I have tried this game a couple of times, and got turned off due to its complexity, until a few months ago I watched a couple of YouTube videos explaining the basics of the game. In my opinion, this is game is the true successor of Diablo II, with a great community and a developer that actively interacts with the player base. I've tried Grim Dawn and Torchlight II, but these games have not been able to hook me as much as 'POE'.

A promising new season is starting on December 7, and I was wondering if there is anyone already playing this game, or someone wanting try out something new, who wants to try some multiplayer?

I would prefer playing on an E.U. server, but ping on eastern U.S. servers seems manageable.

https://www.pathofexile.com/game

A pretty good guide (some things are out of date, but great stuff nonetheless):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEZtq6FSebE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEiqQTJcLzo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nQGB_N1tMM

As we can see in this video, a single unit of werewolf is still powerful enough to beat stacks of 4-5 enemy units. Those without weapon immunity I'm ok with, but these stacks included bears, nagas, occasionally spiders, and two summoned centaurs. In many of these battles the werewolf barely wins (even goes down to 1 hp left) but still they win consistently.
I believe it is more reasonable to require at least 2 wolves to fight that many enemy units. If 1 can do this much, they can expand way faster than any other strategy in the game.
(Note, I'm still watching the second video and there will be more parts coming so it might change my thoughts, but currently this doesn't feel right.)

So we likely still need to do something about it.
I see 5 different possible actions (and we can also combine more than one) :

Regeneration 0
This has very small impact on the short term effectiveness of the unit, and will also have minimal impact to larger stacks, while it still has large impact on solo or small unit count werewolf stacks. It also has no effect on the strategic strength of the unit.

Less HP (4/figure)
This has massively less impact on the long term effectiveness, but will impact short term ability to survive, making it the opposite of the above. The breaking point is around turn 6, after that, the Regeneration nerf will be more effective. This reduces strategic strength by 20%.

Armor 2
This makes the unit take more damage, so it'll much more likely die when fighting multiple ranged enemies alone. This makes the unit weaker against everything, and also reduces their strategic strength by about 20%. It also brings down mithril and adamantium wolves to more managable levels but the difference between them and normal will likely even grow. 

No Poison Immunity
This makes them fight fairly against Nagas, Ghouls and Spiders. They'd still beat those creatures, but not in the current "1 wolf beats 4-5 of those" manner. It also makes the realm less effective at countering those realms and is one we are already considering and likely will add for other early Death units. However, this has no effect on any battle where poison units are not involved, so those early battles of 1 wolf vs 2 centaurs, 2 bears and other things, would still be a win. Since we wanted Death to counter Nature, this might be acceptable but I'm worried letting 1 wolf win instead of 2 results in too fast expansion. This also has no effect on strategic rating (which I think is about right as is, equals spiders or unicorns, nearly twice as much as a ghoul.).
However as Cloak of Fear is fairly effective against Nagas, this might have less impact than expected.

No Death Immunity
This makes the vulnerable to Black Sleep so you will require using more than one unit against Death wizards. It also means they pretty much auto-lose to Night Stalkers. Additionally, they'll be raised as undead when killed by Ghouls or zombies, and will be unable to regenerate if killed by those, even if winning the battle.

No Illusion Immunity
This makes them vulnerable to confusion. Similar to Black sleep except against Sorcery and you don't get your wolf back after battle, even if you win. Not really a fan, as that really defeats the purpose of using regeneration units. Illusion units doing more damage has minimal impact, as the wolf has low armor to being with.

Disallow Magic/Mithril/Adamantium weapons/armor
This doesn't address the base problem directly but prevents those ores from escalating it. Adding +1 to hit to compensate for the loss of magic weapons might be necessary. Alternately keeping the magic weapons, only disabling mithril and adamantium would still require the alchemist guild (or alchemy retort) but would still get rid of the extra armor. The upside is being more AI friendly, as they missing out on adamantium/mithil will no longer matter.


(and now back to watching part 2, which might change my opinion. Right now he has 13 cities and seems to be mostly successful at holding them all, in 1403.)

We already know item teleport is bad for game balance but we had no good ideas last time, however Sapher's last game reminded me of the problem.

This time I have an idea that might actually help :

"Items cannot be moved to/from units that already ended their turn"

As simple as that. Unless I'm missing something, this shouldn't interfere with the intended use of moving items, and shouldn't be particularly unfun or anything like that. If a unit ended their turn, it means you already didn't move their items until the end of the turn since their turn represents the entire time period until the beginning of your next turn from the unit's perspective. In other words the current system basically means you teleport items back in time - if 25 combat turns represent one full overland turn and you use the item on 3 different heroes for the full 25 turns each then either the item travels back in time or the battles didn't actually happen in the same overland turn... 

Implementation would be, if a slot on a hero that ended their turn is clicked, regardless of reason (removing or adding item), a red message window appears that says "This unit already finished their current turn.". I think items collected at end of combat will still find the unit in "active" state, as they are marked inactive only after the end of the entire movement process, which is after the end of combat and getting treasure, so heroes would still be able to equip items they found immediately. But it's best to double check that before deciding to add this feature.

(AI's would probably ignore this rule but they can't move items with the intent to to use it twice a turn anyway - they only move items at the start of their turn, when a new hero is hired, or when new items are obtained, and 99% of the time the items end up on the same hero as that's the optimal setup.)

Game Rules and Settings:

Server: pitboss.watto.no:2058

Game tracker: http://www.civstats.com/viewgame.php?gameid=3021

Claim your civ: (the password is sirian)

Game Host unified tech thread (for all Caledorn hosted games):
http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=7117

Host: Caledorn
Admin: ???
Map maker: Mardoc
Starting date: November 9, 2018
Mod: RtR 2.0.9.2
Mod Changelog: Available here (Note: change log pending).
Turn Timer: 24 hours

Rules:

Quote:Difficulty: Monarch
Speed: Normal
Era: Ancient
Turn speed: 24 hours/turn (ingame clock adjusted to keep turns to 24 hours)
Vassals: off
TT: off
Huts: off
Events: off (broken)
Barbs: on, normal (Not raging)
Espionage: on
Diplo: AI-diplo
Double moves: Don't be a jerk aka normal RB double move rules. If in doubt or a newb, ask the lurkers.
Other:
* No city gifting or trading
* No using trade window to communicate (e.g. using letters or numbers in a way that could be interpreted something else than a real trade offer)

Quote:- Superdeath - Huayna Capac of Carthage
- Krill - Bismarck of Portugal
- Lewwyn - Qin Shi Huang of Mali
- Old Harry - Isabella of China
- Elkad - Stalin of America
- Donovan Zoi - Willem of Arabia
- Gavagai - Mao of Inca
- Superjm - Saladin of Rome
- Mr. Cairo - Julius Caesar of Aztec
- OT4E - Tokugawa of France

I feel we need to discuss this realm because it likely has problems. Specific ones aside (werewolves), I'd like to discuss the global design behind the realm and where I feel it has problems.

Particularly, the early game. Death is one of the two "strong early" realms, but I believe it might go over the top at this.

Death has the following features :
-Free troops. Free as in no maintenance and no cost of production, you get them as a side effect for using certain spells or attacks. However, none of those spells and units really consider the value of this ability in their cost, and it completely bypasses a fairly global game rule, not creating permanent new troops in battle.
-Free casting skill. This is limited to two spells, Life Drain and Syphon Life, both of which are fairly balanced for damage vs cost, but also give you casting skill (AND undead creatures) for free. Drain Power doesn't belong here because casting it costs you overland skill so it's an investment. (a very good one in certain cases, but still an investment)
-Immunity to poison. You might think "no big deal", but poison is a dedicated early game ability, used as the main form of early game damage by three realms : Sorcery (Nagas), Nature (Giant Spiders) and Death itself (Ghouls). Out of these, the latter two have other options, but the former does not, and thus it's an autowin for the Death wizard.
-Immunity to Illusions. Sorcery is already in a bad position by Nagas not doing damage to Death units, but on top of that their phantoms and psionic blasts also don't work. Not that they'd be enough to really fix the problem.
-Immunity to Cold. Only Nature cares about this one and Fairy Dust isn't all that good to begin with, so I think we don't need to worry about this one.
-Immunity to Death. Like the other two realms hit hard by poison immunity, Death also get their share of a double slap in the face. However they are hit by far the hardest, being immune to all spells. While this is mutual, it means combat spells are mostly useless on both sides, aside from summon zombie, and eventually wars are decided by creature combat. As the human is always smarter at positioning their units both overland and in battle, this means Death vs Death is heavily in favor of the human, unless they neglected undead creation or the AI scored some very good undead units from lairs.

Either way, Death hard counters three realms in the early game, while also being very good against Chaos - massive hordes of undead don't really mind a few fire bolts and have immunity to shatter, as well as bypass Fire Elemental's Weapon Immunity. Chaos does have Wall of Fire and Gargoyles, so they aren't as bad as the other realms but it's still in favor of Death, heavily. (and chaos is especially weak in the early game overall)
So Life is about the only realm that isn't an automatic win for the Death wizard - but even they can be overwhelmed easily by numbers as they can't summon so they have the fewest units while the Death wizard has the most numerous. All it takes is Dispel Magic to make sure the buffs won't make their armies unbeatable, or pushing for Blood Lust to counter them anyway.

Overall, I'm pretty sure Death is massively imbalanced in the early game, although I haven't really thought about possible solutions yet.

The other topic is Death being unaffected by spells of other Death wizards. We postponed this discussion until the 5.44 version is released, so it's time to continue it. While this is bad by itself, the fact they are also immune to some other realms makes it even worse - while I had Sorcery books in my last game, even my Sorcery spells were of no use as Death units are immune to both. So we might need to do something about this, but we have to be very careful about it.

We've talked about this in the Life thread but I think it is worth having its own discussion.

The idea is to swap the "+1 To defend" on Endurance with the +2 armor on Holy Armor.
This means the following consequences (without trying to judge which is an improvement) :

-Holy Armor becomes a symmetric pair to Holy Weapon (+1 To Def vs +1 To Hit) which makes it more flavorful
-Endurance will likely need a cost reduction, and Holy Armor a cost increase.
-Summoned creatures will lose access to +1 To Def and instead gain access to +2 armor. This means the buff becomes more powerful on lower tier summons, but weaker in higher tier ones.
-As a consequence to the above, late game fortress garrisons controlled by partially life AI will be easier to defeat, but as the human player playing the same, the endurance very rare creature doomstack will be weaker too. Both of these will likely be minor differences.
-The change in spell cost likely increases the "damage" in lost MP value against dispelling, by 20.7%.
-Players will lose access to "+2 defense" as a combat spell and instead will have "+1 To Def" at a higher cost. This means early game combat spell options will be less diverse and overall worse (no units yet that have enough defense to benefit from To Def better, and cost matters), while mid and late game options will be more powerful (+ To Def is stronger and cost no longer relevant)
-Existing defense on units will be more relevant due to the above - it'll be harder to turn a low defense unit strong enough to win your battle using combat spells, but easier for a high defense unit.
-The ability to replace dispelled "+1 To Def" instantly in combat is a relevant buff to hero strategies.
-The AI's new strategy to use more endurance in the late game for high end summons will be slightly weaker.
-It will no longer be possible to get both the movement and the "+1 To Def" in a single starting spell pick, making low book counts in Life weaker, and high life book starts relying on buffing slightly more difficult for the same reason.
-The Teleportation item power includes Endurance, so it'll also change from +1 To def to +2 armor.

dispel calculation :
Current, assuming strength 50 dispel, 50/85 * 35 + 50/120 *70 = 41.42 MP lost
New, assuming new spell costs will be 50 and 50, 50/100*50 + 50/100*50 = 50 MP lost.
Overall, this is a 20.7% increase in lost enchantment value.

Do let me know if there are other consequences I missed and I'll add them.

This After Action Report is played with version 1.25 of my SMACX AI Growth mod.

Hey there,
after quite some time I've been feeling the Civ itch lately so I purchased a key, as the old CDs would not do... The instruction is to download the game via Steam, but I would rather not register to that, so I was wondering if there might be another way?
When I get it working I'd love to join a PBEM.
Thanks

Ever feel like Civ goes a bit too quick?


(https://xkcd.com/2061/)

Yes, I think I'm clever. Doesn't everyone?