I've played 3 complete games since I first posted this, and have a bit more to say:
1.) In my second game, I played a blue/white + astrologer + alchemy combo. Three notable things here:
a.) Astrologer + Uranus' Blessing is pretty amazing, as it's giving you 21 skill power city (on top of 26 power income, at full development) for the cost of 7 mana per turn. (and plus it's a pretty decent city defense enchantment). I had 6 core cities with amplifying towers (thanks to some early power spending on research to nap Inspirations), and then took another 6 with them from an overseas invasion of kali (who was playing klackons, and had amp towers every size 5 city). That's 252 overland casting power and ~300 power income by itself! Add in Aether Binding, and man I had a ton of casting skill in this game. Then again, I was spending most of it on city enchantments, heh, after I stopped bother with unit enchantments (see below), so who knows how much good it actually did me. Did get some sick very rare global enchantments into play later though, such as Suppress Magic and...
b.) Enlightenment is super nuts. I had thought Aether Binding was a hell of a deal to give you hundreds of virtual power every turn, but then, on the first turn I cast Enlightenment, my research went from like 200 rp/turn to 800! (a strange thing though: it didn't show up on the meter until I went into each town individually). By the time the game ended, I was pulling in around 1500 RP per turn at 0% slider.
c.) (Apologies in advance if I get a bit ranty here)
Obviously, with life and sorcery I tried stacking unit enchantments again, and again felt very frustrated with the current dispel behavior. In this game, there were no runemasters (Horus was Archmage/Myrran, Kali and Sharee were both Conjurer/Artificer, idr what Ariel was but Kali murdered her by like 1404), and, although a couple wizards did cast Aether Binding, I would quickly disjunction it. So, no extra-powered dispels here. However, my spell locks and high-powered enchantments were still getting stripped effortlessly. To give an example, in my first big battle against Horus he cast dispelling wave, which the description says is half-powered compared to dispel magic, and it stripped off 6 outta my 8 spell locks on units! In the next battle, at his fortress, I saved beforehand and ran an experiment - out of 10 fights, 2 of them saw 4 spell locks die on the first dispelling wave, four fights killed 5 locks, and the remaining four fights killed 6 locks. And, because it was a fortress fight, his follow-up dispelling waves (from his heroes) and dispels (magicians) of course basically stripped my units bare of a couple thousand points of mana (and casting skill) worth of enchantments. I still easily won the fight (and later the game), but man was this so frustrating. Casting enchantments in-battle wasn't much better, as stuff cast at the start of battle would be immediately stripped, and waiting a few turns (for them to blow their skill on other things) might mean the battle is already lost. Despite my massive amount of casting skill in this game, I felt pretty ineffectual casting in battle. To make matters worse, Horus eventually started spamming dispelling wave on the world map at my stacks, which seems to ignore the presence of spell lock completely and strip out whatever enchantments it wants. I quickly gave up bothering with unit enchantments altogether, except against nodes and towers, and a bit of bless spam to bait out dispelling wave at the start of combat against wizards.
I understand that stacking unit enchantments can be very overpowered and thus there needs to be a way to counter it, but there's gotta be a better solution than making them so brittle that they fall off to the slightest touch. Even spell lock... I don't know the dispel formula, but spell-lock says it resists at 150 power, which sounds like a lot more than the maximal 40 dispel power, or the maximal 100 dispelling wave power (which should be like a strength-75 dispel, according to the description). And yet even spell lock can't maintain itself more than 25% of the time! And, without spell lock (a school-specific rare, which you have no guarantee of getting even with several sorcery books), almost no unit enchantment will live past the first round of combat. I don't know... some alternative ideas:
1.) make the overland enchantment cost more
2.) weaken the effects of various unit enchantments
3.) maybe even limit the maximum number of enchantments a unit can have on it at any one time (maybe to 4?)
4.) make dispel more effective the more enchantments are stacked onto a unit (say, increasing non-linearly after 2?)
or who knows, but anything's gotta be better than this situation.
You could say that I could take runemaster, but a 2 retort pick shouldn't be required just to use half the spells in two of the realms. It also doesn't really give anything else to enhance a blue or white wizard's life. In contrast, I can still use heavy Chaos magic without channeler, or Nature without conjurer - it'll just be expensive. I know runemaster gives a huge discount on research and casting the SoM, but I've always tried to avoid that victory condition regardless of my situation because it is still maximally tedious to achieve a SoM victory. And then there's the fact that if the enemy has runemaster (or has Aether Binding in play before you get disjunction), then you're right back where you started, with unit enchantments being near useless to you. If you want this retort to essentially be a requirement for using unit enchantments at all, it'd be much better if it lost the arcane bonus and became a 1 retort pick, or perhaps gained some sort of small discount to enchantments if you want it to stay at 2 picks.
2.) Chaos is super crazy when you get to the very rares! Half the spells seem potentially super-overpowered (although expensive), but I guess very rares should be about that. Call Chaos can cripple whole stacks, Chaos Surge + Doom Mastery + Warp Reality is amazing, and Call the Void is crazy devastating.
3) I had one game where, by chance, no enemy wizard started with the lizardman race. And, by god, the game was so much more enjoyable without having a "carpet of doom" of single javelineers and dragon turtles covering 75% of the tiles in my empire! The late-game actually felt more like a 4X game instead of an infinite tower defense!
1.) In my second game, I played a blue/white + astrologer + alchemy combo. Three notable things here:
a.) Astrologer + Uranus' Blessing is pretty amazing, as it's giving you 21 skill power city (on top of 26 power income, at full development) for the cost of 7 mana per turn. (and plus it's a pretty decent city defense enchantment). I had 6 core cities with amplifying towers (thanks to some early power spending on research to nap Inspirations), and then took another 6 with them from an overseas invasion of kali (who was playing klackons, and had amp towers every size 5 city). That's 252 overland casting power and ~300 power income by itself! Add in Aether Binding, and man I had a ton of casting skill in this game. Then again, I was spending most of it on city enchantments, heh, after I stopped bother with unit enchantments (see below), so who knows how much good it actually did me. Did get some sick very rare global enchantments into play later though, such as Suppress Magic and...
b.) Enlightenment is super nuts. I had thought Aether Binding was a hell of a deal to give you hundreds of virtual power every turn, but then, on the first turn I cast Enlightenment, my research went from like 200 rp/turn to 800! (a strange thing though: it didn't show up on the meter until I went into each town individually). By the time the game ended, I was pulling in around 1500 RP per turn at 0% slider.
c.) (Apologies in advance if I get a bit ranty here)
Obviously, with life and sorcery I tried stacking unit enchantments again, and again felt very frustrated with the current dispel behavior. In this game, there were no runemasters (Horus was Archmage/Myrran, Kali and Sharee were both Conjurer/Artificer, idr what Ariel was but Kali murdered her by like 1404), and, although a couple wizards did cast Aether Binding, I would quickly disjunction it. So, no extra-powered dispels here. However, my spell locks and high-powered enchantments were still getting stripped effortlessly. To give an example, in my first big battle against Horus he cast dispelling wave, which the description says is half-powered compared to dispel magic, and it stripped off 6 outta my 8 spell locks on units! In the next battle, at his fortress, I saved beforehand and ran an experiment - out of 10 fights, 2 of them saw 4 spell locks die on the first dispelling wave, four fights killed 5 locks, and the remaining four fights killed 6 locks. And, because it was a fortress fight, his follow-up dispelling waves (from his heroes) and dispels (magicians) of course basically stripped my units bare of a couple thousand points of mana (and casting skill) worth of enchantments. I still easily won the fight (and later the game), but man was this so frustrating. Casting enchantments in-battle wasn't much better, as stuff cast at the start of battle would be immediately stripped, and waiting a few turns (for them to blow their skill on other things) might mean the battle is already lost. Despite my massive amount of casting skill in this game, I felt pretty ineffectual casting in battle. To make matters worse, Horus eventually started spamming dispelling wave on the world map at my stacks, which seems to ignore the presence of spell lock completely and strip out whatever enchantments it wants. I quickly gave up bothering with unit enchantments altogether, except against nodes and towers, and a bit of bless spam to bait out dispelling wave at the start of combat against wizards.
I understand that stacking unit enchantments can be very overpowered and thus there needs to be a way to counter it, but there's gotta be a better solution than making them so brittle that they fall off to the slightest touch. Even spell lock... I don't know the dispel formula, but spell-lock says it resists at 150 power, which sounds like a lot more than the maximal 40 dispel power, or the maximal 100 dispelling wave power (which should be like a strength-75 dispel, according to the description). And yet even spell lock can't maintain itself more than 25% of the time! And, without spell lock (a school-specific rare, which you have no guarantee of getting even with several sorcery books), almost no unit enchantment will live past the first round of combat. I don't know... some alternative ideas:
1.) make the overland enchantment cost more
2.) weaken the effects of various unit enchantments
3.) maybe even limit the maximum number of enchantments a unit can have on it at any one time (maybe to 4?)
4.) make dispel more effective the more enchantments are stacked onto a unit (say, increasing non-linearly after 2?)
or who knows, but anything's gotta be better than this situation.
You could say that I could take runemaster, but a 2 retort pick shouldn't be required just to use half the spells in two of the realms. It also doesn't really give anything else to enhance a blue or white wizard's life. In contrast, I can still use heavy Chaos magic without channeler, or Nature without conjurer - it'll just be expensive. I know runemaster gives a huge discount on research and casting the SoM, but I've always tried to avoid that victory condition regardless of my situation because it is still maximally tedious to achieve a SoM victory. And then there's the fact that if the enemy has runemaster (or has Aether Binding in play before you get disjunction), then you're right back where you started, with unit enchantments being near useless to you. If you want this retort to essentially be a requirement for using unit enchantments at all, it'd be much better if it lost the arcane bonus and became a 1 retort pick, or perhaps gained some sort of small discount to enchantments if you want it to stay at 2 picks.
2.) Chaos is super crazy when you get to the very rares! Half the spells seem potentially super-overpowered (although expensive), but I guess very rares should be about that. Call Chaos can cripple whole stacks, Chaos Surge + Doom Mastery + Warp Reality is amazing, and Call the Void is crazy devastating.
3) I had one game where, by chance, no enemy wizard started with the lizardman race. And, by god, the game was so much more enjoyable without having a "carpet of doom" of single javelineers and dragon turtles covering 75% of the tiles in my empire! The late-game actually felt more like a 4X game instead of an infinite tower defense!
