(February 19th, 2017, 20:23)Nelphine Wrote: Um. I hate to say it, but I think you should see how the new Stream of Life plays out, especially the increased cost.
I haven't actually increased the maintenance - I did say "and maybe 12 maintenance", wasn't sure about doing it.
The problem is, the AI will have it on all their cities anyway, and when the human player casts Great Wasting is what worries me - it works fine enough when the AI does that (although Stream of Life does counter it too well even in that case).
It's a very rare so I'd want it to be scary, and I don't agree about the others not being scary.
Call the Void pretty much destroys an entire city and the only counters to it are also very rare.
Armageddon grants a massive power boost to the AI, comparable to Life Force - the unrest and volcanoes eating terrain are just the extras.
Warp Reality is crazy - at -2 to Hit against all those Chaos units (that like have +3 armor from the Chaos Channel buff granted with Doom Mastery) nothing except super buffed units will do relevant damage.
Call Chaos eliminates pretty much anything if given enough time - The AI definitely has the skill to use it repeatedly, and the change to confusion (chance to change control immediately before the other player can take a turn) makes it even better at removing your big units.
Disintegrate, well, let's just say I lost about 4 Behemoths in my previous game to that - The AI is aware of spell save modifiers and won't hesitate to reduce the resistance of big targets by spells if it can. Unless you can afford to use only 10+ resistance units, this spell hurts even more than Doom Bolt, and the real scary part is you only need to lose a few points to have very rares that get disintegrated. If it ever hits a hero, the items are gone as well - no save rolls, no random chances, the entire unit just gone and the AI is pretty much guaranteed to go for it immediately if there is a chance.
Meteor Storm is questionable - the effects are nasty but hitting other AI players can benefit the human player far more than anything else of this kind in the game. On the other hand, the human player can also forget about using anything but expensive top tier units for anything, but loses buildings needed to produce them randomly, plus being forced to use expensive big units to guard nodes is a pretty huge handicap - leaving them unguarded helps the AI a lot because they will steal them all, but keeping them will cost a lot on maintenance.
Chaos Surge is huge - only with Doom Mastery, but the added resistance means the typical weaknesses of fantastic units are much less relevant while they still get all the benefits of having massive attack power paired with either flight, fire breath or armor. It'd say it's not any worse than Crusade, and possibly better.
Hydra is pretty horrible for the AI, I can't argue with that - it's slow and useless unless buffed -but still has a bit thing going for it. With 90 total health and regeneration, it'll be there to keep the combat going and enable the AI to cast those nasty direct damage spells for eternity and while the Hydra doesn't do anything, the opposing army is still wiped out.
And this leaves two spells - Great Drake is the most powerful very rare creature in the game, albeit ironically the easiest to counter - but failing to do so means certain doom to even the best units.And it's easy only until Warp Reality appears to support them - at -2 to hit, not much can deal damage to a Great Drake with its 10 armor.
Last is Great Wasting and I think this might really be the weakest - corruption is annoying but easy to clean up, and +5 rebels is irrelevant if cities are large, as it's proportionally not as much compared to the total population, only about a quarter - but it's also not very good if the city is small but has all the anti-unrest buildings, as in that case they can counter all the unrest just fine, a small city doesn't have a lot of it coming from the % of the population itself due to taxes.
I might be wrong though, as I said it's really hard to measure how much +5 rebels actually mean in economic output.
PS : If it turns out to be only Stream of Life being a problem, we can add "and prevents reduction of unrest by spell effects" to specifically address the problem, but if it's weak overall, then we need to do better.
