Encourage garrisons

[Nelphine]

Right, but we can assume that on average, even super rush, you'll only find one hero in the first 30 turns. So we put the fame requirement in. Now, in the first 30 turns, you're limited to fame 0 heroes unless you take famous.

From your list, fame 0 heroes, none are game breaking by themselves. I do get your point that some are dangerous (healer not really - doomstacks at this stage take no damage, so it's only potential resources. Dwarf not really, his offense/armor is terrible, so even a random stack of 6 swordsmen is a big problem.
That leaves druid and sage and rogue only.)

All the dangerous heroes are fame 10 (or more). So the only real danger is if someone gets the rogue first, and then finds another hero. Getting the rogue would be a 1 in 9, then you need to get a second hero and then it has to be one of the power house fame 10 heroes. Still only at most 1 in 4, which means even if you're guaranteed 2 heroes in 30 turns, that's 3% of games. Based on your definition of allowing unlikely things, Sapher got ridiculous luck, and simply putting in the fame limit, without a more complicated turn limit, should provide the games you want. And since it's more realistic to say only one hero in 30 turns, that means 0 games would be able to do what Sapher did, and only crazy lunatic strategy could repeat it - which you also accepted as reasonable.

The resource heroes are slightly more likely (15-20% of games) but at the same time, you're talking about letting them in on turn 20, so at most (I consider turn 4 impossible for a 400 gp treasure, so it needs to be more like turn 7 to summon/build better units, and then attack multiple times) you're talking 13 turns. Of those, 10 could have heroism. So 15-20% of games gives you an extra few hundred power/research/skill. I don't see how that's a problem IF the next 20 turns (turn 21-40) getting getting twice that power is not a problem.

I believe that getting 15-40 power/skill/research per turn a much bigger problem, and the fact you can get that in turn 7 or turn 20 really makes no difference. Getting it before about turn 75 is a problem. But delaying the sage to turn 75 is ridiculous, which means the absolute number is the problem, not the turn you get it.

So no, I don't want to see an artificial turn limit on resource heroes. I want to see those resources toned down (maybe the start could stay as is, but each level is worth 1/4 the amount) instead.

[Seravy]

I'm going with the assumption that a player with life books will often have Just Cause cast early, so getting 10 fame heroes would still be a common occurrence. Just because casting Just Cause might be suboptimal for extreme rush doesn't mean all the other strategies don't use it. Furthermore, it's a spell the AI picks early so even if the human did not, they have a high chance to trade into it right after making contact.
Picking Famous is slightly less frequent, but still something that happens reasonably often.
This has nothing to do with super rush - this is a generic issue that affects every single game where the human gets treasure early. Requiring fame might partially fix it for any wizard without neither of Just Cause nor Famous, but this is a human choice. Those players who like picking either of those things will still be severely affected. In fact, as picking those things unlocks an easy way to win, they will be picked more and more often as more and more people discover this loophole.

I agree that getting the Rogue and then a fame 10 hero would be quite unlikely. I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about the retort and the spell. However it's worth considering that Legendary is also available as a random pick on several other heroes. And as crazy as it sounds, a hero strategy might decide to build Colosseums first for additional fame and pay for the cost using the treasure. Overall, the options available as an intentional choice for raising the fame are why I consider the fame requirement an inappropriate solution. If it was enough we'd not have the turn 30 limitation on normal hero recruitment either.

Toning down resources is also something we discarded as non viable. The resource bonus needs to be at least high enough to be worth the slot in mid and late game. I wouldn't care about resource heroes at all, if heroism+warlord wouldn't immediately raise the amount 5 times, but we can't do anything about that either, we're done discussing that as well. But resource heroes are my lesser worry. I don't mind leaving them available, as long as the heroes who actually win the game are restricted. Ultimately, it really is only up to 6-800 gold or power. MP isn't too bad, SP is kinda bad but probably still ok (that early it means like 10-15 extra casting skill),  RP is very worrying but only affects a small percentage of games critically (those where you are researching an expensive, powerful uncommon spell early, like Shadow Demons). So I'm fine with only restricting heroes that have potential to have more than one of these abilities. (Even you have to admit a hero with both Ritual and AEther Master is way too good to get early. It's worth like 4 nodes by itself.)

[Nelphine]

No, I disagree.

First, if you're playing a strategy designed around super rush, taking the time to cast just cause (whether from starting with the spell, finding the spell, or trading for the spell) should slow down your treasure hunting so much that you're not likely to get a hero before turn 30 anyway.

On the other hand, casting the spell, and saving up 400 gold from lairs that are so weak they cannot have a hero in them, is certainly possible before turn 30. Which is why hiring the hero has the turn limit - it's much easier to do, and just cause isn't a trade off.

The same logic applies to famous - if you choose it, you give up an entire pick that would otherwise be dedicated to super rush. That's a tremendous cost and can easily mean that the rush doesn't work otherwise. Now you're gambling on that 1 in 4 (are there even 4 gamebreaking 10 fame heroes? It's probably lower than that) to win the game, which is certainly low enough to be justified.

It absolutely is about super rush. If you aren't doing super rush, then the number of lairs you are going to conquer that could have heroes in them, before the turn limits you're discussing, are practically non existent. Specifically, you would not expect to average even 1 hero before turn 30. So again, you may end up with this affecting 1 in 4 non super rush games, but that's within reason for a lunatic win rate anyway.

Building colosseums are too expensive. 375 production (IF you already have just cause, otherwise 750 production) is simply too much. You can't do super rush with it. Gambling more production than a fighters guild (and 2 is almost a war collegre plus a fighters guild - the holy grail of warlord bezerkers rushing) simply isn't worth it for the rate of return of 1 in 4 games. I'll just build bezerkers and win regardless of the fame if I'm going to spend that much production.


And no I absolutely do NOT have to agree that getting warlord plus heroism resource heroes (more than 4 nodes) is bad at the beginning. I have to agree that it's simply bad, period. Again I'm fine with level 1 being so high to be worth the slot - but I don't need to agree that life deserves to have 24 more nodes than any other realm, even in late game. Or more, if they have heroes like the necromancer who have multiple resources. There's no reason the resources need to stack so ridiculously high. Give the levels gained from heroism plus warlord an equal amount to the first level, and now life is only twice as good as any other realm. That's reasonable, even in late game.

[Seravy]

It absolutely is about super rush. If you aren't doing super rush, then the number of lairs you are going to conquer that could have heroes in them, before the turn limits you're discussing, are practically non existent.

Playing rush isn't required to play a treasure hunting strategy. It can take good advantage of the treasure found so it's a good choice, but not a necessity. It's only true in the other direction - to rush using War Trolls, you need the money from the treasure. But you don't need to rush for building draconian bowmen, horsebowmen, or sprites.

Please assume that we are NOT playing any sort of rush strategy. We are trying to play a random game on expert difficulty that involves using sprites (or draconian bowmen, or horsebowmen, or spearmen+phantom warriors, or ANYTHING that can conquer lairs early.), we find the hero, and whatever would be our actual strategy is no longer relevant - the hero knocks out two wizards alone so we won. The only "restriction" would be that random strategy needs to use Just Cause, or Famous. It could be anything from a Life rush to a Life/Nature hero strategy, even a 10 Sorcery 2 Life peaceful late game strategy, or 5 Life/5 Chaos Runemaster for globals.

Getting early treasure is a generic strategy that works well with everything, and playing the correct race is enough to enable it. (spending a pick on Holy Weapon or Flame Blade or Earth Lore etc helps but you can afford that even if you are playing a late game strategy. )

Give the levels gained from heroism plus warlord an equal amount to the first level, and now life is only twice as good as any other realm. That's reasonable, even in late game.

No it's not, it's a waste of a slot like Noble. Either way, ALL hero abilities that scale are linear. That's how the system works. Can't change it so we have to deal with it.

Edit : Meanwhile I checked and fortunately there is space and possibility to add a turn based table (would be a waste of time discussing it if there wasn't...)

[Nelphine]

And any non super rush strategy will not get enough heroes fast enough from treasure to need anything more than the fame limit. Adding more than the fame limit would do nothing but prevent 1% games from occurring, which we specifically try to leave in the game for variety sake.

And if the resource heroes are ignored, then I've already shown math that says no one is going to get enough heroes in the first 30 turns for it to be a problem. A famous retort player could get a problem hero, but if they aren't super rush, they won't even average 1 hero in the first 30 turns - they'll be taking weaker lairs or simply taking too long on other lairs (summoning 3 sprites without good retorts to back it up takes almost 15 turns by itself). If they are super rush, then famous slows them down because it's still a 1 in 4 (note that number assumes 4 auto win heroes at 10 fame. If its actually 3, war monk, thief and the average of all the other heroes rolling a good random ability, then it's actually 1 in 5)  to get something out of it. And super rush lunatic strategy are already closer to 1 in 2 wins (or higher) so taking famous simply hurts your chance of winning.

Super rush life who choose to take just cause still need to find 5 more fame. The early lairs simply don't give fame, so getting that actually takes time, or attacking much harder targets than super rush normally risks that early.

[Seravy]

And any non super rush strategy will not get enough heroes fast enough from treasure to need anything more than the fame limit.

This is false and I already explained why. Did you even read the previous post?
What did Sapher use in my game? Draconian Bowmen and Flame Blade. What do you need for that? 2 Chaos books and Myrran. That's perfectly viable to include in a 10 book late game chaos strategy even. But we were talking about Just Cause so let's substitute 2 Life and Holy Weapon, it's the same thing.
All the other picks, Warlord, Nature books for Earth Lore, Alchemy, Conjurer, Spellweaver, Astrologer, etc, are the icing. They add a small percentage of increased effectiveness but aren't required. And many of them are valuable picks for a late game strategy anyway. In fact they probably barely matter at all. As soon as you get your first pile of treasure, and due to the 3 easy lairs that takes no time even with level nothing normal weapon bowmen, you can use that gold to buy additional bowmen to spread our in more directions and keep doing that until the entire map is out of treasure. Whether each of those stacks take 2 or 3 turns to get a lair makes no difference, overall each stack will only do like 2-3 of them due to heading to different directions, so your global delay is still less than 5 turns overall on clearing out the whole map... 

I seriously don't understand why you think someone has to be rushing to summon sprites or build level 0 draconian bowmen.

PS : In addition, consider that having a single found hero in treasure winning the game outright is a severe enough disturbance that we need to keep the chance extremely low, if in any way possible, zero. Even if the average number of found prisoners is 0.5 or 0.3, that's still too much. This is not the same as hiring the good hero on turn 30 (still very rare) and then utilizing those extra 10-15 turns to get 4-8 cities ahead in your conquest (which is still plenty and usually wins you the game). You can be 30-40 turns ahead with this, which is such a landslide of advantage you can beat the highest difficulty with that alone, regardless of your picks or strategies. If I had to compare this to something, it's like finding an early very rare spell or a Magic Immunity item.

[Nelphine]

No. Level 0 draconian bowmen, without magic weapons, do not do enough damage. When you tried to test draconian bowmen, you proved this. You absolutely need warlord and alchemy, or it takes a whole unit an entire combat to kill one war bear, which means it takes 8+ turns to conquer one lair that can have enough treasure to be worth a hero.

To get even an average of 1 hero in 30 turns, you need to clear at least 10 lairs worth at least 400gp each. That's 1 every 3 turns. That is absolutely super rush. Any lair weaker than that, which is most of the ones you actually get with normal sprites or bowmen, do not have the chance for Heroes. So in addition to those 10 medium lairs, you also have to clear 5+ weak lairs. Now you're clearing an entire lair every 2 turns INCLUDING travel time. To do that reliably, you not only need multiple units, but they need +to hit, and high damage. Say 6 or 7 sprites minimum. Or at least a full stack of draconian bowmen with magic weapons and at least 1 level.

And that still only averages 1 hero, of which 1 in 5 is a problem hero. (20% of games, not too high to be an issue)

So say you want to go for half of that, which you can reasonably do if you're not focusing everything into those units (for instance you build 12 archers instead of 9, but don't take alchemy) now you're into 10% of games will have this win. That's absolutely low enough to be to be tacked onto a random late strategy. 10% and then since you didn't go for a rush strategy, you probably have few buffs to turn your hero into a monster, so now you rely on getting items, from a strategy not designed to treasure hunt effrciently. You might get them much later, but not early enough to win.

Conclusion: yes you absolutely need super rush to get enough heroes for it to be significant, and even at best that's 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 games. Which isn't enough to be a problem.

[Nelphine]

I'm far more concerned about the turn 50 hero, who you give 3 items to : +1 defense, +4 defense, and+3 defense. You're tactician and life so holy armor and endurance and heroism. Zaldron at +12 defense and +1 to defend and prayer, then goes and decimates all 3 arcanus wizards, and whether you got him turn 10 or turn 50 doesn't matter. The items and his ability to cast healing is what wins, not that you got him early.

[Seravy]

Level 0 bowmen is plenty. You can cast holy weapon (or flame blade) on it to make it work. Overall you need something but it's so minimal it's probably already part of your strategy (2 life books, or 2 chaos books, or alchemy, or warlord, etc).
They key is you can use the treasure to buy any additional bowmen. So it's a self-sustaining strategy. I guess not so much for sprites, but those have a higher default firepower.

But this isn't relevant. I'm going to accept your number, 10% wins from this. Let's assume we do what you want, and add the fame requirement.
What does that mean?
Strategies that include picking Famous or Just Cause, will have a 10% higher win rate, no matter what they are. So ultimately, it means Life magic has a 10% higher win rate, for ALL strategies and all difficulties. I don't think that's acceptable when Life is already perceived as the most powerful realm by a lot of players and is the best "I add 1-2 books for the common spells" realm. If the player is average and doesn't already have a high win rate, that extra 10% might be half their wins or even all of them - they are getting that 10% even if they fail on their original strategy completely. It doesn't take a genius to spam Healing on your hero when the AI casts Fire Bolt on them. So this also steers players towards aiming for playing heroes (with famous or Life books but most likely both), and gives the false perception that games are usually won through luck, not skill.
But even ignoring all that, a 10% additional win rate as the outcome is not acceptable for throwing in an unrelated retort or common spell pick that does nothing for your actual strategy, merely enables you to roll the 10% dice.

then goes and decimates all 3 arcanus wizards, and whether you got him turn 10 or turn 50 doesn't matter.

Except, this thread. Yes the hero can conquer anything they want. On turn 10 that means you get to keep them - the AI has no forces yet and the little they have the hero can actually intercept and kill. The damage on conquest is also irrelevant, there is time to rebuilt the very little buildings the cities had, compared to doing it 40 turns later.
On turn 50 anything the hero conquers, you lose within 5 turns of the hero stepping out of the city, and there is no way the hero can kill all the enemy stacks. 
Also, on turn 50 the spells and higher skill the AI has will potentially kill the hero (Crack's Call) or at least guarantee the battles are no longer zero cost, which is the whole purpose of the thread, to ensure that you either can't kill the AI units or it's too expensive to do so, as we identified that to be the main problem that enables no garrisons - and no garrisons is what enables unreasonably fast expansion (as otherwise you also need to provide garrisons for anything you conquer)

We clearly disagree on the severity of the problem and the implications of those additional turns it seems. I'm going to ask a question. Let's imagine you had a 10% chance to get 20 turns worth of summoned werewolves on turn 1 to start with - roughly equal to the 40 turns difference on the hero as you'd normally have your first werewolf at turn 20. Wouldn't that be completely broken? It doesn't matter what it is, getting what's essentially your first doomstack 40 turns earlier than what we deemed fair is a problem.

[Nelphine]

No,I disagree that even just cause is enough. You still need 5 more fame, which you simply don't regularly get that early. If you put the fame requirement in, I don't think you'll see them earlier than hiring.

And sure you might have an opponent with cracks call. Might. Turn 50 still isn't that late, so unless ai has research bonuses, it's a fair bet you can avoid it, by killing the most dangerous ai first. Zero cost with a hero like that is very very hard to get around.


And no. 10% of 20 turns, is 2 turns on average. Except if I rush werewolves, that's 10% of more like 13 turns, so 1.3 turns over 10 games. And this hero, which I think has a 10% of being in the first 30 turns, but can't possibly be earlier than turn 7, and is more heavily weighted toward the end, meaning 10% of the time, it's going to average more like turn 25. So that's 15 turns earlier. So 10% of 15 turns is 1.5 turns, so over 10 games, no I don't care about 1.5 turns. 

And I had to spend a pick (famous, which I already consider weak, although not as weak as charismatic) to get that, or I had to spend a significant chunk of economy and a common life pick (easily the most demanded realm and the biggest opportunity cost for a common starting spell) and a race on just cause and a colosseum or I had to get absurdly lucky/risky in getting 5 fame from other sources.

Given that requirement? Sure, 10% extra chance to win, when I could just get my turn 50 hero regardless of any of this discussion and win anyway with more than a 10% chance.