spawns it becomes unstoppable!

[quantum_mechani]

Leprosy: I'm not entirely convinced it's unbalanced at 5 gems... but I can certainly see that the effects can be rather annoying and mm inducing, so maybe it would be for the best if it were cast less.

Early Blood summons: It's a tough situation, on the one hand I'm not sure even for current prices they will see much use early, on the other hand I can see the point that they might abusable late game (and by that I mean displace other spells). The issue is, mage time is too valuable to waste on them when you first research them, but once you have everything researched all the sudden you have a huge glut of mage time. I'm not sure there is a real solution to this, but I suppose I can mess with the prices a bit again.

Lord of the Gates: I'm actually really pleased to actually get a compliant about him... he has been stacking up boosts in vain since dom2.

Out of all the troop generating pretenders/heroes he gets by far the most, but I'm not quite convinced it's overkill. I've played against several people trying to leverage the shade spam, and it's usually not to hard to use the usual undead counters on them.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by quantum_mechani

Leprosy: I'm not entirely convinced it's unbalanced at 5 gems... but I can certainly see that the effects can be rather annoying and mm inducing, so maybe it would be for the best if it were cast less.

Early Blood summons: It's a tough situation, on the one hand I'm not sure even for current prices they will see much use early, on the other hand I can see the point that they might abusable late game (and by that I mean displace other spells). The issue is, mage time is too valuable to waste on them when you first research them, but once you have everything researched all the sudden you have a huge glut of mage time. I'm not sure there is a real solution to this, but I suppose I can mess with the prices a bit again.

Lord of the Gates: I'm actually really pleased to actually get a compliant about him... he has been stacking up boosts in vain since dom2.

Out of all the troop generating pretenders/heroes he gets by far the most, but I'm not quite convinced it's overkill. I've played against several people trying to leverage the shade spam, and it's usually not to hard to use the usual undead counters on them.

Damn you :O

Address the global I mentioned!

You buffed Gift of Nature's Bounty, but left Fata Morgana useless!

Jazzepi

[quantum_mechani]

Damn you :O

Address the global I mentioned!

You buffed Gift of Nature's Bounty, but left Fata Morgana useless!

Jazzepi

Heh, sorry, I didn't mention Fata Morgana because I had already buffed it for next version. I don't think Gift of Nature's Bounty is boosted any more though, seems to see a lot more use than in dom2 even without the buff.

About leprosy and black death- while they are superb at screwing somebody over they are less useful for the ultimate goal of winning. Strategies evolving around them take simply too long to come to fruition, and in black death's case ruins your spoils as well. As far as destroying armies leprosy is many times less scary than other options the late game can lob at them (any battlefield damage spell, flames from the sky). And for the purposes of any reasonable length conflict, the effect can be 90% offset simply by castings of astral healing... of course once the war is over having lots of diseased things is a mm nightmare. Given that, it will probably be 8 gems next version.

For example, with a strong Blood income, over 14 turns you can make a raw Empowerment + Booster (total = 68 slaves w/hammer) outperform base batch spell casting. So if you get Blood started early, and take a long view, even a nation without cheap B+? mages can do better with the single casts at 2 slaves per demon. Even 3/demon isn't too bad, it's not until they cost at least 4 apiece that it's just not worth it in a reasonable amount of time.

The problem with this analysis is that it totally ignores mage time, which is the critical factor far more than 2-3 slaves difference.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by quantum_mechani

Heh, sorry, I didn't mention Fata Morgana because I had already buffed it for next version. I don't think Gift of Nature's Bounty is boosted any more though, seems to see a lot more use than in dom2 even without the buff.

I meant you buffed Gift of Nature's Bounty from vanilla version

I think it's fine as you have it now. It's difficult to research, and expensive castings of gift of health are more in vogue these days then extra money.

Jazzepi

[JimMorrison]

[quote=quantum_mechani;684751]

About leprosy and black death- while they are superb at screwing somebody over they are less useful for the ultimate goal of winning. Strategies evolving around them take simply too long to come to fruition, and in black death's case ruins your spoils as well. As far as destroying armies leprosy is many times less scary than other options the late game can lob at them (any battlefield damage spell, flames from the sky). And for the purposes of any reasonable length conflict, the effect can be 90% offset simply by castings of astral healing... of course once the war is over having lots of diseased things is a mm nightmare. Given that, it will probably be 8 gems next version.

Flames From the Sky is 50 gems. For this, it tends to kill less units outright, than Leprosy will Disease. The overland kill spells are HP+Prot dependent, while Leprosy is only an MR check - many more later game and elite units can survive multiple fire/ice bombardments, and yet still more than likely die to the first penetration boosted Leprosy that touches them. The spell truly is a bargain at 10D, I've seen it used to great effect multiple times now - including the current situation, where it is being entirely abused at 5D/cast.....

The problem with this analysis is that it totally ignores mage time, which is the critical factor far more than 2-3 slaves difference.

It hardly ignores mage time. To cast the big batch spells usually requires you to use your pretender, a summoned Demon Lord, or a special hero, and the use of artifact boosters. Building just 1 castle where you pump out cheapo low path demon spammers allows your big guys to do other things. For a little bit of gold and effort, you've allowed someone to exchange 7 nearly useless little no name mages, for the use of their most powerful mages. I'd do that in a heartbeat any chance I got. Dropping the cast from 7 to 2 makes that choice feasible, and economical - and it makes it virtually impossible to boost the single caster high enough to justify using the batch spell over the single spam.

[quantum_mechani]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

Flames From the Sky is 50 gems. For this, it tends to kill less units outright, than Leprosy will Disease. The overland kill spells are HP+Prot dependent, while Leprosy is only an MR check - many more later game and elite units can survive multiple fire/ice bombardments, and yet still more than likely die to the first penetration boosted Leprosy that touches them. The spell truly is a bargain at 10D, I've seen it used to great effect multiple times now - including the current situation, where it is being entirely abused at 5D/cast.....

Firstly, Flames from the Sky has been 35 gems in every version of Dom3, including every CB version. Secondly, the spell can be stacked in one turn to kill even higher hp things. Thirdly, for the most part the things that escape other artillery also laugh off leprosy. You also seem to be saying failing the mr check = death which is an extreme exaggeration. It's a rare situation you don't have healing spells to prolong the effected units almost indefinitely, or access to some kind of healing to solve the problem completely.

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

It hardly ignores mage time. To cast the big batch spells usually requires you to use your pretender, a summoned Demon Lord, or a special hero, and the use of artifact boosters. Building just 1 castle where you pump out cheapo low path demon spammers allows your big guys to do other things. For a little bit of gold and effort, you've allowed someone to exchange 7 nearly useless little no name mages, for the use of their most powerful mages. I'd do that in a heartbeat any chance I got. Dropping the cast from 7 to 2 makes that choice feasible, and economical - and it makes it virtually impossible to boost the single caster high enough to justify using the batch spell over the single spam.

It would indeed make a lot of sense to just build a fort, pump mages there to use the low level spells. Except, people are _already_ generally putting the maximum amount of gold they can into produceing mages. Which means that in general, sacrificing a bunch of mages for that is going to put you far behind in research of where you would be, and all the demons you can muster are probably not going to be a big help if you are behind in research. It's especially compounded if you already are using up a significant portion of your mages to sustain a blood economy.

Of course, as I was saying, once research is done, the whole situation changes. Suddenly you are rolling in more mage time than you know what to do with. So I certainly see the problem with the spells, I just do not see it being any kind of issue in the early/middle game (which is where they should be being cast). The real issue is that mage time goes almost instantaneously from being indispensable to almost worthless, it's very hard to make the spells account for both stages.

[chrispedersen]

In small to medium maps, one third of your income can be derived soley from the capital. Hence *two* castings of Black death are sufficient to drop income 20%.

Way more than an adequate return for mage time.

[Atreidi]

I'll just put it out there:

What is the Conceptual Balance Mod? What does it do?

Could you post this in the Original Post,
Or in a word file in the zip?

Thanks.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by Atreidi

I'll just put it out there:

What is the Conceptual Balance Mod? What does it do?

Could you post this in the Original Post,
Or in a word file in the zip?

Thanks.

It's a general mod that, for the most part, simply makes spells/creatures/items more effective/cheaper/easier to cast so that there are more options for a given nation. It does nerf a few things (like fire arrows) by making them more expensive/harder to cast, but in general it just opens up new options.

Jazzepi