DEATH Realm

[Seravy]

So, instead of using the thread for the new Life spell, better to discuss city curses here.

The best solution might be to keep the ability to dispel, but redesign the effect into something the human player will want to use despite that. They should likely be spells that can be effective even if not cast on all enemy cities, as casting too many is what causes the AI to do more dispels.

So my idea is the following :

Get rid of Famine. If we want to kill population, there is Pestilence (and Call the Void) for that. If we want to make units starve to death - this isn't going to do it unless it's cast on every single city, but when it does do it, it outright wins the game since everything just starves and disbands. That's too binary. And, Pestilence still does it for us.

Get rid of Evil presence. We already have Eternal Night to halve all religious power, and Warp Node to deny even more power. And Drain Power/Mana Leak for unlimited mana draining potential if the player wants to deny the ability to cast spells to the AI completely.

Instead, we could have :

Drought. Percentage production bonuses have no effect, maximum population is reduced by 8, and if the city exceeds that size, it will naturally shrink (same effect as Doomsday does globally).

Why would the human want this? First of all, this gets rid of those small, bad terrain cities the AI loves to build. With the 5 from granary gone and an additional 3 reduction, those bad spots will actually be really bad. Not even the AI can expect to build much with only 3 people in a city.
Alternately, getting rid of the 100%+ production bonus the best military production centers might have, AI troop production can be slowed significantly.
On the other hand, the effect is nowhere near as crippling as the existing Famine.

Sabotage (needs a better name, maybe even keep "Evil Presence"?) Enchanted city produces troops without levels and with normal weapons only. Adds 5 unrest. (alternately, keep disabling unrest removal from religious buildings?)

Why would the human want this? Well, for starters, it disables adamantium, orihalcon and war college so the units built in the city will be much less of a threat. Next, since they don't have magic weapons, Wraith Form and other sources of Weapon Immunity, which Death has an abundant amount of, become relevant. While Death is generally good at killing things, those high resistance races can be problematic, and this spell can get rid of their capacity to build relevant units.

Fortunately the AI is now good enough in combat spellcasting to know how to deal with lack of magic weapons, so we don't need to worry about that. The sad part of this spell would be the game having one more counter to special ores of course. However unlike Chaos, at least this can be dispelled, and this is relevant even if no ores are present.

I think Pestilence is fine as is, it's very rare. Chaos Rift is also fine, Chaos does wreck all your units and buildings anyway, makes no difference.

Warp Node would likely need to change, but I'm unsure how. Maybe if it simply took control of the node for yourself? The power is transformed by a ghost, and Death should be able to take advantage of that.
That effect isn't too crippling on the human (you can send more ghosts to meld it back), but very useful when cast by a human (you gain additional power and the AI likely can't keep up with sending ghosts if it has many nodes - but it's only effective against strong AI since weak AI won't have that many nodes...)

[zitro1987]

Drought - It's good if the percentage bonus also includes buildings or that it negates the effect of all production buildings. I can see myself using this in some (but not all) of their cities.

Sabotage - This one seems fun and tactical. Good to have one that adds a lot of unrest as well.

New Warp Node - I'm not sure if the effect is too crippling on the human if the human has magic spirits around the nodes.

[Nelphine]

Doesn't deal with the fact that the human can't afford to dispel. So instead of having no food because of famine everywhere, you have no troops instead because either you can't build them (drought) or they aren't worth building (evil presence).

If losing all your troops due to famine loses you the game, those two are still nearly as bad. However, they don't but what you already have,do they aren't as bad, so I do like that . 

(I would prefer to keep the name evil presence, keep the unrest reduction removal, and change it to 'prevents alchemists guild, barracks and war college from working', and add the same animation over those buildings).


Additionally, unlike famine, these will have a much bigger impact right away - with famine, a given city continues to produce, and only once there are a lot of famines does your military get impacted.

With these, because they shut down a given city, if you have few enough military centers, the human will be shut down much faster.



I think they are a move in the right direction. I think the new evil presence will be helpful for the human to cast against the ai even if the AI dispels (you still prevent adamantium troops from being built which actually seems worth the cost even if it immediately gets dispelled). However, it's going to be more noticeably crippling when used against the human, although the wont outright win the game as the old famine would.

[Nelphine]

Warp node.. I'm not sure. It seems good, but it also seems to encourage spirit burning and then never bother to meld a node again. Against the human, I think that version would be better than current, but against a maniacal death, it would completely cripple node use. I've had enemies who cast multiple warp nodes per turn until I killed them. At least with current, that 'only' completely wrecks the human power income. Against this, particularly with ai bonuses, that would also treble the AI income.

I don't think think overall this warp node is good. It takes away all long term benefit from node hunting (which current one does) but ALSO gives that benefit to your opponent. So to me it's actually even stronger.

Yes it's 'dispellable' by spirits, but that takes a lot longer, against maniacal you still end up spending all your casting skill on summoning spirits (instead of dispels), the 'spirit dispsl' can't be used on nodes in enemy territory, and suppress magic + warp node would be invincible.

[Seravy]

Considering Spirits only cost 30 each, but warping costs 100 (and we can even increase this cost, if the node does change control it's worth a higher cost for a human player), even with the crazy AI advantages it's a loss for the AI if you do make the spirits to claim the node back. It's only bad for you if the node is far from your territory and you can't do it easily, but holding nodes in territory that isn't yours shouldn't be encouraged anyway.
It's definitely not a perfect solution and if anyone knows a better one, I'll be happy to pick that one. But the current "nodes are no longer a thing in a game" version shouldn't stay.

[Seravy]

Another idea : Warped nodes produce 50% power, and the other 50% goes to the person who warped the node.
So you definitely want to cast it as a human player because you get more power, but your node still has value if used against you.

[Seravy]

How do we want these to interact with other modifiers on the same thing?

Evil Presence vs
Alchemy - allow magic weapons anyway? Hard to imagine a city curse disabling a retort.
Uranus Blessing - Probably allow as well, that part of the effect is quite underused.
Altar of Battle - Unsure, but I kinda like how spells can cancel parts of the curse so allow the levels? Life is strong against Death so it fits the theme better if we allow it.

Drought  vs
Inspirations - Disable the effect? Unlike the other curse, this is pretty meaningless if you can still keep the +100% bonus... easier to implement that way too.
Gaea's Blessing - I think it's technically impossible to have forests not add the 3% but still add the extra 6% so it has to be disabled. However we can apply the +50% max pop before the -8, making the spell still reduce the damage done.

[Settemio]

Another idea : Warped nodes produce 50% power, and the other 50% goes to the person who warped the node.
So you definitely want to cast it as a human player because you get more power, but your node still has value if used against you.

I like this a lot.

Also I want to point something out about curses in general: you were comparing the amount they set a city back to the amount a city buff of similar rarity / cost puts a city ahead, and determined that they are too strong, but this is faulty. In a multiplayer game, if I do something to give myself an incremental advantage, that is almost equivalent to giving that much disadvantage to EACH of my opponents. So I think the city curses SHOULD do more than the city buffs, because if they have only the same overall effect but buffs do it 4 times, curses are not as good.

I am not saying the curses should stay as they are; I have never cast a curse and I won't miss them if they are gone and I agree with you that they should be designed in a way that the human player would want to actually cast them sometimes. But if you are going to balance the new curses, they should be balanced with the knowledge that resources spent against a single player are less effective than resources spent toward your future position.

[Seravy]

While this is somewhat true, in reality these are all rare spells so by the time they are relevant, there should be only one major enemy left in the game - the wizard on the other plane, or on worst case, two. If you're in a position where there are still 4 powerful enemy wizards in the game that far ahead, you should be looking for ways to conquer more territory, not worry about slowing enemy economy.

On Drought I wonder if the 8 max pop reduction is maybe too much? Assuming each pop is worth 5 gold, that's a loss of 40 gold value, on top of also losing probably around 30 hammers due to no production bonus. That's still about as much value as an inspiration plus two prosperities in one spell. I think a population loss of 4-6 is more appropriate.

[Nelphine]

For warp nope remember that a node provides 8-50 power, not 20-50 (that would be always max power) And on fair it's 8-20. Currently if you take astrologer, you actually usually get similar amounts from the node and the retort, so the original proposal would greatly hurt astrologer.

I think the 50 50 would be ok.

I don't think drought should affect inspirations. Yes the effect isn't as important, but since those percents are additive, that would mean drought is far more important to use against inspirations than anything else, even if that otherwise wouldn't be your main target. That seems excessive. Given that cities already reach 100+ production really easily without inspirations, it's still a huge impact even without affecting inspirations. I'd say the same for gaias blessing, but you've indicated potential technical issues. I hope you can overcome them.

Curses shouldn't negate other spells. They should just negate whatever they target, unless you're actively using a curse as a dispel as well which I think is a mistake. (This is similar to the problem of stream of life negating spell unrest reduction - it's really not balanced)

I also would vote for 4 population reduction, not 8. Again, similar to stream of life. 8 is huge (8 with bank and merchant guild and 2g per pop is 28g by itself; add in the production of around 16 from the 8, that's another 8g; that's 36g just from the 8 max pop without even accounting for the loss of production (which is what, 20g minimum (for a pop 20 barbarian city), and upwards of 50g for a strong economy race). And that's without affecting inspirations.