Life spell slot, city curses

[Seravy]

Posted my ideas for redesigning the Rare Death curses in the Death thread.

[MrBiscuits]

Am I the only one who sees curses as being completely unfun?

There's not really much you can do about them until you get disenchant area and then it's a case of casting that if you've got time/mana or putting up with the effects if not.
There's nothing a city can do to counter them, no buildings that you can build to avoid it or units you can leave in the city to stop them...so it's just an annoyance that you can't get around through careful planning.
Yes nightshade counters it (I think) but it's just random chance if you have that, it's not like you can cultivate the conditions for it to appear and protect your city.

I don't find them much fun to cast either, just destroying cities you want to capture later on.

Same deal with corruption and volcano, you spend ages getting a city ready to build adamantium units (often capturing and trasmuting a resource through careful planning) and a volcano destroys that idea forever for just 50 mana.

[Seravy]

We've updated city curses so we almost definitely have no reason to pick 4 anymore. I've also come up with a way to keep Heroic Shout Arcane, albeit I'm strongly leaning towards just removing it entirely. There is no reason why all-figure direct damage should be available to all realms, especially Life. So 1 is also out.

Which means we should pick one of these :

2. We could add a new unit buff, as we removed one. I don't think Life needs a new unit buff, but if you have an idea, this is the time for it.
3. We could separate Endurance into two spells, one for +1 To Def and one for movement, or separate the overland movement effect from the combat movement one. However Life relies heavily on Endurance for their early game to stack defense, so that would be the common effect, meaning the new uncommon would be movement, so it likely needs to be 2 instead of 1 to be worth an uncommon slot. Definitely dislike this solution either way - Endurance is the primary spell to have relevant military in the early game with Life - but it's one possibility.
5. We could move another spell into the Life realm from some other realm, and give that realm a new unit buff. Again, I don't think I can name a spell that would need moving.
6. We could try designing a completely new "special" category spell

[Nelphine]

Note our discussion about common life buffs from the test games thread. I personally would never bother with endurance as a prime pick if it didn't have the overland movement. Also note from my previous discussions how overpowered overland movement is - making it +2 movement but uncommon, would be.. unbelievably good. Like, far, far better than prayer for instance. +2 movement lets me turn standard units into the equivalent of an air ship. It removes the need for transport for speed (so, I don't need to get lucky with the wind mage, or archangels, or draconian cities; now I just need water walking). And if I DO get any of those, well, it's just 50% faster to destroy fortresses. 50% faster! Prayer is only 25% (at best!).

[Seravy]

Yes, exactly, so I wouldn't want 3 either unless we can't come up with something new that's better.

...and I think I have a perfect idea.

Sanctuary
Life Buff, Uncommon.
Casting cost : obscenely low (30?)
Maintenance : 0
Effect : Enchanted units gets <some good buffs>. This effect does not apply if the unit is in an attacking army. This spell can't be dispelled.

Since the default would be the effect applying, it would be counted outside of battle so it can't trick the AI into believing the defending stack is too weak to attack. It fits the theme of Life (strong on defense), in fact fills a pretty important hole as Life currently is weaker than other realms in city defense (Heavenly Light is decent but other city defense spells are way better).
No dispel is necessary to be reliable on defense and because otherwise the low cost would make it too easy to dispel.
Furthermore, it cannot be used for buff stacking an offensive army/doomstack and since the AI avoids attacking those, it's also very hard to be the defender.
Probably should be overland only.

Basically, I think my greatest problem right now when playing Life is, it's bad on defense. Garrisons are obviously not top tier units most of the time, but combat buffing won't be enough to stop a serious 9 unit enemy stack, unless you are already at invulnerability+lionheart levels and even have enough turns to cast them before the garrision completely dies on you.

I believe we can also use this same effect for the empty item power slot, if we end up disliking Necromancy (however then the ability won't be for Death obviously).

[Nelphine]

I like that life will again get a way to defend nodes. However, it's uncommon so it can't be that amazing , yet at current proposed cost, a 9 stack is almost 50% more expensive than cloud of Shadow though, and 3 times wall of darkness. BUT it doesn't have maintenance either.

So, cost more because it can apply to nodes and things like transports and even simply making your doomstack even harder to counterattack (I usually lose doomstacks the turn after killing the city they targetted as they are greatly weakened and so the AI considers them valid targets - this spell would defend against that).

But cost less due to no maintenance. 

Buy cost more due to needing to keep replacing it when your garrisons upgrade.


I'm not sure. At first I thought 'but life has best strategic shenanigans so has the bestdefense' but we don't want to encourage that so this could help.

Tentatively want to say it's interesting, but it has a very fine line to walk to avoid being too powerful compared to city defense spells, particularly since it can be used for more situations, while also not being too weak considering the much higher cost.


I don't think I'd want it as an item power. It's already immune to dispelling, and heroes should be encouraged to be used, not hidden.

[Seravy]

An alternative would be moving up Heavenly Light and making it stronger but I think the unit buff is better because it works on nodes (and ships).
For the buff itself, something like 3-5 defense, 1 hit point and +1 To Hit, maybe? Unsure about resistance, if it's not included you still need to bless (or use a Unicorn with this spell as the garrison) but if included, Death wizards will probably never kill a Life wizard's unit again.
The cost isn't really as high as you think - Life relies on buffing in combat so having 2-3 units the enemy cannot hurt is better than having 9 units that all die. A decent Elite Halberdier with this buff, in-combat Prayer and maybe Holy Armor and some healing should be enough to stop an entire stack.
In fact the cost is low so Good Moon and Divine Order worries me.
I've been thinking this game where I had Good Moon twice, maybe it would be better if Good Moon make city buffs cheaper instead of unit buffs.

[Nelphine]

In which case, you can defend your city, potentially better than wall of darkness or cloud of shadow, for a fraction of the cost.

That doesn't work either. IF that's the case, it would need to cost as much as those spells do, per unit.

[Seravy]

Those spells are a million times more powerful than some stat buffs on a single unit.

...however this might be a bad idea anyway. The reason why buffed stacked doomstacks (or heroes) aren't an automatic win is because you need to leave behind units for garrison and can't keep going on. A low cost defensive spell would completely eliminate that. Albeit it still requires leaving behind some semi-competent units and you'd need to cast it like 2-3 times...idk. Maybe if we get the strength of the buff exactly right so you can't get away with having only one such unit and needed at least 3...

Resistance is my greatest worry, I feel the spell would be useless without a resistance boost, but too powerful if included. Although if we don't include it then the player has to also cast bless, or summon a unicorn...

[Nelphine]

If you make it strong enough that

A decent Elite Halberdier with this buff, in-combat Prayer and maybe Holy Armor and some healing should be enough to stop an entire stack.

then no, no those city buffs are NOT a million times more powerful.

So either you make it so that you need to buff at least, say, 6 units in the stack in order to match those other spells, OR this new spell IS as powerful as those other spells.

Life stat buffs ALREADY allow for single units to stop entire stacks. That's what they do. That's WHY you don't need more city enchantments, because one decent halberdier (don't need elite, you have a spell for that) already CAN take on entire stacks (and you don't even need a halberdier. A halfling swordsmen can do it too. I've literally taken on entire uncommon stacks with one buffed halfling swordsmen.)