Test games played

[Nelphine]

So, what are you building then? Early game, your capital needs to build settlers when it's not doing economy. Your next 5 cities are busy making basic production buuldings, so you don't have extra buildings anywhere.

Yes in my case, where I've already got 54 cities, and it's already 1410, so it has has been almost 100 turns, so if I follow your math, I would have a noticeable amount more - 6 cities each give half a creature, I have 54 cities, so I only needed to skip garrisons on 1/3 of my empire to get a full extra doomstsck. And since my doomstacks are uncommon not rare, that actually means the cost is 1/2 as much, so I only needed to skip garrisons for 9 cities to get an extra doomstack.

Now, I only have 3 doomstacks in this game. So that's literally 1/3 of my offensive capability that came out of skipping garrisons entirely. (I'm working on a fourth stack, but that's only since 1410. 


So in my game, not having garrisons has literally increased my offense by 50%.


Now back to the early game - your capital can't afford to make units for garrisons. Your other cities are growing - so there aren't other cities to build garrisons. Your growing cities have to build them by themself. That severely limits your economy. You can't snowball without something to push it. 

And incidentally when I'm done with economy buildings.. I go to trade goods. I never go to garrison units. It's constant economy forever. If my units won't hold off water elementals or shadow Demons or giant spiders then they aren't worth building. 



As to spearmen .. in this mono death plus 1 sorcery wizard, I use 6-8 spearmen to kill ghouls plus werewolves (roughly 5 at a time). You absolutely can use combat magic against some opponents.

[Seravy]

Well, against wizard 1, I don't really need as much garrisons, so whichever city is producing my military will send 1 of that unit everywhere, then another and so on until all cities are filled.
If I play summoning, that means every unit produced will be for garrisons, if I don't then the first stack will be for offense and all leftovers will be the garrison - conveniently they can also be used to refill the stack if I lose units.

So for this very early phase the garrison is a few horsebowmen, longbowmen, wolf riders or 1 gargoyle, werewolf, etc assuming I have those. In this phase I have no use for another doomstack - the first wizard will go down quickly even if I have only one, and attacking a second wizard when all cities are undefended is outright suicide in most cases.

Later, random conquered cities will produce stag beetles, berserkers, magicians or whatever else.

However, while production isn't a big issue I have to admit I'm wrong in the overall conclusion - we forgot about maintenance. Those units literally cost hundreds of gold each turn. So not having a garrison is indeed a major economy advantage - the doomstack won't be that expensive to maintain overall, even if it contains more expensive units.

I have no idea how to fix this but we have to do something. However, garrisons aren't meant to be good for economy anyway, they are meant to be something you have or you lose the game. So maybe the cost is not the problem. The problem is the player can get away with not having them somehow - we need to find a way to fix that and we're good.

[Seravy]

Carracks might be way too powerful : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WWAalqp7xw
Considering they are meant to be a fast early transport there is no real need for them to also have better fighting capability than galleys while not even requiring the fighter's guild - the lizardmen units carried by them are supposed to do the fighting anyway.

The fact he can mostly ignore confusion/shatter/black sleep due to early research of Dispel Magic is also worrying, as those are the AI's primary means of countering smaller attacking stacks and causing losses.

[Nelphine]

One of the other contributing factors is that non doonstacks are just too slow. All those stacks of random ground units (almost all city units, plus things like werewolves, hell hounds, great lizards, etc), the AI doesn't use very effectively. If you're at peace AND the AI chooses your continent as the major action continent, then they can be placed to be a problem.

But otherwise, they're usually just way too far out of range.

It's another big reason for early conquest - to avoid too many of those stacks being relevant. It's also a big reason for razing cities - if you're already big enough to conquer the AI after the one you're at war with, raze cities near those huge clouds of random units. Don't bother trying to defend. If you aren't big enough, I don't think I've ever seen an AI who has huge clouds of ground troops who did NOT have at least one continent that was mostly empty. Conquer those cities until you're big enough, then raze the rest.

[ivandogovich]

Carracks might be way too powerful : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WWAalqp7xw

Yeah, this is another great example of Sapher finding exploits.

My thought is not that Carracks are too powerful.... rather Wraithform ships doing land operations is too powerful.   You get a free fast carrier for slow troops (like the engineer road building crews), or an early Wraithform doom stack like Sapher is demonstrating. 

Ships are currently balanced around aquatic operations, so why not exclude them from being Wraithformed?  The only equivalent is later game Airships which are legitimate?

I suppose flying spells or windwalking could do the same things, but none of these are as early??

[Seravy]

Well, you don't get all that much out of a trireme. It has minimal combat potential and 3 movement, while good, is nothing special. It merely enables the really slow units to reach at least average speed.
Galley still only move 3, they have somewhat decent military power but still not that great - adding the cost of wraith form and the ship itself, most fighter's guild units are simply better.
Warships are great - but they require expensive buildings so by the time you can have them, it's not that big a deal. Still a good strategy but not gamebreaking. Their 4 movement is a relevant speedup for your doomstack, so yes, that can be a problem. However only Chaos, Sorcery and Death get this feature, the most "doomstacky" Life and Nature do not.

Problem is wraithform does more than just enabling ships to move on water, so disabling them also means you can't give them weapon immunity, etc. If, and I'm not sure we need to, but if we want to remove this ability, we should change movement stacking rules so that sailing overrides wraithform instead of the opposite.

Carracks are the only ship in the game that come early, have strong military potential and fast movement. And honestly I have no idea why I gave them that much firepower, it wasn't necessary at all. I don't think using trireme, galley or even warship on land is a problem (aside from transportation potential - but pathfinding is fairly easy to get so it isn't such a big deal to ignore terrain on land, so it only really is the high movement speed).

[Nelphine]

Yeah, wraithform warship (you only need to build one for your doomstack, so the expense really isn't that high) is amazing. I'll usually build a second one for engineers (hurray building 4 squares of road per turn), and a third for settlers (if playing large or huge).

Its the same issue as windwalking heroes, but it has specific limits.

What if we made sailing units only cost 0.5 to move on water (can we even do that?) and then dropped the movement speed of all ships to compensate. That way they wouldn't be nearly as effective for doomstacks; air ships would stay exactly as is.

[Seravy]

Then wraithformed ships would be slower than normal ships on sea - they are no longer sailing.
Not sure if Sailing has its own table of movement costs...yes I think it does. So it is doable.

It would mean ships end up having 1.5 movement and are displayed as such though (can the game even display that?), which is extra confusing - I rather not do that.

[Seravy]

I think I know what the problem with Dispel Magic vs Confusion is.

Unlike dispelling buffs, dispelling curses costs the same for the person dispelling, but costs more for the person casting the curse - buffs have a 100% success rate but curses generally have around 50% - probably lower if the player is smart enough not to put low resistance units at risk.
That makes dispelling twice as cost-effective against curses than anything else.

Furthermore, dispelling has a 50% effectiveness at the exactly equal cost. Assuming the curse also has a 50% success rate on average (it usually won't, but confusion on 7 resistance would be like that) that means the same amount of spending will have the same amount of effect - so simply having equal or higher casting skill will, on average, result in never losing a unit to the curse.
On top of that, using lower strength dispels can further increase cost-effectiveness, at the price of taking more turns.

Of course this is theory, in practice the cursed unit might get killed before dispelling works - "switch sides" on confusion, or black sleep making the unit vulnerable.
Still, we might want to consider making unit curses have increased dispel resistance, both due to their low success rate, and also because they generally have a very low cost, making them easy to dispel. (Confusion, at 18 mana, is about the most expensive dispellable curse for 90% of the games - only Mind Storm and Stasis are more expensive.)

[zitro1987]

Not sure I agree. The strength of dispel magic early in game requires a sacrifice of I believe 400 research points and needs to be really worth casting to balance the very effective/devastating unit curses.

Later in game, while cost-effective, you are losing your casting turn with your dispel which may instead be used to boost the rest of the units (prayer/high prayer), or things like flame-strike, gates of hades, etc. If kept as is, at least we have a very good chance of dispel working against the curse.

I find it perfectly balanced the way it is.