(May 2nd, 2020, 00:09)Impy Wrote: [*]Other forms of ranged attacks are interactive by the virtue of being blockable or otherwise preventable. First strike isn't likely to kill them in a single hit, teleportation does nothing on turn 1 and regeneration requires you to win the fight. One of my memorable matchups against bats was with trolls where nearly a full team of war trolls got wiped out by bats at a node. The bats killed seven or so and then ran away, with no access to chaos spells and being unable to bring ranged units against bats, the battle ended in a draw, permanently killing off the trolls.
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Great Wyrms are the only top tier creature that can be wiped out by a team of sprites, they are not even remotely close to bats in terms of difficulty.
What you're saying is effectively the same as saying you want a way to defend against Doom Damage, when the whole point is that it's not blockable. War Trolls aren't that strong, I don't see why a full stack of node-buffed Rare summons should be killable by these normal units, unless you have a ton of buffs on them. You can't do anything against them on turn 1 because that's the nature of the defender advantage. Doom Damage is a method of countering high shield strategies, which works against pretty much everything else. It forces you to play a quantity and HP game instead, or use the counters I mentioned. Just because First Strike can't kill in one hit on a hero doesn't mean it's not a counter. Doom Bats have 30 HP each. When buffed Paladins, buffed Elven Lords, or Death Knights attack, they can one-shot. Teleportation combined with First Strike can effective on a hero, as long as it has more than 8 HP left to survive the counter attack and get healed.
If you're expecting to kill Doom Bats long before you have access to Very Rare spells, then I'd consider that something wrong with the game design. A node full of Rare summons shouldn't be taken at any time less than late-Rare or Very Rare stage of the game. Because of specialized counters, that's often still possible to take super early with other types of summons, but the fact that Doom Bats cannot, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it.
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A single champion costs 100 mana more than a Great Drake. Their equipment costs several times that. We're taking about a spell that can kill four Great Drakes for 25 mana on a lucky hit.
I don't know where you're finding the time or mana to repeatedly cast Summon Champion, I've lost games where I've tried doing that with Summon Hero.
Not every build has access to a single specific Rare Life spell. Not every build has access to even so much as heroism for that matter. I was a nature mage in the game where my champion got one-shot by a lightning bolt. I had a full set of gear with both resist elements and elemental armor, so I tried an experimental fight against a weak army. That decision cost me the game before the start of my first turn.
3-4 turns of Hero life means absolutely nothing if your goal is to win the game rather than harass a lone unit of settlers.
Nature isn't supposed to be good with heroes. It's the summon realm. If your build doesn't have the proper hero support, you shouldn't expect your heros to survive long.
I only use Summon Champion once I have 350-400 casting skill. I don't generally use Summon Hero because I don't rely on heroes that much. It's only in the late game when Fortresses are stacked with Very Rare summons and enemy champions and I have an excess of treasure artifacts that I start summoning.
So if I had access to Great Drakes, I'd just summon that. They can easily take out Doom Bats and tank Lightning Bolts, yet they're also expendable.
My point about 3-4 turns is that surviving the first turn means you have options to help that unit. Heal it back up, or just rush the enemy and deal damage like a disposable unit with Regen. If you can't do either of those things, then that hero shouldn't be committed to battle until it has a lot more defense.
Lightning Bolt doesn't deal that much damage. If it one-shot your hero, it must be something like a champion with 14 HP , 6+1 base shields from leveling and 17 from resist elements and Elemental Armor. That's not nearly strong enough to expect it to survive Lightning Bolt. As I said before, you need 30 shields to average 6.66 damage, and this champion only has 23. You would need another 10+ shields from gear on top of resist elements and elemental armor before committing it to a battle where Lightning is a concern.
But I expect such low HP heroes to die anyways. I normally use my caster heroes as extra first turn casting skill, expecting them to die within a couple of turns and come back with Raise Dead or Regen, until the late game when I can equip them with gear worth 4000+ mana total from treasure hunting and killing enemy heroes.
Quote:Let me get this straight, my disposable spearman that spent the past 20 turns walking deep into enemy territory will sacrifice himself so that I can kill the invisible, flying unit that gets a copy of itself made every turn with my melee troops? Are you sure I shouldn't try to win with mass engineers instead? I can Chaos Channel them so that they get an anti-air fire breath attack, the winged ones will be sent ahead to build roads for the rest of the army and the armored ones will be the ones that take place of the poor spearman.
I was referring to neutral lairs. If you're talking about the Combat Summons, your stack should be strong enough to handle it anyways. The enemy can only summon it a few times, as it costs 50 MP each. You don't need to win battles unless you need the regen/undead mechanic, or attack a city. As a Rare Combat Summon, it's supposed to be very powerful, and even then, stalling til turn 25 is a last resort defense mechanism. It doesn't mean much if you've killed all their units, or destroyed all their buildings. You can try playing Sorcery yourself and seeing how useful it actually is.
(May 2nd, 2020, 11:40)massone Wrote: What you're saying is effectively the same as saying you want a way to defend against Doom Damage, when the whole point is that it's not blockable.
I want a way to interact with doom damage other than invisibility before I get my first turn.
Quote:If you're expecting to kill Doom Bats long before you have access to Very Rare spells, then I'd consider that something wrong with the game design.
Great Wyrms die to sprites. Sprites die to random rookie bowmen that take 1 turn to build. Everything has its counters. "Build 9 of the tankiest unit in the game and you might only lose 6 of them", is not a counter.
Quote:Your stack should be strong enough to handle it anyways. The enemy can only summon it a few times, as it costs 50 MP each.
Your skill is about 1/3 of the final wizard at the start of the last war on higher difficulties. It improves as their amplifiers go down, but you have to be able to win battles to do that.
Quote:You can try playing Sorcery yourself and seeing how useful it actually is.
Players cannot afford to play like the AI plays because they don't have a limitless well of resources. There are many spells in this game that are insanely powerful in the hands of an AI player but don't seem to do much for a human player. Spells that scale with power and mana benifit AI players. On the other hand you have spells that scale with intelligent use, which are very good for human players. Consider which spell you'd rather trade off to an AI player: Corruption or Zombies? Nature's Cures or Crack Calls? Zombies and Nature's Cures are infinitely better, but you'd give those away without a second thought because the AI has no idea what to do with them.
Quote:Great Wyrms die to sprites. Sprites die to random rookie bowmen that take 1 turn to build. Everything has its counters. "Build 9 of the tankiest unit in the game and you might only lose 6 of them", is not a counter.
Rare creatures will often have the necessary 28 health to survive the Doom Bats, and even if not, you only lose one of your 9 stack on the first turn. Very Rare creatures usually have enough health to not lose any units on turn one.
Everything else is lower tier than the Bats so there is no reason why they should win without heavy losses.
Yes, many neutral creatures can be taken down with much lower tier units and that's a good thing, but there is no rule saying this has to apply to all of them. It's better if it doesn't - then you have some nodes and lairs remaining to fight in the later parts of the game and the race to get those against the AI is more relevant.
Mid/late Sorcery wizards, with or without Air Elementals are usually a headache. For Air Elemental specifically, let me think...
Life probably shouldn't have a problem. Air Elementals are squishy and you can heal your units while whatever you used True Sight on kills the elementals. Might be an expensive process but the AI will be spending 5-10 times as much mana as you (due to range and high casting skill) so their research might suffer or they might run out of MP. Any battles you can fight with a True Sight item on a hero will be a free "enemy wastes 1000 mana for no reason at all" card.
Nature might have a hard time. You need to rush research for Call Lightning or Colossus, otherwise it'll be difficult to deal it. Nature in general, is bottom tier against Sorcery at the "Rare" tier, as Banish counters its summoning. You should time your wars to happen at the common, uncommon or very rare tier against Sorcery players (but very rare might be too late). Nature being the most early game focused realm, this weakness is expected.
Chaos can Doom Bolt the elementals. Seeing them is not trivial but assuming you have at least a decent sized army in the battle, it's more annoying than difficult. Alternately, you can wait until they summon a lot of them and have no more skill and then use Flame Strike twice to kill them all.
Death should have no problem seeing the elemental, and has creatures that can kill it easily, or can use Wave of Despair to finish them off while there are still only one or two. (Shadow Demon, Wraith)
If you are also Sorcery then it's a mirror match, not relevant. You can use your own Air Elementals but you can probably do better and outright avoid the war due to having good diplomacy with other Sorcery wizards.
Fair enough. Doom damage hasn't been something that I found impossible to play against, just a major roadblock for many builds. Mass warlocks in particular are a real pain.
It's more of a design preference than anything. I really like threat/response style of play where a move is made and the opponent has a chance to react. The issues I have with Chaos and Sorcery largely stem from their ability to bypass that interaction.
Sorcery is the anti-fun realm with staple spells like Counter Magic, Dispelling Wave and Spell Blast removing most of the opponent's choices and foreplanning ability. Air Elementals seal the deal by being a creature that demands a specific set of rare counters. Even if you have them, there's a pretty good chance the artifacts you're making in response will get spell blasted, your undead will get banished and your anti-air unit enchantments will get dispelled. I shouldn't complain too much about this since many of the games I actually won on Master difficulty had a Sorcery main as the final boss, but going up against them was very certainly not a pleasant experience.
Chaos is the brutal grind-down realm that really shows off the difference between the human and AI power and mana pools. Everything becomes volcanoes and corruption in a matter of a few turns, so everything you want to have for winning the war should have already been built before it started. When it comes to combat, any unit that the AI decides needs to die, will die. I've only ever won when I managed to take out the Chaos wizards before entering the midgame. Part of the problem is that Chaos peak very early with Gargoyles, Lightning Bolt and Mystic Surge, making the trick of overwhelming them early quite a challenge. On one occasion I lost a very promising game to a wizard that only had a single Chaos book that just happened to contain Lightning Bolt.
Indeed Sorcery and Chaos aren't fun to fight against, but I think it might be better in CoM 2 with more wizards. The main problem is the "final boss" design doesn't work so well with "strong in the late game" realms, because as long as they are the only wizard on the other plane, the "weak early game" part isn't relevant. In a 10+ wizard game, the Sorcery AI on Myrror would need to compete with at least 2-3 others, ideally resulting in an late game choice of a more expanded non-sorcery and a smaller but more dangerous Sorcery enemy to fight instead.
The "strong in the late game" design itself isn't optimal but unfortunately, considering the themes of those two realms, I don't see how they could be not strong in the late game.
Sorcery/Chaos ignoring defensive moves is part of the interaction despite how it seems - without them, buffing/defensive strategies would have no weakness, and sending a buffed army that cannot be hurt at all isn't any more interactive except the AI isn't good at using them so it's less obvious.
Counter Magic offers choices - high cost spells will have a 100% chance to work, and the player also has the option to either wear it down using weak spells first, or risking a medium cost spell anyway, depending on how urgent it is to produce an effect. In a way it opens up more choices - by making the otherwise often "best" option become less ideal. It isn't making things easier for the player that's for sure, but it doesn't actually remove the interaction, only changes it.
Dispelling Wave is a necessary evil because buffing is also non-interactive : you can prevent any possible counter the enemy has in advance by using enough buffs. Maybe dispelling city spells isn't necessary though, I don't remember if there was a discussion about that part. Is there a need to dispel city buffs at all? dispelling economy buffs can help Sorcery players keep up and not fall behind for the late game although without hostility the AI isn't going to use it for this anyway. Dispelling city defense buffs is probably not good for the game except maybe against Spell Ward or as a combo with Death/Chaos against Consecration. It might also be interesting to consider splitting the spell and moving the "dispel city enchantments" part to a different realm, like Nature or Life. (not Chaos or Death however, those should still require another realm to be able to remove spells that protect cities from curses.)
Spell Blast I am considering to move to rare for CoM 2 to make it less frequent, let me know what you think about that in the CoM 2 thread.
(May 2nd, 2020, 21:12)Impy Wrote: Great Wyrms die to sprites.
Great Wyrms no longer spawn alone or with other sprite-vulnerable units. You must be remembering that from a very long time ago. It's no longer feasible to send in a stack of 9 sprites and expect to take out a Great Wyrm which has 8+2 defense without heavy casualties.
Quote:Your skill is about 1/3 of the final wizard at the start of the last war on higher difficulties. It improves as their amplifiers go down, but you have to be able to win battles to do that.
This tells me that you're playing a strategy that cannot keep up in economy, which is why you have a hard time treating units as expendable. I never have that much of a disadvantage in casting skill when I meet the "final" wizard on Lunatic, regardless of whether I choose to break the planar seal early when I have half as many cities as they do, or wait until turn 160 after I become dominant on the first plane. It's usually about 25% more in their favour, and if I break it early, sometimes another wizard on the same plane as me with Theurgist will have even higher casting skill, despite similarly having half as many cities as the other plane's wizard.
I'm pretty sure the AI doesn't get bonuses on city casting skill, so Amplifiers contribute the same to you as to them. But they spend a lot less on casting skill than pure mana, and frequently stockpile huge amounts of mana and waste a lot more in combat, so it's not that hard to keep up even if they have 2-3x more Power than you.
Quote:Players cannot afford to play like the AI plays because they don't have a limitless well of resources. There are many spells in this game that are insanely powerful in the hands of an AI player but don't seem to do much for a human player. Spells that scale with power and mana benifit AI players. On the other hand you have spells that scale with intelligent use, which are very good for human players. Consider which spell you'd rather trade off to an AI player: Corruption or Zombies? Nature's Cures or Crack Calls? Zombies and Nature's Cures are infinitely better, but you'd give those away without a second thought because the AI has no idea what to do with them.
Everything except Global Enchantments scale with power and mana. But that has little to do with the actual spells, and more to do with AI bonuses. The AI doesn't have a limitless well of resources either. They can run out of mana and casting skill just like you, and it happens more often despite their large stockpiles because they don't know how to conserve mana. If anything, I dislike how much mana they waste summoning Air Elementals to buy time when it's meaningless. Summoning a mere 4 Air Elementals in an irrelevant battle 2-3 unit battle could cost them 600 mana, but they'll do it even when they're banished and have 1500 mana in the reserve.
(May 3rd, 2020, 10:58)massone Wrote: Great Wyrms no longer spawn alone or with other sprite-vulnerable units. You must be remembering that from a very long time ago. It's no longer feasible to send in a stack of 9 sprites and expect to take out a Great Wyrm which has 8+2 defense without heavy casualties.
Come to think of it, I haven't seen them spawn alone in the games I played in the steam version, but I have seen them spawn with stuff like War Bears and Great Lizards plenty of times.
Quote:This tells me that you're playing a strategy that cannot keep up in economy, which is why you have a hard time treating units as expendable. I never have that much of a disadvantage in casting skill when I meet the "final" wizard on Lunatic, regardless of whether I choose to break the planar seal early when I have half as many cities as they do, or wait until turn 160 after I become dominant on the first plane. It's usually about 25% more in their favour, and if I break it early, sometimes another wizard on the same plane as me with Theurgist will have even higher casting skill, despite similarly having half as many cities as the other plane's wizard.
I'm pretty sure the AI doesn't get bonuses on city casting skill, so Amplifiers contribute the same to you as to them. But they spend a lot less on casting skill than pure mana, and frequently stockpile huge amounts of mana and waste a lot more in combat, so it's not that hard to keep up even if they have 2-3x more Power than you.
It's probably a difference in play style. I don't doubt that a macro strategy is more reliable, it's just not that fun for me.
Quote:Everything except Global Enchantments scale with power and mana. But that has little to do with the actual spells, and more to do with AI bonuses. The AI doesn't have a limitless well of resources either. They can run out of mana and casting skill just like you, and it happens more often despite their large stockpiles because they don't know how to conserve mana. If anything, I dislike how much mana they waste summoning Air Elementals to buy time when it's meaningless. Summoning a mere 4 Air Elementals in an irrelevant battle 2-3 unit battle could cost them 600 mana, but they'll do it even when they're banished and have 1500 mana in the reserve.
I've seen them run out of mana plenty of times, but it only happens when I'm already winning the war. It's hard to punch through their initial pool when all you can do is loose. It's true that everything scales with mana but some spells scale a lot better. There's not a lot of difference between fighting 1 or 25 summoned zombies, but there is a huge difference between fighting 1 or 5 air elementals.
(May 3rd, 2020, 02:27)Seravy Wrote: Indeed Sorcery and Chaos aren't fun to fight against, but I think it might be better in CoM 2 with more wizards. The main problem is the "final boss" design doesn't work so well with "strong in the late game" realms, because as long as they are the only wizard on the other plane, the "weak early game" part isn't relevant. In a 10+ wizard game, the Sorcery AI on Myrror would need to compete with at least 2-3 others, ideally resulting in an late game choice of a more expanded non-sorcery and a smaller but more dangerous Sorcery enemy to fight instead.
I'm very much in favor of that. Final boss wizards are a huge gamble for me. Discovering that I'm going to have to fight an 8 chaos book archmage after I beat everyone else is never fun.
Quote:Counter Magic offers choices - high cost spells will have a 100% chance to work, and the player also has the option to either wear it down using weak spells first, or risking a medium cost spell anyway, depending on how urgent it is to produce an effect. In a way it opens up more choices - by making the otherwise often "best" option become less ideal. It isn't making things easier for the player that's for sure, but it doesn't actually remove the interaction, only changes it.
My grudge against Counter Magic is also in the turn 1 power it represents. I played against late game Sorcery as both Death and Life in the past and those two realms in particular suffer greatly from being locked out of casting spells for the first half the fight.
Quote:Dispelling Wave is a necessary evil because buffing is also non-interactive : you can prevent any possible counter the enemy has in advance by using enough buffs. Maybe dispelling city spells isn't necessary though, I don't remember if there was a discussion about that part. Is there a need to dispel city buffs at all? dispelling economy buffs can help Sorcery players keep up and not fall behind for the late game although without hostility the AI isn't going to use it for this anyway. Dispelling city defense buffs is probably not good for the game except maybe against Spell Ward or as a combo with Death/Chaos against Consecration. It might also be interesting to consider splitting the spell and moving the "dispel city enchantments" part to a different realm, like Nature or Life. (not Chaos or Death however, those should still require another realm to be able to remove spells that protect cities from curses.)
I'd personally prefer an arms race to see who can stack the most buffs, but I respect the dispel system for what it is.
As expected there is a neutral undead nomad swordsmen on the tile. I suspect when ghouls attack the city and raise the swordsmen, it counts as a raider instead of a monster and isn't deleted because it's a normal unit not a summoned one.
I recommend deleting the unit using the tweaker to avoid possible problems - most game code isn't ready to handle a tile with more than one player having units on it, or more than 9 total. (It's unit 118 in the file you posted, on tile X=18, Y=8, to delete a unit, set the owner to -1.)
