Test games played

[zitro1987]

I think I might like it better if it only applied to spell counter element while reducing its cost to 100 or keep its cost but have it apply to all non-arcane realms without having to choose.

This way, it can be easily spammed in every city but:
*the AI can probably still win a battle if bringing some good summons.
*the player can probably still win with heroes / good summons.

Spells are so important late in the game that having this effect alone is not underpowered. I think adding summon weakening not only mimics the dark magic rare city defense spell, but seems like too much of a good thing. The attacking player can only cast things like dispel magic and heroic heart.

[Seravy]

No, I described what it needs to be to fill the "holes" on Sorcery's defensive capabilities.
However as we figured it out, perfect defense is too powerful so we likely need to reduce our expectations.

So let's see.

As a human...
-I definitely would need some sort of a curse protection. Curses are too cheap and slip through Spell Blasting. Earthquake we can counter by Flying Fortress so that's covered. Anything that can be dispelled, we are semi-good against, even if they are runemasters, Suppress Magic can counter half the spells. Only in extreme cases do we need additional protection against those, albeit the extreme cases (maniacal expansionist with no very rare summon) do exist and aren't that rare.). However we have zero protection from Fire Storm and Blizzard (the latter is rarely a threat but the former definitely is), and even through Suppress Magic these can go through often enough to cause significant losses. Finally, Call the Void outright wins games, is cheap enough to go through spell blase and expensive enough to go through suppress magic. So even for that one spell alone, we need curse protection.
-I would want to weaken enemy doomstacks, as there is no way to properly intercept all of them in time. This effect doesn't have to be all that powerful, doomstacks are not that easy to build for the AI. If I lose one city, but kill most of the doomstack, that's still acceptable.
-I would want to prevent enemy spells in combat, since even a single use of several of them instantly wipes out an entire garrison. Sure, I could have Magic Immunity on all my units, but that's really to expensive to use for city defense. Also, Magic Immunity is ineffective against spells like Entangle and summoning although those are less of a problem and can be ignored. However Magic Vortex is a real threat that directly destroys the city during combat and even if I do dispel it, it already destroyed some 10-15% buildings in the turn it was cast.

So basically exactly what we have now. And I likely want the same for the AI too.
So this direction isn't really helping.

Now, let's see what could possibly be dropped from this.

I can get around curses by taking advantage of being Sorcery and making treaties with everyone. Then they can't use curses, and if I want a war, I can do it during Time Stop. So if I am playing 10 sorcery, I can usually ignore the curse protection. Usually is the keyword - very often the last war will be too long to do it in Time Stop, and even more often the enemy will be Chaotic so the treaties won't work. So in the end, city curse protection is necessary. I can deal with not being defended from volcanoes and corruptions, which is the case now (Consecration also removes those.)
Preventing doomstacks is already the weakest part of the effect, and reducing it a bit further is okay, but we already know we can do this.
Preventing combat spells...is necessary. Probably not all of them though, only Magic Vortex, and things that hurt units. So the "combat spell" and "special spell" and "unit spell" categories.
For the AI I would also add healing and reviving here (vs Life) so again the "special spell" category. If the Life wizard can keep refilling the health on their OP units, Sorcery stands no chance.
But even then there are some spells that need to be stopped and aren't covered - damage over time is a problem. So we have to also disable enchantments for Call Lighting (Wrack is ok), and summons for Air Elemental (which we can't attack so it will pretty much act like a direct damage spell hurting units). So there is something in each spell category (and rarity and cost tier) that needs to be countered.

Yes, we aren't making progress. This is exactly what the spell needs to do, it's 100% perfect.
Except it's TOO perfect and leaves no room for attacks whatsoever.

So maybe instead we should ask a different question.

"How should the human player be able to beat Spell Ward" and "How should the AI be able to beat Spell Ward".

Right now we have "play sorcery at about 4 books", as that's offering you the most combat spell options with the lowest chance of a Sorcery spell ward being cast (Sorcery is the only realm we can be sure the AI will have and thus avoid warding against). That's not good, it's way too limited. So we need to somehow change it to include other ways. Not that i have any good ideas, since it has to STILL be very hard to do and costly - ultimately, the spell should still slow down invasions massively.

(I rather not break the "protection from realm" effect after spending days on teaching the AI to pick realms and cancel the spell if they happen to do have creatures of that realm. It's too late for that.)

Actually here is a weird idea that might work :
"While you are casting Spell of Mastery, your combat spells cannot be countered".

So basically, you beat Spell Ward by being the first to reach SoM. It will still be spell blasted, but you will be able to start conquering. So Spell Ward is still a huge delay, and it still guarantees victory for the Sorcery player if they can win a race to SoM, but if they can't, then Spell Ward stops being effective.
The downside I see is the human is likely unable to win a race to SoM against the Myrran wizard if they are the Sorcery player. (Or maybe they can? The AI can't start a "rush SoM" strategy unless they are the top player on the charts, and have to deal with mana requirements - if the human stays at war and manages to economize mana spending while the AI is wasteful, the human can reach SoM first.)
The best part? It makes SoM relevant against Sorcery wizards.

Edit : It looks easy to implement the "Can't counter spells if SoM being cast" effect. Alternately we might even want it as "can't be countered if SoM is known" instead, so the AI doesn't depend on randomly picking or not picking SoM against spell warded humans. (but it's also fairly easy to just tell the AI to pick SoM more if the human has Spell Ward)

[Nelphine]

I don't understand your list at all. To me those are ALL wants.

This is a very rare spell. To compare with other very rare spells it needs to do ONE of the following:

Shut down some summons.
Block city curses.
Shut down some combat spells of a particular realm.
Add an extra very rare unit to one combat.
Remove one very rare unit from combat.

ANY one of those things qualifies as very rare. That's ALL you need. EVERYTHING beyond that one thing is want (even if you want it for good reasons) NOT need.

[Seravy]

I don't care what the answer to "what should a generic very rare city defense spells do that does not replace Spell Ward in Sorcery" is. That would not fill the intended role of Spell Ward or Sorcery.

Spell Ward is not a standalone spell, it s piece of a puzzle called "Sorcery realm".
The realm has those needs and no other spell is doing it, so Spell Ward has to. In particular, this is the piece that says "I can stay on defensive and win using SoM if I already control enough cities to reach it first".
Except, there is a fatal logic flaw in that piece. Sorcery also has another piece that says "no one else can reach SoM first", in the form of Spell Blast.
Thus, we need to make it so that Spell Ward can only help you out if you are reaching SoM first, and not if others did but you are blasting it. And that's where my idea comes from.

Whether Sorcery does need that piece in the first place, or not, is questionable. It might be more suitable for Life actually. But Life has research boost and Life defenses are already close to invincible. So in Life it would be very redundant, so it should be in Sorcery. Sorcery actually does not have a good enough toolbox for defensive play - yes, it has flight (easy to counter), invisibility (semi-easy to counter), but that's it. Magic Immunity is far too expensive to really work as a defensive strategy based on full garrisons. Of course, "I have Sky Drake x3 as my garrison" is a thing Sorcery can do, and have 0 normal units as the drakes are enough, and through Time Stop they might even be able to summon that many in an acceptable amount of time, but I really dislike "use very rares for everything" as a strategy, and Sky Drakes+Time Stop are really expensive so it's not a very viable plan if you want to go for a SoM victory.

We could phrase it differently : Time Stop buys you time for offensive purposes after you started the fight, Spell Ward buys you time for defensive purpose to let you have the capability of offense. Two sides of the same coin.
Problem is, currently Spell Ward buys you an infinite amount of time. It isn't supposed to, it should "only" buy you a certain amount of time. (my preference would probably be around 120 turns, but we obviously can't have that, thus we tie it to Spell of Mastery research, which is likely more, but sometimes, less.)

In particular, in the game I was playing, this would have meant I can lay back, summon 100s of Demon Lords, get SoM, and then destroy the wizard in 10 turns - because I control three times his territory. If they control 3 times my territory, well, too bad, they won. You shouldn't watch Sorcery players take over the world, that's not a good plan. (Neither is for anyone else, really.)

[Nelphine]

... so the solution to Spell Ward is to make players play 100+ extra turns... When the game already took 44 hours? And the later the game, the longer a turn takes? You were in what 1420-1425, so 50% longer game, except due to how long turns take at the beginning it's more like another 75% to 100% longer and.

So, the solution to Spell Ward is to make people play 77-88 HOUR long games?

No that's not a decent solution.

[Nelphine]

And no, your description of sorcery needs says 'sorcery needs to be able to counter everything's. That is TOO close to 'sorcery reaches very rare therefore wins'.

No other realm comes close to that.


And no you don't need 3 sky drakes to win defense. You need 9 units, and one combat cast of magic immunity. Then you don't even NEED a very rare. Garrisons are designed to stop standard doomstacls - only COMBAT CASTING stops that. But magic immunity days 'nope'. So no, sorcery does NOT have a defensive problem. They ready have the best defense in the game, using only rare spells, even compares to all other realms VERY RARE offense. (War mammoths plus flying fortress plus invisibility plus magic immunity plus guardian wind. Or any other hardy garrison unit.)

Spell ward just means the sorcery wizard no longer needs to even cast combat world in order to win. There is NO reason why the defending wizard should be able to win, without even needing significant expenditures of their own combat casting.

[Seravy]

You need 9 units, and one combat cast of magic immunity.

The other 8 units die. Next attack you lose the city. More importantly, enemy units will wreck your city so it wasn't defended. Sure, you can summon air elementals and phantoms to beat down the enemy, but the damage the city suffers is simply not acceptable for a long term strategy. It might be ok in a few cases in a short war, but repeatedly, in every city, for a long term, no.

Spell Ward isn't autowin, you still need good units, and cast a few spells, usually one or the other but against better attacking stacks, both. In particular, Spell Ward would have been nothing without the wizard using Life magic to prevent and regenerate all the damage my units did. And AI attacking stacks will be better (and contain more very rares) than human, on the average. (yes, the doomstacks won't be but the majority is more important than those few selected battles)

To translate this to mono sorcery, you'd STILL need to cast Mass Invisibility to actually win without losing any unit, which is a quite expensive spell. You might also need to use some summons if your defenders run out of ammo before killing every enemy. (unless the AI uses nonflying nonranged armies, but that's Flying Fortress's fault, not Spell Ward's. If absolutely necessary we can teach the AI to avoid building those units if FF is being used by the human.)

As for my game, these last turns weren't slow - I already killed their armies outside of cities (ok not all of them, but in another 10 or so turns, I could have killed them all with more demon lords, especially if not wasting so many troops on trying to attack cities) - so researching SoM would have been fairly reasonably doable. What made me quit was the fact I still needed to spend 18+ turns per city on summoning demon lords to actually win AFTER I researched SoM, since I needed all enemy cities to be gone to be able to force SoM through Spell Blast. So I would have needed something like 50 turns for SoM (if focusing on research for real), or less if I knew from the beginning (I saw wards in 1412, if I pushed for more research then, I could have even finished SoM by 1426) but then another 220-300 to actually win the game. (enemy had 14 cities, multiply by 18 demon lords and add a chance of failure...)

So yes, being able to win if I play another 4-5 hours is perfectly acceptable. Basically you have two options : Peace means no battles, so each turn takes 1-2 minutes top. So 1-2 hours total for SoM. War means you eliminated their units (had to otherwise your cities fall and you lose the game eventually, as you can't reclaim any due to wards), so while you did fight a lot in the beginning, after that most turns go without relevant battles and no units to move (yes, you have to send your demons lords to auto against  new units produced every few turns but overall that's less time than waiting on the enemy turn if they have lots of units still living). This is longer but still probably doable in, idk, 5 hours? You often need to take this path to prevent Altar of Peace and force them to use mana in combat, reducing their research, unfortunately. (It's also necessary if they do get Time Stop, to prevent them conjuring up hundreds of rare creatures from the unused mana)

But it won't result in 70 hour long games either way. Unless you are implying trying to research SoM is already too slow and not viable as a strategy in the game. If you can do it for winning by SoM, you can also do it for negating Spell Ward.

(Ideally I would prefer a shorter time but that's technically not possible)

Unless someone has a better idea, I'll have to pick this. 
Alternately, provide a different design goal for Spell Ward that works, is useful for Sorcery, is powerful (this is one of the top spells in the realm, can't overnerf it, as that drops the realm down as a whole), and does not slow down games, but seriously a "city defense" spell always slows down games, that's what defense is for.

(by the way Supreme Light has about the same slowdown effect, if you aren't chaos/death, you likely can't kill a supreme light magician stack whatsoever, or need to lose many very rares to do it. Same as Spell Ward. Which is why my game was this bad - the AI had both spells.)

[Seravy]

I'll start a new game, using the same strategy (this time won't bother with recording). These are the changes implemented, if no further problems arise, this will be uploaded as the next version.
However, I find it extremely likely I'll be doing an AI resource reduction - I'm only playing one more time because there is a real possibility my bad starting location and the Altar of Peace influenced the game significantly.

5.42
-Shadow Demons now have 1 lower resistance.
-Wave of Despair now costs 72 mana but is unaffected by cost increasing and reducing effects.
-Hydras have a reduced treasure budget (550 instead of 725). This also means Efreet and Doom Bat will be now treated as the primary monster when appearing together with Hydras, so those will be reported instead.
-Hydras will appear half as frequently in lairs/nodes/towers as primary monsters. (as the difference between how easy they are for the human and how hard they are for the AI is extremely high, far outclassing any other monster) Note the secondary chance is unaffected, and they can now be secondary to Efreet and Doom bats instead of the other way around.
-Manticores gain +2 resistance.
-Elven Lords gain +2 defense.
-The AI now recognizes Non-Corporeal units as being unaffected by Entangle when calculating the priority of the spell.
-Minor adjustment to the AI's “reroll wizard if extremely bad spells” list. (removed Storm Giant+Supreme Light combo)
-The AI will avoid picking Suppress Magic for research before turn 170 as long as there is any other spell they can pick that's not Spell of Mastery.
-The AI now has an even higher priority boost on research buildings when researching Spell of Mastery, and has a priority boost on power buildings as well. This special priority boost no longer includes the Amplifying Tower which is a magical building but does not produce research, but other research priority boosts (such as Theurgist) still include it.
-The AI will prioritize higher resistance unit production more if the human player had 5 or more Death books and it's past turn 180 (human likely has access to mass targeting resistance based spells like Terror, Massacre, etc at this point). Note this only affects unit production within the city. If the city cannot produce high resistance units, it'll still produce the same amount of low resistance units as before. This effect only activates when the AI is at war with the human.
-The AI will have a higher priority for producing flying units if at war with the human player and the human player knows Flying Fortress.
-The AI will not use “move before shooting” tactic if Wall of Shadows is present : it risks moving to a position where shooting is no longer available. This includes the defender : they might end up outside the wall while the enemy is already inside.
-Spell Ward now reduces unit defense and resistance by 3 instead of 4.
-Combat spells cast by wizards who researched the Spell of Mastery cannot be countered.
(this aims to make SoM useful against Sorcery wizards who spell blast it, and aims to provide a way to win in cases where Spell Ward makes it impossible otherwise.)
-Fixed bug : stacks sometimes show wrong movement paths when out of movement.
-The AI will build City Walls first after all other mandatory buildings at their fortress if difficulty is Expert or higher and turn count is 40 or higher.

[Nelphine]

The AI will avoid picking Suppress Magic for research before turn 170 as long as there is any other spell they can pick that's not Spell of Mastery.

This feels too early. Towers break on 200, based on expected time to very rare research. Wouldn't we want to set Suppress Magic to be one of the later very rares, so more like 220?

Combat spells cast by wizards who researched the Spell of Mastery cannot be countered.

While I still feel this won't actually help anything (I've only ever seen AI reach SoM once), I misunderstood your original proposal. I thought you needed to be CASTING Spell of Mastery in order to gain the benefit. Simply researching it is definitely a much better condition.

Also to clarify, this will apply to nightshade, countermagic, uranus' blessing as well as spell ward? Or just spell ward? (What about Consecration? I think it would actually be good if Consecration was also included in this, giving death/chaos who manage to survive to spell of mastery against life, an extra boost.)

The AI will build City Walls first after all other mandatory buildings at their fortress if difficulty is Expert or higher and turn count is 40 or higher.

This one always amuses me. I haven't built city walls in CoM yet, not since I first found it, back before version 2. Poor AI.

[Seravy]

If the AI picks research at turn 170, they'll finish 10-20 turns later, so I intentionally made it a bit earlier. In most cases they'll do it much later anyway, this is just a limitation for when the AI happens to have abnormal amounts of research. It it only ever happens when the player already has very rares to summon, the spell will be a lot less relevant, so it should be at least a little bit earlier in some cases.

Postponing Suppress Magic means they have to pick something else, and the next two entries in Sorcery are Mass Invisibility or Time Stop so we don't want to trigger this behavior unless absolutely necessary (very early research on those low book count wizards with lots of research boost).

Also to clarify, this will apply to nightshade, countermagic, uranus' blessing as well as spell ward? Or just spell ward?

"Combat spells cast by wizards who researched the Spell of Mastery cannot be countered."

So Counter Magic/Uranus, Spell Ward and node auras.