Game mechanics

[Nelphine]

Turns out it was on the weaker wizards continent. Still no idea why he never came through, also unsure as to who originally cleared it.

On a different note, omg arch mage is crazy as a retort. Sure it's only 50% more but I've got almost 200 skill and I haven't even colonized my home continent (room for 13 cities). And no wizards met me until I had 8 cities and was clearing lairs on my home continent so I wasn't slowed by extra defenses. I want to say it's around 1407-1408?

[Nelphine]

Is it possible to have an extra option like power rating, to set lairs to be stronger, without setting the AI to impossible? (Met me first time stop wizard.. he has 12 death books, 6 sorcery, 1 chaos, 1 2 pick retort and 2 1 pick retorts. Time stop is so annoying! )

I find for impossible, only certain strategies allow you to survive, and I'd like to play other strategies, but I LOVE lair hunting. So I want strong lairs/nodes/towers.

[Seravy]

Is it possible to have an extra option like power rating, to set lairs to be stronger, without setting the AI to impossible? (Met me first time stop wizard.. he has 12 death books, 6 sorcery, 1 chaos, 1 2 pick retort and 2 1 pick retorts. Time stop is so annoying! )

I find for impossible, only certain strategies allow you to survive, and I'd like to play other strategies, but I LOVE lair hunting. So I want strong lairs/nodes/towers.

Those are determined at the start of the game, so ingame options can't help it. Setting power to "Max" at least makes sure Nodes have more guards than usual.

[Nelphine]

Sorry I meant another option at the beginning of the game, similar to power or land size.

[Seravy]

I noticed a flaw in spell research.
Game puts a random spell of the lowest possible rarity from any realm you have.
Let's say, you have 1 sorcery common spell not yet on the list, and 3 nature rares.
You'll have a 75% chance to get the rare. Even if you have 10 sorcery books, as long as the game does not roll that one last common sorcery spell, other realms will get added. You have fewer books from those realms, so the rarity in those escalates much faster. I've seen very rares appear from the "fewer books" realm before the last uncommons from the "more books" one. As is, the system overweights the realm with the fewer books, since every realm has exactly 1 out of X chance to pass the final roll for a rarity, since it's always 1 spell left even if you started with more...and if you started with more, those need to get rolled first, too, so the system actually favors researching higher rarity spells of the realm of fewer books which is the opposite of what would make sense.
I don't think this is a good system. The greatest flaw is, once you have those high rarity spells, the skipped commons and uncommons might becomes obsolete. And then the player thinks the other realm is weak, when in reality they are just far behind in research for it.
I modified it to select the lowest possible rarity period, not per realm. So Phantom Beast only appears when you have no more common spells that could appear but hasn't yet from any realm. And Sky Drake only if there are nothing but very rares left to select from. No more Sky Drake before Change Terrain scenario.
This change will be in the next update.

[Nelphine]

As much as I understand the concern, I do like the feeling of getting an early higher rarity. Can we do say 80% chance of lowest rarity? 16% of second lowest, 3% of third, and 1% of fourth?

(This also will help when you're researching very Rares, and get a new book from a different realm, and suddenly you're swamped with commons again. My suggestion would at least give a chance to get something other than those commons.)

[Seravy]

As much as I understand the concern, I do like the feeling of getting an early higher rarity. Can we do say 80% chance of lowest rarity? 16% of second lowest, 3% of third, and 1% of fourth?

(This also will help when you're researching very Rares, and get a new book from a different realm, and suddenly you're swamped with commons again. My suggestion would at least give a chance to get something other than those commons.)

No. Early rares are bad for two reasons :
1. You can't research it. They're too expensive. Survival Instinct, Petrify, Herb Mastery, Great Wyrm and Earth Elemental was sitting on my list for like 50 turns before I gave up waiting for uncommons and researched the Wyrm by putting all my power into research. Then I stopped playing before finishing the summoning of the first Wyrm because at that point the game was already lost and waiting 15 turns for each one was not viable when had to fight stacks of 6-8 war trolls every turn. So it either ends up wasting a research slot for no good reason or act as a "trap" for the player who tries to research the spell and loses the game before finishing.
2. If you can research it and do so, the low rarity spells appearing afterwards will disappoint you most of the time. What's even worse, those spells will see use much less often.

There are 8 research slots, so unless you still have more than 7 of your current rarity remaining, there will be one or more of the higher one you can select.
Also the system doesn't do any weighting. It rolls an X sided dice where X equals the number of spells that are on the list. Changing that is not realistic.

[Nelphine]

Ah. That sucks. I would gladly give up a single slot (of 8 slots) 20% of the time for higher rarity, just for game variation - especially on lower difficulties. Knowing I can never get a rare spell early means some play styles aren't an option.

I understand your story but that's ALL the slots filled which is the extreme the other way.

[Seravy]

Knowing I can never get a rare spell early means some play styles aren't an option.

You can. Bring 10 book of one realm and no books of others. Then you only need to research 1 common and 3-6 uncommons to get your first rare in the list, depending on how many Arcane spells are rolled. Even faster if you manage to trade for it.
Early rare strategies need 10 books anyway otherwise there is a chance of not even getting that rare spell. Just don't spend the remaining 2 picks on 2 books of another realm.

Meanwhile I checked the book and monster realms of various lairs and such.

Book rewards :

0 Tower - Any
1 Chaos Node - Chaos
2 Nature Node - Nature
3 Sorcery Node - Sorcery
4 Cave - Any
5 Dungeon - Death
6 Ancient Temple - Life
7 Keep - Death
8 Lair - Any
9 Ruins - Death
10 Fallen Temple - Life

Creatures (thanks to insecticide which added a lot more variety than default)
0 Tower - Any, Death has double chance than others
1 Chaos Node - Chaos
2 Nature Node - Nature
3 Sorcery Node - Sorcery
4 Cave - Nature, Chaos or Death (Death has half chance)
5 Dungeon - Nature, Chaos or Death (Death has half chance)
6 Ancient Temple - Life or Death
7 Keep - Nature, Chaos or Death (Death has half chance)
8 Lair - Nature, Chaos or Death (Death has half chance)
9 Ruins - Life or Death
10 Fallen Temple - Life or Death

My thoughts :
Book rewards are fine. There are a roughly even amount of "always one realm" sources for all 5 realms, and everything else can have any realm. Altering the list would probably break this balance.
Monsters, huh... Life is under represented but considering their crappy monsters and the general weirdness of having life realm monsters as enemies, I think that's fine.
Sorcery is also very notably underused, they can only appear in Sorcery nodes and very rarely in towers, nowhere else. This one I'm not so sure about. Sorcery provides easy to clear, but high reward encounters that improve the early game for players, and at the same time also provide some of the most challenging enemies in the game and are an ideal rampaging monster source.
I think I would like to see more of them.

[namad]

I think I agree with nelphine. You can always just research whatever spell takes the least research. Which in fact is probably what new players would do anyways. Having the option to waste resources on something rare sounds fun. If there's no way to make this rarity jump happen less often (without disabling it entirely) I'd say leave it in. Adds variance to the game, doesn't seem particularly harmful.

You may have thought 5/8ths of your choices were impossible, but that still left you 3 valid choices to burn through quicker to see another 4th quick choice. Like nelphine says some strategies will simply be gone forever if you cannot over-commit for something too rare too early.


Removing this entirely would improve game balance, but I think it might reduce game fun. Since there is no multiplayer is perfectly balance the goal? or is balance when it doesn't cost variance the goal?


EDIT: I typed this before your previous post loaded. Sorcery should be the second rarest shouldn't it? Because after life sorcery has the fewest summon spells? That said... if phantom warriors can appear as monsters in lairs, how come centaurs and catapults can't?