DEATH Realm

[Nelphine]

I'm inclined to suggest my resistance changes, particularly death knight, demon Lord, and archangel, regardless of the annihilate discussion.

[Seravy]

Why?
All of those suggested resistance values literally undo all the careful fine tuning we did these past years.
Death Knight at 11 means Nature wizards can't petrify them anymore. Demon Lords at 15 will be back to being an unkillable unit whatsoever. Archangels at 15 would be still impossible to kill whatsoever due to all the resistance buffing in Life, but the human might sometimes trick the AI into not casting any of those and kill it anyway, while the AI can't do anything against it. Djinn we reduced because it was too powerful at 13. Colossus at 13 looks weird when a normal Golem is 15. Makes no sense either as that is meant to be their more resistant unit (as it has the fewest hp and attack power and no regeneration). Reduce it and Nature auto-loses to sorcery (Banish).

[Nelphine]

Primarily I think archangels are simply too high, partifularly with supreme light. I can do things with 1 archangel that I can't do with 4 great drakes. And death knights don't need to be susceptible to petrify, they're a very rare summon that has to melee to do anything. Demon lords (and the others) are less important and more based in the annihilate discussion. Yes it's important to balance around the weaker spells but making sure annihilate matters is important as well.

*Is tempted to list out every resist spell and compare them to each other and then compare to current resist values* *should do that with excel*

Common (-2): black sleep (-2), confusion (-2, can affect other enemies, might not be relevant), warp creature (-5, doesn't kill, might not be relevant), shatter (-7, doesn't kill, might not be relevant, only normal units)

Uncommon (-3): possession (-3, can affect other enemies, only normal units), night stalker (-3), cockatrices (-4, unit otherwise weak, 1/attacking figure), excorcism (-1, -4 only undead units)

Rare (-4): terror (-3, aoe, doesn't kill, has non resistance secondary), wrack (-2, aoe, lasting, low damage), wraith (-3, low damage, 1/attacking figure), stasis (-5, doesn't kill), banish (-4), chaos spawn (need to look up details), gorgons (-3, otherwise strong unit), petrify (-3, cheap), Holy word (-2, aoe, -5 only against undead)

Very rare (-5): annihilate (-5, -7 against normal units), massacre (-2, aoe), death knights (-4, low damage, 1/attacking figure), demon Lord (-5, low damage, otherwise strong unit), disintegrate (special), creature binding (-4, takes control of unit).

Still editing

Things of note:
Holy word and exorcism should really both have the same penalty, either -1 or -2 base; holy word being a better penalty is undervaluing aoe.
Cockatrices have to be unbelievably weak in order for their save to make sense. I don't think they're THAT weak. Their melee attack should probably be dropped to 1 or 2.
Massacre should probably be -3 to match other aoe spells.

[Seravy]

And death knights don't need to be susceptible to petrify, they're a very rare summon that has to melee to do anything.

It's a flying noncoporeal, cold immune unit. Nature has no way to damage it whatsoever aside from summoning an army of colossus. And they heal in melee so that doesn't work well to fight them.

[Nelphine]

Or adamantoum bowmen/slingers/rangers etc.

[Seravy]

Those are not nature, those are normal units... you know, the things that get killed by death magic so you can't rely on them as you can't buff their resistance.

[Nelphine]

Except level 1 adamantium slingers 1 shot wraiths. They do about 60-80% of a death knight. So, via transmute, nature is the only realm that can reliably do that against death. If you defend your cities you don't need to worry about death knights, because you kill almost all of them before the death wizard gets to actually cast a spell, particularly since you're saying you expect very rares to only be used in small groups.

On offense, more of a problem obviously, but aside from massacre, nothing death has is going to hurt a stack of 9 adamantium ranged units enough that they can't slaughter a pile of death knights before they die. And on offense, losing 9 adamantium ranged units to kill ~6 death knights is fine.

And of course if you say 'but death knights + massacre!' well, true. But if the death wizard has multiple very rare spells, then I think it's fine to say the nature wizard can start to use their own optimized very rare spells.. instead of an uncommon spell plus city troops..

[Nelphine]

Finished editing my complete list of all spells or summons that have resist effects.

Compared to each other, I have the following comments about resist spells:
Holy word and exorcism should really both have the same penalty, either -1 or -2 base; holy word being a better penalty is undervaluing aoe.
Cockatrices have to be unbelievably weak in order for their save to make sense. I don't think they're THAT weak. Their melee attack should probably be dropped to 1 or 2, similar to chaos spawn.
Massacre should probably be -3 to match other aoe spells.


Using this as a basis, I would think: we want to have resistances set based on a comparison of the resist based spells and the direct damage spells of the same tier, so that they end up with roughly equivalent value when used on some reasonable target (although we would expect what is a reasonable target for direct damage to be different than the reasonable target for resist spells, but as long as the two reasonable targets have the same cost, that's fine.) However, reasonable target should account for rarity. Once that balance is checked, you can then see a good resist range for a tier. That's where I'm getting my 11-15 for very rare from.

So I would say again, yes, death knights need resist 11 at least. If petrify is a problem, because that is nature method to combat death knights (even if I argue differently elsewhere), then I think we should actually swp the power of banish and petrify.

Give sorcery the resist or die spell with weaker save that can be spammed by magicians, and give nature the stronger save penalty.

This keeps the resist strength of death knights the same when compared to petrify, while giving death knights higher resist against everything else.  Further, spamming spells is more a token of sorcery than nature, so the cost switch makes flavor sense as well. Sorcery has other spells with stronger saves as well, so doesn't need banish to have that particular save for balance reasons, unlike petrify, as nature has no other options.

[Seravy]

First of all, resistance based spells and direct damage are a completely different design space.

Resistance based spells have high variance, are unpredictable, and are very easy to defend against, or even be immune to.
Vs
Direct damage spells have a low variance, are fairly predictable, and are quite hard to defend against or be immune to unless it's a special trait naturally present on the target unit.

Meaning, if I cast a direct damage spell, I can expect the same amount of damage +/-20% almost every time. If I cast a resistance spell, I can expect 0 or lots of damage, and never anything in between. This makes direct damage inherently superior.
Also meaning, I can cast Bless or Resist Elements or Resist Magic to be almost completely immune to all or matching types of resistance based spells. Meanwhile I can cast those same spells (or have Large Shield) to reduce the effectiveness of the strength 24-42 direct damage spells by 3-5 points. So again direct damage is vastly superior here.
Note that I'm intentionally ignoring rares, as commons and uncommons are what matters for this and commons already offer almost full protection against one of the types, so there isn't anywhere to improve on higher tiers. So it has a huge relevance to overall balance of uncommon (and even rare) creatures.

Which means, resistance spells must do a much higher damage/MP spent (or damage/turn) because they are inherently inferior by design in two different ways.

Holy word and exorcism should really both have the same penalty, either -1 or -2 base; holy word being a better penalty is undervaluing aoe.

I was considering to raise Exorcise to -2 to compensate for loss of Bless protection against Shadow Demons. Life generally has a hard time dealing with regenerating units, as it needs to kill at least 51% of the figures to prevent regeneration. (In other words, roll 3 hits on 4 shadow demon figures, which is currently like once out of what, 10-15 uses?)
However -2 Exorcise is overpowered against most non-Shadow Demon uncommon creatures, such as Great Lizards or Fire Giants, which are single figure. It also makes it a bit too good compared to Banish, which is -4 but costs twice as much MP. That difference is reasonable for a -3 save difference, not so much for a -2.
Also -5 total against undead, isn't that way too much? Well, I suppose undead are free units so it's fine either way but that's almost certain success on pretty much any undead that appears at this stage of the game. So overall I'm not against changing this but we need to think it through as it has serious implications. Note this is actually the earliest true "save or die" spell in the game, as all others are unit curses or unit abilities, and it's also the one that costs the lowest.

Cockatrices are absolutely horrible in melee. It's only 4 figures so their attack strength is not any better than a swordsmen unit. If the resistance effect isn't working, the cockatrice is useless. The current attack strength is at best enough to be of use if the unit is seriously buffed (like in a node or lionhearted).

Massacre is already pretty much the strongest combat spell in the game. Buffing it would be stupid. Unlike Holy Word, this targets normal units as well which have lower resistance in general, so while the modifier is the same, effectiveness is a lot higher.

Give sorcery the resist or die spell with weaker save that can be spammed by magicians,

But that's Exorcise. We don't want to have a duplicate spell. Life and Sorcery both specialize at killing fantastic creatures, but Sorcery is stronger at it as it doesn't need weak specialized spells, unlike life, it has generic combat spells to rely on that work on all units, so the specialized spells have to be stronger.

[zitro1987]

I think for the most part resistance in units and resistance-based spells are relatively well balanced:
*Exorcise is among the weakest here, though it is mostly meant to target the undead. I'm not a big fan that bless is another similar death counter early on, but that's not an issue with exorcise.
*Similarly, banish is not an outstanding spell at just -4 for a single unit, but it has the benefit of being used by djinns and focus magic magicians, thus it is balanced as players can make the best out of this spell
*I think holy word is balanced and a good step up from exorcise.
*Annihilate is balanced, but I wish it were -6/-8 resist with a higher spell cost. When we get this advanced with the spells, I'd rather have expensive uber-powerful combat spells.
*Massacre is balanced. Any more would make it much stronger than flame strike and apocalypse (as you might already have eternal night by this point, and have a demon cast black prayer too!)
*Cockactrices are balanced without sorcery… but can be a little too much combined with focus magic.