My extreme life game

[Nelphine]

I have won, destroying every enemy city, in May 1420.

Overall conclusions: the experimental version plays practically identical to the other version, for a strategy that isn't an early rush strategy. I think this is a good thing, as this means that the changes don't throw off balance a lot, although obviously further testing would be required for more specific cases.

Heroes are utterly ridiculous by middle game. Its simply too easy to get items that make them indestructible, when you consider that clearing every node, lair, and tower by 1414 is completely reasonable. Minor things like very rare summons wouldn't have threatened my hero stack, and its very unusual for ai to have stacks of very rares early enough to matter. The only thing that scares them is spells that magic immunity and wraith form doesn't work against, or creatures that fly more than speed 6 and have very strong melee, or creatures with boulder ranged attacks and can overcome 30+ defense. Which boils down to how many items with the obscene combinations can I get, not will I get them (I think its reasisble to expect at least one item of each immunity per game). Get a little lucky and you can have multiple invincible heroes.

For the moment I will continue to simply not use heroes as much as possible. While I used them for mobile defense this game, I don't think it would have mattered if I hadn't. I would have lost more units, and would have been 2 turns slower at killing the last enemy city, and I might even have lost 1-3 more cities, but the entire invasion my heroes stopped was completely out of the path of my offensive stacks, and I did have more troops nearby for defense.

Archmage is still incredibly powerful for the AI. Peaceful AI is still a double edged sword. I like them. They let me play a long term game (this was a long game even if it was totally over by 1420) but its so easy to make a mistake and start a war early that you can't win.

There is a point where more skill for the human no longer matters in terms of winning a war. Specifically its the point at which you don't get overwhelmed by your enemy. After that the only thing that matters is having enough mana because you will fight a lot of battles.

I'm still interested in the elusive SoM. But I don't think its reasonable for it to be researched before 1420, and even that is probably an impossible AI sagemaster; and I simply don't understand how the game goes past 1420. I might have to watch some videos because I just don't see it, but Seravy and others talk like its a real thing.

The history graph is extremely misleading. Even when my opponent literally had one hamlet left, he still had more historical power than me, and more power production, and more army strength (and obviously way more spell power). No one should ever base their game on the historical graph; and the other three graphs provide information, but NOT relative power. Deciding a game is doomed should never be based in the relative power on any of the graphs.

[Seravy]

(I think its reasisble to expect at least one item of each immunity per game).

Nope, Magic Immunity is only available on two predefined very expensive (and thus very rare) items and cannot be generated randomly or enchanted. It's something of a bonus you can only get once in a blue moon.

Missile Immunity, Fire/Cold Immunity, Death Immunity, Wraith Form etc are relatively more common.

Archmage is still incredibly powerful for the AI. Peaceful AI is still a double edged sword. I like them. They let me play a long term game (this was a long game even if it was totally over by 1420) but its so easy to make a mistake and start a war early that you can't win.

Indeed. Hadriex lost his game on Normal difficulty because he did that.

The history graph is extremely misleading. Even when my opponent literally had one hamlet left, he still had more historical power than me, and more power production, and more army strength (and obviously way more spell power).

Weird. I can only thing of one way that happens (aside from reading the graph before it gets updated) - you didn't take away their nodes and they had a lot of ships or strong fantastic creatures for army power.
The game is certainly not one where relative power is enough to determine victory though - thanks to spells it's often possible to beat a much stronger enemy with the right strategy.

[Nelphine]

That was exactly the case. Tons of ships, and tons of fantastic creatures. I wasn't even bothering to reclaim nodes I had lost, let alone take back his. No point when the game was won.

[jhsidi]

Re: heroes, I feel like they're one of the extremely unbalanced aspects of the original game that CoM has only partially corrected for.

Early heroes became really cool to play with, especially the ones with support skills (Rakir, Serena, etc). They're just squishy enough that they're pretty easy to lose, yet they have characteristics that make me want to carry them with my main invasion stack.

As you said, around mid-game things go off the rails, whether it's Fang flying around burning units to a crisp, or Warrax burning entire armies. A hero-focused strategy seems stronger than anything else. Last game, I had an overpowered Valana (!?!?) running around killing giant units on her own, although I tried not to abuse it too much.

I'm curious -- has anyone experimented with removing the level-up bonuses to hero stats? So essentially their skills would increase (Guiding Beacon, Might and so forth) but nothing else. Maybe that would help keep heroes from scaling out of control, as well as ensuring that the way they power up is based more on their "personality" -- i.e. support heroes stay support.

[Nelphine]

Important: Read the comment at the end. Basically, it says its ok for heroes to be overpowered and I don't actually want that to change.

I personally believe the problem is still items. When you're clearing 50+ lairs (and most of those are the high end ones that the AI doesn't get first), 15-20 nodes, 5-6 towers, that's a LOT of high end treasure. (I would say I average more than 1 item per place cleared.) Call it ~100 items from clearing. Add in that I try to keep thousands of gold around, and I get another.. ~15 items offered to me from merchants. Then I steal several dozen items from enemy wizards. In total I'm getting over 120 items.

If we magically assumed all the pre-built items costs roughly match the spread of costs I get in my items (which you'd think is completely wrong, but I'm assuming it for the sake of making this point, and because the conclusion matches my anecdotal evidence that I haven't remotely actually kept notes on, so is also probably completely wrong), then it's actually reasonable to get 1 of the 2 super rare magic immunity items per game.

It also means getting 6 heroes with mostly high end items (+6 or better armors, best movement, best attack, best resistance, -2 to spell saves, strong tertiary) is completely normal. That means even if the hero got 0 stats from levelling, they'd still have 20+ armor, 20+ attack, high movement, high enough resistance to be immune to almost everything. But without levelling, they'd probably not reach 30+ anymore, so very rares would probably threaten them more consistently. But it would SUCK to have a hero in the early game. I firmly believe items are the issue; although levels past 5 or so also start to contribute.

Note these assumptions go slightly off on impossible. Specifically, the AI get a lot more of the lairs. So you probably lose at least 25 items because of that. (You're also MUCH more likely to die/give up before 1414 and everything is cleared, but that doesn't change that IF you survive till then, heroes are likely to become unstoppable.)

*SUPER IMPORTANT POINT*: But fixing items basically requires making them very bland and uninteresting (+1 or +2 bonuses, no immunities, etc), whereas this aspect of the game (heroes and items) is very 'fun'. People like having something NAMED that they can make a personal attachment to (hard to really care about 'Beastman Halberdier' especially when you have dozens or hundreds), and they like to see that named thing that they care about getting noticeable power (and +1 or +2 bonuses aren't really noticeable.) So despite my own conclusions that heroes are still overpowered, I don't think we really want to change them much more; those of us who are worried that they are overpowered can simply choose not to use them effectively, those people who like to make a god hero and rampage around, still have that option in the game. (I know when I first started playing the game, I LOVED that aspect. Balance didn't matter. Getting my namesake to be ultra and destroying everything was a huge draw to the game for me.)

[jhsidi]

Those are good points!

I think we're mostly on the same page, just with a slight difference in how we view the scale and solution of overpowered heroes. The unbalanced / exploitable nature of MoM is what I've always loved, and heroes are part and parcel.

However... there is a line between exploit and cheat code, namely that one is fun and the other is not. Heroes, in my view, cross that line around mid- to late-game. That is to say, early on when you're playing with heroes or even your first champions, they're fun and fit into the overall mechanics, although generally "too powerful": this is the fun exploit stage. Then when you've collected enough items and levels they slip over to un-fun: call it the idspispopd stage.

Actually, I've noticed that several veterans say, in forum posts, that they don't use heroes. That seems indictment enough of the balance: heroes are a major mechanic, one of the most fun, yet you opt out almost entirely despite the fact that it is possible to use heroes during part of the game without "cheating" or impinging on fun. I'd guess that's because it's too hard (and too illusion-breaking) to arbitrarily decide when to take your cheat code out of the rotation.

Shorter version: if the Very Rare summons of a single school of magic were game-breaking overpowered, in a way that's incredibly fun to play the first time you ever try it but henceforth makes you avoid the school of magic, would you advocate to leave them unchanged?

I totally agree with your point about items. Actually, similar comment there: I wonder if the items might be better if they were limited to the skills. Example: my Marcus the Ranger currently has a bow with Doom on it. Doom alone is exploit-level.. but then, he also has 10+ points in stats coming from items. So while he's fun, and part of my game, as a Captain with an unfilled accessory slot, I just know he's going to become game-breaking in 30-40 turns. That evolution of a game mechanic from fun > unfun kinda sucks to see in a game that has otherwise become very well balanced in a lot of ways.

[Seravy]

I think a significant part in the problem was dumb AI research decisions and low AI research bonuses.
Very rare creatures can and will slaughter most heroes in sufficient numbers but...the AI doesn't get them in time (or just don't have enough of them summoned yet to matter).
Very rare spells win the game for the AI (even if they don't kill your heroes, if they blow up all your cities, kill all your other units or just make their normal units unstoppable, you lose the game. One unstoppable stack doesn't equal victory) - but again, the AI didn't get them in time to do that.
Overwhelming amount of units can do it too - your hero stack can only kill one enemy stack a turn which isn't going to help if they have hundreds - but this one only really comes into play on high difficulty and/or late game.

I hope the increased AI research bonus and better decision making will reduce this problem at least for the high difficulty levels - I think it's perfectly fine if a player can win the game using a few heroes on Normal and maybe sometimes on Hard.

As Nelphine said, items are the problem - 12 slots each able to hold a +4 to +6 bonus or some sort of immunity is a lot. However, it's needed to keep it fun, no one cares about weak items. I tried to keep those items that really change the game low - there are about 1-2 items of each type that is near perfect, and strong abilities like regeneration appear on like, ~10 out of 250.
I think Nelphine's numbers are a bit high - in my experience the AI clears a significant portion of lairs and nodes before I have troops to spare to do it. It really depends on the game flow and my own spells though, but I don't think I would get more than half the lairs on the map for Extreme. A greater problem is how the items the AI found get looted by the player, but I don't really have any solution for that.

Oh there is one more problem with heroes.
It's inherently a human player mechanic. Heroes are a "blank" shapeshifting unit that can be turned into anything you need using items, but the AI cannot use them that way. They are also immortal - if you don't lose the battle, you get the items back, and then you also get the hero back for 500 mana crystals. There are a few spells that can break this, but well prepared players will not fall victim to those.

[Catwalk]

A big problem is being able to teleport items for 20 mana. While this is normally a good feature, it allows you to teleport your superhero kit from one hero to another, giving you several heroes with superhuman abilities instead of limiting those items to one hero per turn. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to fix this technically (probably a pain to code), we might consider an honour code disallowing this. It really makes a huge difference, I know I've abused it happily in the past.

Seravy, this game is inherently geared towards offense. The fact that your perspective is highly defensive completely skews your perspective on strategies. Having a big offensive advantage matters far more than having a big defensive advantage. Heroes are a really big offensive advantage. And once their fortress is down, taking a handful other cities the same turn without losses is trivial.

I agree that items are too powerful in general, and that heroes gain too much power each time they level up. I'm happy to stick a +2 Bless shield on my hero if I don't have Bless, that's a significant boost which will let me win battles.

[jhsidi]

Maybe the basic problem comes from the original MoM balancing of items. I agree w/ Catwalk that a simple Bless shield can be really useful (let's say you're Nature fighting Chaos or Death). But the original game put a lot of emphasis on the low-level + Attack / Defense / Resist stats with numerous items that only had those small boosts.

+Stats is a snooze-fest, even at high levels. They're just scaling up something that already exists, often to unacceptably high levels. Spell effects, on the other hand, add a lot of strategy and interest.

I've also abused the hell out of the item transfer technique. TBH I would've often done the same at 200 mana, though. Would be cool if the transfer could only be effected between towns (like Earth Gate).

[Nelphine]

I've never abused the item transfer loophole. I'm not sure there's a good way to fix it. Only thing I can think of is that you put a limit on moving it to 1/turn, and you can only go from hero to hero if the heroes are in the same stack. But that would really suck when you're trying to decide what to do with a new item and are out of room in the vault because you can't see the stats on the item you're currently moving. So on the turn you get it you should be able to move it an unlimited number of times.

But the transfer abuse I don't really care about. Its a perfectly good honour code point.

@Seravy: what problem are you referring to? The heroes too strong problem? I don't think research would matter. My offensive stacks didn't include any heroes - they were only used to stop one particular invasion, and I was taking out his fortress time and again, and all of his cities, without any heroes.