Balancing Wrathful Skies

[Tuidjy]

> The troop mix you describe is a consequence of wrathful skies, amongst other
> things, though. So saying that the spell is spell is not a problem based on
> that is arguably a little disingenious.

Exactly, so instead of trying to get rid of all the other things, let us allow
the nation's mages to protect their troops. Here are a few 'other things' and
a few suggestions:

Wrathful skies, Fire Storm, etc... - allow elemental resistance spells to stack.
Astral Tempest, Soul Drain, etc... - allow magic resistance spells to stack.
Life drain - introduce a 'Hold Life' flag, as well as caster, AE and mass buffs.
Monstrous, etherial, magical, undead meat shields - create spells similar
to 'Weapons of sharpness' that enchant the troops' weapons accordingly.

Speaking for myself, I would love to be able to use magic to make my troops
matter in late game. It's a bummer to have to shelter one's three-stars
principles behind walls because they have become irrelevant.

And as an additional bonus, by introducing all these protection/buffing spells
in Dominions III, Illwinter can strenghten Water magic, which, right now, is
somewhat lacking.

[johan osterman]

Tudijy: Stacking enchantments/buffs would reward players trying to cover all possible paths in order to reap the full benefits of the buffs. While this might serve to deal with wrathfull skies and increase the duration of national troops it would promulgate an unappealing warlords III'ish mischmasch buff approach. I would prefer if you did not stand to gain from buffing soldiers with combinations of the type: warriors of muspelheim + warriors of niefelheim + army of lead + army of gold + body ethreal + barkskin. I find ethreal, cold and heat aspected, soldiers with bodies of both lead and gold with bark for skin a little unaestetic.

[Boron]

Will there be a 2nd form of upkeep in form of Mana or something like that for spells too in Dom 3 ?

Then the issue could be solved imo by making "permanent" spells which give this way "enchanted" troop 50% resistence but cost upkeep each turn .
E.g. a spell for lightning resistence which costs 1 airgem per creature to cast + 1 Mana as Upkeep each turn and gives the troop 50% lightning resistence .

Mana is then e.g. 5 per Province + 5xNumber of Gems gained from sites/turn + 1 per 1000 Population if you have a magically skilled nation like Ermor etc. .

I would wish some more possibilities to enchance troops like Tuidjy as well because i agree with him .
In current Dominions you can outfit all your leaders very well and prepare them well for most situations with the right equipment but with your troops you can only do battlefield buffs which are expensive and not good enough .

So you just try to get the really good troops as quick as possible which are mainly the 200+ hp beasts like abominations , then Mech men and finally the really cheap creatures which are still very powerful , mainly vampires from Vampire lords + devils from soul contracts .
After turn 50 if you see troops you will only see troops from the above mentioned types which are about 10 out of about 500 possible troops .

So a system with permanent ritual like buffs for troops in Dom 3 would be imo a good idea . This is quite well done in Aow 2 SM already (one of the few things where it is a bit superior to Dom 2 ) .

A 2nd form of magical upkeep for all summons would also reduce the extremely exponential growth in lategame a lot because you would have to household with your resources a bit more and wouldn't be able to do things like summoning 30 new Vampire lords from turn 70 or 80 on each turn .

[Tuidjy]

This is wierd. One hour ago, I downloaded the Last turn of the multiplayer game
I'm playing, and as I was looking at my Arch-devils, Ice devils, Storm demons,
and plain old devils, shielded by Abysian Intantries, led by a Virtue, and
backed by hordes of archers and crossbowmen, I was reminded of my favorite
Warlords III stacks - based on the orc race's debuff units (disease, poison,
fear, etc...) and padded with Allies like Archangels, Demons and Dragons.

I am afraid that as a card carrying member of Powergamers Anonymous I should
just shut up and not draw too much attention to myself, lest I suffer the
wrath of the Powers that Be.

[tinkthank]

I think JO's point should be taken more seriously.

Very early in the dom2 manual (dont have it with me, cant quote, but I will paraphrase), we can read in the section "Choosing A Nation" that some nations will have certain advantages over others, but by using proper strategy, a balance should able to be obtained. I think this is a very important vision.

It would be foolish to want to make, for example, Air Magic non-advantageous. But it would even more foolish to implement a feature which is either a no-brainer (since this will reduce the *fun* of the game, if nothing else, and that is more tragic than any maximizer's nightmare) or for which there is no plausible counter.

If it turns out that WC is good against so many things that using national troops is foolish, or that it is risk-free in that it is just too good an investment, then it seems that it is imbalanced. It would be obviously imbalanced if there is nothing which can be done against it whatsoever in many contexts.
If it turns out to be the case that if you invest in large forces of national troops backed up with strong spellcasters of your nation who have researched excellent spells, and that with these forces you are unable to beat back a few evocation-6 casters whose implementation cost a fraction of yours -- even if you successfully utilize the counters available for you -- then this seems sad to me.

Wrath Skies requires Evoc. 6 and Construction 4, but you can even forget Construction 4 if you summon storms yourself and go with Alteration 1 for resist lightning. It is easy and relatively risk-free to cast. If you lose some mages -- then so be it, there are more where those came from.

It seems to me that for such a minimal risk investment, the spell is simply too cheap. It should either be harder to cast (require a4 or a5) or require more gems or both, as well as being an evoc-6 spell. I think there should also be a way to counter the storm aspect of it (see my original post).

I think this, used for other contexts in dom2, would make the game simply more *fun*, because more options are open, and this game has LOTS of options. I dont care as much about winning or losing as much as having fun.
In other words, despite claims to the opposite that the spell is not over-effective (which may be true), I still feel that by changing it, the game would be optimized by making it more variable and hence more fun.

[Boron]

@ Tinktank ( quoting would be too long ) :

You are not argumenting for the games sake but only for your preffered playstyle .

You love national troops but wrathful skies is just a good counter vs. national troops .
There is the really obvious solution of SCs against this though . And there are enough good summoned troops that can withstand wrathful skies long enough .

Because of supplyissues you will rarely have big enough national troop armies anyways that wrathful skies can really hurt you !

If you have e.g. 60 national troops , e.g. as marignon 30 x-bows and 30 flaggelants + 2 mages leading them this force costs you approximately 1000 gold to recruit .

The wrathful sky user has some difficulties :
If he uses cloud trapeze he can't bring with him an army .
But if you do this then he is alone and he is the attacker and could very likely be killed in the first battle round by your troops .

Furthermore you have to invest 20 airgems for a staff of storms most likely .

The wrathful skies is not the problem . As long as you don't have an army more worth then about 1000 gold using wrathful skies against you is not cost effective .
In early-midgame you rarely have greater armies and in lategame you have countertroops + SCs en masse anyways like mech men , tartarians , whatever .


Have you really played a mp game so far where wrathful skies ruined your game or do you just speculate like i did some months before with my "invincible" vampirehoard idea which turned out in practice as garbage ?

[Boron]

Tuidjy said:
This is wierd. One hour ago, I downloaded the Last turn of the multiplayer game
I'm playing, and as I was looking at my Arch-devils, Ice devils, Storm demons,
and plain old devils, shielded by Abysian Intantries, led by a Virtue, and
backed by hordes of archers and crossbowmen, I was reminded of my favorite
Warlords III stacks - based on the orc race's debuff units (disease, poison,
fear, etc...) and padded with Allies like Archangels, Demons and Dragons.

I am afraid that as a card carrying member of Powergamers Anonymous I should
just shut up and not draw too much attention to myself, lest I suffer the
wrath of the Powers that Be.

There is a figure of speech :
Strategy is about winning .
Dominions is a hardcore strategy game so its fangroup should be powergamers .

Fortunately there are so many things to think of that you always forget something so dominions is complex enough and you can't really powergame .
Unlike e.g. Age of Wonders 2 or most other games where it is quickly obvious whats powerful and what is not .

Cause as soon as i find lots of cheap exploits normally a game gets boring for me . In dominions this is nearly impossible

[Turin]

huh? how is killing an army worth 1k gold not cost effective?
For example to take out that marignon army I would stick a bottle of living water(so that the mage doesn´t retreat), a ring of tamed lighning and a robe of missile protection(or boots of quickness to cast air shield yourself) on the wrather and position him in the back so he is unreachable by the mages.The crossbowmen won´t hit with halved precision and only half of them firing. The flagellants will be busy with the waterelemental if they even come that far.

You stick the staff of storms on another cloudtrapezing mage, scripted to retreat.
So for 8 gems and the time investment of two mages I can kill your army worth 1k gold. Sounds like a very nice deal to me.

And this is even without considering things like immortal pretenders casting wrath, or hard to kill units like airqueens.

wrathful skies doesn´t ruin the game, it just makes it not cost effective to build national armys after the first 15-20 turns. And that means that lots of the individual nation´s flavor gets lost.

[atul]

The_Tauren13 said:
From what I've heard, in Dom I national troops were too good and spells too weak.

I think one big problem in Dom 1 was that the battlefield spells such as wrathful skies were totally negated by the 100% immunity protection spells granted. And when all the battlefied-wide protection spells were nerfed to grant only 50% protection while BF-wide damage spells were left as they stand...

And in addition to that, wrathful skies has the perk of being lightning damage - armour negating and stun.

[Verjigorm]

I'm a big proponent of spells that counter others. WS may be too strong/too easy to cast, but adding say a battlefield version of dispel or changing the dynamic of battlefield enchants--maybe working them like globals so that only the most powerful one(s) can exist at a single time would be interesting. In such cases spells like Gaia's Blessing that place an effect on all friendly units could be changed from Battlefield enchants (spells that produce effects on a cyclical basis) to Mass enchants (spells that create a durable effect).