Role of planes

[Seravy]

Reducing the number or strength of creatures doesn't prevent farming undead berserkers.

Leaving that aside, why flat number? Flat total cost would be far more better - at 610 you get one very rare back, or 4 jackal riders.

I'm already starting to dislike this item power. Not necessarily because of game balance - more because I don't want people to think "hey I'm gonna convert my army to undead because they have no maintenance and are immune to everything. 200 units later...eww this is really painful to do and lame and such an abuse and I'm not having fun at all." Another 50 turns later a Life wizard declares war or someone casts great unsummoning and the guy loses in like 5 turns. And of course it will be the game's fault, not his greed of not wanting to pay maintenance...
(well, that is the price of taking the dark path and murdering your own people but I don't expect people to realize this...)

Anyone has another idea for a new item power?

[Settemio]

Anyone has another idea for a new item power?

The hero deals double damage to Normal units as well as Life summons.

or

Battles with this hero start with Darkness

or

(if possible, this wouldn't require any books at all) When this hero attacks, it attempts to dispell buffs from the creature. If this ability is provided by a weapon, it only applies to attacks with that weapon.

[Bahgtru]

Anyone has another idea for a new item power?

Battles with this hero start with Darkness

lovely

[Seravy]

I don't remember, did we discuss the possibility of making the tower timing variable based on landmass size?

Aside from the obvious unfixable problems with huge land, it also means the player will take longer to conquer the intended percentage of their plane so later tower breaking might work better, or the opposite for Tiny - but I don't remember if we already considered this idea and rejected it or not.

Unfortunately, adding it does mean the timing will slip away from the intended spell rarity, but that might be the lesser evil - on smaller land we can't really expect the game to last until very rares anyway (not enough resources) while on huge this might result in crazy multiple all very rare stacks myrran invasions...

[Nelphine]

I suggested it. But unlike you, I believe rarity DOES change based on both size and difficulty. So I wanted turn 200 to be for expert fair, and a variation to be put in for both difficulty and size. Add 10 turns per easier difficulty, subtract 10 turns per harder difficulty, add 5 turns per smaller size, subtract 5 turns per larger size.

[Seravy]

Well the main problem with land size is, it changes rarity and conquest rate in the opposite direction. (conquest percentage will be lower on Arcanus while spell rarity will be higher at any given turn - there is more to conquer overall from the same starting position, and more resources to provide research meanwhile.)
So if we want to tie the towers to rarity, land size breaks it no matter what.
So if any modifier for land size exists that means we are giving up on timing towers to spell rarity on all but Fair land size. (and if not, that means we are giving up on improving land size balance. Even with the change it is already beyond repair anyway but the Myrran opponent is the greater half of what makes it broken so it might worth doing despite that.)
So difficulty having effect on spell tiers stops being relevant if we also include land size.

That said, difficulty has the exact same effect as land size which is why raising land size makes the game higher.
Increasing the difficulty means more resources, so higher spell tiers - only for the AI but assuming the human picked the higher level because they are a better player or using a stronger strategy, then also for the human - and it also means a slower conquest rate (the AI is much more difficult to beat).
So increasing difficulty makes the game harder the same way as increasing land size, by giving more resources to the AI player and making it harder to reach 100% conquest rate on Arcanus.
However there is an important difference. Increasing the difficulty is meant to make the game harder, so it does. There is no need for compensation. Meanwhile increasing land size isn't supposed to make the game harder, thus we give extra time to the player to compensate for that.

(Yes, I'm aware you suggest difficulty lowering the tower timing and I've just proven we don't need to increase it instead. But lowering it makes the game even harder, in other words you are suggesting increasing difficulty should...increase difficulty even more. I'm against that since the game is already way too hard to beat for most people and starting conditions. We also have a bunch of difficulty levels, so there is no need to increase the gap between them. Yes, we could maybe have this instead of some resource advantage but I think this is worse. The player can be very flexible on how much enemy resources they can destroy by using a "no damage to my stack" strategy or leeching mana in combat or whatever. The player can't be flexible on how long it takes them conquer their plane or reach rare spells nearly as much - to do that you need to pick a stronger wizard/strategy. So this direction would reduce the amount of playable wizards faster as difficulty increases than the current system.)

I tried to find where we talked about this but I only see mentions of difficulty and the player's conquest rate of Arcanus, not the land size setting. Could you point me towards the relevant post(s)?

By the way, I'm thinking about +/- 1 to 2 years for each land size level. The difference between how long it takes to conquer the larger land is about that much, if not more.

[Nelphine]

Right, but we didn't tie towers (in the original discussions regarding breaking towers, back when we first chose the turn 200) with conquering all of arcanus. We tied them to rarity of spell research, in particular, we tied them to when we could find very rare spells in treasure, which we tied to when very rare spells would reasonably be researched (you'll recall, I've also argued strongly that the turn we should be able to find very rares in treasure should also be based on difficulty/land size; I haven't found a single very rare spell in treasure since you implemented that change - every single node, tower, and lair has been conquered before then in every game that has lasted that long, including my halfling 5 way life alliance game where i had artificer and only 9 cities). Research goes faster on both land size and difficulty, as you've just proven. Therefore, if we want to tie towers to spell research, then we need to break towers earlier as well.

As a note, increasing size is NOT as much of a modifier as increasing difficulty. Playing on Huge Expert MIGHT be as hard as Fair Master, although I have my doubts. It's certainly easier than Large Master. Large Expert is certainly easier than Fair Master. This also translates to research rate; higher difficulty requires faster research rate (or rush strategies that skip research, but that isn't relevant to this conversation) for the human, and inherently increase research rate for the AI, and the rate that research is increased is larger than the rate it is increased due to land size changes.

However, I do not think increasing land size noticeably changes how long it takes to conquer a relevant portion of arcanus. It takes longer to get the last few hamlets yes, but it doesn't take longer to make your opponent irrelevant. Therefore, even if you decide that towers breaking should be based on conquering your home plane, that would not significantly change with land size. So then we consider whether it's healthy to base it on conquering rate:

If you did decide that you wanted to base it on the rate you conquered arcanus, then you should base it on the rate the human conquers arcanus based on their strategy, not an arbitrary turn limit. I've proven before that allowing the human to conquer quickly, without giving the ai on the other plane a chance to interfere, means the game is over before that last ai is actually engaged, which isn't healthy for the game as it encourages builds which can do so and therefore 'skip' the last opponent. Which means basing it on some set of criteria which is what I proposed for the dynamic version that you so vehemently denied. So if you use a turn limit for a conquering rate, it's not healthy as it encourages builds that can 'cheat' that turn limit. And you are against a dynamic limit (which I accept even if I disagree), which means you can't base tower breaking turns on the rate the player conquers arcanus.

Therefore, towers breaking should solely be tied to research rate, which increases as land size and difficulty increase, which means tower breaking should be faster as land size and difficulty increase. This is completely irregardless of the fact that difficulty is increasing as land size and difficulty setting increase; and the fact that the towers break earlier in this argument is simply a natural consequence of the increased research rate, and the fact that it may cause some strategies to have more difficulty is a side effect - and in my opinion that is such a small increase in difficulty (and the type of strategies where it is a large increase in difficulty probably shouldn't be effective beyond Expert anyway) that it shouldn't be part of the conversation.

[Seravy]

So we seem to mostly agree we can't do anything about the problem, but you seem to also suggest to make it worse for some reason. Personally, I consider Huge land nearly unplayable, if I had to guess, I'd say it adds one and a half difficulty levels - in a system where a single difficulty level means you need to improve your starting wizard to be able to still win. Anything that makes that effect stronger is a big no, especially if it's not even the difficulty setting but the land size one.

[Nelphine]

Nah, Huge is worth more like 0.75 of a difficulty, if it's even that high. Probably closer to 0.6. Large is around 0.4-0.5. It makes some things harder, but the AI also can't handle it nearly as well as Fair games, and it's a lot easier to expand on your own at the beginning and get a core of cities that lets you win, without even declaring war on the first AI. It balances itself out.


And no, MY problem is that: towers break on the same turn that you can get very rare spells in treasure. You can get very rare spells in treasure at the time calculated that you research very rares. The Problem is: Increasing difficulty and land size, decreases the time to research very rares. Therefore, very spells in treasure no longer match when you research very rares. Therefore breaking towers no longer matches when you research very rares.

My solution: Modify the turn that towers break (and the turn you can find very rares in treasure), based on the expected time to research very rares, as this changes (slightly - definitely not as much as a year) based on difficulty and land size.



The problem that you seem to be describing is that breaking towers is linked to difficulty. I believe that this is such a small linkage, that only in the extreme case that it makes the game too easy (human conquers all of arcanus 4+ years before tower breaks), should towers linking to game difficulty even be part of the discussion.

If, as in the past, you disagree that the extreme case should be in the discussion, then my opinion is that towers breaking do not significantly affect the difficulty of the game GIVEN that breaking towers is based on very rare research.

Therefore, breaking towers being linked to difficulty is not a problem, as long as towers breaking are linked to when very rare spells are researched.

[Seravy]

Well I haven't played Huge map games recently, but in the past I had very bad experiences with it (losing on Hard for example, despite going 10 book 2 retorts with a good enough strategy). I'm ok with postponing land size balancing until everything else is done as playing larger maps for testing takes longer.
However I do have to say every single time I see Hadriex play on a Huge map and losing the game due to it, I feel bad. I believe Huge maps are harder, and by a very large margin. (they might not be IF you specialize your strategy around the map size, but for generic wizards, they are.)

I don't think you understand that I want to tie the research speed, the conquest rate and towers all three to the same spot. But difficulty and land size moves research speed and conquest rate in the opposite directions so it's by definition impossible. I'm willing to drop the research rate as a compromise. I'm not willing to drop the conquest rate - the AI breaking through when I'm still less than halfway done on the Arcanus plane is why we have this entire system in place right now. If towers break earlier on larger maps or higher difficulty, I'd never play any of those again. It's unfun to have a Myrran wizard show up when you aren't able to deal with it.