NATURE Realm

[Seravy]

I think given your concept of the nature realm, I would have preferred to keep the resistance modifier at -2 but lower the research cost to 50-66% of rare (given that the spell feels very 'uncommon' in cost and power)

However, given its rarity, it's not guaranteed that you will get this spell to begin with. A small reward and step-up from the earlier 'kill by chance' cracks call is not a bad thing (plus it'd rarely be the first spell I'd research -> I'd probably go for stone giant or earth elemental first with 'conjurer')

The main "weak" point of petrify is that it's per figure, which makes it compare less favorable to spells of the same modifier that hit the entire unit. Destroying 2 figures out of a 4 figure unit is nice, putting the entire unit under sleep, confusion, etc is way better usually. So even at a low cost and decent modifier, it's not very outstanding.

Overall it's a hard decisions because it has to be compared to so many other spells of similar functionality.
Black Sleep : Petrify is now quite a bit better, but it's 5 more mana and 2 higher rarity so that is expected.
Confusion : Now petrify has a better save modifier, but is per figure and has no chance of turning the enemy against itself for 2 higher rarity and 2 more mana. I'm happy with this as well.
Possession : Petrify is cheaper, works on anything, but you don't get control of the unit and is per figure so it's at best about equally good, but 1 higher rarity. Again, good.
Exorcise : Petrify is strictly superior, for the same amount of mana you can target any type of unit and get 1 better save modifier. However, Nature is better at direct damage than Life and this spell is a higher rarity so this is also fine as is.
Banish : For the same rarity, you get 1 lower save modifier, but pay 15 less mana when using Petrify. This actually makes banish compare to it poorly. Sorcery isn't very much about direct damage either, but 35 mana instead of 20 for just 1 better modifier and being limited to fantastic, non spell-locked targets feels a bad deal for me. Problem is, in practice, Banish is a quite powerful spell as is at -4, I don't see much room for improving it. I think we should just go with "Sorcery is weak at direct damage" here and accept petrify being usually better?
Creature Binding : Same thing as Banish, except +1 rarity, cost and you get the unit on your side. Considering how strong fantastic units are, this is much better than the number would make one think, would almost never use petrify instead even though it costs less than half.
Word of Death/Annihilate : For twice as much mana, it has a 2 better save modifier and...that's it. This is another one where I'm not too happy with how the spells compare.

Overall, I think the -3 petrify is fair compared to most spells, but not when compared to Banish and Word of Death specifically.
On the other hand, Sorcery and Death has ways to lower enemy resistance, making their spells a lot more useful even at the same modifier. (Mind Storm is -5, and Black Prayer is -2)
Nature has no way of doing that.

[zitro1987]

There's a certain balance lost with the extremely damaging and flying 'sprites' at the beginning of the game. Especially if you combine with Focus Magic (in my opinion the most unbalanced aspect of your mod is just 1 spell being 'common' instead of 'uncommon' ..I'll explain from own experience).

Sprites with 5 figures, 4 ranged damage, and +1 to hit deal about as much damage as a regular/veteran magician unit with the advantage of keeping out of harm's way (except against wizards). With mana focusing retort or conjurer (the latter being essential for nature wizards), you can summon a big group and take some moderately advanced lairs that consist of melee units and gain 500-1000 gold/mana loots -> something you just can't do with any other common summon. Yes, sprites are fragile and generally don't do that well against wizards, but they bring too much of an early advantage against nature nodes and lairs and as city-defenders.

Suggestion: 4 figures, but +1 armor would still give sprites a considerably powerful role.

Which brings me to the early accessibility of mana focusing. It's not what the spell does that it makes it overpowered, it's the 'common-tier' instant accessibility allowing a few obvious unfair combos with sprites, ghouls, dark elf swordsmen, and other units. It is not reasonable for the beginning of the game to be guaranteed and afford a pack of 4-6 summoning units with destructive ranged attacks and even mass-spellcasting on top of a completely free 100+ skill that can be used all in 1 turn. It's also the only way you can create undead of very advanced summons at the beginning of the game (ghouls are otherwise limited to creating undead low to mid tier units)

Suggestion: move to uncommon exactly the way it currently is (probably swapping with spell lock).

[Seravy]

There's a certain balance lost with the extremely damaging and flying 'sprites' at the beginning of the game. Especially if you combine with Focus Magic (in my opinion the most unbalanced aspect of your mod is just 1 spell being 'common' instead of 'uncommon' ..I'll explain from own experience).

Sprites with 5 figures, 4 ranged damage, and +1 to hit deal about as much damage as a regular/veteran magician unit with the advantage of keeping out of harm's way (except against wizards). With mana focusing retort or conjurer (the latter being essential for nature wizards), you can summon a big group and take some moderately advanced lairs that consist of melee units and gain 500-1000 gold/mana loots -> something you just can't do with any other common summon. Yes, sprites are fragile and generally don't do that well against wizards, but they bring too much of an early advantage against nature nodes and lairs and as city-defenders.

Suggestion: 4 figures, but +1 armor would still give sprites a considerably powerful role.

Which brings me to the early accessibility of mana focusing. It's not what the spell does that it makes it overpowered, it's the 'common-tier' instant accessibility allowing a few obvious unfair combos with sprites, ghouls, dark elf swordsmen, and other units. It is not reasonable for the beginning of the game to be guaranteed and afford a pack of 4-6 summoning units with destructive ranged attacks and even mass-spellcasting on top of a completely free 100+ skill that can be used all in 1 turn. It's also the only way you can create undead of very advanced summons at the beginning of the game (ghouls are otherwise limited to creating undead low to mid tier units)

Suggestion: move to uncommon exactly the way it currently is (probably swapping with spell lock).

The thing about Focus Magic is...it's expensive to use. Quite a bit. In fact, it costs exactly as much as a unit of sprites or ghouls. (and twice as much to maintain as ghouls, same as sprites, though)
So you give up the extra health and safety of having an additional Ghouls (or sprites) unit, and the extra poison damage they would inflict in exchange for twice the attack power (base 3 ranged + 3 from focus magic). This means you're not doing more damage on enemies at 0 armor at all, but you will do more damage on enemies having higher armor, obviously. Yes, you can have your ghouls kill stronger things than what they otherwise would, that's the point of using any offensive buff, however, the tradeoff is, the unit is still as vulnerable as it used to be, and losing it means the loss of twice as much value.
It requires experience to know where it is safe to use sprites (or focus magic ghouls) and where isn't, and the game rewards the player for that. Same for sprites, if you know what to attack, they are rewarding, but they aren't very useful against other wizards and on top of that, there is no guarantee you'll find any node or lair they can safely attack. The vast majority of fantastic units can fly or shot back to neutralize sprites. The only ones sprites are good against are Unicorns, Nagas, Phantom Warriors, Phantom Beasts, War Bears, Guardian Spirits, Zombies, Skeletons, Fire Elementals, Earth Elementals and Great Wyrms. Aside from Unicorns, and Great Wyrms the rest are easy to defeat, using sprites is of course more convenient and somewhat faster but not a gamebreaking advantage. Unless you're lucky enough to find a nature node that has Great Wyrms but no Behemoths, Spiders or other nasty things, using sprites will not be a big game changer. If you do find those, you're still not guaranteed to get a rare+ spell or books. Considering how good most common Nature spells are, picking Sprites is a risk to begin with. If you do not find any nodes they can take out, you wasted an important spell pick that could have given you web, nature's eye, earth lore, water walking, resist elements, etc. all of which being major game changes. (earth lore finds stuff you can take out, water walking is critical if you start on an island or enemies have better ships, resist elements can take out places with sprites, magicians, shamans, and nature's eye is not just a great boost to early research but you won't get surprise attacked either so it keeps your cities safe too. Then there is war bears, the most durable common summon in the game and far cheaper than sprites, too.)
None of the Sorcery uncommons are spells I would want to move to common. Spell Lock especially not, it would be worthless as a common, no one has dispel and banish effects at the beginning of the game, nor the mana to afford a spell that costs that much without making the army actually stronger. Swapping spells is not easy, I rather not do it unless I feel it's absolutely necessary.

I actually haven't tried ghouls with focus magic yet as far as I remember (I did use it on some sprites, though, it helped but didn't feel all that special), I tend to do 9 ghouls with darkness in combat. I don't think I could afford the focus magic tactic until later in the game and at that point I rather have werewolves and shadow demons for regeneration.

[Anthony]

The main "weak" point of petrify is that it's per figure, which makes it compare less favorable to spells of the same modifier that hit the entire unit.

That's not actually a weak point. Let's say I'm targeting a couple of units with 4 counters each and 8 resistance. Because of the way counterattacking scales, it's much better to reduce both units to 2 counters than it is to kill one unit and leave the other one untouched.

The exception to this is units that have abilities that don't scale with the number of counters in the unit, such as gaze attacks.

[Azvael]

There's a certain balance lost with the extremely damaging and flying 'sprites' at the beginning of the game. Especially if you combine with Focus Magic (in my opinion the most unbalanced aspect of your mod is just 1 spell being 'common' instead of 'uncommon' ..I'll explain from own experience).

Sprites with 5 figures, 4 ranged damage, and +1 to hit deal about as much damage as a regular/veteran magician unit with the advantage of keeping out of harm's way (except against wizards). With mana focusing retort or conjurer (the latter being essential for nature wizards), you can summon a big group and take some moderately advanced lairs that consist of melee units and gain 500-1000 gold/mana loots -> something you just can't do with any other common summon. Yes, sprites are fragile and generally don't do that well against wizards, but they bring too much of an early advantage against nature nodes and lairs and as city-defenders

I respectfully disagree with this. I think sprites are about perfect right now.

Sprites aren't a general-purpose unit; they're very specialized. They're good for two things: scouting and cracking a limited number of nodes and lairs. They do this very well, but that's all they can do, and because of this their utility is very limited.

Yes, they can crack nodes and lairs defended by armies lacking any kind of anti-flying capability, and this is a huge advantage for a nature wizard. But, IMO, this isn't game-breaking. Nature wizards need that early advantage. The sprites' ability to bring in some extra resources is critical for a nature wizard in order to stay competitive (I'll get to this in a second).

This advantage is counterbalanced somewhat by the fact that there are only a few nodes, if any, the sprites can crack. If I'm lucky, I'll find a sorcery node or two that's defended by nagas and phantom beasts. I've rarely been able to take a chaos node with sprites, and I've never been able to take a nature node (basilisks everywhere!). Lairs are easier, but unless I find a temple filled with guardian spirits, I'm likely to only claim low-level lairs where I make enough mana to offset the cost of summoning my army of four sprites with resist elements in the first place.

Beyond this, sprites are pretty useless. They're fragile and expensive. The AI wizards always have something in their armies that can one-shot my sprites. I've tested various tactics using sprites in wartime, and everything I've tried just gets them killed. I use them to scout and claim nodes, then I dismiss them.

As a nature wizard, you've got war bears and sprites, the former being the go-to, general purpose, combat unit. Both are heads and shoulders above vanilla with this mod, but they both still kinda suck when compared to the other earlygame summons of other realms.

I won't engage an eight-stack of hellhounds unless every one of my war bears has resist elements, even then, I'm expecting to lose three to four of my units unless I'm very careful and very lucky.

Nagas can go all over the map. Not as tough as my bears, but I need to get some boats in the water or waste turns casting waterwalking on eight bears before I can do that.

Ghouls absolutely terrify me.

A lot of nature's magic is invested in its utility spells (earth lore, change terrain, etc.). Other realms are far more capable in its earygame offensive or defensive spells and summons. As a nature wizard, it's a high priority to get to the uncommon and rare summons ASAP in order to survive. The use of sprites to take some nodes and lairs faster than their opponents is one of the few strategic advantages nature wizards have in the earlygame.

Just my two cents.

[Seravy]

The main "weak" point of petrify is that it's per figure, which makes it compare less favorable to spells of the same modifier that hit the entire unit.

That's not actually a weak point. Let's say I'm targeting a couple of units with 4 counters each and 8 resistance. Because of the way counterattacking scales, it's much better to reduce both units to 2 counters than it is to kill one unit and leave the other one untouched.

The exception to this is units that have abilities that don't scale with the number of counters in the unit, such as gaze attacks.

True but this assumes you have armies capable of finishing the remaining figures (and to cast it more than once).
If you don't, which is often the case if the target is strong enough to require a spell to be used on it, the unit survives the battle and will get healed afterwards.

For example, if there is an enemy Death Knight attacking my city that has swordsmen in it, I would prefer 1 shot of a 30% chance to kill it and win, than a 0.3^4 = 0.81% to kill it, leaving me a 99.19% chance of losing my city.

On top of this, the "cannot regenerate" effect will only apply if over half of the unit is killed by Petrify.

In short, if you win the battle, then killing figures is more efficient, otherwise killing the entire unit is preferred.

[namad]

2. Elemental Armor
Cost : 17/75
Maintenance : 1
Research : 3/8 of the normal
Effect : Enchanted unit has +10 defense and resistance against Chaos and Nature magic and attacks.
A stronger "Resist Elements", this is effectively very heavy armor against all frequent types of magical ranged attacks. Anti-realm is fair because both affected realms can get around it : Chaos has doom and armor piercing spells, and Nature can summon monsters to stomp the target into the ground, neither realm is forced to rely on resistance based curses or elemental damage.


in game it says +12 defense. One of the two numbers is a mistake.

[Seravy]

2. Elemental Armor
Cost : 17/75
Maintenance : 1
Research : 3/8 of the normal
Effect : Enchanted unit has +10 defense and resistance against Chaos and Nature magic and attacks.
A stronger "Resist Elements", this is effectively very heavy armor against all frequent types of magical ranged attacks. Anti-realm is fair because both affected realms can get around it : Chaos has doom and armor piercing spells, and Nature can summon monsters to stomp the target into the ground, neither realm is forced to rely on resistance based curses or elemental damage.


in game it says +12 defense. One of the two numbers is a mistake.

The spell was updated, the post is wrong. I'll fix it.

[zitro1987]

Awareness is still an underwhelming 'v rare' spell that could use some additional bonus, which I'm thinking is an anti-invisibility buff (overland, or both overland and combat)

[Seravy]

Awareness is still an underwhelming 'v rare' spell that could use some additional bonus, which I'm thinking is an anti-invisibility buff (overland, or both overland and combat)

Why underwhelming? Being able to see every single unit every other player has is quite valuable, no one can surprise attack you ever and you'll always know where to send your armies without wasting time getting there with a scout. One of the previous updates even enabled it to show the contents of lairs (both monster types in it), although Earth Lore can also do that.

The main reason why Hadriex lost his last game was being unable to scout the other plane (any unit he sent that way just got killed immediately by AI doom stacks) which prevented him from casting city curses on his enemies, which would have been the best way to deal with the situation (by removing the AI's income, making all those nasty sky drakes disappear to maintenance). With Awareness the game would have been still winnable.

Anti-invisibility for combat would be hard to do, for overland sounds more possible but I haven't yet investigated that part of game code yet at all so idk for sure. Not sure I like it though, not seeing invisible units is part of the fun in the game.