By the time we get mass Zombies with Zombie Mastery, they're not relevant anymore for a human's playstyle. Mathematically and in theory they probably are (giving massive army strenght, and allowing for much more combat opportunities and kamikaze spell casting), but in practice, human players just prefer hopping from place to place with fast doomstacks at that point.
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DEATH Realm
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 Quote: you can do better with ghouls plus other realm buffs. Syphon life is crap. Don't bring other realms into a Death realm discussion. By this logic Black sleep is better than Annihilate because Mind Storm can give you an additional -5 save. You're only arguing for "nerf buffing" with this. Yes, buffing is an overpowered game mechanic, we already know that. ...not that you can actually buff ghouls with anything except Focus Magic. Land Link doesn't give attack power and Life/Chaos spells are normal unit only. The only thing that actually helps Ghouls is Prayer. But even that is marginal, as it's not improving Poison, and having 50% chance to hit instead of 40% on a strength 3-4 attack is not that great. So ultimately, you are just saying "Focus Magic Ghouls is overpowered", we already had a thread for that. Note that I never actually managed to reproduce those results, an attack strength of 6 is not that great. Undead creation peaks at common for you because you dismiss a higher cost efficiency and larger quantity of undead being better. And you also dismiss the ability to make better undead with Syphon Life because you insist on comparing it to something that's already being reported as overpowered. But let's say Ghouls stop making undead. Now that makes them pretty awful so they'd need to cost like 50-60 each. And Death would have one fewer source of making undead. Would that be any better? Quote:Otherwise, I just don't know how to use these zombies. Then learn to do it. It's not rocket science. You get 9 zombies after winning a battle somewhere. Send those 9 zombies to the next city. Use spells to kill the units inside. Win the battle. You now have 9 more zombies to replace the original 9 that probably got killed. Zombies don't need to deal damage. They have 18 hit points, as much as an elite halberdier. That buys you 4-5 turns to cast whatever spells you want. Meanwhile, while zombies aren't that great on offense, they still do some damage and finish off a few of the enemy melee troops on their own. The two effects together are enough to beat a generic enemy normal unit stack, or at the very least severely damage them. As garrison, zombies are unbeatable. Put Cloud of Shadow on the city and build a wall for the defense bonus. Suddenly your 18 health, 5 swords, 7 shield units stand against enemy units with 6 swords, 4 shields but 12 health (Halberdiers+1 level+black prayer). A single zombie will eat 3-4 halberdiers. Even if the enemy had ranged units, the zombies will tank the damage until you pick them off by spells or they run out of ammo. Quote:but in practice, human players just prefer hopping from place to place with fast doomstacks at that point. I can't help it if the human prefers to play the realm wrong. Death doesn't have much in the realm of fast doomstacks anyway, Wraiths I guess but that's about it. And Wraith doomstacks actually create undead anyway.
The distance from Zombie Mastery being cast and effective to Death Knights/Demon Lords isn't very large, which leaves only a very small window where mass Zombies have any use.
But yes, you're probably right. I'm not interested in micromanaging dozens of Zombie stacks. Playing the realm 'right' isn't appealing to me. (December 9th, 2017, 11:22)Kaiku Wrote: The distance from Zombie Mastery being cast and effective to Death Knights/Demon Lords isn't very large, which leaves only a very small window where mass Zombies have any use. That actually is something I was wondering about. Are we happy with the research cost gap between the tiers? Or are higher tier spells still coming too fast? 
Hmm, it's something I've been thinking about in my recent games. In early game, researching spells take forever (as you prefer to spent points on mana). But as soon as you have a couple of cities with universities and sage's guilds, everything seems to research in only a few turns (except for those very expensive ones, of course), especially since you often have excess mana (lair rewards, etc) and can afford to crank up research at that point.
I felt that the gap between 'no research whatsoever' and 'research everything at record speed' was very small, and thought it could be somewhat more gradual. The costs are probably fine, but the research income spikes very hard around midgame. In turn, the start of the game could do with maybe a little bit (2 or so) of inherent research. My research usually only starts when I've built a library.
December 9th, 2017, 12:42
(This post was last modified: December 9th, 2017, 12:55 by Nelphine.)
Seravy. You have a gameplay style. Just because zombie nasrery is good for that style, doesn't mean its good for all styles. And arguably since you don't consistently best lunatic, your style isn't the best.
Please don't say someone 'isn't playing the realm right' when they don't play it the same as you, especially when there are people who can use the realm and win consistently on lunatic. I'm fully aware that some if the lunatic strategies aren't easy for everyone (I can't match arnuz at all), but that's no reason to say your game play style is the right one. Back on topic, I never said ghouls with focus magic are overpowered. What Isaid was that was the only way to increase the quality of your undead creation. Whether its overpowered or not is not the point of this conversation. (And its ficus magic, prayer, Lionheart, high prayer, iron skin, and survival instinct, mind storm, shatter. And if you get a few if the defensive ones, you could add blazing march as well.) And yes, I think ghouls without create undead, but a cost around 65 would be perfectly good for common death. They'd still have summon zombie to create undead. It would reduce some of the problem of common summons being ridiculously hard to fight against with early city units. And you could then add create undead to a higher rarity unit (Nightstalker) without stepping on the toes of lower end units. You could also reduce raw stats of nightstalkers, as the unit isn't a staple of death right now, so changing its direct ability wouldn't be a problem. This would allow create undead to not peak so blatantly at common. Having very rares (or maybe rares..) who could create uncommon undead reliably would not be overpowered. On research costs, very rare summons are already too high compared to city units - the rest of the spells then have to be balanced around those summons. Therefore, its probable that there are too many sources of pure research mid game. Cut most of them by 1/4 or so. Force the player to actively choose research more often, and that gap would widen again. (Actually it wouldn't. Rushing very rare research is the easiest way to stay competitive on lunatic, since the AI can't do it, so you can destroy them despite the AI having a vast quantitative superiority.) I think the bigger problem is that very rares don't get replaced. Rares do. So the human will almost never rush rares of any kind, while they will rush the very rares. On yet another topic : yes, mind storm effectively let's most realms be better at death play style, without being death. If I ever want to do death combat spells, I do feel forced to take heavy sorcery to get mind storm. So, yes, I consider that an actual thing. Quote:And you could then add create undead to a higher rarity unit (Nightstalker) without stepping on the toes of lower end units. Hell would sooner freeze over than me putting create undead on anything better than a zombie or ghoul. That would completely break game balance. Undead creation is "unimpressive" because it would be broken otherwise. Is that really so hard to understand? Try it. Put the ability on any Death creature and see how it works out in a game. (I believe you can edit the unit tables with the Tweaker.) Let's take the Night Stalker for example (which is a good choice because it has the lowest potential for abuse). At Death Gaze-3 and Black Prayer, you have a 80% chance to convert a Great Lizard to your side per attack. And gaze is a "first strike" mechanic, every time it does trigger the enemy won't get a chance to fight back. So you could literally summon 1 Night Stalker and turn an entire stack of 9 lizards to your side. While 80% still means you lose your night stalker once every 10 lizards (it'll still take 2 hits from a lizard to kill it), if you also put Cloak of Fear on the Stalker, It would take two 20% rolls, so a total of 4% chance for the lizard to hit. So you could convert 50 lizards per night stalker lost. Obviously, not everything is as low resistance as a Lizard, but with fear, even a 9 resistance unit has to pass two "40% chance to not miss" rolls, which is a mere 16% chance to deal damage and not die. Note that even most rares only have 9 or 10 resistance. But let's say you go against something really strong and the stalker has a 50% chance to convert the unit, another 50% to die immediately with no damage to the enemy. It's still profitable. On the long term, you gain the same amount of (stronger) units as the number of stalkers lost. And Night Stalker is the "weakest" creature to have this ability on. Anything else is stronger - they regenerate, recover health etc, basically are immortal and their damage does not depend on enemy resistance, while the enemy still needs to do a resistance roll to beat it if you add Fear. Besides, you can double the melee damage with Blood Lust, allowing lowly Werewolves to convert top tier normal units like hordes, jackals or even elven lords or turtles, with the werewolf regenerating after battle to do it over and over again, giving you a free unit every battle at zero cost per unit gained. Quote:Having very rares (or maybe rares..) who could create uncommon undead reliably would not be overpowered. Wraiths. We only need to shift the 50% damage required to 40-45% and they'll do it. The break even point between undead and nonundead damage is somewhere around 7 resistance as calculated above. Uncommon creatures are generally in the 7-9 resistance range. A shift like this might even help the Death Knight albeit those do way too heavy damage so they'd still be less efficient at converting units than the Wraiths inevitably. Once I saw "In this shop we work cheap, fast and at high quality. You can pick any two of these three." written somewhere. Game balance is pretty much this deal. Undead are cheap and fast (to produce) so they cannot also have high quality. Otherwise they'd be the only thing playable in the game. It would be a different story if the killed enemy units would go to a "graveyard" and you'd need to summon undead from there as an overland spell for, say, half their normal production cost. Then Undead could be high quality because they'd no longer be cheap and fast. But obviously we can't and don't want to do that. As is, undead are something you get for free. Producing them costs you nothing, it's a side effect from spells and units that'd still be fairly priced even if they did not create any undead (except the ghoul, that one would have to be cheaper).
Yes, this is why I said you'd have to reduce the stats on night stalker if you did this. For starters, we'd need to tweak the gaze so the save penalty wasn't so strong. And the survivability would have to be reduced, by, oh, 30-40%.
I'm fully aware it needs to be balanced. I just don't want the first strong source to be ghouls. I want it later, so that it doesn't feel so bad to have to choose between it and stronger summons. If lowering the required amount to 40% would actually let wraiths convert uncommons, I'd be all for that. But I want to repeat - the problem I have is not the balance right now. Wraiths are strong enough as it is. The problem is that ghouls are far too good at creating undead compared to other sources, and so it feels bad to not use ghouls. I don't care about adding it to nightstalkers, they aren't designed for it. I just don't want a ranged common unit that can do it and therefore cross realm buffs become easier to obtain rather than actually using more death books.
So ultimately, you want ghouls to be uncommon, pretty much. Or another unit nerfed to be about as weak as ghouls. Because if it would be stronger, it would be overpowered.
If we had an unlimited amount of free slots then two different units with similar stats but one with CU and uncommon and one without at common would be no problem. But I don't think we want to lose an uncommon spell for this and Death already has 3 uncommon creatures anyway, none of which are suitable or replaceable. So this isn't a realistic goal. Quote:If lowering the required amount to 40% would actually let wraiths convert uncommons, I'd be all for that. It most likely does but there is a bit of a catch. The resistance difference between uncommons and rares is very small. So I'm not sure if it's possible to do it safely - we'd probably end up with getting more undead rares than desired. These are the resistance scores of uncommon creatures (excluding immune) : 9,7,7,8,9,7,7,9 = 7.87 These are the rares 10,9,12,12,9,10,9 = 10.1 So a difference of 2.23 only. This much can be negated by the generally higher armor of rare creatures. So if we do this, it'll work on both uncommons and rares. As is it often but probably not always works on uncommons and usually not on rares. If we really want to know more a more exact number, I can try to do a more detailed calculation. Of course we can also just put Wraiths back to 8 melee to gain back the lost undead creating functionality instead. |