Ultra-Elite and Crusade

[MilesBeyond]

Been thinking about this lately. I've been putting together a combat calculator/simulator for CoM 2 and like all good calculators it shows what most already knew: most ranks provide incremental bonuses except for Elite and Champion, which are major breakpoints. Nothing wrong there, business as usual.

The issue comes with the spell Crusade. Because Ultra-Elite is only a small improvement over Elite, Crusade becomes pretty anemic for a Very Rare spell if you don't have Warlord, to the point that I generally don't want to see it.

For reference, Ultra-Elite gives an additional +1 Attack, ranged attack, and defense over Elite. Conferring +1 ATT and +1 DEF on all normal units would be pretty bad even for a Rare enchant (I know Crusade is more complicated than that - there's also the free hero levels and free starting levels for units built in cities without Altars of Battle, but still).

But this is more of a discussion prompt than a suggestion, because I have no idea what the solution would be. Buff Ultra-Elite to make Crusade more interesting, and you've just made Warlord too powerful. Keep Ultra-Elite as is and make Crusade rare instead, but again, that's making Warlord too powerful. It could do something like also have all units start at max XP, but that's obsoleting Altar of Battle, which feels bad.

Maybe something like Crusade also buffs the Ultra-Elite rank, making it more useful for non-Warlords without making Warlords too strong? But the buffs would have to be careful - they'd need to be big enough to feel worth it, but not so big that they make the Crusade-Warlord combo feel bad or irrelevant.

Anyone have any thoughts?

[Seravy]

The issue comes with the spell Crusade. Because Ultra-Elite is only a small improvement over Elite, Crusade becomes pretty anemic for a Very Rare spell if you don't have Warlord, to the point that I generally don't want to see it.

It's been a while but I think the unit levels and spell was balanced around the assumption that most units are Veteran and gaining one level to Elite is significant for them.
Yes, unfortunately Altar of Battle does make it feel less good.
It's on par with the gap between the first three levels though, only Elite and Champion are what I'd consider above average.
Also, Altar of Battle is quite expensive. It's rarely worth casting it on every city, at least I remember mainly using it on the main troop producing cities that generated the armies I used for offense, while cities producing garrison troops didn't have the spell and least not long after they finished producing the garrison units.

+1/+1  sounds unimpressive on paper but the extra defense is quite a big deal when stacked on top of all the other stats from the levels, possible other buffs and Prayer's To Defend bonus, especially when on multi figure units, Defense is rolled for each figure when damage spills over to the next. Likewise the attack bonus benefits from Holy Arms and Prayer too.

The army strength charts already tend to spike significantly from this spell which implies the effect is quite a bit stronger in boosting the effective combat value of units that it seems at first sight. A big part of that might be Veteran units getting boosted to Elite though.

It's better to look at this spell like it was a free Warlord retort. A 2 pick retort for a single spell slot is a pretty good deal tho obviously it's coming into play much later.

Do we have other spells we can compare it to?
Holy Arms... it's an effective 20% damage output increase (assuming Prayer) but no defense.
Charm of Life...this is a 25% boost to a unit's survivability in theory, more like 50% in practice (most units have lower HP and going from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3 is bigger), also affects summons.
Crusade... Assuming the average recipient unit to be Elite at 8 attack and defense, this is a 12.5% boost in both offense and defense. Weaker than Charm of Life, slightly better than Holy Arms, but much better if you gain the Elite level instead of the Ultra Elite one (in that case it's as good as Charm of Life plus additional buffs on any low hp multifigure unit)
Chaos Surge... only works with Doom Mastery but it's 2 attack, resistance and defense, more than twice as good as Crusade.  The price is creating an additional weak point in your army (unsummoning, banish, holy word etc), requiring another spell and not affecting troops retroactively, anything you produced without Doom Mastery gets no buff unless you buff them manually.
Blazing Eyes... 3 Doom damage is roughly as good as 6 attack at 50% chance to hit assuming you did enough damage to overcome armor already, but this is for the whole unit, not per figure so it's only as good as 1 attack on each figure overall. So closer to Holy Arms tier and worse than Crusade as long as you didn't need to ignore armor. However if you did need to ignore armor then it's way better.

Based on all of that Crusade feels to be about right, only a little bit underwhelming if there were too many units at Elite level already. My impression is that it's easy to underrate this spell while in practice it's quite powerful. The main power of this spell is the cost effectiveness, you only pay once and buff everything. There are very few spells that can do that to mass produced, cheap, normal units.

As for how to buff the spell without breaking Warlord, the easiest solution would be to make the spell grant the extra level plus a specific stat like "gains 1 level and 1 hp" for example.

[Anskiy]

The problem really lies with how easily accessible Ultra Elite is to Life wizards. The easy solution would be to nerf Heroism to always grant only upto Elite level, regardless of Warlord, but that wouldn't be well received and would needlessly kill what's supposed to be a good combo. A better idea is buffing its effect; the Warlords mod makes it grant Holy Armor to units produced in any city with Armorer's Guilds and Cathedrals, which makes it decently powerful without getting obscene. This isn't necessarily the direction Seravy needs to take, just an example of a buff to the spell that does work.

[GMBarak]

Been thinking about this lately. I've been putting together a combat calculator/simulator for CoM 2 and like all good calculators it shows what most already knew: most ranks provide incremental bonuses except for Elite and Champion, which are major breakpoints. Nothing wrong there, business as usual.

The issue comes with the spell Crusade. Because Ultra-Elite is only a small improvement over Elite, Crusade becomes pretty anemic for a Very Rare spell if you don't have Warlord, to the point that I generally don't want to see it.

For reference, Ultra-Elite gives an additional +1 Attack, ranged attack, and defense over Elite. Conferring +1 ATT and +1 DEF on all normal units would be pretty bad even for a Rare enchant (I know Crusade is more complicated than that - there's also the free hero levels and free starting levels for units built in cities without Altars of Battle, but still).

But this is more of a discussion prompt than a suggestion, because I have no idea what the solution would be. Buff Ultra-Elite to make Crusade more interesting, and you've just made Warlord too powerful. Keep Ultra-Elite as is and make Crusade rare instead, but again, that's making Warlord too powerful. It could do something like also have all units start at max XP, but that's obsoleting Altar of Battle, which feels bad.

Maybe something like Crusade also buffs the Ultra-Elite rank, making it more useful for non-Warlords without making Warlords too strong? But the buffs would have to be careful - they'd need to be big enough to feel worth it, but not so big that they make the Crusade-Warlord combo feel bad or irrelevant.

Anyone have any thoughts?

maybe these damage calculators can help you:

https://masterofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/Ad...Calculator
https://gmbarak.github.io/COM-Damage-Calculator/