Conceptual Balance Mod 1.41

[Horst F. JENS]

Originally Posted by VedalkenBear

I (personally) like the auto-summoners, except those that produce troops that require upkeep.

For the Lord of War (or the Celestial General), what is the tipping point for a summon that you have to actually command? E.g., would a Lord of War that auto-summoned nothing, but could use Summon Allies to summon 25 infantry and 5 cavalry be balanced? What about 15 and 3? I would much prefer a design that used 'Summon Allies' over auto-summon, because of the control it allows.

The point of auto-summon instead of summon-allies (as far as i understand) is that auto-summon let your pretender do other valuable things with his time, like search, forge, cast etc.

Maybe the auto-summon should be dominion-strength-dependent like with the ghost king ?

I find a batch-summon-allies Lord of War scary because i would strip him of magic and use him as a mobile troop-factory. But maybe that is exact what he need to become more popular.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by VedalkenBear

I love the Lord of the Gates. I (personally) like the auto-summoners, except those that produce troops that require upkeep.

Here's a theoretical question. For the Lord of War (or the Celestial General), what is the tipping point for a summon that you have to actually command? E.g., would a Lord of War that auto-summoned nothing, but could use Summon Allies to summon 25 infantry and 5 cavalry be balanced? What about 15 and 3? I would much prefer a design that used 'Summon Allies' over auto-summon, because of the control it allows.

I can't imagine a pretender being given "summon allies". Usually when you have a pretender you do one of four things.

1. Invade PD provinces. (cyclops, wyrm, PoD)
2. Site Search (Rainbow mages / mages with high levels in off paths)
3. Research (primarily rainbow mages)
4. Forge (Any god can do this)

Summoing allies is almost always strictly worse than any of the above 4. Basically the last thing you would ever want your pretender to do is sit around summoning chaff, or even regularish units. To balance something like this, your pretender would have to spit out 20+ units a turn. Probably more, actually. 25 infantry, 5 calvary, and 10 archers could be good. The idea is that you would literally want him to summon a small raiding force each time he is used.

Jazzepi

[fungalreason]

I found the Lord of War to be a reasonable choice as an awake SC for Bogarus. The units are only slightly worse than their national ones, but it lets you you get away with sloth scales without severely hampering early expansion efforts

[JimMorrison]

Leprosy is not just micro management. Even a single cast against a large army can death sentence 1000g worth of mages and many gems worth of summoned elites. Cast that 3x a turn, every turn on an invader and if you can stall him for a few months, he's completely screwed - unless he is just totally outplaying you otherwise.

Even at 10 gems a player with a small stockpile can ruin an enormously expensive army at relatively little cost - at 5 gems that ruination is easy just off of your monthly income. As if Death nations needed less expensive tools of destruction.


The Demons are a complicated issue - I do cast the individuals sometimes in Vanilla, but only in rare cases, otherwise I shoot for the batch summons if I intend to use them in my strategy. But 2-3 slaves apiece is just wow for some nations.

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.

[chrispedersen]

Well, I like giving gems the possibility of being used for something other than SC's

(thanks QM). However, I am concerned that Black Death at 6 too cheap. Try boosting it to 8? Or perhaps better, keep it at 6 but make the path requirement 7, instead of 4.

The problem isn't the casting of it, its the spamming of it.

[Zeldor]

QM:

I think that both Leprosy and Black Death would be viable at 8-10D gems per casting. Black Death is level4? Huh, I thought it's level 7[which it definetely should be, well, at least 6]. And QM knows why the cost of Black Death can be not so big

There are wars you don't win. Or those where you don't care for spoils. Black Death is a nasty spell, but not really great against bigger enemies, as their income is really distributed.

And could you maybe add a small item pack? Water and fire could really use more items. Especially water. Use of W gems is really boring

[Zeldor]

Black Death is level 7. Domes are level 5. So reasonable player in competitive MP game won't leave his capital undomed. The really bad thing is that some nations cannot put good domes up. Only A/S ones are really good at stopping spells. Well, to be honest, only air one is good, and it needs A4, which is extremely hard to get for many nations.

[Trumanator]

Can you stack domes? As in have both a forest dome and fire dome for example.

[Gregstrom]

You certainly can. You can have multiple domes of the same type, even.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by Gregstrom

You certainly can. You can have multiple domes of the same type, even.

I know that this used to work (IE multiple domes of the same type would be effective) now I believe that multiple domes of the same type are no more effective than a singleton.

I'm not sure, though.

Jazzepi