Death Realm balance

[Sapher]

No no, you summon stacks of ghouls because of auto undead creation. Then you go lair hunting and get things like chaos spawn and hydra (even angels), before, oh, 1407 (experts can do it much faster than me).

What do you do until 1407? Make peace? How many cities do you have by 1407? What if something like this attacks your cities with ghouls who are preparing to do start doing something (last game i had to face that hero i think somewhere around 1407)

So building werewolves, shadow demons, even wraiths, is literally worse than just summoning ghouls.

By 1407 werewolves already killed all the wizards except for may be the last one. So no, they are not worse.

[zitro1987]

My thoughts (some radical):
*Ghouls to become more melee oriented than current version, making free units more difficult (or as difficult as with the other 2 spells that raise undead). This could mean removal of poison or most likely reduction in range damage to the point only focus magic or lower-resistance units (poison) can be raised from far.

Ghoul Example:
*80 cost /2 upkeep
*5 melee (+1) or possibly even 6 melee
*2 range (-1) or possibly even 1 ranged
and either +1 on armor, hp, or movement.

Only with the considerable effort of focus magic + darkness you might be able to kill those tough advanced neutral creatures. However, on regular gameplay, you are relying mostly on the poison damage now, limiting effectiveness of free units to less balance-breaking targets  


I don't like the extreme number of counters death units have.
*I don't see why undead would be immune to illusions . . . especially if thinking of the traditional zombie ('oooh brains' and it's an illusion), making death too much of a counter against sorcery.
*I honestly can't comprehend why undead would be immune to cold - if you smack a unit with blizzard (wind), ice bolt (blunt trauma) … well maybe not the death-oriented cold spells … this could also go.
*Poison immunity is harder to justify removal on a logical sense, but one could argue it is balance-breaking. What if it is applied only to select units instead of all. We can make exceptions to units that could logically suffer poison damage, like werewolves, shadow demons, night stalker, death knights.
*Death Immunity makes death vs death highly boring, but I don't have suggestions.

I do think I have a proposal for the multi-immunity concern about death. 

How about removing the hardcoded requirement that death creatures have all the immunities? What if Seravy chooses 1 to 3 immunities to each death creature (except for undead, which may need all).
For example (ideas badly thought out, meant more as examples of what I mean): 
*Shadow Demons can be vulnerable to poison (does demon mean they can't get poisoned) and probably cold (they don't seem to represent cold immunity)
*Werewolves could also be made vulnerable to poison (aren't they living) and death (same reason)
*Demon Lords could be vulnerable to illusions (I again don't see why a demon is immune to illusions … play heroes of might and magic)

[Nelphine]

No no, you summon stacks of ghouls because of auto undead creation. Then you go lair hunting and get things like chaos spawn and hydra (even angels), before, oh, 1407 (experts can do it much faster than me).

What do you do until 1407? Make peace? How many cities do you have by 1407? What if something like this attacks your cities with ghouls who are preparing to do start doing something (last game i had to face that hero i think somewhere around 1407)

So building werewolves, shadow demons, even wraiths, is literally worse than just summoning ghouls.

By 1407 werewolves already killed all the wizards except for may be the last one. So no, they are not worse.

If an AI has something like that before 1407, I would literally stand around in awe. 1407 is still uncommon phase, unless you're facing a specialist sagemaster.

And again, I said experts are faster with ghouls than I am. Similarly you can certainly have people who will use werewolves, but at least that requires 8 death books, and if you fight too many sprites, or multiple draconian opponents, or megabuff life halflings (which does occasionally happen), werewolves simply don't work.

On the other hand, nothing the AI can do stops multiple undead hydra. Literally nothing.

And realistically, you still get your first 9 ghouls before your first 9 werewolves, so you're ready to go faster with the ghouls, and 9 ghouls beats the first wizard, and multiple stacks beat the second wizard. Any rare undead beat the third wizard, and undead rares and very rares beat towers more reliably that werewolves.

[Seravy]

Shadow Demons are immaterial (ghosts) so Poison and cold seems necessary.
Removing some for Werewolves would make sense but we lowered their resistance with the assumption they have these immunities. Maybe we can get away with removing poison or cold, but not death. (removing poison would be a very large nerf to the unit as it's meant to be used in the timeframe poison is the most common, but probably one that might be needed anyway.)
I picture wolves to be strong against cold though. (in fact, why don't Wolf Riders have cold immunity?)
Demons being immune to illusons is one of the few ways the AI can counter invisibility, by summoning them in combat. Of course zombies do the same but zombies are too easy to oneshot before the illusion immunity actually matters.
Overall, as Cold Immunity doesn't contribute much to the strength of the realm and plays into the role of "Death beats Nature" I prefer to keep that one. Revising Death and Illusion immunity on a few creatures sounds better.
For Death however, changing some spells to bypass Death Immunity is probably the better path to take.

Undead are the really important question, as they are the most abundant. We might need to drop poison immunity from those, too, although it's kinda hard to justify. But as long as an Undead naga fights better than the original and counters it, we likely have problems at sorcery. Illusion Immunity is not as bad because Psionic Blast can at least still do some damage even if not ignoring armor (phantom warriors not so much). There is also AEther Sparks which is fairly decent (I killed undead with that in my last game, it's painfully slow but works. Just not against a stack of 9 shadow demons). Illusion Immunity also helps keep Invisibility in check so I rather keep that.
Death Immunity on undead is somewhat questionable, as it contributes absolutely nothing to the game besides Death wizards being unable to cast spells against each other.

btw, here is a list of what spells each immunity disables :

Poison Immunity : 
Nagas, Ghouls, Giant Spiders, Reaper Slash

Illusion Immunity :
Wall of Shadow (in Death!), Phantom Warriors, Psionic Blast (partially), Phantom Beast (partially), Invisibility, Night Stalker (in death again!), Mind Storm, Confusion, Vertigo, Blur

Death Immunity :
Black Sleep, Weakness, Cloak of Fear, Wrack, Terror (partially), Night Stalker, Life Drain, Syphon Life, Massacre, Vampiric and Death weapons.

Cold Immunity :
Wave of Despair, Fairy Dust, Ice Bolt

I'd question Syphon Life and Life Drain being well balanced. They are well balanced at the cost vs one of their effects, but you get all three. Unless we can prove players usually use the spell for only one of the three effects without any benefit from the other two, it's not well balanced overall (meaning it's balanced as a damage spell, but not as an economy spell, in fact it's the only in-combat economy spell in the game, a category that doesn't exist for a very good reason - combat casting skill is virtually unlimited.)

Illusion Immunity is somewhat scattered among realms (Colossus, Angel, Archangel, True Sight, Sky Drake) and while most of it is late game, Invisibility is, too.

Immunity has to be outright immunity because it's more fun to play them that way. Units generally have these abilities in cases where increased defense would not make sense or would be insufficient (bows vs magicians or skeletons).

I still can't comment on Ghouls, I have to play them first (but Werewolves still need another game and then there are 4 more races to test...)

Undead hydra... They have Regeneration 7 now, not sure how much harder that makes it to kill one with ghouls but I'd think it matters a lot. If it still stays a problem we can give them 1 more armor or something. (also note we've reduced the frequency of Hydra places)
If undead lose some of the immunities, most undead rare creatures won't be as powerful as they are now.
Two more things we could consider for undead is to lose buffs when raised, or being undead granting some sort of stat penalty (-1 To Hit?), as I don't think we can do much in changing how they are generated.

By the way to show how bad the problem is, a complete list of spells that do affect Death units (in combat), not counting spells that aren't meant to affect enemy units directly in the first place :

Life - everything works (3 spells)
Nature - Petrify, Call Lightning
Sorcery - Stasis, Banish, Creature Binding, Aether Sparks, (Psionic Blast)
Chaos - everything works (many spells)
Death - Annihilate.

For Nature I assumed wraith form was cast on the unit(s).

[Nelphine]

Poison immunity also works on great wyrms, wyverns, and nightblades and the ninja. I feel like there's at least one other.

Illusions immunity also works on nightblades and the ninja.

[Seravy]

I've only listed spells and specifically those rendered entirely useless. I think a Great Wyrm works fine against most Death units as long as they don't fly

[Nelphine]

I actually think great wyrm is hit harder than giant spiders, primarily due to land linking on Mukti figure units making their attack still relevant, whereas the great wyrm loses a lot of damage against low resistance units (werewolves is a great example).

[Seravy]

There is a bit of a difference between dealing 24 armor piercing damage without poison or...like 3-4 total like the other things listed.

[Nelphine]

Ehh.. losing 20+ damage from poison (assuming we increased werewolf resist to 6) is major. About 50% of the wyrms damage.

Spiders doing 24 regular attack vs werewolves translates to 8 or so damage, and 16 poison means also 8 damage, so immunity to poison is making the wyrm lose as much damage as the spiders do.

[Seravy]

Which part of the "makes completely useless" do you not understand? The Wyrm still deals the second highest damage in the game without poison.

Okay, maybe Spiders shouldn't be on the list either, they are at least an expensive war bear with 9 resistance which is something. Still, this is nitpicking. Wyrms aren't relevant to Death's early game issues. You aren't going to fight any. Even if you do, use a shadow demon, flying works better, making poison immunity still irrelevant.

(and by this logic, Death Immunity counters Wraiths, Death Knights and Demon Lords as they have Life Steal, which is a relevant part of their damage at least for the first two.)