DEATH Realm

[Seravy]

No those are the number of tiles, but power was something like tiles+5 or 10, I don't remember. Guess I'll see when I add the new effect.
Inspirations by itself adds so much production that even with the curse on the city would already have enough production to instantly build a unit a turn, rendering the curse completely useless for humans. At the very least the Life wizard should use Consecration to negate it instead of just shrugging it off. (and yes this will make it more important against Life but why is that a problem? Death is already weak to life, at least they get one thing to fight back...until Consecration.)
It's also hard to justify from a technical viewpoint : "Percentage production bonus has no effect" should trump +100% production bonus from a spell. It's also hard to justify by flavor - If there is no water to plant trees or operate your mines, it doesn't matter how inspired your workers are, they still can't do the job.

For the time being I made Drought a -6 max population, then we can move it up or down as needed when we get a feel to how strong it is. However I made it so that population shrinking is slower than Doomsday, -120 people a turn only.

I made Uranus' Blessing win over Evil Presence, same for Altar of Battle and Alchemy.

[Seravy]

Should Warp Node steal 50% of the extra power generated by Astrologer or Seismic Mastery? Or just of the base amount? What about the +3 from Guardian Spirit?

also, checked meanwhile, node power is (tiles+8)*node power setting. So that makes nodes 12-28 units of power, where a unit is 0.5 to 2.5, so overall the range is 6-70, without spell effects. That's an average of 38, but old warp node also added 15 power loss, so the net effect was an average of 53 power - about twice as powerful as power producing buffs.

If we do the 50-50, the net effect will still be 38, making it 50% better than Dark Ritual, but at least not twice as good, and the effect will be divided between two players. Considering how good this already is I think it should not affect Astrologer and Seismic Mastery extra power. Probably doesn't matter on the Guardian Spirit though.

[Nelphine]

Right I forgot it was tiles + x. My bad.

I wouldn't steal guardian spirit or astrologer or seismic mastery. Those are all seperate, and like city curses I don't think a curse should also be effectively a dispel.

On inspirations vs drought flavor.. I think a superman (created by inspirations, think the stories of man vs machine railroad workers, like John Henry) would certainly work far harder regardless of missing the basic products that allow production. That's EXACTLY how I picture the spell.

From a technical point of view, it might not be that simple. But, that's still my view.

[Seravy]

New spell costs :
Evil Presence 180
Drought 150
Warp Node 120

New research cost :
Warp Node 4000 (is now as good as Dark Rituals)
Cloud of Shadow 3500 (city defense, always a good candidate to reduce RP if we need to swap costs)
Evil Presence 2500 (disabling troop quality is useless if coming too late)
Drought 3000 (slightly less urgent but production reduction is also something you want early enough to matter)

AI research priority : 
Evil Presence very high (before all other rares)
Warp Node medium (after Cloud of Shadows, before Dark Ritual)
Drought high (before other rares)

AI casting priority : 
Evil Presence 18
Warp Node 33
Drought 40

AI disenchant casting priority :
Warp Node 10
Evil Presence 12
Drought 19

[Nelphine]

EDIT: Never mind, just saw disenchant priority.

Are these versions of the spells still assuming dispel available for everyone?

I feel they're still too strong if undispellable. For instance if you are playing a strategy such as warlord that intends to use city troops, evil presence, if an opponent you can't kill quickly learns it, will eventually swamp your whole Empire (and probably much faster, swamp your primary military cities).

I'm thinking a game based around flame blade and chaos channels, or sorcery buffed city units.

It will make city troops completely shut down,in the way we've already been talking about some realms countering each other - in this case, drought shuts down all city troops, which isn't even limited to one realm. EXCEPT against life, which is the realm that has the strongest city troops anyway.

[Seravy]

Yes, for now we are assuming everyone has dispel. Not being able to dispel curses is unfun, so it's a last resort if we can't find proper balance for curses otherwise.

...which means we are free to pick the other options for the Life spell slot if this change does work well.

[zitro1987]

I'm not sure how I feel about not having disenchant area unless playing life, and disenchant area as life becomes obsolete when a very rare with low research cost comes in. The idea that we can dispel unit enchantments and global enchantments, but we can't dispel city enchantments, sounds strange and loses an important feature of arcane.

The death city curses - we should have something that counters them, even if not too cost effective. The idea that life beats death is getting a bit out of hand with changes like these.

[Nelphine]

No he meant currently we are not change my disenchant area. It is staying as arcane.

[Bahgtru]

[quote='Seravy' pid='683587' dateline='1533225746']
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.

Isn't this approach part of the reason why long term strategies are shafted?

[Seravy]

Well, this is a problem inherent to the genre. You can't realistically expect to win if you are too far behind in territory, since by definition controlled territory is the main determining factor for your overall power, so you have to expand even if playing a late race.
Of course, that expansion can come from settler spam but whether that works greatly depends on the starting positions on the map, which is entirely luck.