some balance questions

[apoger]

>1 Resistances are harder to come by. Most items no longer provide 100% resistance. Resistances are important to supercombatants

Most items?
Rings of frost/fire/tamed lightning seem to offer the same immunity as before.
The elemental armor gets a user all the immunities.

What items are we talking about?


>2 While mages where a good counter against supercombatants, their site searching and forging of magical items where also a vital part in decking out supercombatants. So if mages are harder to come by this will also affect the effectiveness of the supercombtants, not only the effectiveness of counters against them.

A bit harder to make items versus a massive lack of counters... still comes out in favor of the super combatants.

Also plenty of super combatants need few if any items.


>3 The high end bloodsummons are more expensive, there are demon combating spells and items.

While the blood summons are higher cost, you must also account for the fact that the gold economy is much weaker in Dom II. As such everything is more expensive, the blood summons are only keeping pace.

In Dom I blood magic was completely out of hand. In Dom II the non-blood nations can't get into blood easy since they can no longer use SDR's, however the blood nations are just as abusive if not more. I have found blood hunting easier in Dom II than Dom I. I predict it will be a major issue in multiplayer.

I only have the demo so I can't check items well. At level 4 construction there are no anti-demon weapons. The only anti-demon spell I can find is 'banish demon', but that requires blood skill, so not much help there. Might I ask what demon items and spells you are refering to above?


>4 Fire shields and astral shields are slightly toned down.

Slightly being the operative term.


>5 Some units commonly used as supercombatants now has additional suspectibilities. Such as Arch Devils taking extra damage from cold etc.

1- Arch Devils were never popular super combatants.

2- If an AD had a ring of frost...


>6 And Lastly if the magically endowed pretender is the supercombatant that is fielded it is not so bad, first of all he is expensive to loose,

This is the crux of why the situation is bad.
Players will need to use super pretenders to compete. When they encounter each other one will die. It's not just expensive, it's NOT FUN. Players will lose their pretender and quit in frustration. We play for fun. The trend I anticipate is not fun (super combatant battle arena).


>secondly he is only one,

One good super pretender is enough to steam roll independent provinces and powerfull enough to blow away 95% of conventional armies.

One is enough.
One is needed.
In multi-play without your 'one' I predict a swift demise.


>thirdly it is ever so much more appropriate with a pretender supercombatant actually able to cast a few spells compared to the magically impaired pretenders often encountered in dom 1.

It depends how you look at it.

If you think of your pretender as a person that walks around a battlefield and zaps troops, then yes a pretender with magic is a sight to see.
However the "impaired" pretender with little personal magic are 'magical' or 'divine' by virtue of their ability to mold the world by their dominion. That's plenty "godly", in my opinion.

[Pocus]

I tested a bit Abysia. Wow... blood slaves everywhere! With several Ice Devils (I dont know there exact stats, what I know is that some are less fit for battle than the doms I incarnations) at your disposal, the super combattant problem appears to concentrate mostly on native blood nations which will abuse the system.

Sure you can counter bet and steal an Ice Devil (or perhaps he is dispelled, I will have to wait for the retail to know that), but who will emerge as winner? Abysia, Jotunheim, Pan, Vanheim. The others will just have to pray that their toned down star fires, or some herald spears will be sufficient to kill them.

The only safeguard to these nations will be to have their pretender as a super combattant.

The toning down of star fires is very detrimental here. Was SF considered overbalanced? I seldomely saw it used in battles where no super combattant was present. I would like to know which spells are new that function somehow as star fire. Those which are elementals, are not armor negating, or ask for a MR check, have few chances of finding a use against a SC.

Anyway, star fire is only part of the issue.

[apoger]

>I tested a bit Abysia. Wow... blood slaves everywhere!

The new mini-warlock is amazing.

>With several Ice Devils (I dont know there exact stats, what I know is that some are less fit for battle than the doms I incarnations)

You can't have Ice Devils if you are using the demo. Perhaps you were using frost fiends? The ID are research level 5.

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by apoger:


*Elemental summons have been rendered impotent (double fatigue plus gem cost!). A basic defense versus super combatants was swarming them with elementals. Not any more.

I'll want to see more of the game before responding to the full post, but I would like to address this point: although lesser elementals are no longer as abusable as they were in Dom I, I think they are far from ineffective. Super combatants are expensive (aside from gods, the *cheap* ones start at 50+ slaves before equipment - and remember, part of your gem income doesn't depend on hiring mages, while *all* of your slave income does unless you are Mictlan; the effect is even bigger for rainbow mages, which aren't hurt at all by the increased difficulty of hiring more mages fast). I don't think many opponents will have much trouble coming up with 20 or so gems to swarm them with elementals (which should be plenty if your nation has any level 2+ elemental mages). That's not even counting the new high level "elemental swarm" spells.

Elementals are now a situational tool, not a "win every battle without casualties" tool. But I expect them to still be effective.

[Jasper]

I like that Star Fires has been toned down, as IMHO it's power was way out of line with it's level of research, skill requirement, power, low fatigue cost, no resitance, no MR save, everything. Astral shouldn't have the best evocations IMHO.

Still, I do fear that Super Combatants are a bit more powerfull. It seems to me there are several problems behind this:

1st, the blood summoning engine is still out of whack, with a ridiculous income possible out of a single province. It's output should scale with the sight frequency, should give fewer slaves on average, and there should be a hard ceilling.

One idea is to have blood slave stem from hidden sites representing "blood lines" that you have to find, with one blood mage able to enter each site each month to get it's payoff. Another is to just let one mage blood hunt in each province.


2nd, The combination of good defense, protection, luck, etherealness, Life Stealing and Regeneration. None of these things by themselves are really a problem, but their synergy is great.

Protection has enough counters I think it's fine as is, although I would like to see the accuracy and damage of missiles increased (along with cheaper light troops, and one unit per space).

Defenses in the 30-40 range are easy to come by. This could be offset by lower defense by 2 per attack instead of one, especially if the highest skill attacker were saved for Last. In particular this would help deal with Tramplers.

Luck. It's good that giving luck to others is now higher research, but perhaps it just shouldn't be possible? Barring that, make it take Astral 3+ to cast.

Etherealness. Perhaps there could be some low to mid level spells that give a group of soldiers magic weapons with minor effects?

Life Draining. Make life drain increase strength and fatigue, rather than health and fatigue. Very much in line with Elric, etc.

Regeneration. Seems fine to me, especially since without it the incidence of fluke afflictions is way to high.

My aim here is to keep Super combatants viable, but to make it much more risky to field them alone. Then, one defense against them would always be to strip them of their bodyguards.


3rd, one of the primary threats of a Super Combatant Pretender is an early rush, where the Pretender sits on your only castle. If you allowed games with more extensive starting positions there would be both more defense against this, and less damage done.


4th... Well, that's probably way more than enough . ;-)

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by apoger:
>1 Resistances are harder to come by. Most items no longer provide 100% resistance. Resistances are important to supercombatants

Most items?
Rings of frost/fire/tamed lightning seem to offer the same immunity as before.
The elemental armor gets a user all the immunities.

What items are we talking about?


>2 While mages where a good counter against supercombatants, their site searching and forging of magical items where also a vital part in decking out supercombatants. So if mages are harder to come by this will also affect the effectiveness of the supercombtants, not only the effectiveness of counters against them.

A bit harder to make items versus a massive lack of counters... still comes out in favor of the super combatants.

Also plenty of super combatants need few if any items.


>3 The high end bloodsummons are more expensive, there are demon combating spells and items.

While the blood summons are higher cost, you must also account for the fact that the gold economy is much weaker in Dom II. As such everything is more expensive, the blood summons are only keeping pace.

In Dom I blood magic was completely out of hand. In Dom II the non-blood nations can't get into blood easy since they can no longer use SDR's, however the blood nations are just as abusive if not more. I have found blood hunting easier in Dom II than Dom I. I predict it will be a major issue in multiplayer.

I only have the demo so I can't check items well. At level 4 construction there are no anti-demon weapons. The only anti-demon spell I can find is 'banish demon', but that requires blood skill, so not much help there. Might I ask what demon items and spells you are refering to above?


>4 Fire shields and astral shields are slightly toned down.

Slightly being the operative term.


>5 Some units commonly used as supercombatants now has additional suspectibilities. Such as Arch Devils taking extra damage from cold etc.

1- Arch Devils were never popular super combatants.

2- If an AD had a ring of frost...


>6 And Lastly if the magically endowed pretender is the supercombatant that is fielded it is not so bad, first of all he is expensive to loose,

This is the crux of why the situation is bad.
Players will need to use super pretenders to compete. When they encounter each other one will die. It's not just expensive, it's NOT FUN. Players will lose their pretender and quit in frustration. We play for fun. The trend I anticipate is not fun (super combatant battle arena).


>secondly he is only one,

One good super pretender is enough to steam roll independent provinces and powerfull enough to blow away 95% of conventional armies.

One is enough.
One is needed.
In multi-play without your 'one' I predict a swift demise.


>thirdly it is ever so much more appropriate with a pretender supercombatant actually able to cast a few spells compared to the magically impaired pretenders often encountered in dom 1.

It depends how you look at it.

If you think of your pretender as a person that walks around a battlefield and zaps troops, then yes a pretender with magic is a sight to see.
However the "impaired" pretender with little personal magic are 'magical' or 'divine' by virtue of their ability to mold the world by their dominion. That's plenty "godly", in my opinion.

The only items giving 100% resistance where originally intended o be the rings, for some reason I do not recall the elemental armor also kept its 100% resistance. Fire brand and the dragon armors and the burning pearl are items that now give 50% resistance, there are more but these are the one I can think of at the top of my head.

The tuning of the fireshield does have a notiecable effect, the lucky grunts landing an occasional blow without being fried by the fireshield occasionally get a high open ended damage roll.

Well Ice devils are susceptible to fire. I do not recall how susceptibility interacts with resistance but it well might be that the sysceptibility reduces the resistance, Ill check it out.

The problem with pretenders and magic in dom 1 wasn't that they occasionally were magically deficient, the problem was that to play competitively you were discouraged to invest magic in your pretender, this was never an intention. It is one thing for a Manticore or Wyrm to rampage around with no magic, it is another for a Great mother to be out magicked by a common druid.

[Pocus]

Originally posted by apoger:
>I tested a bit Abysia. Wow... blood slaves everywhere!

The new mini-warlock is amazing.

>With several Ice Devils (I dont know there exact stats, what I know is that some are less fit for battle than the doms I incarnations)

You can't have Ice Devils if you are using the demo. Perhaps you were using frost fiends? The ID are research level 5.

no I was speaking of ID, I cant recruit them in the demo (this is why I was saying I didnt knew their exact stats), but I know something like 6 are available, with a tempering mechanism that they function like global enchants (dismissable).

What I see, is that with hundred of blood slaves in stock, Abysia, and to a lesser extent other blood nations, will have no problems fielding several super combattants. The problem of SC domination is then perhaps worse in doms II compared to doms I because only an handful of nations will be able to field them, and the non blood nations will be forced to field their pretender as SC too , so to counter act a bit the 'problem'.

we will see with retail, but it does no harm to discuss the supposed problem before...

edit : Alex you can see their stats. I have not done that, because I dont want to spoil the fun of discovery for me, but the #commander command is not interdicted in the demo.

[ October 30, 2003, 07:10: Message edited by: Pocus ]

[Calanor]

Originally posted by Jasper:
One idea is to have blood slave stem from hidden sites representing "blood lines" that you have to find, with one blood mage able to enter each site each month to get it's payoff. Another is to just let one mage blood hunt in each province.

One blood hunting mage per province sounds like a good solution, IMO.

3rd, one of the primary threats of a Super Combatant Pretender is an early rush, where the Pretender sits on your only castle. If you allowed games with more extensive starting positions there would be both more defense against this, and less damage done.

Starting positions are defined in the map file. Or rather, the provinces where you can't start is defined there. This should allow mappers to make sure that no side start too close to another one (assuming that this was what you meant?).

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Calanor:
One blood hunting mage per province sounds like a good solution, IMO.

Hmmm... I don't like that too much... it sounds artificial. I'm thinking that each turn, each province gets a hard cap on blood slaves, of ((2d6*)+(population)/2000). And each blood slave taken reduces the population by 1, or 5, or 1d6 (not 1d6*). You can search with as many commanders as you want, but there will only be so many slaves to find per turn per province... so you would avoid using too many commanders in a given province.

-Cherry

[Pocus]

the Pythium battle deacon rose in price, from 80 to 90 gp. I wonder what motivated the change?

Can someone tell me how he is supposed to be used by the way? A prot 12 priest is fine, but I prefer a theurg mage/priest for the same price, any time.

I would have though, on the contrary, that he would be tweaked down to the 50-60 range (compare it to an indep priest, not armored, but costing 40).