Message from Abysia

[Morkilus]

The more I think about it, the more I think aging is a great concept in this game. Think about all the horrible things that can happen to you in this game and in myth: Barbarians pillaging, vampires, catching a crippling disease, losing your daughters to the local warlock apprentic, being forced into slavery by sea nymphs (maybe that's not too bad...) Through history, fantastic and realistic literature has always illustrated man's fear of those things, but aging has always been prevalent. The Greeks were practically obsessed with it. So I don't mind having this in the game, and without it I wouldn't get that cool Decay effect where my troops age rapidly. The first time I saw that happen (after attacking some TC troops for some reason..? I loled.

I always liked the old Ultima IV and D&D description for the Haste spells, where you took a year of age for casting the spell as a side effect. Anyone know if this happens in the game? It would be a great touch if it did.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think aging also took care of the tactic of heavily defended labs with eternally improving mages that were such a game definition of games with large maps, long running games.

Also for mega-equiped last-forever super combatants (altho not as much) but it can affect your leaders so that they arent eternally improving. It abit of a realistic "use them while they are young" situation now.

[Archonsod]

PrinzMegaherz said:
Yes, they stop aging. But do they prevent old people from getting diseases?

Apparently so, though I'm not sure if that's intentional. Then again, if the chance of affliction is age dependent it may just be that the mages are stuck with a miniscule chance of an affliction.Either way, I haven't seen a mage (or pretender) develop an affliction through age once they're wearing the boots.

[DominionsFan]

Gandalf Parker said:
I think aging also took care of the tactic of heavily defended labs with eternally improving mages that were such a game definition of games with large maps, long running games.

Also for mega-equiped last-forever super combatants (altho not as much) but it can affect your leaders so that they arent eternally improving. It abit of a realistic "use them while they are young" situation now.

Yeap, this is totally true. This way it is more balanced, especially because mage spamming was very annoying in Doms 2. Well we can still spam mages sadly [that is why I've mentioned that mages should be extremely expensive], but now we can also loose them because of the aging system. It is pretty cool imo. Anyways this is my subjective opinion, especially about the mage spamming part, since probably many players never had a problem with that.

[curtadams]

Well, I just had my first experience with an age-susceptible kingdom and I have to agree aging is overdone. I was playing Marignon, no growth/death, and those Witch hunters were dropping like flies. First, it really clashed with my concept of Marignon. I'd always assumed the initiate/hunter/Grand Master business was one of those youth-adult-old man contrasts and it certainly doesn't feel right for all competent witch hunters to be doddering old men with a life expectancy of four of five year preaching from the pulpit. Second, it made Witch Hunters almost useless - if I'm going to put up with aging, I'm normally going to do it only for relatively rare particular issues, like a critical combat or a site search team, or if I can manage some treatment, and I'll just go ahead and get a Grand Master then. Third, it's just too weird that Witch Hunters age and die as fast as High Inquisitors, who really *are* supposed to be doddering old men. Simarily, it was odd for my Tien Chi S&A Celestial Masters to die so fast if they could make it to 300. If it takes them that long to get old, it should take a little longer to actually die than for a normal human.

In real life aging is an exponential process and the chance of death doubles every x years, where x is relatively constant for a given species (it's 8 years for humans). I figure the base chance of dying should be about 100/(years to get old), or about 2%/year for a human. It should double every (years to get old)/6 years (8 for a human, assuming a start around 50) So a full formula would be 100/years to get old)*2^(age-(years to get old).