My extreme life game

[Seravy]

@Seravy: what problem are you referring to? The heroes too strong problem?

Yes.  Aside from other things, the main thing the AI has against heroes are very rare creatures, but they need to research them in time.

Good hero stack? Not good enough to take out a capital with 9 Sky Drakes.

Seravy, this game is inherently geared towards offense.

Then we have a bigger problem. We might want to start by fixing that. The AI can't play offense effectively.

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.

Except, a hero stack can't take down a fortress with 9 Sky Drakes or equivalent. (Yes, if you're artificer and all 6 heroes wield 3 perfect 4k mana items then you can. But that's not an option in 99% of the games - even if found items are good, they won't be anywhere near that level - maybe you can have one hero geared up that way, or if lucky, two.)
Which is why I believe the problem is that either heroes can get unstoppable too early (doubt it, EXP rewards are not that high and good items aren't that common) or the AI is just too slow and doesn't have the very rare creatures in time (with the old research, I'm not surprised about that.)

Transferring items is powerful but I have no good solution for that. At best I can raise the cost but that would be really problematic in the early game where you can't afford to pay more.

My last test game, aside from Sprites, was Life+Sorcery artificer to see if heroes are even still playable. Unfortunately on Hard difficulty I was able to win without really doing much with my heroes - I won the game before any of them reached a high level or got strong items. Maybe I should play the same on Extreme next time.
Any suggestions what setup to use? The last one was Artificer, Tactician, 5 Life 5 Sorcery I think.

[Nelphine]

The best hero game is NOT a hero centric build. If we agree with my conclusion, the problem with heroes is primarily items, with a possible problem being that they have too many levels so you get things like super agility on a demi god being ridiculous.

With this in mind, the biggest problem hero game is a game that follows my numbers - in other words a game where you clear ~75 lairs/towers/nodes before 1414, giving yourself the most high end treasure possible with which to cherry pick gear for your heroes.

So, pick a build that will do that. The only retort you want to include is tactician because it let's you reach unstoppable hero level just a little easier. If you find yourself not caring about the rest, pick warlord for the same reasons. Similarly, 4-6 life books let's you get the easiest large numbers of buffs to stack on your heroes, but since they can be dispelled they aren't all that important. Resurrection isn't important because the idea is to not even use your heroes until they're invincible anyway, but you can pick it up with life books just cuz - it let's you do stupid things like accidentally drowning your heroes like I did. You could pick up sorcery for magic immunity items to seal the deal.

More important than this test game is the problem with numbers and research you suggested the AI had in my game. This was pretty normal for my extreme life. Meaning, this game was what I expected, not a fluke, in terms of how many lairs/nodes/towers I got. My original purpose was to see of the new spellbook system would change it, because I'd played thus strategy many times before. It didn't change much, which I think is good.

The research. Merlin had 6+ very rares. He had far lower power production than Raven. I think Raven got very unlucky with his selection of very rares (getting all 4 as things like Great Unsummoning, that simply didn't mean much against my strategy). But I feel certain he had them all researched before the war started. Only Jafaar, who was far weaker than anyone elsr, didn't have very rares yet (another reason to start the war early - I couldn't risk him getting the sorcery very rares that would bother me like time stop).

'A stack of very rares should beat heroes.' Tell me, what does 9 archangels or behemoths or hydras or demons or sky drakes do against my hammerhands, if the wizard doesn't have dispelling wave?
They might be better 1 on 1. They aren't as good as 2 on 1. Which means it takes 2 stacks of hammerhands to beat the very rares.

What happens when one of heroes meets my hammerhands? Well, Taki has 554 XP. He has 35 armor, 19 resistance, 26 HP, Immunity to cold and fire, wraithform, 7 movement, melee 21, a throwing attack, water walking.

Taki wasn't one of the ones I optimized. He's just got random stuff on him. He has endurance, Lionheart, holy armor and holy weapon cast on him.

You could kill him with warlocks or demon lords or great wyrms. Maybe colossus. You probably can't kill him with anything else. What would a sky drake do? Fly in circles around him. Even if one managed to attack him, he's going to block 9 damage on average against the breath (which only averages 10) and 14 or 15 against the attack which averages 15?

He destroys my hammerhands, he destroys all the very rares I listed. He runs circles around the few that do enough melee to scare him.

Now imagine him backed up by 5 other heroes that have stronger items. Death Stryke or Sir Ronin for melee, an archer for sky drakes (Shuri is my preference), the Necromancer, the Chaos Warrior and the Illusionist for ranged. They all have 30+ ranged attacks. Someone has logistics, someone has capacity. Great drakes won't touch them now. Colossus won't kill them all. Ensure 2 of two of the ranged have flying items, great wyrms can't hurt them and the rest can stay home.

Add in just one magic immunity item and you can defeat any stack of very rares.

[Seravy]

They might be better 1 on 1. They aren't as good as 2 on 1. Which means it takes 2 stacks of hammerhands to beat the very rares.

I thought we were talking about heroes vs those creatures. If you mean to say you will not use the heroes where you see those creatures, then you are right and we are back to this "The AI can't play offense well". Unfortunately we can't expect the AI to have 9 Sky Drake offense stacks except past 1420 on impossible. (unless we do something drastic like drop their casting cost to half)
At the very least, you can't take out the capital with the heroes and idk about Hammerhands. I had a game once where I attacked a 9 Sky Drake city with 9 Hammerhand stacks (or maybe it was 1 Chosen and 8 Hammerhands and probably lionheart on all of them, something like that) and I couldn't do a thing. Hammerhands don't fly so they got eaten by the drakes and couldn't even enter the city area because Flying Fortress. That's only Sorcery though, I guess it could work against something like....errr...idk. Demon Lords will tear them apart at range, Great Drakes hit even harder than Sky Drakes, and both fly. Colossus will kill them at range, and Archangels are just invincible. Have you seen Hadriex's game? 20 shields, +4 To Def, regeneration and invulnerability.
I guess wizards that got unlucky and didn't pull the very rare creatures (or got the weaker ones like Hydra or Death Knight) might have problems though.

You probably can't kill him with anything else. What would a sky drake do? Fly in circles around him. Even if one managed to attack him, he's going to block 16 damage on average? Not even a sky drake does 16 damage per hit average.

Well, a Sky Drake has 18 armor piercing lightning breath, which also has +3 to hit, and halves your armor to 17. So ~6 damage goes through there. Then another 4.5 goes through from its normal attack. Three of these hits and the hero is dead and one drake will usually attack twice before it is killed. This assumes your hero has no +To Def and the drake has no buffs to go with the example numbers you gave.
But that's a Sky Drake. A Great Drake does strength 35 attacks twice at +3 to hit. Those deal 21 damage twice, even if you block 16, you take 10.

Anyway, I don't really see what can be done (or if anything needs to be done at all). I do think having a Wraith Form item for all 6 heroes (to block Crack's Call+Web), and an Inner Fire item for them (to block Wave of Despair) is unrealistic, but of course if the main enemies are not green or black then you don't need these.

With this in mind, the biggest problem hero game is a game that follows my numbers - in other words a game where you clear ~75 lairs/towers/nodes before 1414, giving yourself the most high end treasure possible with which to cherry pick gear for your heroes.

So, pick a build that will do that.

So drop Artificer and rely entirely on treasure? I guess that provides better testing results.

To clear nodes...I guess most races can do that., the problem part is, having troops to spend on it which is not trivial when trying to compete with 4 wizards. Sorcery is by far the best at it so Sorcery+Life will do, question is, what retorts, if any....wait, that's not even a question. Astrologer, obviously! So Tactician, Astrologer, 5+5 books.
...wait just a second. If I include Sorcery and survive until the late game, I won. With or without heroes, it doesn't even matter. That's how that realm works. Then why is it a problem if heroes are involved in winning?
...maybe I should do it without Sorcery? But heroes are a whole lot weaker then and lair hunting is much slower.
idk what to play...

Speaking of Magic Immunity items, I found the sword about 2 or 3 times...in over a whole year of playing. I don't think I ever found the accessory. If it's so much of a problem, I can remove these two items but I don't think a strategy can be based on them as is.

[Nelphine]

About offense. Human players have a huge disadvantage trying to keep up with the AI in a war of attrition. Both because the ai has far more casting ability on higher difficulties which results in curse problems, but also because there are 4 AI. When trying to win, you have to neat them all. So attrition is always in the AI favor. That means fortress strikes are paramount for the human. That's the way to win.

For AI, the human is hurt by every little loss - a single city or node is a large blow to the human when its early enough. The AI can play a war of attrition and win.

I don't think the whole game is about offense. I think the human game is about offense. I think human and AI play distinctly different styles, and that's fine. If you want humans to have to play war of attrition, I think you'd have to change the game immensely. One node or city is too small for the AI overall to matter so it doesn't hurt the AI noticeably to lose it. It helps the human to gain it, but it requires declaring war. Going to war with a strong AI risks curses, which means its very easy to lose many cities to curses. Since the AI don't feel the loss, you have to gain more than you are going to lose to curses, or its not worth attacking. In most cases that means its only worth it if you attack the fortress to slow curses and to make future battles easier. Similarly, razing vs capturing: if the AI declares war on you early, capturing is often better because you aren't prepared for a full war, so your goal might be peace. If you're going back to peace, grab what you can. If the human declares war, they should expect to win, which means they don't need any more resources to maintain the war. Razing is the only option then, so that your offensive stacks aren't slowed down. The AI can't plan like that, so razing or capturing has to be an algorithm based around both possibly outcomes. Again, I think the game is well designed here as is.

[Nelphine]

What makes sorcery so good at node hunting? Also, as a note, my claim.is that heroes are invincible at 1414, whereas you seem to say late game starts at 1420. While I disagree with that definition of late game (I think 1414 is late game) it should be enough for your game balance to see that even if you were sorcery.

[Seravy]

About offense. Human players have a huge disadvantage trying to keep up with the AI in a war of attrition. Both because the ai has far more casting ability on higher difficulties which results in curse problems, but also because there are 4 AI. When trying to win, you have to neat them all. So attrition is always in the AI favor. That means fortress strikes are paramount for the human. That's the way to win.

For AI, the human is hurt by every little loss - a single city or node is a large blow to the human when its early enough. The AI can play a war ofcattrition and win.

I don't think the whole game is about offense. I think the human game is about offense. I think human and AI play distinctly different styles, and that's fine.

This is correct but this is where the problem comes from. Heroes cannot be dealt with through attrition, it requires strong offense that strikes at the right targets - either the heroes, or the player's most critical cities.

The only thing the AI can do is taking out more player cities through sheer numbers than the player can get using their hero stack. But this won't always work - if the hero stacks raze the cities the player is still at the advantage...and then we are back to the "razing is overpowered" topic.

[Seravy]

What makes sorcery so good at node hunting?  Also, as a note, my claim.is that heroes are invincible at 1414, whereas you seem to say late game starts at 1420. While I disagree with that definition of late game (I think 1414 is late game) it should be enough for your game balance to see that even if you were sorcery.

Your units are invisible, flying, and you can summon armor ignoring illusions that can kill anything.
And you have resist magic against things that have gaze and touch attacks.
You also have Wind Walking to travel to those last remaining nodes fast enough before the AI clears them out.

[Nelphine]

I don't think is razing is overpowered. I think its the only chance humans have since they lose drawn out wars. But that has nothing to do with heroes.

Heroes are overpowered in that they don't die. They still take a long time to singlehandedly take out the enemy. Without heroes you have to replace troops since they die but you have the benefit if having multiple stacks so you're actually faster.

Heroes are not overpowered in that they are the only thing that works. They're just individually overpowered to the point that a single hero stack of 6 heroes and 3 strong other units can't be beat by the AI.

Given my note above I don't think its really an issue that needs solving.

[Seravy]

Well, tried playing heroes.
Being Blue/White I didn't have summons, which was a big disadvantage for the early game, especially with all 3 wizards attacking me (albeit not at the same time) - I managed to clear 3 nodes anyway using longbowmen, so I have fairly good power. Unfortunately there isn't much to use it on.


I found a medicore, 2 defense sword, and a pretty good 4 defense accessory, both of which I equipped on my melee hero. These, plus tactician plus holy armor made my hero almost invincible - or so I thought until he got killed by a bunch of Klackon Swordsmen. So the items are gone and I now only have 2 mage heroes left.

It's 1408 and I mostly stabilized my empire but I still have to fight off incoming units every turn. I lost the city furthest from my capital - the enemy razed it. I have mithril but I had to clean corruption from it regularly.
The enemy on my continent is white/green klackons - Beating this wizard using longbowmen will be easy but the problem is, I really should be beating other wizards right now. There is one who is all Chaos with Chaneller and Astrologer - fortunately everyone was at war with her so she is behind, but that doesn't mean I have the luxury of waiting until she gets Fire Storm or something worse. She made peace with everyone including me so nothing is stopping that. The third arcanus wizard is another life/nature but she is on the top of the graph and grew about 50% in historian in just a single year. Fortunately life/nature is not very strong against my strategy but if they get crack's call I will need a lot of Wraith Form items (so far i have none).
Then there is the other plane - everyone has planar travel already but I can't afford spending resources on going there - too busy getting rid of the enemy on my continent.

(also, I've already lost 2 heroes - one of my mages got assassinated by an invisible ninja. And summoning heroes cost a lot - 330 mana each.)

The low number of starting and researchable commons is noticeable - I still don't have Endurance or Bless and had no chance to trade for either even though 2 other wizards play Life books.

I'm going to continue this game but won't do it in one go - probably at a more convenient rate of 1-2 hours a day.

[Nelphine]

Recall that for my claims you don't even need to use heroes until you've cleared all the lairs. Your focus is to make heroes invincible, not to use them to win. So losing heroes this early (and it is early until you're clearing the top nodes and towers and getting the best items) doesn't mean anything.

Similarly this has little to do with defeating enemy wizards early.my claim is that by focusing on lair clearing your heroes will be invincible and you can waltz around and kill whatever you'd like once you've cleared the map of item treasure, if, as I experienced, this happens in the 1412-1415 range.