DEATH Realm

[Nelphine]

That's true. When you lay out the raw abilities, I go 'i don't care'. So they can be reduced. 32 health, 4 ammo, 1 or 2 less ranged, 2 to 4 less melee.

The main problem I have is that the stats are there for the AI. They don't know how to use the abilities effectively, and when my bezerkers waltz in and slaughter neutral demon lords it makes me sad.

However honestly, I'd be fine if you gave colossus in combat Regen and summon spiders. I think that would be awesome. I really would like to make very rares better.


Looking at other things: how are they immune to firebolt or flame strike? 

Life steal? Teach AI to use bless or resist magic more if you are deep death. Only 1 or 2 demon lords? Put in an exception that demon lords can always trigger apocolypse or flame strike.
Put an exception in to dispel wraith form at high priority if the AI knows web and cracks call.
Call lightning: what exactly does your demon Lord do to kill the 8th centaur the nature ai summons? How about the 12th? Teach them to use more centaurs if they have call lightning in play.
Life? Buffed bezerkers (elite + lionheart + bless) slaughter demon lords. That's how the human kills them. Teach AI to put a single archangel or angel in a stack of units with bless.

Biggest issue is pure chaos, because chaos can't survive anything in order to use their expensive combat spells (back to teaching the AI to attack with multiple stacks); and pure sorcery. Edit: actually sorcery has storm giants, who chew up demon lords pretty nicely if there are 3 or 4 of them.

But a sky drake eats a demon Lord for breakfast, if it learns to get the first strike. (Teaching ai to move in tactical combat to guarantee first strike with throwing and breath would be HUGE.)

But you've said we can't assume the AI has very rare summons. We've discussed elsewhere an automatically without very rare summons is largely crippled anyway. You don't need demon lords to beat them at that point - demon lords just do it faster. This is kind of like what sprites turned out to be - yes it LOOKS super scary, but while it's obvious and crazy, if the ai can't use its best spells, then tons of things work.

I really think you're making this out to be bigger than it really is.

I also realize a ton of my 'teach them' suggestions aren't realistic. Maybe none of them are. But I think keeping the demon Lord with its current ability set (which is the core of the problem) is more important, and 'mere' impossibility of dealing with it isn't good enough to change that. Fun and iconic gameplay are more important than potential game abuse of one very rare from one realm.

To put it another way: the AI is equally as screwed if you have invisible sky Drake's in the hands of the human. Except, a garrison of 9 warlocks can actually kill 2 demon lords. There is no non very rare garrison in existence that can hurt the sky drake (except true sight steam cannons, but the AI doesn't cast enough true sight, and certainly doesn't waste true sight on steam cannons.)

So aside from minor stat changes, I wouldnt want to see anything done to demon lords.

Wraith form demon lords, invisible sky drakes, mystic surge hydras, mega buffed life units, are all things the AI simply can't deal with. Nature doesn't have any such combo, although just having iron skin is almost as bad. (And even land linked gorgons are almost impossible for the AI to deal with.)
Plus heroes. So if 4.5 of the 5 realms have something, plus everyone can get hero's, I don't think Denon lords really stand out as that bad.

[Seravy]

But a sky drake eats a demon Lord for breakfast, if it learns to get the first strike. (Teaching ai to move in tactical combat to guarantee first strike with throwing and breath would be HUGE.)

Nah, it would be ridiculous, the human is not the AI, they won't go closer to let them actually have it.
The two sides would just stand there waiting for the other to move, doing nothing - whoever moves first, loses. (assuming both have the same movement speed but that's very often true)

Not that it can be done, anyway.

But you've said we can't assume the AI has very rare summons. We've discussed elsewhere an automatically without very rare summons is largely crippled anyway.

I meant it in the sense you can't assume the AI has them where the Demon lords are attacking. They might have a stack of 9 very rares somewhere - but that won't help them defend against the Demon Lords, and the 1 very rare in the city won't be enough (the player will use 2 Demon Lords if they need to)

Life steal? Teach AI to use bless or resist magic more if you are deep death

This wouldn't work. The player will attack whichever thing does not have the buff and still gain life. It's not realistic to assume the AI can put the buff on every single unit in the game.

Put in an exception that demon lords can always trigger apocolypse or flame strike.

Sadly they are immune to fire and the confusion from Apocalypse is worthless if there is only one Demon Lord. The damage effects simply can't outdo the combined Life Steal and 35 health anyway.

Put an exception in to dispel wraith form at high priority if the AI knows web and cracks call.

Wraith Form can and will be recast by the human immediately so this just wastes the AI's turns.

Call lightning: what exactly does your demon Lord do to kill the 8th centaur the nature ai summons?

Melee? With Terror in play from the demons, the centaurs don't get to move at all in like 70% of their turns or more.

So aside from minor stat changes, I wouldnt want to see anything done to demon lords.

That's about what I want, too.

...so having had time to think about it, this is what I think.

First, the Demon Lord has Life Steal -5. Assuming there are some medium resistance enemy units (res 7) and you have Black prayer (your demon will cast it for free), you can gain an average of 5.5 health on each attack which is fast enough to actually make sure nothing except the most severe attacks from very rare creatures will hurt the Demon Lord. Alternately we can say the Demon Lord has an additional 44 health though Life Steal, so its effective health is 79. Suddenly it looks ridiculously powerful, on par with Hydra in durability. This is absolutely necessary to fix if we want them to actually take damage in battles from, like, anything. Each save modifier on Life Steal is an extra point of health gain per turn to the Demon Lord. However changing it has no effect on strategic strength and has marginal effect on its ability to kill things - it really only is there to keel the Demon Lord "immortal".

So first, we should reduce the Life Steal modifier. At -1, it would still heal for 2.1 health on average, making it equal to, but no better than, regeneration, unless there are enemy units with even less resistance than 7.

Next, what various realms can do.

Chaos : With less Life Steal, single target nukes become more viable but we really want Flame Strike to work as well (to clear demons). So we need to lose Fire Immunity and should probably drop health to ensure the total health pool isn't too high to actually kill one before the battle ends. Not sure but 28-30 health sounds fair.
Death : Annihilate is the only thing they have and it has ridiculously low odds of working. Reducing resistance by 1 can fix this by pushing up chance to work to 10-30% depending on presence of Black Prayer.
Life : units generally have much higher resistance here so the Demon Lords will be unable to heal using Life Steal if the modifier is less. So Star Fires and ranged attacks can wear it down.
Nature : Without the crazy lifegain, rare Nature creatures, Call Lightning and garrison units should be able to hurt the Demon Lord enough to matter. Especially if Entangle is buying time for that to happen.
Sorcery : Spell Ward can effectively protect cities, but aside from that, nothing here to hurt it. However units with Magic Immunity can force melee and wound the Demon Lord. Maybe making Creature Binding save -5 could help, by providing a 10% chance of working on the Demon Lord (assuming we do the resistance reduction for Death anyway).

Summary :
Life Drain save at -1
Lose Fire Immunity
Max health down to 28-30
Resistance down to 14
Maybe Creature Binding at -5 save

and it should work fine. Out of these, only the max health has any effect on strategic strength.

btw I don't think reducing ammo would do enough - most battles were over before they used up even their first 4 ammo. Reducing ranged strength might but we probably don't want to do it.

[Seravy]

btw your list of "unbeatable" things from other realms all have answers the AI can use (maybe not in every realm but most).

mystic surge hydras

This results in low enough resistance so the AI can use Petrify/Banish etc effects which prevent regeneration. Not at a very high chance but enough to matter.

mega buffed life units,

While not killing the unit, Dispel will cause damage to you and force you to recast spells just like losing creatures would.

invisible sky drakes,

Ok, I don't think the AI has an answer for this one. It's Sorcery though, the only realm that is allowed to have "I win" buttons in very rare.

[Seravy]

Oh, their resistance is already 14. Why did I think 15? I guess we don't need to reduce it then.
Or maybe we do? 13 sounds way more appropriate -20% chance for Annihilate without or 40 with Black Prayer (but 10/30 usually due to Darkness cast by the demons or owner) and Death creatures usually have low resist. Also this would mean no need to change anything else for Sorcery - 10% chance for banish and creature binding would be there with 13 resist.

Unfortunately the health reduction puts them at 440 strategic strength which... isn't that bad but about 70 less than currently.

[Nelphine]

I wouldn't put life less than 31. 9 warlocks killing 3 demon lords is sad.

Life steal -1 is fine if enemy is average resistance 7. But seriously, on any decent end game opponent, average resistance isn't 7 anymore. Magicians, warlocks, etc are all the standard garrison, plus uncommon and rare summons so average is 9 OR HIGHER. Yes there are piles of lower units floating around, but if they aren't in a garrison, you just ignore them anyway. They literally do nothing, so you should not include them in the average. So life steal should be minimum -3. You still want it to do something in battles that have important units in it.

I'm fine losing fire immunity, I honestly had no idea they had that. Yes it hurts chaos too much.

Resistance 14 I'm ok with. I'd be careful going lower - again, the human will massacre them if you make it too low. But, resistance is less important than the others, so if you do the other changes and still see a problem 13 could work.

Single target confusion wins battles? Why would this not matter on apocalypse??

Mrgabuffed units still win the battle, thus allowing you to fortress strike. Cost doesn't matter if you win the game.

Why on earth name should sorcery be allowed an I win button when no other realm can? That's.. not a productive statement.

Mystic surge hydras : I can get 2 of them for the cost of 1 demon Lord. It doesn't matter if you CAN use things like cracks call or petrify (although there's, what, a 1/3 probability, maybe slightly higher, that I'll get a buff making me immune to those anyway?) - I have enough that at speed 5 plus buffs I'll kill all the units before the ai can succeed on killing a single hydra, and they'll still fully Regen in Overland.

Attacking first: the AI in standard assumptions has the advantage in combat carting skill. If the human refuses to play, the AI still wins.

Additionally, you can still make it move forward. But if it's x squares away, and it has x-1 movement, it should not move x-1 in most cases. Too often that means the human gets two first strike/breath attacks. At most, it should move to half the speed (round down) +1 of the human unit, to avoid getting hit twice.

Worst culprits? Wraiths. (But any other speed 4 or 5 units are also terrible for it.) Oh and sky drakes. There's no reason for them to give up 2 attacks on the first turn against speed 3 opponents.

[Seravy]

But seriously, on any decent end game opponent, average resistance isn't 7 anymore.

It was in my game. Unless the wizard plays Life or a high resistance race, 7 is pretty normal. Ok, most magicians are 8 so I guess that's 1 higher but not that far (and with Eternal Night that's actually 7). Uncommon and rare summons are not standard - there will be one or two in most cities but the rest will be whatever random normal units that city can build. Often magicians, but might be anything else, even halberdiers.
Also, several of the actually dangerous uncommon summons have 7 resistance : Lizards, Fire Giants...

Why would this not matter on apocalypse??

If there are no other strong units to attack it literally only makes you skip a turn while you dispel and nothing more. I was talking about the case of 1 demon lord.

[Nelphine]

If your dispel works on the confusion. That isn't reliable. And if you can confuse it, then your last unit dies, the demon Lord dies anyway.

And in the end game, most races are high resistance (dark elf and draconian; high men magicians and paladins, high elves, nomads. These are all the top priority races.)

If your opponent has tons of other low resistance things floating around, they aren't relevant by the time death gets to very rare anyway - you could get final wave instead of demon Lord and kill them all without even attacking. Or you could get massacre and kill them with 3 spearmen. Heck you don't even need very rare - wraiths will destroy them too. Or wrack, which we've just decided is too WEAK and all it does is kill those low resistance units. Dont count them when considering demon lords.

[Seravy]

And if you can confuse it, then your last unit dies, the demon Lord dies anyway.

It doesn't have that bug anymore. If the last unit you have is a confused Demon Lord, then the battle still won't end until turn 25 or if it gets killed. If you mean the Demon Lord winning while confused, yes that can happen but it's extremely unlikely (usually there will be still many enemy units around and the DL would not even roll "attack enemy" that turn.) - paired with the 1/8 chance of landing the confusion it's something that likely won't even happen once per game.

About the resistance, your examples are wrong. I mean, they are correct but use the wrong premise. The Demon Lord is unstoppable if there are ANY low resistance units around, it doesn't have to be TONS or even many. City has 7 decent units with 12 resist and 2 random halberdiers? Demon Lord can use the halberdiers to gain the extra health anyway and beat the good units though that extra health.

Life Steal was never relevant against strong enemies like very rare creatures - even if it still hits for 5.5 that's not a high amount compared to its actual attack strength but it usually won't hit for that much on them anyway. The only purpose of Life Drain is to let you heal your Demon Lord by leeching off health from random weak units.

Speaking of which the AI will often summon things in battle. Those things will have low resist and feed health to the Demon Lord even if nothing else would. Centaurs, Catapults, etc. even Earth Elemental aren't that resistant.

Honestly Life Steal probably shouldn't even be on the unit (it's too hard to damage and strong on offense to let it also heal itself) but it contributes to the strategic strength and AI ability to make undead so I want to keep it.

[Nelphine]

Demon Lord will kill those halbediers very quickly if he's using them to boost his health. Maybe 3 turns per, more likely two. That's NOT 25 turns of bonus health. Even with summons, by that point in the game, there are usually higher priorities than weak summons. Earth elemental may be an exception, but the earth elemental will do more damage in melee than the demon Lord heals. It's still not a problem. And if the demon Lord is facing 7 strong units, and it's wasting ranged attacks to heal itself on summons, then its not killing the strong units, so it's i going to lose anyway.

Again, I'm fine with reducing it to -3. But those resist 9 units should be the ones that are considered weak fodder, ones lower than that shouldn't even be used in that stage of the game. Will the AI have weaker ones? Sure, but they'll be kicked out of garrisons and die off. Did your game have other results? Sure. But you don't base a change like this on one game.

[Seravy]

Answer me one thing :
Why do you think a creature with top tier offensive capabilities, flight, 3 summoned minions, spellcasting ability (through those minions) and a lot of immunities plus high armor should be able to heal itself at all?

(and if you manage to answer that, also tell me why do you think they should heal faster than a regeneration creature?)

btw it doesn't need to be 25 turns at all. The assumption is the battle will be won in about 4-6 turns, so there only needs to be enough of those halberdiers to cancel out the damage enemy spells (or garrison magicians) manage to deal to the Demon Lord - in fact it doesn't even need to cancel it all, just enough of it to stay below 0 health at the end (albeit in my experience it almost always ended the battle with max health).

Maybe I'm overthinking it (Death Knights drain life much faster) but I think the main problem is being able to gain life at range while already being obscenely hard to damage. Other Life Steal units are melee and they don't have such high defenses either.

I guess time will tell if the -1 or the -3 save modifier is better but we won't know unless we try and it's better to try the more drastic change first in this case - it's way harder to tell if it's "still slightly too powerful" while it's pretty easy to tell if it's "still strong enough".