I agree that Stream of Life works better as an uncommon. Part of the problem with it is that you've altered the tax thresholds drastically, so it is now easy to run max tax without any special gadgets. Previously, Stream of Life was a considerable windfall due to being able to run at 3.0 gc. Is growth boost even supposed to be a life effect, though? I think it belongs in the Nature Realm. Unrest reduction is definitely Life.
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Right but its also opportunity cost (which is why I don't consider the cost worth it). In absolute terms, pop growth and unrest is better than the cost - but depending on the wizard, 8 mana per turn is simply a high cost - there are too many other spells you need to cast.
Any who, not worried about it, but, I'm not actually sure what changes you are implenting. So I can't say either way. (Meaning we discussed white a few things, and I don't know which ones you are actually in favor of. (February 19th, 2017, 12:31)Catwalk Wrote: I agree that Stream of Life works better as an uncommon. Part of the problem with it is that you've altered the tax thresholds drastically, so it is now easy to run max tax without any special gadgets. Previously, Stream of Life was a considerable windfall due to being able to run at 3.0 gc. Is growth boost even supposed to be a life effect, though? I think it belongs in the Nature Realm. Unrest reduction is definitely Life. Nature actually doesn't have any direct growth bonus spells. It improves terrain, which improves maximal population which results in growth indirectly...or improves max population directly which again improves growth indirectly, but there is no way in Nature to improve growth without increasing maximal population. So ultimately, Nature increases the capacity of your cities. Life on the other hand increases growth directly - the maximal size isn't any higher, you just reach it in less time. I'd say these are quite different effects, a larger max size versus the ability to fill that max size faster. Quote:Any who, not worried about it, but, I'm not actually sure what changes you are implenting. So I can't say either way. (Meaning we discussed white a few things, and I don't know which ones you are actually in favor of. Stream of Life - Uncommon with the current effect and possible 12 maintenance. Healing Charge - Rare with the current effect, or at most 9 health for 32 mana, if we absolutely want to make it better. I think being able to heal 60% more per turn and ignore the max health cap and no healing limitation is good enough to be a rare without any further improvements. It might be somewhat redundant with Lionheart though, as that provides the same health bonus with additional stats - but only once per unit while Healing Charge is unlimited. Even if you will always want to start with Lionheart, if the unit needs further healing, HC is needed. A bit worried about having it the same tier as Mass Healing as well, unless you do need the extra 3 hp that badly, healing multiple units is better. Prosperity and Resurrection : no changes. (Prosperity costs 175 in the current version, it was reduced from 200 already. It seems I didn't list it in the changelog, even I'm not sure if it was added in 3.2 or 3.21...or after 3.21 in which case it's new?)
February 19th, 2017, 13:36
(This post was last modified: February 19th, 2017, 13:39 by Nelphine.)
OK, I understand those changes. I think any uncommon that costs 12/turn will never get used, but I don't think its unbalanced.
Also I think healing charge as is, but rare, is great. 
While working on swapping the spells, I realized Healing Charge can only bypass the "no healing" effect of Raise Dead, and even that is a bug - I intended this to be not possible and it isn't for the AI, it's just the human player due to a mistargeted conditional jump.
Either way, being able to raise a unit's health over the maximum with no limitations, and heal irrecoverable type damage are unique and powerful enough effects to be rare. ...and while we are at Stream of Life. The AI always targets their highest value city first with any city buff. We might want to change this for Stream of Life? Unless the unrest rates are really high, a smaller city benefits much more from the boosted growth so targeting the weakest would be better? (unless it's weak because it was built on horrible terrain) On the other hand, it's much more likely to lose the weakest city, wasting the spell so idk. The largest city is more likely to benefit from the unrest reduction part, as well as healing the units is better on more important cities. ...btw are we happy with the name "Healing Charge"? It's not very impressive although it does imply healing over the maximal health. Quote:Stream of Life - Uncommon with the current effect and possible 12 maintenance.I like the high upkeep, but I suggest reducing the casting cost to 100. Then I can see it being used on key expansions. Quote:Healing Charge - Rare with the current effect, or at most 9 health for 32 mana, if we absolutely want to make it better. I think being able to heal 60% more per turn and ignore the max health cap and no healing limitation is good enough to be a rare without any further improvements. It might be somewhat redundant with Lionheart though, as that provides the same health bonus with additional stats - but only once per unit while Healing Charge is unlimited. Even if you will always want to start with Lionheart, if the unit needs further healing, HC is needed. A bit worried about having it the same tier as Mass Healing as well, unless you do need the extra 3 hp that badly, healing multiple units is better.I think Healing Charge should be more powerful at a higher cost. 12 health for 45 mana. It's too similar to both Healing and Lionheart where it's sitting at now. If you want to bump it up to Rare, it should be more potent. Quote:Prosperity and Resurrection : no changes. (Prosperity costs 175 in the current version, it was reduced from 200 already. It seems I didn't list it in the changelog, even I'm not sure if it was added in 3.2 or 3.21...or after 3.21 in which case it's new?)I still think Prosperity is underpowered for a Rare spell, how about reducing it to 125 with an upkeep of 5? Quote:I think Healing Charge should be more powerful at a higher cost. 12 health for 45 mana. It's too similar to both Healing and Lionheart where it's sitting at now. If you want to bump it up to Rare, it should be more potent. The idea here is that it cannot heal equal or more per turn than Doom Bolt, otherwise direct damage will never do anything aside from forcing you to counter it by healing - ultimately making both wizards waste their turns. It used to be 10 healing for a higher cost but it was way too good. At 8 health, it already heals 60% more per turn than regular healing, and while it's not as cost-effective, mana cost is hardly relevant when it's about your important hero being able to tank doom bolts and lightning bolts for only 2 turns, or 7. At 12 healing, a lone hero with caster could even negate the damage of Wave of Despair or Crack's Call by casting this spell together with the wizard - and keep it up as long as the hero has MP - on a Battlemage, that's until the combat is over as the hero recovers lost mp in melee combat. (yes, this requires the hero to already have a max health of ~30 to not die to one hit but that's not too hard with Lionheart). While I completely agree a rare should be much more potent than a common or uncommon, a +60% effectiveness of healing per turn (not per mp) is a lot and should not be underestimated. The similarity to Lionheart is certainly not ideal but I have no good idea how to deal with that, aside from assuming the lack of being able to repeatedly use Lionheart is enough - generally when you want to heal an important unit to keep it alive, you'll need to do so more than once in the battle as the enemy keeps targeting it. Edit : Reducing the cost instead of increasing the effect is an option though. As is, Healing is more cost effective in MP, and Healing Charge in heals/turn, but as a rare, it might make sense if it was equal in healing/MP but better in healing/turn. This would make it compare better with Lionheart as well (25 mp vs 40 is a lot if you don't need 3 swords and crosses - a strong single figure unit often doesn't), I'm not sure if it's necessary though, doing so would mean Life wizards and their heroes can keep up healing units much longer before running out of skill - and they can do that for an obscene amount of time already. Quote:I still think Prosperity is underpowered for a Rare spell, how about reducing it to 125 with an upkeep of 5? I don't see how an extra 20-30 gold every turn can be underpowered for 175 mana - even if we consider gold only half the value of mana, it returns the investment in about 10-15 turns and makes a profit afterward - compared to Uranus's Blessing where this takes about 3 times longer. It's more of an issue with what sort of wizard the player is playing - gold is of low relevance for most wizards who rely heavily on magic, while a casting time of 175 means missing out on summoning an additional pretty good creature, or whatever else the core strategy is. However, all overland spells are meant to be a net positive over sufficient time, so the main question here is, how much of an effect we want. As is, this spell increases the gold output of an empire by about 25% - assuming every city has a 100% bonus already from terrain, roads, banks and merchant's guilds - if not, the benefit is higher. Whether that's a lot or not depends on how many percentages your Gold income is out of your entire economy. Honestly, unless playing inquisitor, I think it's actually not all that much - cities produce roughly as much production as gold, and about half as much power, so gold only means 40% of the total city economy - factoring in nodes and other sources, gold is about one third of a player's overall economy. A 25% boost to one third of the whole is only about 8% overall economic power boost which certainly doesn't seem all that big deal for casting a 175 cost spell 10-20 times - compared to casting Inspirations on 2-3 key cities improving relevant military production by 50%. Inquisitors and Dwarves, or wizards having a mostly nonmagical economy benefit massively more though - for them this might be as much as a 15-30% bonus to their economy overall. So I think, we have a choice to make here. Keep Prosperity as is - decent but not impressive for normal wizards but still great for dwarves, inquisitors, or races that don't build magical buildings. Or buff it to produce more (and/or cost less but I'd prefer producing more - cost can be reduced by a lot of different effects) in which case it's a good rare for everyone but those above mentioned strategies get a massive boost from it. (in this case, +100% might be a good plan) There is one more thing to consider. Even if the actual economic effect is low, the effect on available gold can still be significant. Gold is typically spent on maintenance - most of it anyway, buildings eat almost the whole gold production of a city and military eats the rest. If there is 25% more gold produced, it can be the difference between a 0 gold income (2000 produced and spent on maintenance) and 500 a turn (2500 produced but only 2000 spent.). Even though the numerical effect is low, it's a quality jump from being unable to hire heroes, mercenaries, buy items, rush produce things, make mana etc to being able to do so when needed. Other resources don't work like this, if you produce 25% more of something else, you do get 25% more, as maintenance is nonexistent (research, etc) or much lower compared to the income in other resources (mana).
I'm not sure if I like the idea of having healing charge at 'rare' due to redudancies with lionheart also at rare, and mass-healing, also another healing spell. I strongly believe resurrection or a modified divine order that omits own caster spell cost penalties would work better.
Nevertheless, my proposal is: Cost 35-40, Target unit ends up with 15hp or +9-10, whichever results in highest hp. Unit cannot have 9-10hp more than max. (versatile, but works best with near-death units and fully-healed units) *Prosperity, leave it alone as rare, or move it to uncommon with a powerful but fixed 1.5 gold per pop, unaffected by race or taxes. (otherwise, it seems a bit powerful with certain cities) *Stream of Life - I'd like to see the unrest bonus brought down to just -3 if uncommon. That way, the spell would become affordable.
Meanwhile one thing I'm worried about. Stream of Life pretty much counters Great Wasting and Armageddon - the unrest part anyway. Not a problem for Armageddon, the power benefit from volcanoes is the primary effect there. However Great Wasting, which is already not that impressive for the human player, will be even less useful - uncommon spells are much more frequent on AI wizards that play multiple realms. The AI is good at cleaning corruption with shaman now, so that part of the effect is not very beneficial unless paired with Meteor Storm to kill the Shaman. Similarly, Evil Presence and Famine is less effective - Food or power is still lost but without additional rebels, neither of these spells are enough to cause a city to start losing population.
I see two ways to fix this : 1. Stream of Life unrest reduction needs to be lower, in which case cost and maintenance needs to be less as well 2. Make Evil Presence disable unrest reduction from Stream of Life (make it count as a religious building for explanation) and change Great Wasting similarly somehow. Quote:Nevertheless, my proposal is: Healing charge uses normal Healing code, with the parameters "8" and "can heal over max=1". Adding details like that is not possible, or at least way too hard. That sounds a bit too complicated for the player to remember and use as well. (February 19th, 2017, 09:01)Seravy Wrote: -Units heal fully in the city. Nature has this effect at uncommon as well, and for a much much lower mana cost so no problem with it - especially as cities already provide faster healing on their own anyway. Two more things that I feel like you're missing: 1.) You avoid the need to build Parthenons and Cathedrals, two very expensive buildings, if your race can even build them. It's similar to Altar of Battle allowing you to skip a War College. 2.) Stream of Life has multiplicative effects with the other 3 rare life city enchantments. A recently planted city with SoL will of course grow far faster than one without it, which means it will have more population that pays more taxes at a higher rate - and thus gets more of a bonus from Prosperity. The bigger city also has more workers to gain a bonus from Inspirations - and more production means you end up spending less gold on rushed buildings, which is similar to paying back the mana you spent on the city buffs to begin with. IMHO, I disagree with Nelphine completely. Stream of Life is the best of the three white city buffs in terms of its effects, and is only limited by its large research/casting cost. |
