SORCERY Realm

[Seravy]

Aether Binding HAS to be high priority, due to how amazing the skill production is

All enchantments are high priority in the early game (think 100 or 120 turns?) so it'll be cast. The difference of low priority is, if you dispel it in the mid or late game to protect yourself from dispel effects, it won't be recast in the next 2-3 turns, rather, 6-8-10 or something, so repeatedly dispelling it becomes more viable as a strategy if the double dispel effect is seriously hurting the player.

[Nelphine]

Correct. But that makes no sense to the human player - the skill bonus is so good in the later game, that it 'should' be auto recast in one turn. Making the AI artificially take longer won't help any players that don't know that the priority is changed for dispel balance reasons - they'll just look how good economically it is, and the fact its cheaper to cast for the AI (vastly cheaper with cheating bonuses) than for the human to cast the disjunction. And so it won't be dispelled in the first place. ESPECIALLY because disjunction is almost never an instant cast spell for the human, and most of the time, a sorcery AI with aether binding also has spell blast - and disjunction is exactly the kind of spell the human would expect the AI to spell blast.


So yes you can artificially reduce the casting priority, but it won't help any human player except those few of us participating in this discussion. Which means, to me, its a bad change. With economy and dispels (and the AI priority regarding them), the changes need to be intuitive to new players, because those systems are immensely complex and we don't want new players to have to read these forums to have a hope of understanding how they work.

[Nelphine]

*sudden thought* you mentioned you think spell blast should only be for certain things. Without looking at how possible it is, would spell blast at rare still work?

And, how important is spell blast - does it have to exist if those few things come into play - can they be rebalanced without it? Or, could making it arcane be an actual possibility, so that you can rebalance around everyone having it?

[Seravy]

Yes I think at rare it might still work albeit that means it's a bit too low chance to have a wizard who can stop Spell of Mastery.
How important, well...idk. Let me think...

-Using spell blast is fun. It makes Detect Magic more relevant and rewards the player for paying attention to the magic screen. It is also a lot more viable tool of stopping nasty global effects than Disjunction. Unfortunately with the AI casting advantage, this is not very effective anymore.
-Its main role is to make sure not every game can be won by Spell of Mastery. Jihad is a decent AI feature but it won't really stop a good player from winning. If we don't want every game to end by "make alliance with everyone, pass 300 turns, cast SoM to win" then SB is needed and can't be too rare - at Uncommon its about right, it might work as rare, probably not at very rare.
-Stopping global enchantments is actually not very useful for Sorcery, as they can steal or dispel it
-However stopping summons (including champions and artifacts) is a big deal...or not. Sky Drakes and Djinn and Spell Ward on defense can actually deal with it.
-I think at this point the main argument for it is Spell of Mastery on one side, having to rewrite massive amounts of AI code if functionally altered is the other side (decisions for power distribution, casting SoM, using SB itself, etc). In fact this by itself is enough to not move it to rare as that still means all of that needs to be changed (address of spell in memory etc)

[Nelphine]

Right spell blast is fun.. for the player. But it's awful with the AI casting spell advantages. Sure you can reduce priority, but just like Aether Binding, that gets to the point where it simply stops making sense.

And because it comes in at uncommon, you have to kill the AI at uncommon.. which means it has nothing to do with spell of mastery. You can't fight the other AI without killing the sorcery AI first - again, not because the sorcery AI is unstoppable with very rares, but because human play is unplayable with a sorcery AI with spell blast. (This is an exaggeration, but there are definitely limits on what the human player can do if spell blast is in play, which comes back to my main point, the enjoyment factor of game play.)

So if it's main goal is to prevent just sitting around and casting spell of mastery.. I believe it fails at that. As soon as spell blast comes into play, that AI becomes your main target, which means, spell blast is never a factor if you have the option of using spell of mastery.

[Seravy]

I've been thinking and while I have ideas on how to change the effect, ultimately the problem is the cost. Losing MP equal to the amount the target already spent is...not very prohibitive. Especially when the progress is still at zero for the human but a full turn's worth for the AI. But since the spell can be recast again immediately, it can't be prohibitive either, it needs to be cheap.

So I think we need something like
"and that spell cannot be cast again by that wizard for the next X turns, but you lose Y resources."
We just need good formulas for X and Y, the resource lost could be SP from the SP pool, or mana crystals and could be proportional to the RP cost of the removed spell (tho that might not work well for SoM). By "cannot be cast", I mean it would simply vanish from their spellbook until the timer expires.
This way the player even has a tool to prevent a spell even if the AI can instant cast it, as long as they manage to hit it at least once.
We also need to make it in a way where disabling too many spells at once should never be possible. (ideally, disabling more than 4 spells should never happen. 4 is somewhat pushing it, 3 is probably the best)

[Seravy]

So if it's main goal is to prevent just sitting around and casting spell of mastery.. I believe it fails at that.  As soon as spell blast comes into play, that AI becomes your main target, which means, spell blast is never a factor if you have the option of using spell of mastery.

Not really, the AI can't use Spell Blast if not hostile. So don't make them so and you can ignore the Spell Blast or anything else they might have until the turn you start casting SoM. All you need is an Alliance, or Peaceful/Lawful with an army strength that's different enough from yours.

[Nelphine]

Right, but as SOON as you fail to keep those conditions (and they aren't given conditions) then spell blast comes out. If you make a mistake and do that while at war with some other AI, its horrible. Thus, as soon as I see it, I just destroy that AI. Nothing else matters.

[Seravy]

Checked where the unit table is located in the data segment. Unfortunately, it's not possible to add a new unit, as directly after it, there is the EXP table and the race table. While moving the EXP table would probably be doable, it is smaller than one row in the unit table, so that's not enough to add a new unit, and the race table doesn't seem to be moveable (it's too big, there is no way I can find that much space unused in the data segment.) and then we haven't even considered having to find out how to extend the LBX files containing the unit graphics.
So unfortunately, if we want Water Elemental, we need to remove a unit. And it has to be a fantastic one, otherwise every single code where the game checks for a unit being fantastic needs to be updated and that's unrealistic (there is no easy way to find all the locations).

...which is where problems start, as I don't want to sacrifice any existing summoned unit. Each of them is fairly unique and has an important role.

(No, I'm not moving Gargoyles. Chaos needs those.)

Edit :
Phantom Warriors and Beasts do have a bit of redundancy but they are still fairly different - durability, figure count...warriors benefit from node effects and other buffs a lot thanks to the figure count, while beasts don't, but can deal decent damage through illusion immunity due to being single figure. (if the enemy is not immune to illusions, their armor is ignored so figure count doesn't matter)
Beasts however don't lose figures so they can keep their attack power even if damaged - they are more effective than even Air Elementals against enemies that deal high damage.

...although phantom warriors do have a redundancy with psionic blast. The only real difference is, phantom warriors cost less but you need to have the enemy on your half of the field, while PB works from a distance and deals less damage overall. Well, that's a very big difference actually so I can't really say Psionic Blast is capable of replacing Phantom Warriors.

[Arnuz]

Phantom warriors can defend a city, too.