Test games played

[Seravy]

Dispel Magic is supposed to be researched and used for dispelling enemy buffs - that function is not affected.

I'm not sure if dispelling curses should even be a thing in the game - they are primarily used by the AI against the human to generate attrition, and a spell that outright says "The AI's strategy cannot work" is bad design. 
But if we are going to have it, it should be a safety net that gives a chance of saving valuable units, such as heroes, not something that's actually more cost effective than the curse itself, which basically means curses are a bad move to use and should never be used by the AI against a player who can dispel them because they are burning up their casting skill for nothing.
However, even if it's weaker, it's still very well worth researching and using - each successful use saves an entire unit, and possibly turns a battle into a win. It doesn't have to be a 70%+ chance of saving all your cursed units every battle. The saved units accumulate - if you "only" save 50 production worth of units on average per battle, it still pays the 640 RP cost and MP cost to use in like 20 battles. But realistically you'll be saving way more expensive units, like your buffed doomstack.

That's still theorycrafting, however there is one other spell we can compare it to that has the same function. Healing. For 15 MP you cancel out 5 damage, which have costed your opponent about 10 MP on average to inflict. (using Fire Bolt, Life Drain, etc) Less cost effective than the damage spells, but still it's a powerful spell we use all the time. So Dispel shouldn't cost 15 MP to cancel out 20 MP of A spells, it should only cancel 10 like healing.
Both Healing and Dispel fills one role - if you can win the battle without using spells, they allow you to use your casting skill to cancel the AI's casting skill that tries to cause you permanent damage. That's a very powerful effect, and really, the only one kind you are after if you do have an unbeatable doomstack. (and this is why Life is so powerful with their healing and raise dead spells.)

[Nelphine]

Actually this hits on the archangel problem.

My base unit costs 60. Confusing it costs 18, firebolting it costs 10.

Confusion is balanced well in cost vs firebolt.

Now healing steps in, and it's cost and effectiveness is balanced against firebolt. So healing 5 for 15 mana is balanced against firebolts 10 cost for a str 24 attack.

Now two problems arise from this. One is dispel magic vs firebolt as you've mentioned. In order to be balanced, dispelling confusion should cost roughly the same proportion as the healing vs firebolt scenario. Healing costs 3 mana per heal, when damage is roughly 2 mana per damage.
So since confusion affects an entire unit, dispel is also affecting an entire unit. So it should be costing 50% more than confusion for the same chance at success as confusion has in the first place.

However, healing and archangels has a similar problem. It's balanced around damage costing 2 mana per damage. But against an archangel, it's probably costing a lot more like 4 mana per damage (doombolt, because anything actually resistable, like firebolt, will probably be worse - firebolt for instance is only going to average 1 damage, so is actually 10 mana per damage), but the price of healing doesn't change.

That's what contributes to archangels feeling invulnerable. You can spam your common spell and negate any damage that does get through despite your enemy throwing rare or uncommon spells at you.

[Seravy]

Yes, exactly, healing effectiveness scales up by the quality of target.

Not only the defense - the overall quality too. Healing a more expensive unit prevents losing more total value. Healing a unit with higher damage output allows that unit to deal that higher damage longer. etc.
It's most obvious on defense as defense has increasing returns in damage reduction, to the point where healing can reach infinite effectiveness (the unit is taking 0 damage from everything so any heal counters an infinite amount of spells or attacks) - while everything else is linear, healing a unit that has twice the attack power will only allow that unit to deal twice the damage to the enemy before it dies.

Also the game doesn't even have rare and very rare damage spells except in Chaos - we have Warp Lighting which isn't effective against the Archangel's defense, Doom Bolt which works but Exaltation cancels 8 so it only does 4 damage/turn effectively, and Magic Vortex which the AI isn't that good at using. The remaining spells - Petrify etc, are save or die which have no effect on an Archangel.
But ultimately you don't need an Archangel - any rare or better creature if you have Exaltation and can avoid getting hurt by attacks from units will survive pretty much forever. (even Healing works if you have Invulnerability cast.)

Of course the game does have a few answers even to this - Call Lighting in Nature - it never runs out of damage while Healings do run out - Apocalypse in Chaos (not that great on an Archangel but still can confuse, halve defense or deal 12 damage and it affects more than one at a time), but nothing in Sorcery, Life and Death. Sorcery has Creature Binding and Mind Storm but Archangels are immune to that. Death would have Annihilate but too much resistance. Life, well Life vs Life is always better for the human anyway.

[Seravy]

I was able to catch one of the confusion crashes in debug, it happened when trying to draw the "Wait" button of all things. So probably some data corruption but still no idea where it comes from.
Well at the very least it seems to fairly consistently crash when I have forced confusion status enabled on all unit. So Confusion is definitely related somehow.

...wait, it's the control change summoning crash isn't it. I need to test this with less than 9 units in the stack... yes, 6 units still crashing. Good it isn't the control change then.

Disabling the effects, so the unit only has the confusion status but doesn't actually change sides, moves randomly or skips turns, seems to eliminate the crashes, so I think we've proven Confusion is causing the problem, and that it's not a graphical/memory allocation glitch but an actual problem with the effect somewhere.

That's something at least.

...seems it's specifically the control changing part of the effect. That might still cause the crash pretty much anywhere though (either due to the inconsistency between owner and controller or something like that) so this'll be hard to find.

I think I found it...in the control changing branch where this effect is set, the block to address the unit data was removed to make room, assuming it's already calculated. But it isn't so it corrupts memory, makes sense. I wonder when this got messed up...probably the regeneration changes.

[ivandogovich]

I was able to catch one of the confusion crashes in debug, <snip>....in the control changing branch where this effect is set,  the block to address the unit data was removed to make room, assuming it's already calculated. But it isn't so it corrupts memory, makes sense.

Dude... Great Work!  Always good to squash a bug, but I also appreciate following your discovery and thought process in the post.
  

[Sapher]

I was able to catch one of the confusion crashes in debug, it happened when trying to draw the "Wait" button of all things. So probably some data corruption but still no idea where it comes from.
Well at the very least it seems to fairly consistently crash when I have forced confusion status enabled on all unit. So Confusion is definitely related somehow.

...wait, it's the control change summoning crash isn't it. I need to test this with less than 9 units in the stack... yes, 6 units still crashing. Good it isn't the control change then.

Disabling the effects, so the unit only has the confusion status but doesn't actually change sides, moves randomly or skips turns, seems to eliminate the crashes, so I think we've proven Confusion is causing the problem, and that it's not a graphical/memory allocation glitch but an actual problem with the effect somewhere.

That's something at least.

...seems it's specifically the control changing part of the effect. That might still cause the crash pretty much anywhere though (either due to the inconsistency between owner and controller or something like that) so this'll be hard to find. Is that intended?

I think I found it...in the control changing branch where this effect is set,  the block to address the unit data was removed to make room, assuming it's already calculated. But it isn't so it corrupts memory, makes sense. I wonder when this got messed up...probably the regeneration changes.

I also noticed confusion doesnt give 25% chance to control confused creature. I cast apocalypse and only on the very first turn can control some confused creatures if lucky. On next turns i can not.

[Nelphine]

Lunatic Life Barbarians (hadn't done this in a while). 6 life/alchemy/warlord/astrologer/spellweaver.

This is the game where my first opponent is Horus: 9 life/1 sorcery/alchemy/cult leader/archmage/famous, so I have a wizard pact. (Horus)
Second and third opponents are: Oberic: 6 chaos/6 nature/spellweaver (this is the one that has been throwing volcanoes everywhere. My cities are pitiful wrecks being carried by granary + animists guilds - I don't have a single city with pop 15) and Freya: 9 nature/3 death/alchemy/conjuror (throwing drain power).

Freya actually went to war with Horus and me, so I was able to switch over to killing Oberic. However, all 3 of them are doable with life bezerkers, which is good. But it's taking me longer to get my replacements than usual, and I was suckered into settling my entire home continent which delayed me a lot. However, I got 10 barbarian cities out of it, which means that despite the volcanoes I can at least continue producing enough bezerkers.


And the neat thing is that Freya managed a mid game (1409) banishment of Horus. I kind of wish I knew what Horus had as a garrison, but my guess is magicians - life buffs don't help magicians nearly as much as many other units, and magicians have a high garrison priority, but relatively low strategic strength (compared to a survival instinct 9 nature conjuror at least).

My bezerker production is also being kept so low that Freya has stronger army strength than me, which is kind of mind boggling. (Of course, it's also low enough that I have holy weapon and holy armor on practically all my bezerkers - over 60 bezerkers have both holy weapon and holy armor out of ~70 bezerkers, and my main doomstack also has endurance and bless on all 9, plus heavenly light on all 17 cities, plus some stream of life, plus some sanctify, plus heroism on all 4 heroes sitting in my capital - and no, none of them are resource heroes, except one has legendary).


But, Sss'ra, the Myrran wizard (no towers broken, just watching globals) is some kind of Life/Sorcery/Chaos. So I think this game is shaping up to have a very interesting end game. I'll be able to block the towers, and prevent him from attacking, but he's got the right realms that he can still do massive damage assuming he gets good globals, and he would win if I let it go to Spell of Mastery.

[occasionalplayer]

Question to Nelphine: Would your strategy possibly be stronger if you used Flame Blade on top and substituted 2 life books with 2 chaos books?

[Nelphine]

Um. Generally, no, because I do play for the long game. I like to see rares or even very rares, so the extra life books become far more important later (90% of life spells are extremely useful for this strategy, so it doesn't matter what spells you actually get, although inspiration, lionheart, and incarnation are the best - bezerkers with the Chosen One are simply ridiculous and can generally beat any stack in the game)

However,if you play faster, and turn into a true rush game (kill all 4 ai before 1410) then you won't have time to research a lot of the extra spells so 2 chaos is much better.

However, then you have to decide between 2 chaos for flame blade,2 death for wraith form transports (though that will get nerfed, see other ongoing discussions) and 2 sorcery for resist magic.

But if you do that, don't forget you'll lose 2 starting life spells in return - not a huge deal, in principle, but you'll need to do a lot more treasure hunting to get all the common life spells you want. But, if you're doing crazy rush, then you should be doing a lot of treasure hunting anyway.

The main reason I don't get flame blade most times is that the rest of the chaos Commons are worthless, and the only uncommon that really helps is chaos channels (although a few others at least see use occasionally) - which really dilutes found treasure, because the life spells are so good. With death it's even worse, none of the other commons or uncommons are really helpful. Sorcery do have a bunch of other Commons and uncommons that help, and has the most game winning rares of any realm, so if I do this I usually take 2 sorcery. 

But since I like the late game, and I'm taking warlord, I usually just stick to life for more chances at crusade. Because champion bezerkers with lionheart and the chosen are just silly and I love them. But if you want to go for silly, chaos channel survival instinct bezerkers with the necromancer are also absurdly silly (+7 to hit for 100% damage! Yeah!).

(And I once played against behemoths supported by supreme light, so occasionally, you even need absurd)

[Seravy]

I believe this is worth its own thread so I'll be moving the related posts.

Done : http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...515&page=2