Sleep and zombies, or zombies in general

[Seravy]

Trolls, good point. So the regeneration idea is no good either.

Maintenance - the loan part is pretty important. On "normal" undead, you only get to use them a few times (due to no healing), a high maintenance for these units would make no sense whatsoever (you already use them up quickly, unless they end up as garrison in which case paying high maintenance would be unacceptable.).
But regenerating undead act like they weren't undead units - they act like a non-undead summon with bonus immunities. Which is acceptable for blood lust (you're transforming your own, already paid unit, so it's a buff basically) but not for raised units - where the drawback of being undead is kinda the whole point of the mechanic being balanced. Anyway, since they act like a better nonundead unit, it's not very different from saying you can summon great lizards for free, but they have double maintenance. That's what being a "loan" means, and we don't have such spells (no cost but high maintenance) for a very good reason. It doesn't work. There are always ways to get around it, most trivial being disband the unit after you already conquered the things it worked well against. Then you get the benefit but don't pay the cost.

[Bahgtru]

Maintenance - the loan part is pretty important. On "normal" undead, you only get to use them a few times (due to no healing), a high maintenance for these units would make no sense whatsoever (you already use them up quickly, unless they end up as garrison in which case paying high maintenance would be unacceptable.).
But regenerating undead act like they weren't undead units - they act like a non-undead summon with bonus immunities. Which is acceptable for blood lust (you're transforming your own, already paid unit, so it's a buff basically) but not for raised units - where the drawback of being undead is kinda the whole point of the mechanic being balanced. Anyway, since they act like a better nonundead unit, it's not very different from saying you can summon great lizards for free, but they have double maintenance. That's what being a "loan" means, and we don't have such spells (no cost but high maintenance) for a very good reason. It doesn't work. There are always ways to get around it, most trivial being disband the unit after you already conquered the things it worked well against. Then you get the benefit but don't pay the cost.

Yes, summoning lizards for "free" (actually, on the cheap) and having them not heal is Death.
If they regenerate then there's a problem. But is it not also a problem if they cast? Considering that casters have all Death spells at their disposal, they can drain life. So is regeneration a specific problem or would you rather remove also casting? And why not all the special abilities, like chaos spawns' - those are supposed to be limited to rares and up, getting them early with tricks is also kind of game breaking...

Either all of those are an issue, or none. So yes, you can remove all of the above - but I'd feel a bit sad - or make it cost. For me that one is a good call:
- Making fantastic undead not fit for garrison duty seems to be a perfectly good mechanic. As you write, it doesn't matter if you use them up quickly - so maintenance wouldn't have negative consequences on the intended use of undead.
- On regenerating undead it means that they cost more, and you need to use them to make their cost worth it. Getting them in peace time for example would mean a drain on your resources. Sure you can get them just before a war - but that's good strategy.
- You can also sacrifice the undead, that works too. If you disband them though, that's exactly entering this case: "On "normal" undead, you only get to use them a few times" - so this is making them work exactly as intended for "normal" undead.

In retrospect, the idea behind the old very high maintenance of elementals might be the same - those are powerful creatures that can only exist in a temporary fashion, so you better use them even quicker than the normal fantastic undead.

"Then you get the benefit but don't pay the cost."
The very same applies to non regenerating undead... So that means... We're going towards no undead at all? 

You're trying to tackle a side issue of a larger one. I'd suggest leaving this for when you've tested ghouls, and to think of all of the undead mechanic in general. Werewolves+BS is either not an issue, or WW+life drain is too. If so, that can be fixed with a raise to their resistance, to be eventually undone when the full solution is implemented: you may recall that the resistance nerf was done before the removal of the immunities, so it would be appropriate to restore it partially.

[Bahgtru]

PS I also like the flavour of it: the wizard gets animated corpses, but if they had supernatural abilities, it's his mana feeding them now.

[Nelphine]

Right but low resistance units, often have high hp. Such as werewolves. That's why werewolves plus life drain isn't an issue. You need to do 18+ damage to the werewolf with life drain (+ because overkill is a thing. If you do 18 life drain, and then hit it with 2 doombolts, then you still don't get it because you did 24 non life drain damage.)

So to get 18-20 damage with life drain, on average is what, 5 life drains? Whereas black sleep (even 125% of black sleep cost) plus zombies is not nearly that expensive.

So in principle yes, life drain or syphon life has the same issue, but in practice, the hit points already solves it.



Although.. 5 life drains is only 25% more expensive than 1.25 black sleeps and a summon zombie. So it is an issue (if 18-20 damage reliably gets a werewolf. You may need closer to 25, which would be more like 6 life drains due to overkill, which is 50% more expensive.)

[Seravy]

Yeah at first I thought that, too.

Then you realize black sleep disables the wolf, while life drains do not, so that's 5 turns the wolf has to actually wreak havoc on your units - which have to be too weak to deal with that, otherwise they kill the wolf and you don't raise it. Even if you do manage to bring the wolf down to the last 2 figures without engaging it, you then still have to fight it unless you have a ranged army.
So while the MP cost might not be all that much higher, the hidden cost is huge. You're pretty much limited to only doing it with Horsebowmen armies or equivalent, that can evade the wolf for the entire duration.
And then there is the case of 2 wolves - 10 life drains vs 2.5 sleeps and 1 zombie.

So no, I don't think Life Drain is anywhere close to being equivalent to zombies, even if the MP costs aren't that much higher.

(obviously, life drain still creates regenerating undead for you which is an issue - but it isn't anywhere near as effective at it as zombies are. In fact, that extra 25-50% cost by itself is enough to put it above your casting skill capacity for the most critical turns of the game in many cases.)

[Bahgtru]

you then still have to fight it unless you have a ranged army.

You can do that with archers and swordsmen, which do exactly the amount of damage needed to an armor 3 target... Sure this doesn't work against 9 WWs but neither do the zombies unless you have 150 skill, by which point you're in a "win less boringly" situation. With 3-4 of them you don't need horsebowmen, a single cavalry can do it - first strike! And then avoid the rest, win at 25 and get the undead WW.

Anyway, I don't feel that WWs have been tested enough to be sure that it is a problem, why don't you give it some time to check it? Isn't the death AI going to always cast bloodlust on them anyway? They don't have so many buffs to use and BL is already quite high priority I think. If not then maybe this whole mess can be dealt with by simply raising its priority, making the find of a turnable WW a lucky find.

That is, if you really refuse to consider to give maintenance to undead, which I think would be a good addition - and I am an undead player. Or to raise again their resistance given that that nerf has later been doubled by the removal of the immunities? Speaking of which, can you remind me why they're illusion immune? If it is just to keep the realm strong against sorcery, well, there are other tools in Death toolbox. All it takes is a player that doesn't only use fire and forget, use auto button strategies like werewolves...

[Seravy]

At the moment this is the last remaining thing to decide on - to keep or not to keep the black sleep nerf.
I'm too tired to think about this today but feel free to post if you have anything new to say, I'll try to decide on one or the other tomorrow.

A quick overview though...

1. I think we decided this is not a major issue. If absolutely needed, raising maintenance would cover this for fantastic units, but they are kinda already expensive compared to Death's own units.
2. I think sleep is a significantly greater issue than any other disabling unit curses or effects because sleep makes the target take higher (read about 4-10 times more) than the normal amount of damage from attacks. Basically, while you'd need like 10+ ghoul shots without, you only need 2 with sleep. That literally makes ghouls 5 times more effective which is...even beyond significant. Sleep isn't a major issue for zombies this way (those can't run out of ammo aren't permanent units to care about their "per battle" efficiency), but it does enable them to damage things they otherwise couldn't even kill in 25 turns.
3. This is no longer an issue
4. Irrelevant
5. Definitely a problem when the "most unfun" and the "most efficient" overlaps. This is worse than it seems like, even though it's not balance related.
6. This is basically 5 with other words.
7. Still valid, AI can't use sleep+raise undead.

[Nelphine]

I don't think 7 is that important. AI get completely different undead creation rules, and so they can raise undead the human never can anyway.

2 also isn't that important. Specifically, you don't use ammo on anything hats slept - you use your ammo on all the things you can't sleep, and then you're just a zombie with less figures, but way more movement. So it's still important for ghouls, but not much more important than for zombies.

5 and/or 6 - I'm not sure. For ghouls specifically, killing the target is usually much less difficult than surviving. Black sleep doesn't aid surviving (against the first turn which is the most crucial) - so buffs like resist elements and endurance can actually be far more efficient than black sleep. 5 and 6 are important, but in many scenarios black sleep is simply win more (even if there are some scenarios where black sleep does let you win in the first place, those are often luck based - like successfully using black sleep against multiple gorgons - so I'm not convinced it's the most effecient. Instead it's the easiest, which means it's actually not the most unfun, because easy is often appealing.)

[Seravy]

Did we do a cost efficiency comparison between sleep+zombie and life steal? (not against a werewolf but in general, probably also considering higher end units with black prayer involved.)

Depending on the result of that we might, or might not have

8. Sleep/Zombie is more efficient than Life Drain/Syphon Life

which can be a major problem (Life Drain not so much, Syphon Life though is uncommon, it shouldn't be worse than zombie+sleep.)

but in many scenarios black sleep is simply win more

And that's the problem. You can't know in advance (game is hard nowadays, easy to underestimate the enemy especially if not even knowing who is on the other plane) whether you will or will not need the units later.
If you raise them and don't need them, you will be annoyed because you've waster hours worth of your real life time for no reason. (Yes, it's only an extra 1-2 minutes per battle. How many battles do you fight? Hundreds.)
If you don't raise them and lose, it's even worse.
So you would need to make a lose-lose decision, every single battle, without proper information. That's why I call it "most unfun".
It wouldn't be an issue if raising them was a single click on the mouse, but it's literally 50+ clicks. Per battle.

[Bahgtru]

Uhm, a super simple solution comes to mind. Don't make sleep maximise damage? It's not going to make battles a lot longer, and that means that you're not going to be able to convert with 1 zombie a lot of high armor units. So, there goes the efficiency.
Also, sleep makes it so that life-steal never raises because of the maximising normal damage (I don't think life-steal damage is maxxed): removing that, life-steal units can start creating undead from sleepers too.

Another idea: make auto/AI combat stop other units when there's only sleeping targets left, and you have zombies (well, or ghouls)