Balancing the blesses

[thejeff]

The blood 9 bless is one of the worst. It's a little more useful if you apply it to one of the cheap mass-produced sacreds, flagellents or jaguar warriors (are there others?), instead of the standard expensive capital only units.
Still probably not worth it, though.

I wouldn't use Air on Shadow Vestals. They're ethereal and have shields. Arrows aren't a great threat. Again that's for the cheap unshielded sacreds, so they can survive to close and do damages. Astral's the same way. Practically doubles the lifespan of a flagellent, does almost nothing for giants.

Death does work with arrows, so I'd assume it works with spells as well. I had fun with W9D9 Ancestor Vessels. 2 volleys of affliction & fear causing arrows a round until they reach your lines, then they still face serious heavy cavalry.

Fire is nice, but it isn't always the best. With the heavier units, survivability is more important than more damage, so Water, Earth and/or Nature dominate.

I think they're pretty well balanced. At least they all have uses, even if some are more niche than others.

[Ygorl]

Do Death weapons make the base weapons magical? Flaming weapons are not magical, only the wimpy fire strike is, so a fire bless is not useful against high-protection ethereal dudes. Depending on how Death works, that could make it better in some cases... Teraswaerto alluded to cases where a blood bless could be better than a fire bless. A water bless is especially nasty - with more than one or two blessed guys whacking at high speed against an enemy, the multiple-attack defense reduction will often do more to help them hit than the +4 to attack. Think, e.g., of Warriors of the Five Elements... With a water bless, each gets three attacks per turn; that's nine attacks coming out of a single square, for an average defense reduction per attack of -8 (divided amongst the number of different targets, of course). Ozelotls are even scarier.

I do wish blood had a slightly more interesting level-9 bless. Mostly, though, I think things are good; which blesses make sense is hugely a matter of circumstance (Air-9 isn't a terrible idea if you know you'll be starting next to Caelum, eh?) - yeah, yeah, blah blah blah...

[normalphil]

Life drain would fit as a B9 bonus (blood-drinking/soul drinking weapons, people), but it'd be far to powerful.

The problem that I have with the existing B9 bless is that it just doesn't make sense. At all. I'd like it to be something that fit with the magic path. Anything at all, no matter how trivial otherwise.

[mivayan]

B0rsuk said:
Blood9 is a joke. You buy a (typically expensive) sacred unit and hope for it to die ? For a chance of cursing your enemy ? Because then your other units may hurt enemy more instead of simply killing them ? Ridiculous. It should either be made automatic (no MR), or replaced with Horror Mark.

Blood9 causes horror marks too, but even more rarely than curse, probably because of an easier MR save.

Automatic curse plus horror mark with normal MR save would be interesting... annoying as hell for bladewind casters, SCs, superstrong sacreds... perhaps over the top.

And unthematic if it become popular for MA mictlan...

[Baalz]

Meglobob said:
Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.

Hmmm, I'm going to have to try that out. One thing I have found with the death bless is that the affliction bonus does effect missile weapons unlike the damage bonus for f/d level 9. If you have access to holy archers (they're fairly rare) a high death bless is pretty wicked as those little 1 and 2 point damages from the arrows make people's arms fall off! On top of the obvious advantage this gives you, you can imagine the uses for "fire and retreat"....

[Gandalf Parker]

A stay-bless shroud on an assassin would be very interesting also. Even if the assassination fails, you would be likely to inflict crippling damage to leaders far within the enemies territory.

[Meglobob]

Baalz said:

Hmmm, I'm going to have to try that out. One thing I have found with the death bless is that the affliction bonus does effect missile weapons unlike the damage bonus for f/d level 9. If you have access to holy archers (they're fairly rare) a high death bless is pretty wicked as those little 1 and 2 point damages from the arrows make people's arms fall off! On top of the obvious advantage this gives you, you can imagine the uses for "fire and retreat"....

Yep, this makes death bless rather nice if you can pull it off. If it works with sacred mages which are for more plentiful then this could seriously hurt. I rarely have a chance to test, MP is my usual test ground. Hence my spectecular battlefield successes and my hideous battlefield flops. It could have been kissblade who mentioned it, I forget now.

[MaxWilson]

Blood bless.... tell me, what distinguishes extra strength from simple +damage bonus of Fire or Death ? Not only is the blood bless weaker, but also bland. In theory, some units can throw javelins further (sun warriors), and commanders could use Fire Bola better. But the difference would be pretty marginal, I think.

Fire and Death aren't a +damage. They're separate attacks, which means armor gets applied again (except that Death is AN,MR and fire is AP). Against a heavily-armored opponent (Prot 20 say), +4 to strength could increase your expected damage more than a separate 6AP fire attack. The following numbers are from a Monte Carlo sim, 2000 runs:

Str 12, Light Lance (3 dmg). Expected damage vs. Prot 20 0.548.
Str 16, Light Lance (3 dmg). Expected damage vs. Prot 20 1.8125.
Str 12, Light Lance (3 dmg) + 6 AP. Expected damage vs. Prot 20 1.322.

The fire bless is non-negligible but it's not as good as the Str +4, if we're not taking attack/defense into account. Expected damage over 2000 hits for the above-given Str 12, Light Lance fellow (Helhirdling):

Prot NoBless +4 Str Fire
1 13.95 18.05 20.18
2 12.84 17.08 18.70
3 11.88 16.19 17.57
4 11.18 15.29 15.93
5 10.26 14.04 14.95
6 9.12 12.74 13.56
7 8.31 11.87 12.14
8 7.37 11.05 10.35
9 6.33 10.18 9.92
10 5.55 9.34 8.19
11 4.90 8.40 7.40
12 4.06 7.23 6.33
13 3.32 6.58 5.42
14 2.73 5.48 4.31
15 2.15 4.72 3.83
16 1.74 3.96 3.00
17 1.27 3.38 2.59
18 0.98 2.75 2.01
19 0.73 2.21 1.60
20 0.46 1.66 1.36

For anything above Prot 8 or so, the fire attack is slightly inferior to the extra strength. To take the attack bonus into account, I simulated a couple of Helhirdlings (Str12,LightLance,Attack12) vs. a Wraith Lord (Def 15, Prot 22).

1 Helhirdling, no bless 0.0725
2 Helhirdlings, no bless 0.1895
1 Helhirdling, +4 str 0.1625
2 Helhirdlings, +4 str 0.6475
1 Helhirdling, F9 bless 0.4745
2 Helhirdlings, F9 bless 1.1065
1 Helhirdling, F4 bless and +4 str 0.392
2 Helhirdlings, F4 bless +4 str 0.971

Take these numbers with a grain of salt (I didn't do variance analysis or test for statistical significance), but it does seem clear that a fire bless's main advantage is indeed the synergy between the attack bonus and the damage bonus, and that against heavily-armored foes it's better to have high strength than an extra fire attack. This may suggest that Wraith Lords are best swarmed by Hoburg Militia under Strength of Giants, but don't try it--6 of them inflict only 0.308 damage per turn.

Python code attached.

-Max Wilson

[MaxWilson]

P.S. About the black hunters--I didn't realize the rider stayed dead. I did a quick test game and killed off all of my army except for two spiders with dead riders. My upkeep was 0. I bought two new black hunters and my upkeep went up to 8. Interesting, no? Sacred units with zero upkeep and 55 hit points.

[MaxWilson]

P.P.S. 3 Att12 Hirdmen under Strength of Giants (Str15, Broadsword) would do 1.9755. This requires no bless at all but does as well as F9 on a per-man basis. I think what's happening is that strength of numbers cancels out the high defense, and SoG cancels out high Prot.