Life spell slot, city curses

[Nelphine]

Interesting. I loved black channels because it made the unit awesome. The upkeep had no part in it. But again, I've always loved brute force quantity strategies so I didn't care that I lost units and they couldn't heal, I just threw more of them. And then trolls.

I honestly think poor windwalking will be far more important for the AI to become a danger with mono life, than this will help the AI get a strong late game economy. If they aren't already getting a strong economy from the city buffs (seriously, prosperity is worth what, 7 halberdiers with this spell on it?), this spell is NOT going to help them get that strong economy. They'll still end up summoning unicorns instead. So this spell is purely for the human, where it isn't cost effective; which makes it the very definition of a trap spell. That isn't good for the game.

[Seravy]

Prosperity is money. In fact everything Life makes before very rare is money and production, except for Altar of Peace. The AI becomes a threat through skill and research and those cost power.
The AI has only two cases when their gold can turn into mana, which allows them to produce less mana and thus more skill and research : if they have alchemy, or if they get near the 30000 cap which won't happen unless they are literally making more than what it costs to buy a unit in every single city every turn.
So this should be helping the AI (especially as they are using it with like 4X the human's ROI - half skill needed to use but double income gained.) as long as the units enchanted stay out of battles. Yes, unfortunately it's economic help and not military help - but as we concluded, Life isn't compatible with their military tactic (until very rares, at which point the global buffs turn all their crappy stacks into unstoppable doomstacks. 9 Halberdiers? Not Scary. Same with High Prayer, Crusade and Charm of Life? I wouldn't want to fight those...)

[Nelphine]

Minor nitpick, but Crusade is worthless to the AI (except when used with war college AND no warlord; and no altar of battle, and no heroism. OR altar of battle/heroism + warlord). It's worse than land linking, and at least land linking can go on a fantastic unit that has decent stats anyway so the extra armor helps. Charm of life is only helpful if the base unit is dangerous. High prayer isn't enough better than prayer to change whether something is dangerous or not. Either prayer makes them dangerous already, or high prayer doesn't.

Admittedly, this would make those useless stacks do something, so that's helpful - BUT, this should never ever be used on the same units that are getting other life buffs (or buffs from any other realm for that matter, although most of those won't change strategic strength nearly as much as life ones, so they won't matter nearly as much). And AI buff things that already have buffs; this is so expensive, it will generally always 'collect' other buffs as well. You'll need to teach the AI to treat this buff differently; it can't target things that are buffed, and other buffs can't target things with this buff.

And while I'm sure you can have this spell with unusual targetting, trying to teach all the other buffs not to target this buff doesn't sound practical. But if other buffs target this buff, then the unit gains strategic strength, and the AI suddenly thinks its a good unit to attack with. Which is completely counter to what the buff should do.

[Seravy]

You'll need to teach the AI to treat this buff differently; it can't target things that are buffed, and other buffs can't target things with this buff.

Not a problem, we can replace Planar Travel's targeting with this one. Buffs don't actually stick to each other on purpose, but most military buffs have the same targeting condition (stronger stack, best unit, etc) so they naturally hit the same thing.
So all we need to do is define a condition for this spell that's different enough. My suggestion is, target the best thing that has a magic ranged attack. Those units are the most likely to stay in garrison and those occasional heroes that do not, are not a problem because there aren't many of them and they have a pretty good life expectancy compared to any other normal unit. Even if the magicians wander outside the city, they have the best chance to survive and they are too weak to attack others, and humans are unlikely to attack them without a very good reason either as they are painful when they are the defender.
I don't think the AI targets Magicians with any buffs unless they are really running low on units, and even then the magicians rarely end up attacking.
The only downside to this I see is races that don't get shaman/priests/magicians will end up wasting the spell - but maybe we can add a condition of "Do not cast if not owning at least X non-klackon non-gnoll non-dwarf cities". (other races all get a priest, shaman or magician I believe, even barbarians)

[Nelphine]

no the bigger problem is the military buffs accidentally targetting this one; do they not look at cost of current buffs? If they don't, then that's fine. But I thought we had it set up so that if something had say magic immunity (or bless), it would be a higher target for holy armor then. And I don't see how the AI will tell the difference between this and bless.

The best unit for these to be cast on are the 9 unbuffed level 1 halberdiers I was discussing in the other thread - anything that's too weak to bother being a garrison but also too weak to actually attack anything. If it's in a city, it will eventually die. If it's a strong unit, it will eventually die.

However, I still don't see how this is a better solution than the weak version of windwalking. This takes an AI that already has strong economy, and gives them something else to do. If that AI DOES go to war (far more likely, regardless of personality and human strategy), the windwalking will actually make them potentially dangerous.

So your spell is 'win more by not wasting quite as much' while wind walking is 'allow life to actually do what we tried to teach all the AI to do and make dangerous doomstacks'.

[Seravy]

no the bigger problem is the military buffs accidentally targetting this one; do they not look at cost of current buffs? If they don't, then that's fine.

They don't. It's based on strategic strength of unit, and stack, and whatever special condition that spell needed. On Regeneration and Invisibility have the special condition to prefer stacks that already have copies of the same enchantment but even those don't care about other buffs.
As this "buff" won't raise strategic strength, it won't make the unit a more attractive target for other buffs.

. But I thought we had it set up so that if something had say magic immunity (or bless), it would be a higher target for holy armor then. And I don't see how the AI will tell the difference between this and bless.

Maybe we did something like that for combat targeting but not for overland.

However, I still don't see how this is a better solution than the weak version of windwalking.

Well, Life does not get windwalking because it does not get water/flying movement.
Same thing as not giving them the combat movement buff, it's not what the realm does. You said it yourself, what the Life realm should be doing and what the AI knows to do are incompatible, and I agree. We shouldn't redefine the realm just to have a new spell.
Btw no, the windwalking does nothing useful for the AI at all. As the units don't use the doomstack procedure anyway, they are just normal stacks, not doomy at all. Exactly the same things the AI loads into ships and throws on your shore. Makes no difference, unless the human plays a naval blockade tactic, in which case this change would make that tactic no longer work against an entire realm and that's bad, there are far too many realms that get around it already. (Nature/Chaos/Sorcery all do with varying efficiency)
In fact such a spell hurts the AI. Ships move 3-4 tiles a turn, while this stack would move 2 almost all the time. Which is slower. 

Also, considering how many places have hardcoded "do this if windwalking" for the AI, and all those need to be rewritten, I wouldn't want this even if it was ok for the realm to have that.
This spell would also be horrible for a human - Life gets Endurance so their ships can travel 1 tile faster than usual. You could move at 5/turn on a Warship while using this gets you 2 unless it's some sort of a cavalry stack. 

I don't think my spell is all that great for the AI, but at least it's good for both the AI and the human to some extent, is fun on both sides, and fits into the realm, while also not having major impact on game balance that would break other things.
None of the previous ideas had all of these at once and I think this is the minimal we should aim for. Of course if we can come up with something even better, I'll be happy to pick that, but let's say we have another 2-3 hours to do that, maybe 12 if I leave this for tomorrow, then I have to start working on it otherwise we aren't making progress, I can't start a new test game, and we never move this out of beta which is bad considering how important the plane and curse updates are.

[Nelphine]

Putting in a spell that is a trap and doesn't help the AI in a significant fashion, is not worth doing. Even if it technically meets the requirements, that doesn't make it a good addition to the game.

Yes the plane change is important. The curse change needs wider testing to see if it actually improved the game or if it simply changes things (change can be good, and I agree with the change, but we don't know if that's actually an improvement.)

So I wouldn't say the curse change is that important to rush out.

And even if it was, and even if the plane change is important, we've had both of those things for literally years. You do not need to rush this out in the next 12 hours. I accept you want to do that, but this spell is being chosen purely based on not having any other choice. That's not a good reason.

[Seravy]

Eh, no 12 hours is for starting to work on adding the spell.
After that it still takes like a week before the beta becomes non-beta since I want to play one more game...preferably as Death to test Necromacy and curses. But we do need that new beta otherwise testing cannot start, neither mine or anyone else's.
Why does it need to be a week? I expect Hadriex to finish (probably lose) his current game this week and it would be nice if we could see him play the new version. Otherwise we are not going to see anyone playing it on the internet for months.

I accept you want to do that, but this spell is being chosen purely based on not having any other choice. That's not a good reason.

If not having any other choice then that's the best reason we can have. I mean, what else can we do, leave the slot empty and name it "Blank Spell Slot"? If you have only one choice that's the best one, by definition.
And it's not like we can expect a better choice to pop up either - we've done this in the past and took weeks to come up with Altar of Peace which is kinda the same thing as this new spell except that one is a city buff and this goes on units, that requires peace directly, this is a bit more subtle but still strongly prefers peace. Ultimately they are the same thing, with some differences, but it's not like we found any completely new working ideas for Life in the past year - and we definitely tried.

Not that this spell is as bad as you make it sound, I think the "minimal requirements" were pretty high. It's useful for both human and AI players (can't say that for Earth Lore or the now gone Move Fortress), suits the realm, fills an actual purpose, and it's likely fun to play with or against. What more do we want? What are the chances of finding one if we couldn't in the past year?


I still don't understand why you think +3 power is not great for the AI? If necessary we can teach it to only use the spell if expecting peace to exist for a while. Also the numbers were examples. If you think the spell is too weak as is, (yes I think I was overly cautious with the numbers) we can push it a little and make it, say, +4 power but 2 maintenance at a cost of 75.

[Nelphine]

It's not that it's not great; it's that life AI already have strong economy. This is a 'win more' spell. It won't change - either the life AI already has a strong economy and is a threat, or they don't, and this spell won't change that. So while it looks neat, it isn't actually doing anything. (If this spell would be worth doing, then we would teach chaos AI to cast raise volcano for power. That hasn't happened, for good reason. It's simply not going to change their economy. I've tried to play that way, and it doesn't work.)

It's a trap for the human, in the same way that casting stream of life or heavenly light too late in the game is a trap (or even in the mid game if you're actively at war); if the game/war is only going to last 2 more years, then you want another summon, not minor economy buffs. This spell has the exact same issue, except it's already weaker per cast than stream of life. So if it's not worth casting stream of life on all your cities, then you should literally never cast this spell. But stream of life is situational - correct. It's situational, and only when an economy spell is going to make a relatively major impact should it be used instead of a summon.

We can't change that thought process for the AI. So it's giving up a third of a unicorn, for something that is going to take, 5+ years in order to allow summoning.. one more unicorn. That's not worth it. But it's a repeatable spell, so you cannot make the numbers truly worthwhile, or anyone who can remotely hold peace will get a huge advantage simply because you CAN repeat it. Its the same discussion we had with raise volcano. And you can't teach the AI to go crazy casting it early, because the AI simply must have those summons/combat buffs in case it DOES get attacked. So the best use for it will become a human player charismatic aura of majesty barbarians who make themselves immune to attack, and then end up with a better economy than dark elves. It's TOO subtle. Spells need to be big impact, that's why we don't bother with things like giant strength, and why economy spells like prosperity are such huge impact.

[Seravy]

Well, ok, then I'm waiting for a better idea. But I do need it for tomorrow.