Random questions

[jhsidi]

I was reading back at the older answers in this thread and noticed the one about Chaos being intended to counter Sorcery, but not being good at it. Separately, I'd been thinking it might be nice if Chaos had a way to disrupt ranged combat -- I was thinking of how heat shimmers distort the air. Anyway that leads to my question: 

In general, would you ever think of spending some time figuring out how to balance the game so that ranged is less overwhelming? I see a few problems with it as-is:

• Ranged magical attacks have no ranged penalty (for no apparent lore or logical reason)
  
• Ranged magic can scale up absurdly high, especially with Sorcery (consider the case of elite high men magicians with focus magic and reinforce magic)
  
• Ranged magic users (whether normal units, heroes or summons) also either cast spells that support their ability to stay at range or slow / halt enemies, have high speed, or both
  
• A lot of hero buffs are geared toward improving ranged combat for entire armies (more shots, higher power, higher to-hit; chaos channeled magicians with soul linker are another absurd combo)
  

I'm using magicians and heroes as my examples there, but it extends to summons. Like someone else pointed out recently, if you're a Nature wizard with the rare summons, you're pretty much always going to summon a bunch of stone giants and not bother with gorgons. If you're choosing between an efreet and a chaos spawn, you'd never choose the chaos spawn.

Whether the units are normal or summoned, I end up stopping a lot of games because, even at high difficulty, it just becomes too easy once I have my ranged doomstack.

Anyway, I think the solution would be a combination of:

• Adding a couple more spell counters to ranged; or maybe even converting the arrows-only hard counters to be soft counters to all ranged
  
• Tuning down damage from ranged a bit (maybe by adding in the long range penalty for magic, or maybe something else)
  
• Tuning up various non-ranged summons
  
• Maybe adding a couple anti-ranged abilities to different summons or heroes
  

But it would require a lot of thinking about this specific problem and nudges to a lot of game balance. So... is that something that could be in the future?

[Seravy]

I don't think there is a balance problem between melee and ranged.

Melee allows counterattacks and requires reaching the enemy, which is a clear disadvantage, but there are no abilities or spells that reduce or block melee damage specifically and it has infinite uses. (except Flight but flight has enough counters that any melee based strategy can plan to have one.)
Ranged doesn't allow counterattacks and ranged penalties are not as bad as melee being limited to 1 tile distance, but ranged has many specialized counters you can't overcome and has finite often very limited number of uses. (Guardian Wind, Warp Wood, Invisibility, Magic Immunity, Elemental Armor, Mana Leak.)

I'm not sure if Chaos has much use for a high tier anti-ranged spell because ranged units aren't very durable so all it takes is a Flame Strike or Warp Lightning to get rid of them.

Personally, I prefer using Gorgons if I can afford having 1 lower resistance.

Chaos Spawn isn't bad because it's a melee unit, it's bad because it has 2 movement and Chaos has no counters against either ranged or ways to buff defense. So you pretty much must combine it with another realm to take advantage of it. Sorcery can make them invisible, Life can put Invulnerability on them, Nature has Iron Skin and Elemental Armor. Death can't do much to protect it unfortunately but it can reduce enemy resistance...
That said, Chaos does counter ranged units with direct damage. So if you need to fight a mixed enemy stack, you can Flame Strike away all the ranged units first, then use the spawn to kill the rest. And while it's not necessarily a safe thing to do, in an emergency you can use Mystic Surge to make that Chaos Spawn reach those archers nearly instantly.

Here is an idea to make Chaos Spawn better : we could give them "Resist Elements" similarly to Golems or maybe even Elemental Armor. Bows and catapults still work, but they counter magicians and it fits the theme with the unit having high magic resistance. It might be an overkill though and I would still use Flame Strike to counter magicians either way. Or even better, Fire Storm. So I don't think it helps making the unit useful. The thing is Chaos doesn't really need units in the first place at rare tier.
I'm not sure Efreets are still the trivial choice though, now that we swapped the resistance scores. Chaos Spawn can't shoot but at 12 resistance they will be far more effective at buying time than an Efreet which has 30% chance to die to Holy Word or 50% to Banish. And time is all Chaos needs, combat spells do the rest. That said, the problem probably is that Chaos Spawn also have to compete with Doom Bats and they pretty much do the same thing - kill the thing they attack, but the Doom Bat does it with a speed of 6. Chaos Spawn does way more damage but against most enemies you don't need more. Even a Doom Bat will kill a unit of halberdiers in one attack...
But really the main problem with Chaos Spawn is that Chaos doesn't need creatures at the rare tier to function and it has THREE of them.
But really the problem is 3 summons in a tier in a realm where summons are not really relevant for said realm anymore.

[Anskiy]

Chaos Spawn's big issue is the 2 speed. That is agonizingly slow for a unit that wants to maul things in melee, and also makes it slow at traversing the world map. They work well in lairs and nodes though, so I am hesitant on recommending any changes.

[massone]

I do think any buff to Chaos Spawns' ranged defense is overkill. They already dominate melee. If they don't have a weakness to ranged, how do you kill them? Resist Elements would put them beyond the reach of even elite magicians, and clearly impossible to kill with Bowmen garrisons. Considering that they appear in neutral stacks on high difficulties quite early and sometimes when I don't even have Wizard Towers yet, they would destroy entire garrisons easily.

I also agree with Seravy that melee is quite good when used correctly. It's melee that benefits the most from def stacking, and invincible heroes.

In regards to summons, I think that's less an issue with ranged vs. melee and more individual units' designs. Stone Giants are great because their def is the highest, not because they're ranged. High def on a ranged unit means you can use them offensively without expecting any of them to die from the defenders' first round of ranged attacks, and just trade ranged attacks--which you'll win because nobody can afford to garrison same-tier summons in all their cities.

That's the real problem IMO. The meta involves putting ranged units in garrisons (which is how it should be, as IRL), which are fragile and too easily killed by ranged summons, which are not fragile. Melee would be more useful if you actually needed them to tank the defenders, and if ranged was worse against garrisons. Walls are clearly not enough when the disparity between the durability of ranged normal units and summons is so vast. Either cities need more defenses, or ranged summons need to become a lot more fragile.

[Seravy]

which you'll win because nobody can afford to garrison same-tier summons in all their cities.

That's basically it. A stack of high tier ranged (or any) summoned creature is a doomstack. It's just as unstoppable as a stack of 9 regenerating units or a stack of heavily buffed anything, or a stack of good heroes.
Any battle that's not against the doomstack of enemy players is a default win.
But that's part of the design. Doomstacks are supposed to do that. What keeps them under control is the cost and availability. You can't afford more than a few, often only 1-2 doomstacks at any given tier. But they can only attack or garrison one thing at a time and there are 50-200 cities on the map, plus nodes and enemy doomstacks to intercept.

Also, ranged doomstacks are usually less efficient. They rely on having as many units as possible to reduce the number of turns in combat and/or have enough ammo to kill everything. Meanwhile melee doomstacks can often function with only 2-3 units if they have some good defensive buffs. 2 Gorgons with Elemental Armor and Iron Skin can conquer pretty much every city the 9 Stone Giants could - but it costs only 1/2-1/3 as much as the giants.

So I don't think this is an issue.

Chaos Spawn do have the right amount of defense against various ranged attacks so I agree that increasing it is not a good plan. What really makes them bad is spell damage from wizards. They are slow so even if bows or magical ranged attacks do very little damage, the enemy has like 4-8 turns to throw Fire Bolt or Star Fires or something like that on them which is enough to kill 1-2 units, making it way too expensive to use them even though in melee they will not take damage at all most of the time.
So maybe a new special ability that ONLY reduces damage from spells, not magical or other ranged attacks?
Even that will interfere with hunting nodes a lot though. Most of the time my bowmen or magician stacks only win because I can add a few, or even many, fire bolts on top of the damage. Otherwise the spawn have too much defense to reliably beat them with generic ranged units tho obviously the good ones like high men magicians or warlocks or elite longbowmen with flame blade have no problems.

One unrelated idea, what if Chaos Spawn had Illusion Immunity? That could give a utility not available otherwise in Chaos and matches the theme of an eyeball monster. I'm hesitant though because there aren't all that many realms that can't counter Invisibility and Chaos is one of them (well, they have Flame Strike and Mystic Surge but neither is really an efficient solution like True Sight or summoning Zombies would be) so if we do this then it only leaves Nature and Sorcery as realms weak to Invisibility. Tho Chaos Spawn fortunately isn't a combat spell so the effect is minimal as far as AI countering invisibility goes.

[massone]

One unrelated idea, what if Chaos Spawn had Illusion Immunity? That could give a utility not available otherwise in Chaos and matches the theme of an eyeball monster. I'm hesitant though because there aren't all that many realms that can't counter Invisibility and Chaos is one of them (well, they have Flame Strike and Mystic Surge but neither is really an efficient solution like True Sight or summoning Zombies would be) so if we do this then it only leaves Nature and Sorcery as realms weak to Invisibility. Tho Chaos Spawn fortunately isn't a combat spell so the effect is minimal as far as AI countering invisibility goes.

I don't see a problem with countering invisibility but I do see a problem with the broadness of Illusion immunity.
A single Chaos Spawn could probably kill an entire stack of Phantom Beasts in nodes if it had illusion immunity and that doesn't seem appropriate. It could probably even kill the half Air Elemental nodes.

[Seravy]

One unrelated idea, what if Chaos Spawn had Illusion Immunity? That could give a utility not available otherwise in Chaos and matches the theme of an eyeball monster. I'm hesitant though because there aren't all that many realms that can't counter Invisibility and Chaos is one of them (well, they have Flame Strike and Mystic Surge but neither is really an efficient solution like True Sight or summoning Zombies would be) so if we do this then it only leaves Nature and Sorcery as realms weak to Invisibility. Tho Chaos Spawn fortunately isn't a combat spell so the effect is minimal as far as AI countering invisibility goes.

I don't see a problem with countering invisibility but I do see a problem with the broadness of Illusion immunity.
A single Chaos Spawn could probably kill an entire stack of Phantom Beasts in nodes if it had illusion immunity and that doesn't seem appropriate. It could probably even kill the half Air Elemental nodes.

Why would that be a problem? Air Elemental and Phantom Beast nodes can be cleared by simply casting Flame strike twice so Chaos Rare can already do it with just a a few bowmen to finish off any beasts that survive somehow.

The other use of Illusion Immunity is dealing melee damage through Blur and Invisibility but neither of those work on Gaze attacks anyway so that doesn't matter. Chaos Spawns have no ranged attack so being able to use ranged on invisible isn't relevant either.
Phantom Beats are still immune to both stoning and death so the Spawn will be very inefficient to kill one. Even if the 10 defense is not ignored, the beast will deal as much or more damage than the spawn as it is limited to 4 doom damage only. And the beast is a disposable combat summon while the spawn is a rare overland creature.

[Anskiy]

Currently it's Death which hard counters Sorcery oddly enough, with how prevalent Illusion Immunity is on their units and undead creatures. Considering how weak Sorcery is early and mid game, perhaps it could be looked at?

[massone]

Why would that be a problem? Air Elemental and Phantom Beast nodes can be cleared by simply casting Flame strike twice so Chaos Rare can already do it with just a a few bowmen to finish off any beasts that survive somehow.

The other use of Illusion Immunity is dealing melee damage through Blur and Invisibility but neither of those work on Gaze attacks anyway so that doesn't matter. Chaos Spawns have no ranged attack so being able to use ranged on invisible isn't relevant either.
Phantom Beats are still immune to both stoning and death so the Spawn will be very inefficient to kill one. Even if the 10 defense is not ignored, the beast will deal as much or more damage than the spawn as it is limited to 4 doom damage only. And the beast is a disposable combat summon while the spawn is a rare overland creature.

You're right, I forgot Phantom Beast has both those immunities, and also forgot that Chaos Spawns are actually Rare rather than uncommon. I suppose that just shows that Chaos Spawns really do need a buff. Seems like there's no problem then.

[Anskiy]

If they do get buffed they should become rarer in nodes and lairs. They seem rather frequent to me, which is odd considering how much they hard counter a lot of units and practically demand you bring strong ranged attacks.