Test games played

[Seravy]

There are two problems with the above.

One : If we disable both spells, Life will have only Star Fires, Healing and Holy Weapon left as commons. That's not enough, and is pushing things way too far. Life already struggles with the early game whenever not playing some sort of an OP strategy involving unbalanced units. AI especially, and AI relies on combat magic especially heavily. Either way, only 3 combat spells is just not enough to be fun to play. Every other realm has more, even Nature. Not to mention, one of these doesn't ever work on normal units.

Two : You're overrating heroism. First of all it NEVER adds 3 attack. Either you are warlord and go from level 2 to 5, which is +2, or you aren't and go from 1 to 4 which is also 2. Second, having a Barrracks which is very reasonable for all but your starting swordsmen and maybe the first 1 or 2 bowmen, takes one of that away. It makes you go from level 3 to 5 or level 2 to 4, both of which are only +1 attack. In either case Holy Weapon is superior (in case of the +2, because it costs half as much, in case of +1 because it actually grants more damage output outright and still costs less) for the use we've seen. So I automatically ignored these Heroism uses because they are not good enough to care. It's something, but anything else other realms can cast for 15 mana does more. (it's a different story for swordsmen where the hp and defense also matters but swordsmen die when fighting. It's not the same category as bowmen at all.)

[Sapher]

Agreed. Heroism is extraordinarily important to get the ball rolling. I'd love to see the difference if heroism was overland only (sapher, can you try that and pretend it's a rule for one game, pick something similar to a game you've already done,although, please not draconians I already think the archers are too powerful with life buffs).

Heroism was not important in this game.

[Nelphine]

Then I'd have to go with +1 to defend is too strong (and scales too well) to either be a combat spell, or to apply to summons.

In general it's probably too strong for Heroes, and even removing it from combat and making it overland still allows it on offensive stacks.

So I'd say +1 to defend is simply too strong for a common spell. In which case revert the change to holy armor, and either leave endurance as is, or completely remove the defensive component from endurance.

[zitro1987]

With heroism a unit gains 6 armor or 4 armor and 1 to defend.

Without it it can be 4 armor or 2 plus defend.There lies the problem: holy armor plus endurance together is comparable to iron skin and even gives movement. For common spells, this is bad balance. There is no way around it - you introduced additional protection via endurance that the original game did not have.

If holy armor is 2 armor or even 3 and allowed in combat while endurance is just 1move and also allowed in combat they dont have the same synergy thus combined are just half iron skin with movement on top

[Bahgtru]

Agreed. Heroism is extraordinarily important to get the ball rolling. I'd love to see the difference if heroism was overland only (sapher, can you try that and pretend it's a rule for one game, pick something similar to a game you've already done,although, please not draconians I already think the archers are too powerful with life buffs).

Heroism was not important in this game.

Disagree for 2 reasons:
1. when you don't have that kind of speed, the lunatic AI also grabs nodes. Speed is important to have more resources AND deny them to the AI.
2. - it let you buy the war college 6 months in advance, and go for the fortress 6 months in advance. Each turn means 1 less [uncommon summon¦superbuffed unit|....] in the first fortress, making it easier and faster.

[Seravy]

So I'd say +1 to defend is simply too strong for a common spell. In which case revert the change to holy armor, and either leave endurance as is, or completely remove the defensive component from endurance.

In this particular game, it was equivalent to 2.33 defense which is only marginally better than the original Holy Armor. Yes, there are a few cases when it's much more but this game wasn't one of them.
I'm leaning towards, combat cast defense is simply too powerful. The amount of benefit it gives is not on par with the cost of 8 mana crystals and no overland skill spent.
I don't think the overland version has too much of a problem, other than it being strictly better than Endurance now (which is a problem by itself but at least, there are a few cases where you care about the movement difference).

With heroism a unit gains 6 armor or 4 armor and 1 to defend.

Without it it can be 4 armor or 2 plus defend.There lies the problem: holy armor plus endurance together is comparable to iron skin and even gives movement.

That's the whole point. Life has no summoning - it has to have enough buffing power to create an uncommon tier creature out of basic units, at an expensive overland cost.
Basically, Endurance+Holy Armor+Heroism is Life's equivalent to casting Cockatrices, Werewolves or Chimeras. This has been working fine so far - but there are two problems.
One, casting the spells in combat (and eventually you can use Prayer to replace the unavailable Endurance) has no overland cost. So it's as good as a combat summoning spell of the same tier, and no spell in the game summons a strong uncommon tier creature early for a good reason. The only one, Phantom Beast, has zero armor, not to mention the high research and casting cost.
If you can get the same unit for spending 8+15 mana in battle, that's a problem, especially because you usually only need one, at most two such units to win any early game combat. Swapping Holy Armor and Endurance made this worse, as it moved the more powerful effect from the overland only spell to the combat one. Let's compare the costs. Instead of 75+40 = 105 overland skill and mana, you only need to spend 23 mana crystals per battle. So you can do 5 battles before the cost breaks even on mana, but if I also consider the overland skill, it probably is closer to double-triple of that.
The other problem is more trivial : You can avoid getting dispelled - you buff the unit in combat, after the enemy used up their skill. Even if not, getting dispelled won't hurt - you aren't losing overland spells.

Let's continue this in the Life thread.
Meanwhile I'll try to find the last time we discussed draconians. Can't find it. Anyway, do we agree Draconian Bowmen need less ammo?

[Bahgtru]

do we agree Draconian Bowmen need less ammo?

No, the issue here was heroism combined with warlord and casted in combat 8 times during the first hour of the test game, resulting in 

• a speed up of many turns of the first fortress strike
  
• clearing lairs at great pace
  
• denying the same lairs to the AI - they were already in AI territory - or,
  
• clearing fast lairs that the AI can't get into such as unicorns
  

I guess we continue the convo in the life thread...

[Sapher]

I guess we continue the convo in the life thread...

And flame blade in a chaos thread? Because i could replace heroism with a flame blade. Alchemy+myrran+warlord+astrologer?+5life+2chaos. Now not only i have a cheaper alternative to heroism i can use it to speed up fights in nodes. No channeler? Who cares. We've decided that that game was won by the end of part one and that was not much fighting far away from a fortress. 
The most important spell from life realm i think was prayer. But i am not even sure this stratergy will fail without it. Just imagine i had mithril ...

[Bahgtru]

And flame blade in a chaos thread?

Why not? Alternatively we can consider this the unit buffing thread I guess...

Because i could replace heroism with a flame blade. Alchemy+myrran+warlord+astrologer?+5life+2chaos. Now not only i have a cheaper alternative to heroism i can use it to speed up fights in nodes. 

You're right on this. (in case you mean: because of that heroism is fine, then I differ) 
I myself have used flameblade to get the goblin grenade effect - highmen pikemen against angels. 2 pikemen at a time, 1 ahead the other runs away, finish off the damaged angel with a firebolt and flee... Great fun. That effect should at least require you to sacrifice overland skill with the goblin grenade unit, doing this with in-combat skill is grandly OP. So maybe all normal unit buffs (to attack/defence at least) should not be castable in combat?

On the other hand life buffs are just better, flameblade only affects attack and not defence or resistance like heroism, holy weapon beats FB for attack strengths over 3... I don't know if 2 chaos is worth spending for that. Maybe it is, maybe not, gotta test the build you mention.

No channeler? Who cares. We've decided that that game was won by the end of part one and that was not much fighting far away from a fortress. 
The most important spell from life realm i think was prayer. But i am not even sure this stratergy will fail without it. Just imagine i had mithril ...

Prayer arrives once the game is decided, at least this game, I wouldn't bring it in the discussion. Mithril/adamantium are situational, they don't make or break the strategy - it works without them as you've proven. Sure, they make it even stronger.

Still, you're completely right and I agree. This strategy is by far the strongest in the meta-game, you don't even need draconians - barbarians work equally well with it, thanks to their overland speed, exchanging flight (myrran) for a book/retort. I'd prefer 2 books to make it sure that you have a sea-crossing spell but Seravy is set on making myrran cost 1. High elves are very close, a bit less overland speed but +1 to-hit, mana, and they work with alchemy.

Now the question is: what's the aim? Getting other strategies to be on par with this speed+map control one or leaving this one as an outlier? I wish it was the former but I don't see the game balance going in the correct direction. Forcing you to spend overland skill for this stuff would be the thing to do imho, not sure it'd be enough.

[teelaurila]

I used the holy + flaming weapon (+ transmute for adamantium by the mid-game) to rather great effect with nomads. Which should be better than elves, haven't tried barbs. Horsebows and griffins work great with it. But it didn't feel overtly superior to, say, death ghouls and undead spam. The nature was probably an ineffective addition, though. Take this with the caveat that I "only" play master level.