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Encourage garrisons

Expendable? That's the complete opposite of what heroes are meant to represent - an above average, rare to get unit with huge potential for long term. (and that's not really a game design thing, it's the meaning of the word "hero". Someone who stands out, is special and is reliable.)

We already made hero offers very common when you have few (below 2) heroes, if that's what you want to use them for, you can, but honestly that gold cost is kinda expensive for a disposable lighting rod.
I think Regeneration and Life Drain are definitely on par in healing power with Life magic. Sorcery has none but can make the hero near invincible (flight, invisibility, missile immunity, resist magic, magic immunity, teleportation) so they definitely can work with them. Chaos I admit works poorly for heroes still, but it has the really powerful soul linker/chaos channels combo.

Quote:you haven't addressed why heroes win
Currently I believe they win because of the zero cost battle and zero garrison problem and am trying to fix exactly that.

But let's ignore that and start a new train of thought.

Heroes, the type we are talking about at least, act as a doomstack either alone or as part of one. Human doomstacks are unstoppable for the AI, heroes or not. We have to accept that as it is the result of what the AI is capable of, and nothing can be done about it, even in theory. However, there is absolutely no reason to cherry-pick heroes as the one doomstack component we are nerfing, if we accept the human will always have unstoppable doomstacks. Instead, we have to make sure heroes have a similar "pacing", and cost as other doomstacks of equivalent effectiveness. The items cover the "cost" part - a good set of hero gear can pay for a whole doomstack on its own if you melt it down. So all we have problems with is the "pacing" part - for units, the required buildings, for spells the research costs take care of that. For hired heroes, the fame requirements do. But for prisoners, nothing does so that's what needs to be fixed.
Pacing is important - the AI can deal with and beat human doomstacks indirectly through that, either by reaching the spells that counter that particular type of doomstack, or more often, by having enough units built up that the player needs too many doomstacks and too much resources for combat spells to keep up with them (and this is where the zero cost doomstack battles become relevant).

That said, if anyone tries to argue the heroes are undercosted (either the items or the hiring/maintenance costs), I'm willing to listen to that, but using the nerfhammer and cutting every stat on everything to half isn't the correct way to address that. That's the easy (and bad, unfun) way out.

(Minor adjustments to hero abilities and item stats is fine, but we've been through that so many times I don't think anyone can suggest anything new that actually needs that sort of change. I'm pretty sure I've considered agility granting 2/3 defense per level and dropped the idea several times already and I'm tired of having to rethink the same things over and over and over again. )

I don't want to cut all stats. I want to cut defensive ones (same thing as archangel armor and resistance!) because in this game armor and resistance can result in zero cost battles. And yes, every time heroes come up, j will bring this up again, because it's the same issue - variance is too high. You could have an armor 7 hero, or, an armor 22 hero - often at the same time period. Same with linear resources in a game where 1 realm gets to start 4 times higher than the other realms (and often 5 times due to warlord being such a good pairing).

And sadly nature is almost as bad off as chaos - they don't get the defensive capabilities until far too late, unlike life and death.

You can get the exact same result of taking no damage with the correct immunities, regeneration, invisibility, etc so nerfing armor wouldn't change a thing.

Except armor is universally available, requires no picks, and there is no immunity to melee damage, plus we specifically highly restricted immunity to lightning damage.

So yes, you're right, immunities are a thing. But having someone with resist 13+ and armor 20+ is the same as having all of the immunities, without any noticeable cost.

And saying 'you can have an overpowered hero in many ways so why try to fix them' in the same thread as saying 'overpowered heroes are a problem' seems contradictory.

Immunities, regeneration and invisibility aren't limited to heroes.
Also the game has plenty of effects that ignore armor and/or resistance exactly because they would be too universal otherwise.

It has some such effects. This whole conversation started because sapher had a charmed hero with high armor too early.

Variance in armor and resistance matter throughout the game - whether you get armor 15 on turn 5 or armor 20 on turn 40 or armor 25 on turn 70, they all mean effectively invulnerability. By turn 70 the AI might have one effect that can kill that hero, but by turn 70 you can have the immunity to that effect to (if your opponent is nature, flight or waithform item, if your opponent is chaos, strong healing, if your opponent is sorcery, true sight, etc).

And the next game, your hero on the same turn might only have 5, 7, or 9 armor, and get killed by a swarm of halberdiers.

So in the first game, you win with that hero alone, the second game, you decide heroes are awful. That's too much variance.

T.T

All you are saying is we should make sure the correct amount of armor comes on the correct turn count. Which is what I've been trying to do all the time with the turn limit.
Reducing variance is not possible in a game that's about variance of effects AND has about 20 different sources of armor that stack. It has also been explained countless times. I feel like I'm throwing my words into a bottomless well, if this keeps up I'm going to close the thread.

Given I'm one of the ones who explains it countless times, no. It's not an endless well. It's game design, which you have the power to change.

Variance right now goes from 5-22 on turn 40. That absolutely could be changed to 10-18, and then a turn limit might start to make sense.

But a turn limit on armor 5 is pointless, and all of the proposed turn limits you suggested are far too low for the high end of the scale. Zaldron with the wrong items is too powerful for turn 75. So a turn limit of 10 or 20 doesn't solve the problem you are proposing the turn limit for.

If you're not going to fix the variance (which is fine, and why I haven't bothered with heroes for years), then these turn limits will not fix the problem, and without removing heroes from the game until turn 60+ (and even then, realistically any time before the AI have very rares, heroes can always win the game), turn limits can't fix the problem.

Would you please realize you can't change the core design on a project that's at 95% completion?
Sure I have the "power" to start over, redesign everything, armor and all directly or indirectly related things, attack, hit, to def, figure counts etc... but I would be an idiot if I did that.

So, reduce the variance on Armor.

Let's see...

Tactician provides 2. That's actually really low for a retort pick, we can'd reduce it.
Level-ups provide 2, it was already reduced in the early stages of development. This is as far as it goes.
Agility we can probably reduce to 2/3. So there we go from 0-13 to 0-9.
Holy Armor, Endurance, Prayer, Invulnerability we can't reduce these, they are vital parts of Life magic and all perfectly balanced on their own. This is 2 armor, +2 To Def and 2 damage reduction which I'll count as 5 armor.
Chaos Channels doesn't matter, only 1/3 chance to get armor - but it still means a variance of 10 and +3 To Def, if Chaos Node auras and Chaos Surges and Land Linking and Survival Instincts and Soul Linkers.
Items we already nerfed so now they only have 4+8+4 = 16 armor at most. At most we could probably shave off 1 point from the weapon, 2 from the armor and 1 more from the accessory, reducing it to 12.

This is probably not even half of the list and we went from 53 armor and +5 To Def variance to 45 with +5 To Def only.  
Even if I do every nerf that can be reasonably done, and ignore the uncommon or late game effects, the variance will still be over 30 with several + To Def points as well.
We've gone through this math 2 or 3 times the past two years.
The worst part is, any nerfing we can actually do only applies to the part of the spectrum that doesn't really matter in the early turns. You aren't actually getting the level 9 bonus of Agility in the early game, it goes at most up to 5. You are extremely unlikely to have items that have the maximal armor stat on them, especially for more than one slot per hero. So nerfing those would have an extremely minimal effect.

You are seriously trying my patience and I warned you that I'm going to close the thread if you make me repeat myself any further. Badgering me to do impossible things won't get the project anywhere. Ignoring the "AI has too many units for heroes to cope with it past a certain turn count" design repeatedly is why I say it's a bottomless well and a fruitless discussion. Most importantly the goal isn't to make heroes not win games. The goal is to make them win games slowly enough that it's not a boring landslide victory that anyone can always do, and that it becomes necessary to play the other aspects of the game (economy, defending cities, casting overland and combat spells etc) well at the same time. How powerful they are in the battles they are being used makes minimal difference. How much of the game happens outside of those battles does, and the number of battles they can do per turn as well as the turn count (which determines how much the enemy has and produces, and how much tiem you have until the heroes do get obsoleted by very rares) is what matters.

It would be sad to end this here when you FINALLY said something valuable, that you think heroes should appear at turn 60 instead of 30. We should be discussing that, instead of nerfing armor which is obviously the wrong way to go, so I'm not closing the thread yet, but if you keep making me go in circles, I'll immediately do that.



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