Hello,
I decided to start playing MoM again on a whim a couple weeks ago, and I gave your mod a try because I see threads from this subforum pop up pretty often in Today's New Posts. I enjoyed it quite a lot, so I figured I outta give some feedback too. I'm making a new thread because I don't want to make a dozen posts in a dozen different category threads (or have the time to read them all, heh). I apologize in advanced if some things I say already have a dedicated discussion going somewhere else.
For reference, I would play MoM on impossible but played CoM on extreme. (edit: my CoM version is 2.7)
In general, I really liked most of the changes, especially bug fixes and where severe abuses were patched out completely. (e.g. word of recall, recall hero, free artificer mana, various rare-magic openers, etc) I also liked a lot of various balance tweaks to various spells... the best example of this is that, in the midst of a critical battle, I would often find myself going slowly through my spellbook before each time I cast, which contrasts to my memories of MoM where the norm was just spamming the same few offensive spells in every battle.
I kinda wrote this as I played, so some sections are a bit lengthy... I'll wrap those in spoiler tags just so there's not an extreme wall of text in this post.
A few random things I thought were really great:
A few random things that I found very frustrating but aren't necessarily unbalanced:
A few particular balance thoughts:
And that's about all I thought to write down. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm complaining too much because I had a lot fun playing your mod!
I decided to start playing MoM again on a whim a couple weeks ago, and I gave your mod a try because I see threads from this subforum pop up pretty often in Today's New Posts. I enjoyed it quite a lot, so I figured I outta give some feedback too. I'm making a new thread because I don't want to make a dozen posts in a dozen different category threads (or have the time to read them all, heh). I apologize in advanced if some things I say already have a dedicated discussion going somewhere else.
For reference, I would play MoM on impossible but played CoM on extreme. (edit: my CoM version is 2.7)
In general, I really liked most of the changes, especially bug fixes and where severe abuses were patched out completely. (e.g. word of recall, recall hero, free artificer mana, various rare-magic openers, etc) I also liked a lot of various balance tweaks to various spells... the best example of this is that, in the midst of a critical battle, I would often find myself going slowly through my spellbook before each time I cast, which contrasts to my memories of MoM where the norm was just spamming the same few offensive spells in every battle.
I kinda wrote this as I played, so some sections are a bit lengthy... I'll wrap those in spoiler tags just so there's not an extreme wall of text in this post.
A few random things I thought were really great:
- Between various buildings buffs and a smarter AI, the game feels a lot more fast-paced in general, which I really liked.
- The AI sometimes uses actual tactics in battle! Like sometimes they'll lure out a hero and then drop a phantom warriors right on their face. They know how to kite, and they seem to be a lot smarter about when to use unit enchantments. This combined with the better balanced combat spells, I found that battles are much more interesting now.
- Inquisitor - I really like this new retort a lot! It has a very nice balance of a very strong effect with a huge drawback. I really love how you can get a game started very, very quickly, either from cash-rushing in every building almost as quickly as you can, or pouring in all the money into mana. The drawback is very harsh too... for example, my first time using the retort was with the dwarves, and I thought the retort was insanely overpowered when I was pulling in 1000gpt with 6 cities, until Tauron (goddamn him) started spamming corruption on me. I was eventually able to put him out of my misery but not until at almost half of my tiles were corrupted! Another attempt with Halflings was a brutal battle of attrition when, against Tauron again (arrgh this guy) learned Flame Strike and would spam it relentlessly against my fragile stacks. It makes the game very fun and different.
- Cult Leader is a very nice retort too for just 1 pick, and I really liked that it enables you to build a very respectable power base without needing to conquer nodes. It's such a relief to have this retort if you discover that all you have nearby are Sky Drakes and Doom bats.
- Heroes aren't quite as crazy powerful anymore, which encourages you to use more of what you have on hand. Big thumbs up!
- The AIs aren't as obnoxious anymore. My memory of the MoM AIs is that you can try to trade some spells when you first meet them, and then, randomly, they'll declare war on you and remain at hate for the rest of the game. I'm not gonna say the CoM AIs are super intelligent diplomats or anything, but at least its possible to make deals with them, know what pisses them off, etc.
A few random things that I found very frustrating but aren't necessarily unbalanced:
- Chaos users spamming Corruption, arrgh! Races without a purifier have a big, non-obvious nerf.
- Volcano spam in the end-game. =/ Better make sure that Tauron's wandering scouts don't find your adamantium mines, lemme tell ya. I never saw it once create an ore as the changelog says, only destroy every single resource I had. (although it's not as big of a deal in the end game compared to corruption in the early game, as you have lots of cities to compensate)
- Lizardman settlers and waterwalking settlers. Ugh, I hate seeing these things settling up on me early on, before my own first settlers are out. They're even obnoxious in the mid game, as there's always that one spot in the middle of my empire, in some tundra or desert or swamp, that they'll find to sneak up to and settle in, leaving me baffled as to why the enemy wizard is popping up every turn to yell at me about encroaching on their territory.
- Actually, I think I've become Adolf Hitler against the entire lizardman race. Arrghh, I hate these guys, and try to wipe out rivals that use them ASAP. Sometimes I'll just restart a game if I meet a meet a rival lizardman settler early on, as I know it's just a prelude to a nonstop flood of Javelineers coming from every conceivable direction and wandering around my territory, preying on whatever isolated units they can find. Removing them is always a huge slog, both in terms of resources in-game (it's never just about the single Javelineer, but the flame strikes and endless summoned centaurs that will inevitably come with it), as well as my own time in fighting tedious battles against single units inside my own territory.
- Anytime I didn't take Archmage or Astrologer, I always ended up regretting it. As the game feels more intense now, you need every scrap of skill you can muster, especially with enemy wizards casting more offensive city enchantments and magicians stripping your own unit enchantments nonstop. Without one of the skill-boosters, I could only barely keep up in reaction to the enemies even having 100% of my power devoted to skill (with Aether Binding on top!), much less cast stuff for myself proactively like artifacts, big global enchantments, or high-end fantastic creatures.
- There were a few occasions where I really missed Awareness; I'd finally kill what I'd think is the last city of an enemy wizard I banished, only to discover that they still have another one out there somewhere, often on a 1-tile island on the other side of the map (and perhaps on another plane). A pretty frustrating situation.
A few particular balance thoughts:
This section's a little more lengthy...
Heroic Shout
I feel like this spell is a little too good. As much as I love the idea of screaming your enemies to death, if there was any one spell in CoM that was "no-brainer, spam on almost anything", this is it. It's just too generically good for the price, being useful on lower-end multi-figure stuff (sprites, halflings, etc) all the way up to stuff like Death Knights. It can get especially bad when you've got some magicians in your stacks, as you could be potentially spamming it 10 times per turn. If possible, I think a restriction of *only* Heroes can cast it would be enough of a nerf.
Focus Magic + Sprites/Ghouls
I first want to say that I like Focus Magic by itself; it's a cool spell that helps you get a lot more outta your heroes and some high end caster-units. However, the combination of Focus Magic + Sprites (which I'll call FMS) and, to a lesser extent, Focus Magic + Ghouls (FMG), is simply too good too early.
Let's start with FSM, although much of what I say can be generalized to either. One well known advantage of sprites is that you can sometimes find some dungeons/lairs that you can whittle away (attacking to kill at least one unit, stalling to the end of battle, and then diving in again next turn) with only a few sprites much earlier than you otherwise could. No problem here. However, this is limited by what you can actually kill by the end of battle and survive. Ranged defenders will kill your fragile sprites straight away, while flyers and breathers (e.g. hell hounds, gorgons) will close the gap if any are left over by the time you're outta ammo. Focus Magic drastically changes this scenerio as you can now kill so much more. Great Wyrms, Chaos Spawn, Great Drakes, Death Knights, Chimeras, Gorgons, Angels, Wraiths, Chimeras. I've killed lairs/dungeons/towers/nodes guarded by all of these units in the very early game with just FMS! The snowball effect that conquering a high-end node in the first few dozen turns of the game is huge, to say the least, both in the conquer reward and the income from the node. In my most current game, I've already conquered four Arcanus nodes and I think I can do a fifth one soon, and it's not even the end of 1404! I haven't been pouring everything into magic either, as I have a 6 cities in which I've been merrily cash-rushing buildings as fast as I can manage, and have a base casting-skill of 80. (on top of which I have the additional Astrologer bonus) That feels pretty extreme compared to other strategies. FMG are a little more brittle as a strategy as there won't be quite as many different things you can conquer early, as you can't "whittle" a node away through repeated battles. However, once you win something once, now you can bring that whole new army with you to the next thing and begin to snowball from there. FMG are much, much better for conquering neutral towns as sprites tend to melt under mass shaman fire.
The essential problem with this combo is that what you get is relatively too powerful too early, and for too cheap in what it costs you on the retort-pick screen. If looking just at the mana cost of FSM, I'd say the combo was fine... at 160 total mana, a FSM has power/cost reasonable for a strongish but situational uncommon summon. The difference is that you can cast it on T0, unlike every other uncommon in CoM. FSM also has other advantages: for example, you don't have to cast FM until you need to, as there's still some dungeons/lairs that can be conquered with just plain sprites. You can also cast 3-4 sprites first, and then cast FM afterwards, giving the unit extra turns to move to its destination, which is perfect for a rush scenerio if you find an enemy wizard tower early. (and yeah, you can kill enemy wizards' capitals in the early game with just FSM if you give 'em resist elements)
Finally, if all that was the worst of it, I wouldn't think it was a big problem. The biggest problem is that getting FSM only costs 4 of your 12 retort picks. That means you have 8 more to use to enhance the combo further. For example, adding a couple more nature books gets you Web and Resist Elements, which allow you to kill sooooo much more with your FSM (resist elements for enemy sprites and ghouls, web to kill a lot of those big/fast flyers and heroes etc) and unlocks Archmage. Another book can get you Nature's Eye or Earth lore, which are both awesome spells now that Awareness is gone. You can also pick up Astrologer, to cast get your FSM faster, conquer more nodes types, and doubling your rewards. Alchemy+Inquisitor gives you tons of mana. Famous might get you a hero with Guilding Beacon or Spirit Linker. There's all sorts of great retorts to pair... and even though we're talking about an early-game rush strategy, it's not like you're gonna have a weak late game with retorts like Astrologer, Alchemy, or Inquisitor. In the old 11-book MoM strats, as broken as they were (and FSM isn't quite at that level), you at least had the downside of not being very robust as you didn't have any retorts to fall back on.
I think that either Focus Magic needs to be Uncommon so that it can't be picked up for 2 retorts (perhaps being cheaper in cost to compensate) or else it shouldn't be useable on fantastic creatures.
Magician Casters spamming Dispel Magic
Magicians having generic caster ability is a bit flawed right now. I like the idea in theory a lot, but its kinda problematic in practice.
On the player's side, this means that some spells become way too good, like Web, Black Sleep, Mana Leak, etc. However, it would be an easy fix to say, increase the mana cost of some of these to like 11 and 21.
The really big problem is in access to the dispel magic spell when magicians are controlled by the AI's hands. I'm not sure if this is an AI behaivor problem, a balance problem with the formula for dispel magic being way too effective at +10 power, or a problem with the spell being spammed repeatedly, but the net effect of AI magicians having the option to cast dispel magic is that if you go into battle with an AI with overland enchantments on your units, the AI casters will go insane trying to get rid of them. A 9 stack of magicians will mean you see dispel magic cast 10 times on the first round of battle.
On the one hand, this is extremely annoying for the player because it is simply impossible to keep enchantments on your units. It's extremely unlikely that'll ever last more than one battle with any wizard leading a race with magicians. Yes, even with spell lock; I don't know how the dispel magic formula works, but spell lock is usually gone within 1-3 dispel magics (which shouldn't have more than 10 strength, right?) and then the rest of your enchantments are gone with the next one. If they have a hero, they'll cast Dispelling Wave instead and crush everything you have. (and yet it never seems to work when I use it =/) So, overland unit enchantments are now almost useless in CoM... or, at least, too expensive (in terms of both mana and skill) for the amount of use that you'll get out of 'em. Some key enchantments on a few key heros to be recast each turn is really all you can manage.
In addition, any AI that spams magicians (and they all seem to love spamming magicians if they can) is extremely easy to defeat. In round one of a given battle, they'll use up all of their action/mana spamming Dispel, and then you can essentially wipe them out with some fast moving units, e.g. a hero with merging/teleport or some nice movement items, or your own casters spamming Heroic Shout or Fairy Dust. In round 2, they'll be either dead or out of mana and down to just a figure or two per unit, meaning their otherwise formidable ranged attack will not do any noticable damage. Furthermore, it's very easy to purposely abuse their behaivor by broadly casting a few cheap enchantments (e.g. resist elements or whatever) on your units before the fight.
I'm not sure about the right way to fix this behaivor, but the current situation isn't good.
A few other random things that felt off:
Heroic Shout
I feel like this spell is a little too good. As much as I love the idea of screaming your enemies to death, if there was any one spell in CoM that was "no-brainer, spam on almost anything", this is it. It's just too generically good for the price, being useful on lower-end multi-figure stuff (sprites, halflings, etc) all the way up to stuff like Death Knights. It can get especially bad when you've got some magicians in your stacks, as you could be potentially spamming it 10 times per turn. If possible, I think a restriction of *only* Heroes can cast it would be enough of a nerf.
Focus Magic + Sprites/Ghouls
I first want to say that I like Focus Magic by itself; it's a cool spell that helps you get a lot more outta your heroes and some high end caster-units. However, the combination of Focus Magic + Sprites (which I'll call FMS) and, to a lesser extent, Focus Magic + Ghouls (FMG), is simply too good too early.
Let's start with FSM, although much of what I say can be generalized to either. One well known advantage of sprites is that you can sometimes find some dungeons/lairs that you can whittle away (attacking to kill at least one unit, stalling to the end of battle, and then diving in again next turn) with only a few sprites much earlier than you otherwise could. No problem here. However, this is limited by what you can actually kill by the end of battle and survive. Ranged defenders will kill your fragile sprites straight away, while flyers and breathers (e.g. hell hounds, gorgons) will close the gap if any are left over by the time you're outta ammo. Focus Magic drastically changes this scenerio as you can now kill so much more. Great Wyrms, Chaos Spawn, Great Drakes, Death Knights, Chimeras, Gorgons, Angels, Wraiths, Chimeras. I've killed lairs/dungeons/towers/nodes guarded by all of these units in the very early game with just FMS! The snowball effect that conquering a high-end node in the first few dozen turns of the game is huge, to say the least, both in the conquer reward and the income from the node. In my most current game, I've already conquered four Arcanus nodes and I think I can do a fifth one soon, and it's not even the end of 1404! I haven't been pouring everything into magic either, as I have a 6 cities in which I've been merrily cash-rushing buildings as fast as I can manage, and have a base casting-skill of 80. (on top of which I have the additional Astrologer bonus) That feels pretty extreme compared to other strategies. FMG are a little more brittle as a strategy as there won't be quite as many different things you can conquer early, as you can't "whittle" a node away through repeated battles. However, once you win something once, now you can bring that whole new army with you to the next thing and begin to snowball from there. FMG are much, much better for conquering neutral towns as sprites tend to melt under mass shaman fire.
The essential problem with this combo is that what you get is relatively too powerful too early, and for too cheap in what it costs you on the retort-pick screen. If looking just at the mana cost of FSM, I'd say the combo was fine... at 160 total mana, a FSM has power/cost reasonable for a strongish but situational uncommon summon. The difference is that you can cast it on T0, unlike every other uncommon in CoM. FSM also has other advantages: for example, you don't have to cast FM until you need to, as there's still some dungeons/lairs that can be conquered with just plain sprites. You can also cast 3-4 sprites first, and then cast FM afterwards, giving the unit extra turns to move to its destination, which is perfect for a rush scenerio if you find an enemy wizard tower early. (and yeah, you can kill enemy wizards' capitals in the early game with just FSM if you give 'em resist elements)
Finally, if all that was the worst of it, I wouldn't think it was a big problem. The biggest problem is that getting FSM only costs 4 of your 12 retort picks. That means you have 8 more to use to enhance the combo further. For example, adding a couple more nature books gets you Web and Resist Elements, which allow you to kill sooooo much more with your FSM (resist elements for enemy sprites and ghouls, web to kill a lot of those big/fast flyers and heroes etc) and unlocks Archmage. Another book can get you Nature's Eye or Earth lore, which are both awesome spells now that Awareness is gone. You can also pick up Astrologer, to cast get your FSM faster, conquer more nodes types, and doubling your rewards. Alchemy+Inquisitor gives you tons of mana. Famous might get you a hero with Guilding Beacon or Spirit Linker. There's all sorts of great retorts to pair... and even though we're talking about an early-game rush strategy, it's not like you're gonna have a weak late game with retorts like Astrologer, Alchemy, or Inquisitor. In the old 11-book MoM strats, as broken as they were (and FSM isn't quite at that level), you at least had the downside of not being very robust as you didn't have any retorts to fall back on.
I think that either Focus Magic needs to be Uncommon so that it can't be picked up for 2 retorts (perhaps being cheaper in cost to compensate) or else it shouldn't be useable on fantastic creatures.
Magician Casters spamming Dispel Magic
Magicians having generic caster ability is a bit flawed right now. I like the idea in theory a lot, but its kinda problematic in practice.
On the player's side, this means that some spells become way too good, like Web, Black Sleep, Mana Leak, etc. However, it would be an easy fix to say, increase the mana cost of some of these to like 11 and 21.
The really big problem is in access to the dispel magic spell when magicians are controlled by the AI's hands. I'm not sure if this is an AI behaivor problem, a balance problem with the formula for dispel magic being way too effective at +10 power, or a problem with the spell being spammed repeatedly, but the net effect of AI magicians having the option to cast dispel magic is that if you go into battle with an AI with overland enchantments on your units, the AI casters will go insane trying to get rid of them. A 9 stack of magicians will mean you see dispel magic cast 10 times on the first round of battle.
On the one hand, this is extremely annoying for the player because it is simply impossible to keep enchantments on your units. It's extremely unlikely that'll ever last more than one battle with any wizard leading a race with magicians. Yes, even with spell lock; I don't know how the dispel magic formula works, but spell lock is usually gone within 1-3 dispel magics (which shouldn't have more than 10 strength, right?) and then the rest of your enchantments are gone with the next one. If they have a hero, they'll cast Dispelling Wave instead and crush everything you have. (and yet it never seems to work when I use it =/) So, overland unit enchantments are now almost useless in CoM... or, at least, too expensive (in terms of both mana and skill) for the amount of use that you'll get out of 'em. Some key enchantments on a few key heros to be recast each turn is really all you can manage.
In addition, any AI that spams magicians (and they all seem to love spamming magicians if they can) is extremely easy to defeat. In round one of a given battle, they'll use up all of their action/mana spamming Dispel, and then you can essentially wipe them out with some fast moving units, e.g. a hero with merging/teleport or some nice movement items, or your own casters spamming Heroic Shout or Fairy Dust. In round 2, they'll be either dead or out of mana and down to just a figure or two per unit, meaning their otherwise formidable ranged attack will not do any noticable damage. Furthermore, it's very easy to purposely abuse their behaivor by broadly casting a few cheap enchantments (e.g. resist elements or whatever) on your units before the fight.
I'm not sure about the right way to fix this behaivor, but the current situation isn't good.
A few other random things that felt off:
- Artificer feels kinda useless now. As mentioned before, it feels like you've gotta cast something all the time, whether its reapplying unit enchantments, dispelling freaking chaos rifts, reapplying your global enchantments (especially Aether Binding), etc, that it's too big a liability to spend several turns creating an artifact even if you otherwise could afford the mana cost just fine. By the time you're able to cast a mid-range artifact within just a few turns, you've already filled up your heroes slots with spoils from dungeons and conquered enemies. Being able to cast some cheapish, specialized items is still useful, but it's a very disappointing retort considering stuff like Alchemy, Archmage, Inquisitor, Tactician, and Cult Leader are all also only 1 pick.
- I wasn't really able to make summoning creatures work for me in the mid to late game, even when using Conjurer. It's a similar problem to the above... as awesome as e.g. a Sky Drake is, it's really a big liability to lock up your casting ability for even 5-6 turns casting the damn thing. I guess I never went for a deep multi-book strat combined with specialist, which perhaps would help a lot?
- Doom bats feel way too strong for a rare. With 6 moves, they can completely demolish your entire first line on the very first turn of combat. It feels off to not be less worried about the Very Rares (Great Drakes and Hydras) appearing in a chaos node, but being terrified of even attempting one with Doom bats.
- You shouldn't be able to cast web on Death Knights (which should be non-corporeal, like Wraiths) and Sky Drakes (magic immune)! It shouldn't be as easy and cheap to kill top-tier fantastic units that have "hard to kill" as a big selling point as spamming web with magicians and then beating them down with cheap ranged trash like slingers or longbowmen or whatever.
And that's about all I thought to write down. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm complaining too much because I had a lot fun playing your mod!
