Caster of Magic II Spell System overhaul discussion

[Seravy]

Making Mislead into a global enchantment is a good idea.

I was also thinking that it would be good if the new spell was affected by Spellweaver, as I think it's a bit underused retort. A reusable spell would be best for that but a global enchantment is still better than a combat spell.

Edit : actually, no it shouldn't be a global. The main idea is the spell is only useful if the enemy army consist of mostly normal units.
If you get the effect for free, then it'll become relevant even for battles where only a smaller amount of normal units participate.
Only Sorcery gets global enchantments at uncommon anyway, so there is no particular reason why we need one in Death.

[roarmalf]

I think cloak of fear has some solid uses, depending on enemy army makeup. It's solid to cast on an early game unit or two to conquer most of the neutrals.


Wondering if something like fits in to Death:

Soul Harvest
"Destroy all (non-hero?) normal units (affects your units too) with less than X (8?) resistance. Any units killed this way are raised as undead after the battle."

Or just skip the undead raising and call it "Cull the Weak"

[Seravy]

Killing without a resistance roll is a Chaos feature (Disintegrate) so I don't think it should be in Death.

[roarmalf]

It could be based on defense+melee+ranged instead, or just one of them, but that becomes either harder to understand or balance. 


Or... If we based it off the greater of ranged/melee that could work and add to the value of weakness.

Cull the Weak:
Destroy all normal units (affects your units too) with less than X (5? 6?) attack (melee or ranged). Any units killed this way are raised as undead after the battle.

[roarmalf]

Another thought for Nature that was inspired by reading through the milestones which mentioned new ores as a possibility:


A spell that discovers an ore (maybe a 3rd tier of ores) within city limits (much like the random events). Not sure if/how specific it should be targeted or if it would be allowed more than once in a city. Likely would either need to be random OR be part of an enchantment rather than changing the landscape permanently, to prevent stacking too many ores/etc. (or maybe not, I'm honestly not sure).


And/or this could be part of seismic/planetary mastery, granting a small chance to find an ore deposit each turn (and maybe chance enemy deposits dry up?) Alternatively could grant a chance to upgrade tier 1 minerals to tier 2 minerals.


Just a rough idea that felt like it fit in nature

[Seravy]

Creating new minerals sounds like it would fit Planetary Mastery well.
However then Planetary Mastery will have 3 effects again like the old Seismic Mastery.

Also, the spell already gives you extra power from nodes, so power producing ores are a redundant effect.
Gold ores can be transmuted into military ores, but...
Military ores shouldn't be added because it's simply too good. Assuming a relevant amount of ores are generated (like one per turn), it only takes a short amount of time before the benefit is as good as, or exceeding Life globals like Crusade or Holy Arms, as adamantium ores, or things transmutable into adamantium cover more and more cities.

So none of the ore types would actually be good to include in the effect.

[Cruel100]

Let's try to summarize again.

Chaos
This leaves 1 unused rare and very rare slot.

Fire Colossus.



It's just an idea, I liked the image.

[massone]

The problem I see with this is that if it affects all units, it's basically uncounterable (there is no weak point to strike at, everyone is buffed.), but if it's single target then it needs to be artificially restricted to not work when more than one unit is buffed by the effect, or we are back to the same problem.

I don't think that's a problem. That's actually both the strength and the weakness, and really, the whole point of the spell. All units are strong as long as all of them are there. As soon as one falls, especially a high leveled one, they all start losing buffs. It's like the Phalanxes that Alexander the Great used to great effect and defined warfare for the following era. When the units act as one group, it's extremely strong. When there's a gap in the formation, unless they can repair it quickly, they will soon fall apart as normal infantry do. There doesn't necessarily need to be a specific counter, if brute force is basically the sole "counter" of several other Very Rare summons too, especially Sky Drakes and Colossus. And these units would still be weaker than the comparable doomstacks of VR summons, which similarly have no weaknesses to strike at.

I don't like the Prophet version even without the AI problem, as it removes the most fundamental part of the spell, buffing weaker normal units, and switches that to buffing further the already powerful unit, which I thought was undesirable with buff stacking.

[Seravy]

Ok, I guess if the buff is the long list of small effects you posted then it's fine.
I was thinking about a simplified version that would have done "each normal unit gets +X to hit and To Defend depending on the total amount of units levels" instead.
If all it does is add 1 defense and a bunch of other random stuff that's probably fine.

Except, I don't think we need another global stat buffing spell?
We have Crusade, Holy Arms and Charm of Life.
Two of these affect normal units only.
We also have High Prayer and Supreme Light which are also global stat buffing spells, just cast in combat, and we have Archangel which, on top of being a creature, is also a global stat buffing spell (Holy Bonus 2).
So 6 of the 10 very rares in Life already do this sort of thing and we really don't need more of the same.

I guess we could throw in "all normal units get +1% chance to hit and defend for each 5 units levels present in the battle" as an extra effect on Crusade but then we have a spell that's a combo with itself which is a bad idea and probably too powerful.
Or we could get rid of the current Holy Arms and make this the new effect (so instead of +10% to Hit, the bonus scales with unit count or total unit levels.) while keeping the "weapon is magical" part of it.
That might be a good idea actually, although there is still a problem. Normal units aren't that strong, so you want to use them in groups of 9 either way in this stage of the game (or pretty much always except the very beginning). This makes the mechanic non-relevant. It rewards you for doing what you do anyway. But not so for the AI. The AI puts together their land stacks somewhat randomly. It's much more likely to have a few weak units in each stack instead of having stacks with no weak link. So it's a spell that grants the maximal benefit for zero effort to human players, and is much less useful for AIs. I think that's bad for the game. (we are talking about the masses of normal units here, not the few, quality units like buffed ones or heroes, where using less than 9 makes sense due to the cost and power. Those would still not benefit from the spell in a relevant way though, because putting together many units like those = unbeatable army even without the spell.)

[roarmalf]

I think it's fine to have another global for life. Having multiple good options for a realms strength means that you're more likely to get at least one of them when you take fewer books. 

I think this is ideal at every rarity beyond common since even at 4 books we're not guaranteed anything specific outside of commons. A life Wizard with 6 books that doesn't wind up with the option to learn a global buff feels bad. The same is true for Nature and summons, etc., etc.


I think some redundancy is good as long as it also adds variety, especially as we add more spells.