The logic of MoM Guardian Spirits

[rgp151]

For a long time I never understood why Life got superior melding spirits in MoM, but now I think it actually makes a lot of sense and leaves something to be desired in CoM.

All of the realms beside Life have relatively capable Common strategic summons. But they wanted Life to be different and be more dependent on Normal Units. So they didn't want to give life a Common strategic summon at all, but that would have been unfair because Common strategic summons are the best way to guard nodes. So what they did was give Life a Common summon that could meld and guard a node all by itself because forcing a Life player to put Spearmen on every node would have been prohibitive, plus a Spearman on a node wouldn't have been very helpful since Life doesn't have many effective combat spells that could be used to help defend a node.

I guess you could put a Guardian Spirit on a node to defend a node, but doesn't seem as effective as doing that with other realms and also kinda undermines what was unique about Life in MoM.

[Nelphine]

4 things:


A) did you read the discussion as to why we changed guardian spirits? (Primarily, the AI couldn't deal with it, and so the most cost effective way of guarding nodes.. was to not guard nodes. I literally had games where I had all 12 myrran nodes melded, no guards, and in 3 years, didn't lose a single mode.)

B) even if you do guard nodes, in CoM, common summons are simply not going to be good enough, except at the beginning when they are the best summons you've got; so the actual most common method guarding a node is 1 spearmen regardless of realm (and this is what I do in MoM as well, as it's simply more cost effective)

C) the MoM guardian spirit wasn't fun gameplay. The best thing to do was run around with a stack of 9 spirits, which has no purpose except to meld things; and if you were lucky, most of them are wasted anyway.

D) CoM guardian spirit buffs your troops who are guarding the node, specifically allowing life to use weaker units to guard a node effectively.

[Seravy]

Unfortunately Guardian Spirit never real worked well for that.
Of course in the base game where the AI was retarded and could only find your node like once every 50 turns, it worked. But with AI players who know how to play, the 80% chance of protecting the node is not going to do much. Every 5th spirit still takes it away and the AI will be sending like one every ~10th turn PER PLAYER. So with the typical 3 AI opponents, your node wouldn't even last two years. On top of that, for most players, taking a 20% risk of losing a critical resource is not very acceptable. And these numbers assume 1 node - the current AI is programmed to send spirits to any number of nodes simultaneously and tries to have at least 3 of them in play. So if you have 3 nodes, you'll be still losing each of them about once every 2nd year or more.

Also, in general, we want to avoid luck having an overly high influence on the game. Especially for non-Chaos realms.