SORCERY Realm

[Seravy]

I do C : Take a step forward, attack, take a step back. Works as long as the unit has 3 or more moves. Even if this isn't an attack against a unit that is stuck behind city walls, and it finds my unit, the casting phase is already past so the unit was safe from enemy spells for the turn (and the unit can't be a threat to it in melee otherwise I'm not attacking it in the first place).

A is basically a subset of C - if you kill the target, you don't need to take that step backwards.

However regardless of doing A, B, or C, you cast Invisibility because you don't want your unit to be hit by ranged attacks. Even if your unit is revealed, the enemy STILL can't use ranged attacks on it, so it ONLY means they can hit it with a spell. Now that might be painful for a hero but if your invisible army is something less valuable, then being safe from damage done by cannons, catapults, bows, magicians etc is enough. And yes casting Guardian Wind+Magic Immunity does almost the same thing but it doesn't protect from rock type attacks and costs a lot more, and doesn't protect from getting dispelled either. (yes, if the enemy sees the invisible unit they can dispel them but by then it's too late. The units are already close enough to attack and kill the remaining ranged units, and already killed some of them. They miss out on their first two-three turns worth of dispelling.)

Anyway, assuming we do want to keep some melee benefit as well, and I somewhat agree with that, making it be Blur is probably an appropriate solution. Blur and Invisibility ultimately do the same thing - make the unit harder to hit by illusion. So having the same effect would make sense. It's more flavorful, and fixes both the illusion immunity inconsistency and the supernatural problem. That of course would still make it useless for pure Sorcery wizards who use Blur anyway, but we can also fix that if we want to - we can for example say you get 18% reduction if you have Blur, you get 10% if you have Invisibility, but you get 25% total if you have both. So we can basically specify a percentage for all 3 possible cases - then they stack, but we can control the amount.

[merlinp]

To me it would make sense that 'invisible' is stronger buff than 'blur' from melee combat point of view. A blurred unit is harder to see. An invisible unit is not even visible. On similar lines of reasoning, blur shouldn't add anything on top of an already invisible unit.

I think illusions immunity should negate the -tohit penalty.

[Seravy]

Peeked at the code, I was wrong, Illusion Immunity does allow the -1 To Hit to get ignored.
Furthermore the -1 To Hit is applied to ranged attacks, however there are zero cases where that's relevant. Either the attacked has Illusions immunity and ignores it, ot does not and cannot attack. There is no way for the penalty to actually apply to a ranged attack.

[Seravy]

Ok, done implementing the "blur = invisibility" feature, now we just need numbers.

How much % reduction should we get in the 3 possible cases?

1. Only Blur (currently 20%)
2. Only Invisibility
3. Both

Until we decide on numbers, I've set the amounts to 20,20 and 30%.

One consequence of this is, Invisibility will no longer be more effective on enemies with lower chance to hit. The -1 To Hit penalty is a 33.3% reduction on things with no hit bonus but only 16.6% on things with +3 to hit and 10% on +7 to hit. The new effect will be equally effective regardless of enemy hit bonus. Depending on what amount we decide on, this can mean the spell actually becomes better against high-end units than before.

However, that's just a minor side effect, the real benefits are no longer working against Supernatural, and having a less overpowered effect when stacked with Blur. (how much exactly is what we should decide now.)

[teelaurila]

For clarity, and also because strong enough, I'd say not stack at all. Invisible units are not truly invisible in that they can be seen from distance of 1 (presumably not by touch), so blurred also seems to make sense, for what you can say about sense with magic. That still doesn't make this effect of invisibility pointless either: casting blur takes a turn that by the end game you generally spend on something else.

[MilesBeyond]

I apologize if this has already been asked, but my Google-fu is weak. Where did the Water Elemental sprites come from? They look so good and fit in so well with the base game's aesthetic that I almost wonder if they were dummied-out content. Same thing with the Aether Binding spell art.

[Seravy]

Water Elemental : I made this one. Fortunately it wasn't too hard because the lower half is the same from all 8 directions.
AEther Binding : It's this : https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/echom...rop.hq.jpg , converted to 256 colors, runes added, etc.

[Seravy]

After Hadriex's latest game I feel we need to rethink Time Stop a little. I mean, it's the best spell in the game and that's okay but taking down a 50+ city empire 3 times your size from only 10k mana crystals? Not so much.
So I wonder, how much exactly do we want the spell to allow the player to conquer (per mana crystal, assuming they have the army to do so)?

I looked at my earlier calculations and the per turn maintenance vs the amount of casting skill you can use seems fair. Using two smaller Time Stops (10k mana each) instead of one big Time Stop (for 20k) is more cost effective but that's not a big deal. We can counter this by raising the initial casting cost to 2000, then those two cases will be roughly equivalently effective if we want to. This has no significant difference in overall effectiveness. It will make it slower for the AI to cast the spell, but that's kinda a benefit, as it allows them to store more mana, which they deplete in battles rapidly. The spell is already expensive enough to guaranteed a spell blasting opportunity for the player so it makes no difference there.

So casting cost going up to 2k seems okay, maintenance should stay at cumulative 30.

Where we do need to make changes is combat. Combat during time stop, or more precisely, conquering cities during time stop should have some cost associated, otherwise a single time stop from minimal mana crystals is enough to wipe out the entire map (you only need a stack of sky drakes, behemoths, or any hard to damage stack to do it). I believe the most clear implementation for this is a flat rate cost : "conquering a city during time stop costs 1000 mana crystals" or something like that. Or we could do something like "each conquered city adds 5 to the time stop maintenance counter" instead. Furthermore, looting gold by conquering cities (razed or otherwise) is a big no. It allows the conquest to pay for the time stop by itself, effectively making the duration unlimited, as long as you're not wasting the mana on combat spells. Note this affects the AI much less, as they are not that likely to successfully conquer things while time is stopped, and they waste mana on combat so their turns are already fairly limited.
This is assuming we do want this to have any limitations. If we are ok with "5k mana crystals wins the game if I have 2 decent stacks" then we don't need to do anything. So that is the main question.

[MilesBeyond]

I'm rubbish at searching and so haven't found an answer. Confusion always auto-kills any unit it's cast on at the end of the battle - they don't die in the fight but are gone from the overland map. Is that WAI or a bug?

I think that mechanically and conceptually implementing a mana cost for each city captured, either directly or though the maintenance counter, makes the most sense. Mechanically it works because makes the spell less of an automatic "I win" button while still keeping it true to the original of the spell - and remaining still one of the strongest spells in the game. Conceptually it works because every time a city is added to the empire that's another however many thousand people that the wizard has to enchant to make them exempt from the spell, which I imagine would cost a non-trivial amount of mana.

You could even possibly scale it - i.e. the mana and/or maintenance counter increase based on whether the settlement conquered is a Hamlet, Village, Town, City, or Capital, with Capitals being pretty exorbitant. That might limit the degree to which large, established empires can be swallowed whole by a Time Stop spell.

Because I agree, as it is right now Time Stop feels like a bigger "I win" button than the actual "I win" button, the Spell of Mastery itself.

[Seravy]

It's WAI, units driven to madness will desert your army as they unfortunately no longer understand what being a soldier even means.