Test games played

[Seravy]

My best attack spell is Star Fires. (and they cost like 80% extra due to Divine Order+Evil Omens)

I have warlord and altar of battle and I'm producing adamantium jackals that can only watch the wraiths hiding in a corner and die from the ranged attacks.
With Evil Omens in play I can't really afford blessing everything...well, maybe I can but haven't had the chance to prepare it in advance.
Not that it matters, this is only a problem for my offense side. The AI's wraith doomstack got obliterated by a single buffed cockatrice. Buffs are OP. (I don't understand why the AI didn't use Dispel Magic on that cockatrice...had like 6 buffs on it. Maybe the AEther Flux? It kept spamming the direct damage spells.
ok let's see, 5 buffs so 35 priority on dispel. I had a single unit so bonus 12? 18? on direct damage. Battle was in AI's favor so +50 on direct damage. So 68+ vs 35, yes, that means no dispelling. Maybe dispelling should also get the "low unit count" priority boost?)

[Nelphine]

You should probably count dispel magic as a direct damage spell where it calculates the expected result of the dispel magic and see if that reduces the strategic strength by a larger amount than the direct damage spell. Admittedly, that won't include wierd immunities, but leave that as the baseline dispel priority that you currently have.

[Seravy]

Uh that wouldn't work, first because dispelling cannot be simulated, and second because direct damage spells measure their effectiveness in damage points (and kills and unit cost), not strategic value.
Also Dispel Priority is and needs to be capped, direct damage isn't and shouldn't. We don't want to dispel instead of high priority moves (such as killing the unit) but we do want to damage if the expected damage is a lot.

The thing is in theory spamming direct damage IS the correct move against a single buffed unit. It'll eventually die. Except mine had 3 rare buffs - Iron Skin, Lionheart, Invulnerability, which are powerful enough to make the unit take less damage than my healing, even including melee damage from wraiths. "normal" buffs wouldn't do this and wouldn't let the unit survive a reaper slash and psionic blast spam for 8+ turns.

So we only need a small modifier difference in favor of dispelling - if those spells could have done 2-3 more damage each, the cockatrice would have died.

(albeit honestly, Death would need to use Wave of Despair for this, the AI didn't get it this game. Chaos would do Doom Bolts. Life has no direct damage anyway, and Sorcery has a dispel bonus so the situation rarely comes up...I was very lucky.)

[Nelphine]

Oh bah. Didn't realize it was in straight damage points, I thought it was a conversion process. Unfortunate. Hard to say then. Actually.. can we just count rare tier buffs seperately? They're the ones that really shut down damage (yes, the combination of life commons is crazy good, but it also shouldn't put you into excessively take-no-damage-from-spells range.)

So any rare tier buffs are counted as say triple priority?

Alternatively, can we have direct damage priority done as a percentage of life of the single target? So the current scenario had a priority of 68 for direct damage, but in my suggestion that would require the spell doing at least 2/3 the damage of the unit in one go? (This idea would probably need to be refined a lot because I simply don't have a firm grasp on the combat spell algorithm, but basically, if the spell is doing less than 1/3 of the units health, then your current dispel priority would already be higher so you wouldn't need to change the dispel priority.)

[Seravy]

Problem is direct damage priority already includes damage dealt. So how much damage is reduced is already considered.
The result comes from the different base priority of the spells. Dispel Magic has no base priority : it's equal in all combat situations. We don't want the AI to dispel more, or less just because it is winning/losing/equal in a battle.
Direct damage does have base priority. So it'll be preferred when the AI is strongly winning or losing. Meaning in those cases, Dispel has a hard time competing.
Do note my unit was still taking damage. If buffs are enough to reduce damage to zero, the damage spell won't be picked. Also if the damage spell halves or ignores armor then dispelling instead is a bad move - and this will be reflected in priority as the spell deals more damage.
So it's really a corner case when the AI really wants to deal damage because the situation calls for it, can do so, but the damage isn't enough to actually kill the buffed unit, despite the unit not having enough buffs to trigger the dispel anyway.
Oh also one additional effect, the AEther Flux. That boosts the priority of every spell by 12, except dispels. Dispels don't benefit from cost reduction priority because, well, you don't want to dispel more if it's cheaper otherwise the AI might end up dispelling when there isn't really anything worthy to dispel. Furthermore dispels scale down in strength by cost reductions (and up by cost increases) as far as I remember so during AEther Flux, dispelling is actually less effective. So the DD spell had +12 from that, +18 for lone enemy unit, plus the combat situation. Meanwhile dispel was underrated because I had only 5 buffs but the unit was as strong as if it had 10.

Either way, let's hope in 90% of the games the AI won't miss Wave of Despair...

[Seravy]

4am I guess I have to fight this war tomorrow... fixed the tower bug and AEther Flux ended so might start losing now. Divine Order gets dispelled a lot, too. Spells cost like 3-4 times as much as a turn ago... I wonder how much is a bless now, 52?

...maybe I should move my best items onto the Barbarian hero and rely on her thrown for attacking cities...

[Seravy]

Done, I think this game is lost. (btw the AI did manage to dispel the cockatrices, they do it rarely but every once in a while is enough...)
   
I have zero answers to Wraiths. I don't make enough MP to be able to deal with combat costs even in battles I could maybe win. My overland spells are more expensive due to Evil Omens, so I can't buff efficiently. Possession tears apart my javelineer and jackal garrisons, and I only have magicians in like two cities. I can't realistically hope to bless this many units. I can't afford high research so I likely won't have a very rare spell that can help any time soon. (Entangle is almost researched by doesn't work on noncorporeal. I don't think I can afford waiting another 20-30 turns for a different very rare.)

Overall, playing a semi-rush strategy allowed me to clear Arcanus earlier than usual, but even despite the economy spells and 2 free years for treasure hunting and buffing, I still couldn't gain enough advantage to get ahead of the Myran wizard. Furthermore this game shows the AI and game balance are now good enough to beat a player at nearly equal graph strength. (the difference is entirely magic power, our spell research, skill and army strength were identical. Gnolls don't make much magic power....)
Also, it seems you can't just look at your stats and assume they are high enough so you can beat the Myrran wizard when it's time for it - you need to have a foolproof plan that works against all realms and races. In my case, I should have spent all my gold on my two adamantium elven cities and built pegasai and elven lords instead of crappy jackal riders which...are excellent but useless against Death wizards.
Still, despite this mistake, the Dispelling Wave from a 8 book Death wizard was too much of a bad luck, also Wraiths are brutally powerful. Not only because they are flying and noncorporeal and sometimes ranged (yes they also had Focus Magic) but because when they break towers, they also come with some undead archangels and stuff like that... oh, stacks of 5-6 undead focus magic cockatrices too...
I'm worried Death might be on the overpowered side a little, most of my losses seem to happen when the Myrran wizard is Death. This game we haven't even reached city curses, but the game is already lost because their hordes of (undead) units, paired with combat spells that can only be stopped through resistance and there are no "mass resistance" buffs so either all garrisons have naturally high resistance or you lose your cities (unless you are already up to High Prayer but not everyone plays Life).
I suppose, having Gorgons or petrify could have made this winnable but I missed both. Nature books are simply not good if you don't have a full 10, if you don't get the spells needed to counter the enemy you are fighting, you're dead.
I could probably still try to send my hero into the other plane with artifacts and try a "raze war" but there is no way my one doomstack can be faster than their dozens.

[Nelphine]

The problem of needing 10 books I agree with. Multi realms need to be viable, but that should mean you can reasonably expect good spells without 10 books. That's another reason I play life. However, that should have meant you had enough life books to make it work. But you were against dispelling wave, and weren't playing warlord/life specialist.

We've already said gnolls arecweak - in particular I think they should get magic Mart if they don't already. Lack of hitting fliers is a problem, but don't on purpose, so in this case I think you've proven they are difficult (in my opinion the worst race) as you want them to be.

Is death too powerful? Hard to say. But strategic combat undead creation IS far far stronger than normal - try strategic combat with the necromancer, you can get multiple very rares per combat without a single death unit or spell. Vampiric weapons on melee heroes do the same.

So in particular, this is a particular niche case of 'the player who breaks the towers, wins'. In this case because wraiths do break towers, and come out with so many extra strong units.

I don't think in this case death is the problem. In this case binary buffing, plus undead creation problems, are the problem. Binary buffing you seem to like, or at least, have no good suggestion for.


What if dispels/disenchant area didn't dispel, but reduced the power? So they weren't binary - if you buff/city cursec you're super, if you get dispelled you lose 1/2 or 2/3 of the buff power?

(Probably WAY too hard to implement due to varying nature of buffs/city curses. Sigh.)

[Seravy]

One of the problems this game was that even though I had 5(+2 found) Nature book, and 5 Life books, I didn't get either of Holy Word, Exorcise, Gorgons, Petrify, and since I didn't expect Wraiths to be a problem (normally I have at least one of those spells) I also didn't prepare enough ranged units to stop them. I should have researched Stone Giants first, but didn't, thinking "eh, I don't need those and I want Divine Order in effect so they'd be expensive as well"
I also wasted the two years on buffing cities which didn't help at all, I still had way too low resources for the war but also lacked armies of relevant unit types (which javelineers and jackals weren't at all). 
This could have probably been a win if I focused on giants and pegasai as soon as I saw Zombie Mastery appearing. But it's still amazing to see how picking the wrong strategy can result in losing even if the AI isn't much stronger than you.



Dispels reducing effect is impossible to implement. Buffs and curses are stored in a single bit of data. (actually, only unit buffs. City buffs get an entire byte so those could work but those don't need it...)
Dispels weren't the main problem though. The problem was Evil Omens, and having basically 200 units without Bless against a Death wizard. That's like starting the war with 0 troops and 200 free enemy zombies.
Against Death you need either summons that cannot be possessed or high resistance (or blessed) normal units, I had neither so I had zero relevant armies despite my army bar being the highest.
At least this shows Death does do its job - it can effortlessly kill any amount of units if they don't have high resistance.

I feel city buffs are a bit of a newbie trap in the game now, using them instead of preparing for war does lose games if the style of a war ends up being not about economy but about the type of units.

[Nelphine]

Yup agreed. But that's the same as building a merchant guild instead of two paladins.

In general, I think city buffs are in a good place, and your game shows most things are where we want them, as opposed to anything might be in a bad place, except the two things I already mentioned.