Life spell slot, city curses

[Nelphine]

Ok in other realms, the realm gets multiple spells of its strength, often multiple per tier. For instance chaos has lightning bolt and fireball, flame strike and doom bolt, etc.

Life is meant as the buffing realm; and in combat the heal and survive realm. However, at uncommon, you get true sight, and you get raise dead. That's only 1 of each. 

So I'd say, life needs more spells of its main strength, that are in some way redundant - better versions of earlier spells, or more specialized versions of spells for use in different situations.

One of the main reasons I find life overly strong is that very few of their spells overlap at all - so they all stay relevant. Even healing and exaltation don't make each other redundant, whereas you'll virtually never use firebolt after you get lightning bolt, and you'll never use war bears after you get lizards or spiders or cockatrices.

So, I'd say we need an uncommon spell that replicates a common spell, but better.

Something like, make endurance uncommon as is (or maybe with +1 resistance in addition), and make a common spell 'long haul' that grants +1 speed and is only castable overland, and the unit can only have one not both spells.

Or maybe a weak version of exaltation that can't actually heal it can only shield.

[Seravy]

Yeah but we already determined Life does not need more buffs. And buffing is overpowered. So this would be in many ways worse than an economic spell. And no matter what we do it will stack with other buffs. Maybe not the common variant of itself but everything else. So overall the unit does get a lot stronger.

Also, Life does have two of each. They also have Prayer (best buff in game) and Resurrection (well, not in combat, but it is a "survive" spell anyway).

But let's see what can we buff on a unit.
Defense/To Def? We have enough and any more would just be OP.
Resistance? We don't want to buff that because it ruins other realms.
Attack/Hit? It's a completely useless stat, Prayer by itself is enough to ensure your units will be able to damage high armor enemies well enough and in the unlikely case you need more, you have Holy Weapon.
Movement? We agreed we don't want that, you even said it would require removing healing.
HP? Don't think I can nor do I want to. It ultimately is just more defense but in a nastier way as it cannot even be ignored by effects that ignore defense.
Ranged attacks? Same deal, Prayer and Holy Weapon are plenty. Don't forget Heroism. And we can't really have "holier weapon +2 to hit" which would be the only possible way to make it not stack with HW.

And that's all the stats on a unit, really. We seem to agree a buffed unit on common spells alone, can beat anything at the uncommon tier. So an uncommon buff is unnecessary and would just make things overpowered.

So that leaves healing. But healing for 5 and 8 aren't that far apart from each other to need an additional step in between. So that leaves the type of healing. Shielding, as you say, but that would be a spell entirely unusable to the AI. They can't predict what will take a hit. (Even the human often can't nowadays as there are too many factors that affects the AI decision.) But it's worse. Shielding in Exaltation is rare because it allows you to "heal" things that cannot be healed, like irrecoverable damage. It's a very powerful effect. It doesn't matter if I actually heal the 21 damage after Crack's Call or only prevent the next 21 by adding three of these shields. (btw "shields" are just additional hit points that are added to the "additional hit points gained" field instead of the "normal hit points" one. But their effect is the exact same. There is no in-game difference except the amount of displayed grey and gold hearts maybe.)

So we can't do these two, otherwise we'd have already done it.
(Also I'm pretty sure we agreed we wanted Life to stay weak at uncommons when we first noticed that is the case.)

[zitro1987]

The +3 power and no upkeep buff is a cool idea. Kind of like life's version of 'raise volcano' but just its self-benefit effect. Can it have synergy with cult leader?


I'd leave the cost somewhere in 70-80 (or the power as +4) as the effect is not that significant. It should give players a good chance to boost their economy early on, thus needs to actually matter.

[Seravy]

So, for the AI casting Sanctify, we want it to only be done if there is a high chance of lasting peace.

With other AI that's simple, if we require a wizard's pact with contacted players, we are good.
We might want to also add "personality isn't chaotic" but that has a low chance to trigger and might narrow down the possibility of using the spell too much?

Peace with the human is trickier.
Having a wizard's pact doesn't really mean anything, but an alliance means we'll be forced into war against other AI. So for the human we should assume it's unpredictable and simply look at the current state (don't use if it's already war).

Alternately, we could use it when our military is stronger than others, as that means the lowest chance of garrisons getting hurt (we are attacking others, not the other way around).

We probably shouldn't use it if we can cast good summoning spells (rare or better) instead.

[Seravy]

Current implementation :
Priority=40
For each wizard with higher army strength, priority=priority-10
For each contacted AI player that has no treaty with us, halve priority
If war with human, priority=0
If "need armies" tactic is set, priority=0
If good rare or better summon spell available, priority=0
If medium summon is available, priority=priority/4 (angels, great lizards, etc note unicorns are not in this category!)
If perfectionist, double priority
For each Divine Order, add +50% priority.

Research priority is after Unicorn and True Sight, before Raise Dead and Resurrection. During war with human player, research priority is pushed to the end of the list.

[Juffos]

Will the spell affect heroes? Negating 6-10 gold upkeep might be cool, especially for heroes on casting skill duty.

[Seravy]

Yes, it will.