Test games played

[zitro1987]

Playing expert, I faced two mega-buffed aggressive heroes from one wizard, a sign that AI is utilizing heroes well.
_Alorra, with decent items and a lot of buffs
_Paladin hero, with ridiculously good axe and all the buffs imaginable via the 3 artifacts. Had about 35 attack / 3 to hit with haste, about 10 move with haste, about 16 armor with +1 to defend, invulnerability.

The paladin, without sacrificing armies to cast dispel magic, was nearly indestructible.

[Seravy]

Continuing my game. Not much has been going on - I produced more bowmen, summoned more spiders. Silver made a wizard's pact with me, she seems to be on the losing side of the war with Flandre. I also made peace with Flandre and expect to get a wizard's pact after I start producing mithril Hordes with 250g/turn income I should be able to build up my military production city to build them in a year. 
Made contact with the last Arcanus wizard, Tenshi. I'm really surprised by the graphs - there shouldn't be enough territory on Fair land size to have another wizard that's even stronger than me. I already control ~50% of the plane.
   
   
She doesn't have Warlord, only books, 8 Life, 4 Chaos. I suspect something like Klackons with Stream of Life, or similar going on. Based on magic power she also have nodes, while I don't have any yet. I guess I'll use Earth Lore to see what's going on.
Long term plan is to get Great Lizards, Survival Instinct, a soul linker hero, make a regeneration item, and use that to clear the plane, it should be effective against Tenshi. Thanks to my large territory I already make 160 RP a turn and I don't have wizard's or sage's guilds yet. I expect to get the research done quickly once I finish the economy and production buildings and start on that. No need to hurry - my skill isn't high enough to be efficient with Lizard yet anyway. For now I want to hit that fire giant/hell hound node with some spiders.

Tenshi seems to be playing Orcs, good for me. She seems to be at war with Flandre, even better!
9 Spiders took out the node with 3 giants and 3 hell hounds. I found a Thief hero inside. Not what I was looking for but it's still a pretty good one to have Regeneration on, so keeping.

Even though I have Artificer, I got Summon Champion and Disjunction on my spell list before Create Artifact, and even before Great Lizards. Weird. Do they count as uncommons in the research procedure?
...oh, Arcane spells work differently... I need to do something about this.

Conquered one more node, Nature, had many sprites and cockatrices. Spiders with resist elements made it easy, I should have done this one much earlier. Not much remaining on the continent that I can expect to do with just Spiders, I'll try the "many fire giants", after buffing up with Land Linking. The rest, I'll need lizards or better to take out.

Meanwhile Tenshi is at war with both other wizards, and seems to be on the winning side. I guess I can safely ignore the other two wizards for the rest of the game, they are too far behind now. I have built Oracles in most of my cities, so I can afford running max tax rate finally, earning 391 gold.

[Seravy]

Meanwhile finished the above game.

I started building up my forces, producing lots of mithril hordes. This wasn't such a great idea, as it started a war with Tenshi, but I was strong enough to deal with that so I didn't care. I decided to rely on lizards, as they are strong against Life/Chaos which has no good way to deal with regenerating armies. Sadly, Tenshi got Exorcise soon after, but I got Survival Instinct, lowering their chance to kill a lizard to a mere 20% each try.
Unfortunately, lizards were expensive, and two Divine Orders further pushed up the cost, and Tenshi was consistently lucky on their Exorcise rolls, so I struggled building up a lizard army and going on the offense - for several years, we fought over the small continent with the two red cities on the above screenshot, as Tenshi picked that as her main action continent. You can see the corners of the two continents on the screenshot, the top one had Silver's cities, about 3-4 of them, and 3-4 of Tenshi, the bottom was Tenshi's main continent, with about 5-6 maxed orc cities. I conquered all the cities she had on the top continent, but I was still making very slow progress, and I had to keep summoning some lizards on my home continent as wyvern attacks started to get problematic. I was planning to rely on Hordes but Tenshi used Fire Storm every second turn so that wasn't acceptable, and magicians were obviously even worse. In the end I mostly filled by cities with catapults, which aren't all that great against wyverns but at least survive the fire storming. So ultimately I needed to summon lizards there as well, and pair them with paladins I bought in my only high men city to wipe out the incoming wyverns.
Eventually I realized I'm way too slow, the wyvern stacks started to become too frequent and large to deal with, and the time for towers to break was near - and my continent had 6 of them.
I mostly gave up on lizards by this time, as 20% chance to exorcise still killed about 2 of them each combat, and I had to pay 20% extra to summon any which is bad when playing without Conjurer or Specialist. My main strategy was artificier, so I started summoning champions and artifacts to make them regenerate and merge. So using the champions I razed all of Tenshi's remaining cities except the capital, and one city that was way too far on Silver's continent. By then, towers already started breaking, which made it even more urgent. I was thinking about whether to even raze Tenshi's cities, or leave them alone and turn towards the Myrran wizard. I decided to raze them, as the heroes needed the exp. The Myrran wizard was Yuyuko, Death/Chaos, so I needed strong enough heroes to not get wiped out. Unfortunately, I lost the Priestess - the city where I summoned her got attacked a turn before I finished her regeneration accessory, and she was lighting bolted to death. In the end this turned out to be irrelevant but at that time I thought it was a big loss, as Super Prayermaster and Holy Word are both very effective against Death/Chaos wizards, and I could have made a spell save artifact set for her.
Before even going to war with Tenshi, I already turned the other two Arcanus wizards into allies as they were a lot weaker than me (they lost a lot of their cities against Tenshi...), and after razing Tenshi's cities, I did the same with her.
Despite all of this, I was completely defeated by the myrran wizard. My large stacks of mithril hordes and catapults only served as zombie generators and instead of helping me defend, they made things worse. Stacks of 5+ Wraiths were pretty much unstoppable, and while I could summon gorgons, I had nowhere near a relevant quantity of them. I knew I had no way to defend myself at all, so I was hoping to raze all of Myrror using the hero stack instead. That didn't work - with 9 towers on the map, the amount of Myrran troops was unstoppable and I lost all but 3 of my cities by the time my heroes finished half of Myrror, at which point Yuyuko started using Stasis on them, from the three Sorcery books she found...

At the very least, after this, I don't think the 20% land size modifier is too much for the planes - the Myrran wizard was unstoppable and powerful enough to beat all four of us on Arcanus. In fact, I regret razing Tenshi's continent, maybe then we could have held the plane longer, albeit against Stasis, my hero stack tactic is ineffective anyway.

[Nelphine]

Personally, I'm glad to hear stories like that. I find that it's still the best tactic to put unassailable forces in the 9 towers (for you, that would mean 9 elite mithril hordes in each); so knowing that you can get messed up by the arcanus wizards enough that generating those 81 troops isn't possible is very important. (Note, wraiths are strong enough to attack those types of garrisons, but the ai isn't likely to get more than 1 doomstack at a time with enough wraiths to be an issue, so one stack of gorgons plus windwalking to hunt those wraiths would work.)

I would personally have gone for a 'raze all of arcanus' strategy, and used nodes to keep the required power generation.

I'm not a fan of lizards past early. If I can get them before my enemy have more than early uncommons, I'll use them; otherwise, I find the same problem as you described - when they do get killed, it's just too expensive. I'd personally go with hordes of spiders, and replace the heck out of them constantly. But I would also never play nature without conjuror. Ever.

[Seravy]

Personally, I'm glad to hear stories like that. I find that it's still the best tactic to put unassailable forces in the 9 towers (for you, that would mean 9 elite mithril hordes in each); so knowing that you can get messed up by the arcanus wizards enough that generating those 81 troops isn't possible is very important.

Technically, I probably had enough hordes to put them into the towers. I didn't have anything to open them with - my hero stack was busy elsewhere and orc units aren't that great to send them against "many wraiths" or "few archangels", at least not for a Nature wizard. I should have used a 9 lizard stack to clear them but I didn't have the luxury of even having that stack ready. But as you say, hordes don't stop Wraiths anyway, and opening the towers myself when I was still busy on Arcanus would have been a suicide move. (I knew there is a Death/Chaos wizard there, as they used Doom Mastery. Speaking of which I forgot to mention, they had had that, Zombie Mastery and soon after, Chaos Surge up, no other globals. Race was Dark Elves.)
Oh and I forgot to mention but obviously the Myrran wizard spammed city curses due to being Ruthless plus two divine orders plus having a full set of them. So I didn't even try hard to defend as I knew my cities are guaranteed to starve to death anyway and I don't even have any unit available that's effective against the enemy. But ultimately, I couldn't have stopped their units even if I wanted to. Nor could my three allies. (and Yuyuko had plenty of doomstacks. I saw at least two or three with 5+ wraiths, and at least one with 9 nightmares. Once a doomstack leaves the Myrror plane though a tower, she can start building another.)

I probably should have razed the entire Arcanus plane but then I couldn't have refilled lizards in the stack and the heroes came much later (Summon Champion and Create Artifact cost a fortune and I needed many heroes as the enemy had Chaos with early Warp Lighting and albeit much later, also Doom Bolt...), and I was also worried about the two allied Arcanus wizards. If I let a Sorcery/Life/High Men wizard build up cities on 10-15 razed spots, then I lose to them... and ofc, using lizards is not an option against that wizard at all.

After that failure, I started another game, same setup.

I started on a medium sized island this time, near the larger continents.
   
   

Had a good start - found several easy nodes and other sprite-able treasure. As I was on a separate continent, and surrounded by enemies from 3 directions ( E, SE and S), I built up to Wyverns immediately on my capital, and started taking advantage of Coal there.
That paired with early spiders, gave me the confidence to go to war.  I picked purple because 3 of the easy nodes were in their continent, plus their graph looked too scary to leave them alone. As usual, Byakuren was playing Life/Death Charismatic, which spread the war to all three wizards. Fortunately, Satori was not sending anything of a threat, and my Wyverns were able to sink Tenshi's ships, and eventually I built up enough of them to conquer 3 of her cities. This was enough to make her accept peace, and Satori was Peaceful so tributing her a few worthless common spells allowed peace there as well. Taking advantage of that I focused on Byakuren and conquered all her cities :
   

I had to reload once - I forgot spiders are not strong enough to fight a hero, even in stacks of 9, unless the hero has low resistance, and would have lost my main stack at the beginning of the war. I wasn't in the mood to start over a third time for a silly mistake like that. Hero had 12 resistance (Healer is a high natural resistance hero) and something like 11 shields with +2 To def. The 9 spiders weren't able to chew through that armor...

After this, I was hoping to build up an army in peace - I researched Stone Giant as early as 1409!
Unfortunately Tenshi landed a stack on my continent and razed one of my cities, then Satori joined...
I feel peace treaties are extremely punishing nowadays - not only do they give the enemy time to build up a massive number of troops (due to being behind in army strength and outnumbered in their home continent, they'll produce a lot) but on top of that, you can't kill their transports either.

Right now I'm in the middle of this two way war, and have problems defending against invisible focus magic cockatrice doomstacks. Eventually, enough Stone Giants and Earth Elementals should be able to deal with the threat, but I'm nowhere near having enough, and Satori is an Archmage with both Crack's Call and Ice Bolt. No amount of stone giants is expected to survive long against that, and even with immunity to stoning, they'll have a very hard time beating flying invisible enemies. On top of that, Counter Magic almost guarantees I can't use webs...

I also reloaded one more time because somehow my 2 land linked stone giants, 3 cockatrices, and 3 other lighting rod units failed to win against Byakuren's capital of 6 ghouls, 1 magician (which I webbed) and 2 weak heroes. (and no, Byakuren didn't have high skill or good spells. The loss was purely due to the giants losing to the 14 sword hero without equipment and lightnings...)

Things aren't looking as great as they did even a year ago...
   
Myrran invasion is still almost 6 full years away, and the only thing I know is the Myrran wizard will be Seravy and has Just Cause. So high chance of some combination of Life/Nature, low chance of Life/Sorcery.

Overall, I can't help thinking Expect difficulty is far too hard based on these two games. I admit I was 1 pick short from what is normally meant to be a 100% chance to win on this difficulty - artificer isn't that great with Nature, merely average -, and Orcs are not even a strong race (though they are very good for this particular startegy - maintenance free garrisons and a lot of gold to use through Alchemy), but I did have good starts in both games to compensate and I wasn't playing especially poorly or anything. I still have a 50-50 shot at winning this second game, but for these two games, the difficulty seems way above expected. In particular, it seems far too unforgiving - even a small miscalculation (or bad RNG) can result in a guaranteed loss, which should probably be exclusive to the highest two difficulty levels at most.
(Either way, I won't alter the difficulty levels based on this much data but these two games feel like they should be categorized as "expert is to difficult", unlike the previous few.)

A few factors I think were contributing to the excess difficulty this time are :
-The overextension warning for controlling 20 cities made me lose my Wizard's Pact with Tenshi, which then escalated into the multi-front war and I wasn't expecting it. Maybe the game should allow slightly more cities per land size than it currently does?
-The difficulty is high enough that you are under constant pressure and end up taking battles which are slightly risky. Not very risky, but risk enough to have a chance to lose the entire game, as it's also unforgiving enough that you can't afford losing your main stack even once.
-Peace treaty lasts just about long enough for a beaten enemy to become a threat again, but not long enough for you to outgrow them and build up all garrisons, and it prevents you from keeping them away from your territory at the same time, so it sets up a nearly guaranteed backstabbing unless you can maintain a wizard's pact as well or the wizards are Lawful/Peaceful personality.
-Invisible cockatrices are scary. (Even if they don't shoot, but they will...)

And what wasn't a problem :
-I was Nature against a wizard with half Death books for the first half of the game, and that wizard was the strongest.
-I had significant losses against random Night Stalkers once or twice - Spiders and Wyverns can't kill them and they are immune to cold. It even made me think whether it's really necessary to have Cold Immunity on all Death units... Fortunately, I realized Cockatrices work against them.
-First opponent was also Klackons with Life which results in by far the craziest graph growth I've seen on graphs - high pop growth plus Stream of Life plus high production output of above average troops.
-First opponent started on Mithril and shared it between two cities.
-The three way war - I was able to hold and bargain myself out of two of them in time.

[Nelphine]

I find the biggest thing is that by definition, the enemy have to build more troops than you.. but that means unless you go for strategic strength shenanigans, you're almost always going to be in the position you describe where a peace treaty results in them declaring war at the end. I'm not really sure what to do about that - they need the troops, but it ends up very lopsided in terms of army strength, which results in very aggressive ai in most cases. And if you do go with strategic strength shenanigans, you can effectively 'turn off' the most difficult portion of the game (if you have highest army strength, everyone avoids declaring war on you far more often.) I think this is fine at the lunatic level (ok, there is a reliable way to win lunatic! but it's very specific, and not the easiest thing to maintain), but at lower levels, even master, I think it's the biggest contributing factor to whether or not a given game feels overly difficult or not. And, strategic strength is the biggest thing that can't really be fixed. So, I'm really not sure there's anything you can effectively do about this, without completely reworking core mechanics.

That being said, AI declare war based on strategic strength - but due to the way the game works, the majority (or more accurately, the majority of the portion that puts them ahead of the human) of that will still be city troops (simply due to sheer numbers). However, the THREAT from the AI comes from their summons. Might be able to 'fix' this, simply by making them build less city troops, or more accurately, give them less bonuses for city production (or maybe simply reduce it over time - so the first 30-50 turns leave it as is, when city troops really matter the most, but after that, reduce it, as summons become the main threat of the AI). That way, they still have the same number of summons on both offense and defense (which are still the units that make the most difference on both offense and defense), but their overall army strength will be more reflective of their actual capabilities, and therefore, make the diplomacy more reflective of their actual capabilities, instead of them declaring war based on their city troops and then hoping to get lucky with summons. 'How will this work with life?' Life still requires buffing troops to make it work. Less troops, means more stacking of buffs. The non buffed troops really don't do that much for life any more than any other realm, so reducing how many of those exist, won't actually change much in terms of actual threat level.


Sorcery still has the most brutally on/off individual spells in the game (focus magic/invisibility/magic immunity. Either they work, and they make life hell for their opponent, or they don't, and they are totally useless.) Life is still worse than this (either your opponent can dispel your buffs, and you lose, or they can't, and you literally win the whole war), but Life requires a rack of spells to do it, whereas sorcery are just the individual spells.

[Seravy]

. but that means unless you go for strategic strength shenanigans, you're almost always going to be in the position you describe where a peace treaty results in them declaring war at the end. I'm not really sure what to do about that - they need the troops, but it ends up very lopsided in terms of army strength, which results in very aggressive ai in most cases.

Assuming they manage to catch up to, or overtake your army strength, yes. That shouldn't really happen when you outnumber them 15 to 3 in cities though, they might be growing, but you should be growing faster.

The problem I perceive is more specific. By the time the peace treaty expires, they'll have at least 2-3 full stacks roaming around, and exactly because of the peace treaty, you haven't killed these even when they entered your territory. You don't know the exact turn when the treaty expires, so this ultimately sets you up for a "yes so now that stack of 9 ghouls/hounds/bears/whatever is attacking my pop 24 city defended with 3 spearmen, 2 catapults and a magician, and razes the city" because you can't realistically put 9 hordes in all your cities during the ~20 turns the treaty lasts, especially if you're also doing a war elsewhere, or are still building up basic economy buildings and don't even have a fighter's guild or something equivalent. Ultimately, if you did ask for the treaty that meant you didn't have enough troops to deal with the war, so full garrison won't happen. This is more of a problem in the first half of the game - past that, you can likely defend anything through combat spells against a wizard that weak, and your garrisons should be better too.

I haven't really found strategic strength to be a problem - the things with high strategic strength are either prohibitively expensive to have everywhere, or really vulnerable to fire storm due to high figure count. You need really specific strategies for it to work that well - at least Warlord for extra health at elite, probably more. (Or for Life wizards, vulnerable to Dispelling Waves instead)

(of course if no enemy has fire storm, then you got lucky. But personally I found it questionable even then - yes, my cities are safe but those hundreds of enemy units will be there, unable to attack, so I can't move anything outside, can't regroup, etc, so it's a huge disadvantage. If I do, they get attacked and killed right away.)

Note that in this particular case there was no war declaration - the treaty simply expired and the AI had a stack of 9 near my city so they attacked and razed it. Unless their personality prevents that, army strength is irrelevant. Even if mine is 5 times theirs, it can happen (though in that case it's less likely to have a weak city like that...)

Ultimately, a peace treaty is a deal where you buy a temporal improvement for your position in exchange for a significantly worse one ~2 years later.

I suspect the real problem here was the overextension warning - normally if the enemy is that weak, you get a wizard's pact. Which I also got, but it was broken because I had 20 cities. I believe the difficulty is far too high up to still punish the player for having...as many cities as we actually intend the player to have in the first place. This was a useful feature when the AI was weaker but idk about now, we likely should rethink the numbers on it.

(+20% Arcanus territory also means you are going to have 20% more cities, so that much more overextension penalty...)

[Nelphine]

Maybe make the overextension a comparative strength - if your opponent has 30 cities, and you get 20, he shouldn't care? So make it 30% larger than your opponent, or 10% larger if expansionist?

Edit: my main reason for peace treaties is to avoid being cursed while I get ready for a fortress strike. I hate curses.

[Seravy]

Played a few more turns.

Tenshi has proven to be pretty much no threat - now that she can't find an undefended city to sneak attack, her stacks just die in combat. Wyvern in the gate+ webs is pretty effective, and her stacks aren't that great to begin with, best units are wyverns and gargyoles... I can summon 2 earth elementals each combat and she has..fire bolts.

Aside from the initial razed city, and she retaking the one I attacked the turn the war started, I haven't lost anything else to her yet, and her bar dropped like 25% from the 3 battles she lost this turn.

Satori conquered 3 of my cities, but I managed to retake one and kill the 3 cockatrices there using 2 stone giants. Originally I wanted that as a test battle to reload, as I have no idea how good Stone Giants actually are nowadays (I rarely used any even before the change), but they managed to barely score a win somehow (one dead, one down to red health). I guess there weren't as many cockatrices as I thought.

The other lost city only has 4 slingers remaning from the attacking army so it'll be easy to take back. (Unless there were invisible cockatrices? I don't remember, maybe I shouldn't play at 1 am...)
The third one was fairly deep in her territory so I don't expect to get that back any time soon, and it has like 6-7 cockatrices. I do have two stone giants about 2 cities distance from it though - once I manage to build up to 4-5 of them, I'll start moving towards that direction.
My main worry is, I have no idea how many other cockatrice stacks she might have and where.
She is playing halflings, so to conquer her cities, I'm going to either need Blizzard, or use 9 spider stacks, both of which will be tricky as I need a lot of stone giants first to not lose the game to cockatrices. I don't expect the stone giants to work well against slingers and magicians though, unsure if it's worth trying to use giant stacks or the losses would be too heavy. Giants do attack at range but against 8 figure slingers, I don't think the rocks will deal enough damage. On the other hand, they might be invincible to their attacks if I put Land Linking, or Iron Skin on them, problem is, magicians will dispel so this only works on ure slinger cities, not sure if there are any.

I abandoned the other city in yellow territory as half of the cockatrice doomstack was in range and it didn't have anything that could have stopped it. This move saved a spider, 2 wyverns and 2 mithril klackon halberdiers.

btw if Stone Giant wasn't the first rare to appear (after Create Artifact which I haven't researched yet), I'm pretty sure this would have turned into a loss.

Satori now has Survival Instinct, fortunately, it doesn't do much for the cockatrices, and I never traded Spiders with her. (speaking of trading, I got like 5 spells from trading with her, further adding to the "I had a good start" point. She gave me Cockatrices, Transmute, Dispel Magic, Earth to Mud and Crack's Call. I gave away Change Terrain, Enchant Item, Detect Magic, Earth Lore and Web I think. Or maybe Nature's Cures? I do know I kept spiders and neither of us has lizards or catapults yet.

I'll continue tomorrow.

[Seravy]

Another year and the map now looks like this :
   

Red is almost defeated, a stack of halberdiers is heading towards her last non-capital city. After that, I'll start targeting her nodes, but if the capital isn't too strongly defended, I might do that instead.

Blizzard will be researched in 4 turns, which should make halfling garrisons nonexistent, so my offense should progress easily. For now I have 5 stone giants in my main stack, and I decided to carry them with the wind walker hero. Unfortunately the continent is very narrow, only 1 tile wide at the area where I'm fighting now, so it was unavoidable. I also used that hero to bring some orc magicians into the city I reclaimed. Cockatrices now tend to show up 1-2 at a time, and some are not invisible, so I can kill them easier, but I still lose and reclaim a city every once in a while. Water Elementals seem to be a threat, with Survival Instinct they are pretty hard to damage for my units (poison immunity!) and hit hard as well. Fortunately Ice Bolts work well against them. The enemy has Peaceful personality, so the cockatrices have a tendency to get stuck in cities (garrison requirement of 3 strong units!) where they are easier to kill. They are pretty hard to attack outside as they move 3 but flying, while giants move 3 only on land.

This turn a Sorcery conjunction started. I'm not sure if I'm happy about it or not - I spend quite a bit of mana on battles, which will be harder to afford if I max skill production. On the other hand, I do need more skill badly, as Stone Giants are expensive, I can only summon one roughly every 3 turns, if I do nothing else. Considering the conjunction, maybe I should try to hit yellow's sorcery node which is on my island, not a fan of fighting a sorcery wizard on a sorcery node but it's only defended by 2 slingers, a swordsmen and 2 bears. She has 2 other Sorcery nodes, one too far to take, and the other is next to the city I was going to target after I reclaim the one I lost 2 turns ago. Right now I can make 4.7 skill if I max it, which is quite a lot.