Balancing Wrathful Skies

[jeffr]

As has been said in this thread, in order to compete, you must field a force that can survive Wrathful Skies. This forces everyone to use the same small subset of units (lightning immune leaders and units). The great variety of unit types present in the game (and therefore, in my opinion, a lot of the flavor) is rendered meaningless.

Even if Wrathful Skies was more difficult to cast, the ability to build gem producing items combined with the superiority of certain summoned units, makes national units unviable. Similary, unit producing items (i.e. soul contracts) product the same effect. Why have any unit except a devil (assuming you have any units at all, you could just field leaders) ?

The game is deep and it is a shame that MP is reduced to a few units and strategies. I'm not very experienced, but from what I have seen and what I have read this is true.

But, I've heard a lot of good possible solutions that would make more units viable. I would love to see large armies of both National and Summoned troops backed up by mages and not just mage armies and SCs.

Regardless, I'm having a blast It's good to see Illwinter here discussing this stuff. It bodes well for Dom 3.

[Chazar]

Turin said:
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.

Question: Where exactly does the staff of storms-bearer retreat to after cloud trapezing?
Code:

---

Cloud Trapeze:              3 gems

Storm:                      1 gem

Staff of Storm:            20 gems

Ring of tamed Lighting:     5 gems

Copper Plate:               5 gems

Living Clouds:              3 gems 

21 Black Hawks:             5 gems

Wrathful Skies:             2 gems



Fires from Afar:           10 gems

---

So if you use Wrathful Skies aggressively with nowhere to retreat, it is quite a little gem investment: You must bring along an expensive Staff of Storms, for otherwise all flyers present at the defensive side will easily wipe out the mages before they can even cast storm! Even if you bring a couple of decoy air mages (1000 Gold = 4-9 mages), which in turn increases the investment for cloud trapezing! So a sensible distant attack with two mages will cost about 300 gold and 41 gems = 2*3(CT) + 20(SoS) + 2*5(CP) + 2(WS) + 3(LC), not counting gems (or path-boosters) possibly required to make a mage casting wrathful skies (Air3, 200 fatigue)!

A naked AirQueen costs 50 air gems and is reusable after destroying one army...

What is the expected damage of four castings of Fires from Afar against non-abysians?

So I do not think that Wrathful Skies is too powerful: Just try out to rely on it and see where that ends! Sure, you can destroy an army with seemingly nothing by using it, but the cost-effectiveness results from the fact that your opponent will never rebuilt that army because he thinks that wrathful skies is so powerful. I use Wrathful Skies once or twice and then I rely on the fear that it invokes!

However, I do agree that Storm Warriors and similar spells should yield a bit more than 50% protection, say 60-70% and should stack differently (see earlier post somewhere else). Same is true for most other protection types...

Another thing that bugs me are those small area protection spells. Why isnt there anything in between 'battlefield' and 'area 1+'? I think that a capable air mage should be able to shield a group of 20 archers with, say 65% protection, with a single spell...

[tinkthank]

Chazar said:
So I do not think that Wrathful Skies is too powerful: Just try out to rely on it and see where that ends! Sure, you can destroy an army with seemingly nothing by using it, but the cost-effectiveness results from the fact that your opponent will never rebuilt that army because he thinks that wrathful skies is so powerful.

But I think this is just the point. Jeffr just said it very well: Because Wrathful Skies exists as it does, there is a strong disincentive to produce armies of national troops. This is not a "problem" from a balance perspective, since you can make something else (as Boron does) but from a "fun" perspective, which is in my opinion even more important: Viable, multifaceted options with which this game is overabundant become suboptimal, and that reduces the number of competetive strategies, and that is -- for me and obviously quite a few other players -- *less fun* if we are also interested in winning. Yes, WC can be dealt with; but doing so hampers a lot of the goodness of this excellent game and may potentially turn it into a less good one.

[Chazar]

No! Just keep on building those armies and keep on running against the enemy! It might be depressive, but you should grinde them down. One cannot defend every single province at once and wrathing squads are limited by the available gems. For 1000gp you can produce quite a nice number of troops (in case of a sensible productivity scale). Does wrathful skies protect against Ashen Empire in a long run? Propably not, and neither against hordes of average men at arms backed up by few better units...

PS: I think the problem really is that people are just too afraid to loose/use all those affectionately built little neat toy soldiers, even though it would be sensible to do so!

[tinkthank]

I'd like to think as you do, but I can't.

Once the initial investment has been made (3 or 4 Staffs of Storms, with Vanheim these are automatically forged with hammers, a couple of Air mages, perhaps some path-boosters, and AQ if you want) there is an exceptionally small diminishing return to continue to cast WC. 3 or 4 WC raiding-parties (and note: they dont *have* to Cloud Trapeze in; in fact, they are usually quite more devastating if they use normal movement, since then no normal army can move on top of them during the movement phase -- also note that some of the more conspicuous WC casters are also exceptionally stealthy (Van, Man LoT)) will be able to raze more than you can produce, and they need 6-8 air gems per turn. It is very difficult to make armies to match that. Almost any nation will have 8 airgems per turn by midgame, and an Air nation will often have a lot more than that.
So although I would like to continue to beat my head against a wall in a fun way, I will eventually run out of money while my opponent will fail to run out of air gems.

Also, I was taking what you said (what I quoted) very seriously: He who meets a WC-spammer will, as you say yourself, no longer build those armies. Schade!

[Boron]

tinkthank said:
I'd like to think as you do, but I can't.

Once the initial investment has been made (3 or 4 Staffs of Storms, with Vanheim these are automatically forged with hammers, a couple of Air mages, perhaps some path-boosters, and AQ if you want) there is an exceptionally small diminishing return to continue to cast WC. 3 or 4 WC raiding-parties (and note: they dont *have* to Cloud Trapeze in; in fact, they are usually quite more devastating if they use normal movement, since then no normal army can move on top of them during the movement phase -- also note that some of the more conspicuous WC casters are also exceptionally stealthy (Van, Man LoT)) will be able to raze more than you can produce, and they need 6-8 air gems per turn. It is very difficult to make armies to match that. Almost any nation will have 8 airgems per turn by midgame, and an Air nation will often have a lot more than that.
So although I would like to continue to beat my head against a wall in a fun way, I will eventually run out of money while my opponent will fail to run out of air gems.

Also, I was taking what you said (what I quoted) very seriously: He who meets a WC-spammer will, as you say yourself, no longer build those armies. Schade!

No Chazar is right imo . Normally there is plenty of money available . 100 fire gems give you between 1500-4500 money . By early lategame you will have 100 fever fetishes .

So just keep storming with e.g. 10 armies of 30 flaggellants or pikeneers and 20 x-bows and 1 or 2 inquisitors almost every turn . Such an army costs about 600-700 gold but can overcome small obstacles and maybe even thugs .
Firegems and thus money is in much higher quantities available then airgems in a normal game .

As Chazar says Wrathful skies is still quite an investment .

[Turin]

Chazar said:

Question: Where exactly does the staff of storms-bearer retreat to after cloud trapezing?

umm why would you want to cloud trapeze in the middle of nowhere in the enemys mainland? I´d just let him pay upkeep for that army and wait till he moves it to my border and is a threat to me. It´s obviously no problem then to retreat.

to point out how ridicolously powerful wrathful skies is:
in the game "god is a bullet" c´tis invaded me with a force consisting of about 120 vine ogres 40 mages(lamia queens and shamans mostly), 50 longdead archers, 20 fairies and 4 tartarian titans. He has the gift of health up, so his troops were extra beefy even after entering my doinion.
So I did three things to greet him:
I cast flames from the sky(20 fire gems) , it killed 39 units.
I cast murdering winter(30 watergems) which killed 19 units

I cloud trapezed my wrathful skies caster in(4 air gems).
When the battle started 16 fairies,20 archers, 12 mages and a few vine ogres were already dead from the artillery spells. The battle lasted 5 turns(until his forces had reached my caster and triggered his ritual of returning) . During that short time wrathful skies killed 17 mages 23 archers and a few vineogres. His mages had mostly 15-20 hp due to the goh effect.

So the lvl 6 spell was far more powerful than the other two artillery spells(note that the battle resolved last, so there wasn´t as much to kill for wc) and it cost only 5 air gems.

What could c´tis do to avoid such a disaster?
1) Equip every mage with lighning immune items. This however is very expensive and it would hurt even more to lose them due to other battlefield killing spells.
2) only field scs like his tartarians. This however means the game winner is the one who has the better scs, which is pretty boring.

Of course your point is valid, that if you use wrathful skies in the worst way possible(aggressively while losing all the equipment) , then it might be a big gem investment.
This doesn´t prove however, that the spell is not overpowered.

[Turin]

Boron said:
No Chazar is right imo . Normally there is plenty of money available . 100 fire gems give you between 1500-4500 money . By early lategame you will have 100 fever fetishes .

So just keep storming with e.g. 10 armies of 30 flaggellants or pikeneers and 20 x-bows and 1 or 2 inquisitors almost every turn . Such an army costs about 600-700 gold but can overcome small obstacles and maybe even thugs .
Firegems and thus money is in much higher quantities available then airgems in a normal game .

As Chazar says Wrathful skies is still quite an investment .

I don´t know about your math, but you could just alchemize those 40 firegems you need for 600 gold(27 with alchemy stone) into 10/7 air gems and fuel your wrathful skies with them. You have to factor the upkeep of that army in as well(with strat move 1 they will take a long time to reach the enemy forts) . And the wrather doesn´t even have to cloud trapeze.

[Huzurdaddi]

Turin,

I am glad to see that someone else is playing the game game I am playing.

I don't have any idea why people would like to keep wrathful the way it is. The only possible reason I can see is so that they can beatdown on people who do not know about it's power and that is sad.

[Soapyfrog]

Or they have not witnessed first hand how early it can be obtained and how devastatingly effective it is. Saying you should just keep throwing troops at the wrathful squad is insanity... there is no effective counter at the research levels that wrathful can be obtained and effectively implemented.

Just for the record, I agree, wrathful is way too powerful.