The same way I do germanjoey. We've had one player who has stated this and given various amounts of demonstrarions. When we've tried to recreate it, other factors seemed more importsnt, and often, no one else could recreate the actual victory. I can't even do it on a lower difficulty, despite being one the players who has beaten impossible and given strategies for how to do so (IN THE PAST, not current version).
With these combination of factors, it appears it is not as simple as 'sprites too strong', but rather a complex interaction between many of the pieces being used, including sprites. If we can get more reports of other players able to recreate this constant win streak (ESPECIALLY if they play the full game, as opposed to ending early so as to see what other factors affect each of the AI), then we might be able to fix it.
Otherwise, I'm willing to tip my hat to catwalk and say 'you are an excellent player and can do things beyond my skill'. The most important thing is getting multiple players involved. We NEED other people replicating catwalks work. The more people involved, the easier it is to identify all the different interactions, and then choose a solution that not only fixes it, but also keep the style and flavor of the game we all love.
Other things, even when proven to be powerful, aren't necessarily broken. Things like aether binding and wave of despair are clearly powerful, but seravy has stated multiple times he's OK with that as long as all realms have similar powerful options, that match thier themes. And so far, it appears most realms do.
(I need to learn chaos next. Its the only realm remaining that I'm complete garbage with, even if I'm not remotely expert at non life.)
(April 22nd, 2017, 11:19)Seravy Wrote: No, unless you prove Sprites need any sort of action directly or indirectly, I'm not going to do anything because I have already proven they don't need any. (if you aren't going to play, you can watch my recorded games if you want)
It's hilarious that you say your games are "proof" because you've used them and did poorly with them, as if you're some sort of ultimate paragon of a player. And yet you repeatedly ignore counter-examples to your "proof." How do you explain how other players dominate games so easily with sprites despite the fact that you've proven them as balanced?? What goes on in your mind when you see 1408 victory dates on impossible?
What counterexamples?
This thread was made exactly for that and so far NO ONE actually played the maps or posted anything.
I played the wizard Catwalk suggested - one optimized for maximal performance of sprites with the best skill increasing and cost reducing retort+book set still available, the way he suggested to the best of my ability and all three ended up as actual proof of sprites not being overpowered. Not just a vague "I don't know" or "seems ok", or "well this is powerful but didn't win the game", no. Spoilers below (tl;dr version of the actual game report posted earlier):
-Game 1, Sprites gave me a really nice advantage. A lot. Not gamewinning lot, but enough to stand out and make me think there might be something in this...except there was a tiny little problem. I played the map twice. Once with sprites and once without. (I still used earth lore and pretended I don't know what is where to be fair the second time) And you know what? I was in a better position in the game without using sprites. I covered a larger map area, had stronger military and my main enemy was much weaker. If someone asked me which of the two saves I would want to continue, I would have taken the one without sprites. And before you say I was using some ultra lucky rare tactic, no. I did all of that with common longbowmen.
-Game 2, I died. As simple as that. I had no armies to defend myself and enemy nagas obliterated my fortress before I could do anything. I tried summoning sprites in a hurry to my capital to survive but they got blasted by aether sparks and psionic blasts. (This wasn't directly the fault of sprites, more the brainless settler spam but the point is the sprites failed to find me enough gold to build up a single city to producing slingers this game.)
-Game 3, I found barely anything in a reasonable distance and even the nodes I found very late (like, 1403+) were both the kind I could have taken out using a much cheaper army of horsebowmen, sligers, or anything really.
And that's all.
If you mean those games played with no longer existing retort strategies, so what? They are not even in the game anymore, I can't nerf it any further than that!
Unless someone plays these three maps and gets a result that shows sprites are overpowered on at least two, we have nothing to talk about. I've already spent well over a hundred hours playing games just to test this strategy.
That said, the above game 1 does show Sorcery nodes are easy - but so are for the AI, and the AI can even do Air Elementals which the human player cannot. I'm pretty sure games where there are 6 easy sorcery nodes available like this map are very rare, even based on math. There are 16 (or 18? idk) Arcanus nodes, in 3 realms, meaning 5-6 of each realm for the whole world. Half of these will generally have air elemental, storm giants, sky drakes or djinn, leaving 3 out of which probably only one is actually close to the human player's starting location.
PS : I agree with Nelphine that game balance is targeted at the average, or maybe, expert players, but not the top 1% - if there is only a single person in the world being able to consistently win using the strategy then there is no problem. This isn't a PVP game where that one person will ruin the game experience by beating everyone all the time - and if they aren't having fun they can play a different strategy (albeit Catwalk admits he is having fun with sprites even as is)
Another way to tackle the sprite issue (I generally had great results, but struggle a bit with the 2upk when having them idle)
The unit treasure points, if it matches what I see on 'Master of Magic Tweaker', may need further balancing towards the difficulty perspective of units at the use of neutrals, not wizards. Fast and/or ranged units would have preference. Units hard to beat with weak units would also have preference.
Um. Main problem with this is to recall strategic combat, which has a rather different set of strengths (for instance gorgons are much more difficult than a sky drake.)
But i bring it up because ai will also be clearing these and the strengths are quite different - werewolves are pretty nasty in strategic combat, especially paired with ghouls. I guess realistically we should just make a completely custom list for unit cost from a neutral point of view, which I can't believe I never thought of, but when/if we do so, we should also account for strategic strengths.
(April 22nd, 2017, 11:19)Seravy Wrote: No, unless you prove Sprites need any sort of action directly or indirectly, I'm not going to do anything because I have already proven they don't need any. (if you aren't going to play, you can watch my recorded games if you want)
It's hilarious that you say your games are "proof" because you've used them and did poorly with them, as if you're some sort of ultimate paragon of a player. And yet you repeatedly ignore counter-examples to your "proof." How do you explain how other players dominate games so easily with sprites despite the fact that you've proven them as balanced?? What goes on in your mind when you see 1408 victory dates on impossible?
If you mean those games played with no longer existing retort strategies, so what? They are not even in the game anymore, I can't nerf it any further than that!
The retorts really weren't important. You simply wanted to keep sprites unchanged and thus decided that it was the retort combination that was at fault, not the unit that's shown to be a problem to the point of absurdity.
As for why Catwalk has stopped trying to convince you? Seems like same reason I stopped trying. He's busy, and he eventually realized that all that would come out of trying to convince a brick wall to topple over by tossing eggs at it... would be that he'd run all outta eggs.
So why can't others replicate it, including myself and seravy? Give me a game report. Send it privately if you want. Use a different map than the ones seravy posted if you want. I obviously can't follow catwalks plan, so I'd love to hear another take on it, so I can try again on the 3 maps seravy has up.
Nobody has reported that a sprite strategy gives overwhelming advantage in 100% of games, right? There is just some % of games in which it's overwhelming. I've experienced these: early games where multiple nearby ruins and nodes are pushovers for my sprites, so I end up way ahead of enemy wizards fairly early. (I like using them w/ Focus Magic and Resist Elements for faster victories + fewer losses from ranged units).
Then there are the in-between scenarios, where maybe you have a couple phantom beast / warrior nodes, one with cockatrices, a couple accessible ruins but otherwise the landscape is littered with shadow demons and the like. I have to imagine even Catwalk and Germanjoey encounter these games. And in some games, you end up with nothing at all nearby that sprites can handle.
Really, you're dealing with a random number generator: let's say 40% of potential enemies are vulnerable to sprites, while 60% are not. Because of RNG generation, that means some maps will come out filled with the 40% vulnerable, some will come with the 60% resistant. Most maps, hopefully, will come out with the sort of mix that allows the excellent sprites user (Catwalk) to win whereas Seravy can't.
The same RNG gives massive advantages to other strategies, too! In my current Extreme Death game, my ghouls + Supply Chain hero gave me 5 giant lizards and an efreet early on, which is sufficient to go on a stomping tour-- it's early 1407 and I'm absolutely dominant. My last Extreme Death game was similar (I LOVE seeing giant lizards when I've got ghouls...) but in the two before that, I was quickly destroyed.
So the only argument I can find is that Sprites are dominant *too often* given the current RNG. The other argument, that every single sprite-vulnerable monster should be rebalanced so that sprites are *never* dominant or exploitable, seems to run counter to the RNG goodness that makes MoM sticky in the first place. But if it's the case that sprites just win too often to be as fun, then you only need to rebalance a few monsters to become resistant to sprites to blunt the advantage: more maps will come out incompatible with a pure sprite strategy, while some will still be vulnerable -- which you could say about many mechanics / strategies in the game. Hence my comments about earth elementals -- EEs are one piece of the sprites strategy that can maybe be fixed without screwing up other things.
Commenting that the mod has "poor balance" is absolutely correct, MoM is not a balance-able game in the modern sense and, speaking for myself, I'd quickly lose interest if it was.
(April 22nd, 2017, 21:06)Nelphine Wrote: So why can't others replicate it, including myself and seravy? Give me a game report. Send it privately if you want. Use a different map than the ones seravy posted if you want. I obviously can't follow catwalks plan, so I'd love to hear another take on it, so I can try again on the 3 maps seravy has up.
As I just said, the last time Catwalk posted a sprite thread, I did post a full game report... but nobody even responded to it. Why would I expect anything different to happen now? Again, why keep bashing my head against the same wall over and over and over again to no avail?
It's not like Catwalk was the first person to notice how ridiculous sprites were. I pointed it out to him back when he was still new to the mod, and likewise found out about it back when I first tried CoM by reading these forums. In fact, it was Seravy who first pointed it out to me that sprites by themselves could clear Great Wyrm nodes! At least 7-8 months ago now! And since I've been here, many people have complained about Sprites. Most often its been in the form of Focus Magic Sprites, but in that case it is the Sprite that is the root cause.
And TBH, what's truly frustrating about this issue is that Sprites aren't even close to the worst balance problem this mod has. I think Catwalk has focused on them simply because it is just that it is SO EVIDENT that they are broken. How many games has he posted by now? A dozen? Even one should be counter-example enough. I mean, come on, banishing all four wizards on Impossible before T100 (April 1408) should simply not be achievable by design. Yet Seravy not only repeatedly ignores results like these but also ignores the person telling him "this is how I achieved this result." He tears out the lousy retort of Conjurer because, ah, of course, it's not Sprites that are the problem! It's this other random thing that I've suddenly and arbitrarily decided was the problem! Apparently, even though he thinks a 1414 victory on Extreme is a shockingly early end date, he knows better than guy who can do something he can't.
I mean, hell, how many times have you told him that you don't use heroes when using Life magic and yet still regularly win on Extreme and Impossible, and yet... he still won't nerf Heroism or Endurance because he thinks those spells are too crucial to Life? Why keep trying with this guy?
(April 23rd, 2017, 01:14)jhsidi Wrote: Nobody has reported that a sprite strategy gives overwhelming advantage in 100% of games, right? There is just some % of games in which it's overwhelming. I've experienced these: early games where multiple nearby ruins and nodes are pushovers for my sprites, so I end up way ahead of enemy wizards fairly early. (I like using them w/ Focus Magic and Resist Elements for faster victories + fewer losses from ranged units).
Then there are the in-between scenarios, where maybe you have a couple phantom beast / warrior nodes, one with cockatrices, a couple accessible ruins but otherwise the landscape is littered with shadow demons and the like. I have to imagine even Catwalk and Germanjoey encounter these games. And in some games, you end up with nothing at all nearby that sprites can handle.
Really, you're dealing with a random number generator: let's say 40% of potential enemies are vulnerable to sprites, while 60% are not. Because of RNG generation, that means some maps will come out filled with the 40% vulnerable, some will come with the 60% resistant. Most maps, hopefully, will come out with the sort of mix that allows the excellent sprites user (Catwalk) to win whereas Seravy can't.
The same RNG gives massive advantages to other strategies, too! In my current Extreme Death game, my ghouls + Supply Chain hero gave me 5 giant lizards and an efreet early on, which is sufficient to go on a stomping tour-- it's early 1407 and I'm absolutely dominant. My last Extreme Death game was similar (I LOVE seeing giant lizards when I've got ghouls...) but in the two before that, I was quickly destroyed.
So the only argument I can find is that Sprites are dominant *too often* given the current RNG. The other argument, that every single sprite-vulnerable monster should be rebalanced so that sprites are *never* dominant or exploitable, seems to run counter to the RNG goodness that makes MoM sticky in the first place. But if it's the case that sprites just win too often to be as fun, then you only need to rebalance a few monsters to become resistant to sprites to blunt the advantage: more maps will come out incompatible with a pure sprite strategy, while some will still be vulnerable -- which you could say about many mechanics / strategies in the game. Hence my comments about earth elementals -- EEs are one piece of the sprites strategy that can maybe be fixed without screwing up other things.
Commenting that the mod has "poor balance" is absolutely correct, MoM is not a balance-able game in the modern sense and, speaking for myself, I'd quickly lose interest if it was.
Yes of course, you end up encountering some maps where there's no easy neutral cities, every nearby nature node is loaded with Gorgons, and every ruins is packed to the brim with Shadow Demons. In these games, Sprites are essentially useless, it's true. These games are pretty rare though. A little more common are games where there's only a few easy lairs/nodes available, but usually this is enough to snowball yourself into something better. For example, a couple thousand extra early gold and Transmute with a High Men city could mean that you're fielding veteran Adamant Paladins (with Web) by 1404-1405 or so. It won't be sprites that are invading the enemy's tower, but it was still sprites that got you there.
Death is much more swingy than Nature, IMHO. And it can't take down any VR nodes ultra-early the way sprites can. That said, Summon Zombie is a pretty ridiculous spell. I wonder if Catwalk has ever tried that one.
(April 23rd, 2017, 01:14)jhsidi Wrote: Nobody has reported that a sprite strategy gives overwhelming advantage in 100% of games, right? There is just some % of games in which it's overwhelming. I've experienced these: early games where multiple nearby ruins and nodes are pushovers for my sprites, so I end up way ahead of enemy wizards fairly early. (I like using them w/ Focus Magic and Resist Elements for faster victories + fewer losses from ranged units).
Then there are the in-between scenarios, where maybe you have a couple phantom beast / warrior nodes, one with cockatrices, a couple accessible ruins but otherwise the landscape is littered with shadow demons and the like. I have to imagine even Catwalk and Germanjoey encounter these games. And in some games, you end up with nothing at all nearby that sprites can handle.
Really, you're dealing with a random number generator: let's say 40% of potential enemies are vulnerable to sprites, while 60% are not. Because of RNG generation, that means some maps will come out filled with the 40% vulnerable, some will come with the 60% resistant. Most maps, hopefully, will come out with the sort of mix that allows the excellent sprites user (Catwalk) to win whereas Seravy can't.
The same RNG gives massive advantages to other strategies, too! In my current Extreme Death game, my ghouls + Supply Chain hero gave me 5 giant lizards and an efreet early on, which is sufficient to go on a stomping tour-- it's early 1407 and I'm absolutely dominant. My last Extreme Death game was similar (I LOVE seeing giant lizards when I've got ghouls...) but in the two before that, I was quickly destroyed.
So the only argument I can find is that Sprites are dominant *too often* given the current RNG. The other argument, that every single sprite-vulnerable monster should be rebalanced so that sprites are *never* dominant or exploitable, seems to run counter to the RNG goodness that makes MoM sticky in the first place. But if it's the case that sprites just win too often to be as fun, then you only need to rebalance a few monsters to become resistant to sprites to blunt the advantage: more maps will come out incompatible with a pure sprite strategy, while some will still be vulnerable -- which you could say about many mechanics / strategies in the game. Hence my comments about earth elementals -- EEs are one piece of the sprites strategy that can maybe be fixed without screwing up other things.
Commenting that the mod has "poor balance" is absolutely correct, MoM is not a balance-able game in the modern sense and, speaking for myself, I'd quickly lose interest if it was.
While I'm trying to step quietly out of this, it's difficult
For the record, I did report winning all games on Impossible back when Archmage + Astrologer gave awesome casting skill, Conjurer gave -1 upkeep and Conjurer + Specialist gave a 40% cost reduction on Sprites.
I agree with your notion that it's a question of how often the RNG gives you an easy game with Sprites. In my experience, it's the exception that Sprites don't give you an easy game. I decided to pick up the gauntlet and am rushing through game 2, which suffers from awful luck. I peeked at Seravy's spoiler where he says that he died miserably (I didn't read beyond that). There are enough early targets, but they all give spells or items (worst outcome for a Sprite strategy). There is also not a single neutral city nearby which I can take out easily. However, I'm doing well all the same using Sprites. I got two early nodes and am about to take a 3rd by March 1403. I have enough mana and power that I can defend the mindless settler spam that I'm conducting, and those will give me a considerably economic advantage in a few years.
I'll briefly note that pure Nature is definitely not the strongest setup for Sprites, but it still performs well. Omniscient + Spellweaver + Cult Leader with 3N3L1C1D blows everything out of the water consistently. And in that setup it makes a huge difference to have 3 Nature books for Earth Lore and Sprites.
