Current Impossible Strategy

[Nelphine]

Right, so the only case i KNOW we need to have a split garrison is sprites; anything more than 5-6 sprites just dies too easily; they also have abysmal strategic value so you get bizarre AI defeats/banishes in early game due to them.

If all barbarian garrisons suck, then make bezerkers the priority over shaman (say 13 vs 12). They have more hp, they don't have a LOT less resistance, and they can in fact overcome weapon immunity through sheer damage; so at worst, they're as bad as shamans; and if you don't have good resistance based spells to kill them, they're much better than shamans. They've also got like 25 times the strategic combat value, so they're good at preventing other AI from conquering the city.

Try playing life/nature against bezerkers. You'll still probably be able to defeat them, but just because chaos/sorcery/death have ways to defeat them doesn't mean all realms do - and not even all human players of those 3 realms will have the right spells. Raw stats are still very dangerous.

[Nelphine]

On another note: I'm going against everythign I've ever said about settling/conquering cities. I'm pretending I'm playing Inquisitor barbarians. If it's not a barbarian city, it can't build bezerkers, I don't want it. Which means I am actually sending out settlers periodically when I have several doomstacks active and enough bezerkers I could garrison more cities. 'But Nelphine' you cry 'amplifying towers!' 'What about Amplifying towers??!!!!' I'm trying it. I have 12 barbarian cities so far. With Life, 12 barbarian cities is... a very large amount of military power. And a very large amount of troops that can be lost in combat. And I am planning on conquering 1-4 more barbarian cities before this is all over, as well as settling more.

Edit the second: I'm up to 365 overland casting skill (without any amplifying towers) and I'm ahead of all the AI. Seems ok.

Edit: Although I haven't got consecration this game, so my entire empire has famine on it. I have to save disenchant area for warp node. In fact I've only found 2 very rare spells this whole game, which is unusually low.

[Nelphine]

Huh. 6 wraiths, a paladin, and 2 nightstalkers just attacked a city with 5 bezerkers guarding it.

Rares! Attacking bezerkers! (I may have just clapped with glee)

Whats the strategic strength of a focus magic wraith?
Melee rating: [(10-2)*4*20+100*4]*1.65 = 1716
Ranged rating: [(3-2)*4*20+100*4]*1.65 = 792
Defensive rating: 4*4*8*(6+4) = 1280

Wow. Yeah, their offensive rating is HUGE. Whoot! (The +2 to hit applying to both ranged and melee lifesteal is extraordinary.)

[Tlavoc]

Wow, I completely forgot that lifesteal affected ranged attacks (most units with it are melee, other than the necromancer hero), so focus magic on wraiths or death knights... ouch!

Well, I'm in the middle of a 6D, 4S game... I was planning on lots of undead magicians with focus magic to leave an undead army in their wake, but I think I may have to try this...

[Nelphine]

Demon Lords also have Life Steal.

Demon Lords are life. All hail Graz'zt and his Marilith harem!

(And if I could figure out a tactic that would let me play 7+ death on lunatic using demon lords as my primary AI killer, I would do that all day every day. But I can't figure out how to do that, and dungeon crawl effectively, and defend myself against AI until I have demon lords.)

[Seravy]

+2 to hit does not apply to lifesteal. Hit is applied before other modifiers such as touch attacks or first strike.
But yes, Focus Magic gives them a massive ranged attack strength so they are quite powerful if including that.

[Nelphine]

Oh. That means, both melee and ranged are 242 less. Still the melee strength is as high as some very rares, even before the ranged attack is added.

[Arnuz]

That's why I'm trying to get bezerkers set to 4 figures (and melee and thrown increased by 2 to compensate, hp increased by 1 or 2, as seravy feels appropriate) and thrown/first strike/breath to be worth 60-75% of a melee attack in strategic combat instead of 100% (for breath/thrown) and 50% (for first strike).  The units that have first strike also all have very high movement - so Seravy's concern that first strike seems overpowered at 100%.. I disagree with, but I also don't think any of those things are as good as a melee attack ever.  First strike units are stronger than breath/thrown units though, and strategic simply doesn't reflect that (heck, except in very rare cases, breath/thrown are often so weak that realistically they should be even less; thrown 3 simply doesn't get through enough armor on ANY enemy to be worth as much as 3 extra points of melee attack).


Life for me is easy mode but not really overpowered. Life lets you do all the things the easiest (immune to many of the most annoying spells, great economy so that you can just brute force everything whether spells or production). Why not overpowered? Because the things life does don't WIN for you; they let you make mistakes and still stay ahead/equal with the AI.  But you need something else to actually win with.

Bezerkers are very troublesome.  Yes, I do avoid attacks do to them but honestly, its the diplomacy factor that I care about more.  I regularly have cities with nothing but a spearmen or two in them, and they don't get attacked - obviously not because of the strategic strength of the garrison, but because the AI doesn't dare risk declaring war on me.

And that's not something we want to change without a lot of thought (Seravy has created a fantastic diplomacy system that both makes as much sense as possible, while working toward the goal of challenging the human player), and it's something you can do with lizardman and probably dwarves - it requires a bit more work than bezerkers, but it's doable.  I used to do it with Beastmen too, but I'm not sure I still could with all the changes (notably unrest).

But on the flip side, what I ACTUALLY love bezerkers for, is conquering lairs and nodes.  Yes, your first doomstack has to avoid strong ranged nodes like water elementals or shadow demons; but sky drakes? great drakes? hydras? behemoths? death knights? eat them up for breakfast.  And that has nothing to do with strategic strength; I used to do it with halberdiers but you REQUIRE loads of buffs to do it with halberdiers. Bezerkers can do it without anything except Elite experience - buffs simply allow them to do it without taking losses. And once you have a bunch running around and can replace losses (Or you have a megabuff stack), even ranged units aren't a problem - many colossus? 9 megabuff bezerkers!

And why do I love that?

Because the MOST enjoyable thing in this game for me is still dungeon crawling, and getting retorts/spell books as treasure.  Nothing else compares.  I know WHY we reduced that, and I totally agree.. but, I still want those extra picks.  It's also why I prefer long games - its why I play as if I was a peaceful perfectionist.  Because I don't care about the enemy wizards.  I want to end the game with 22 picks worth of spellbooks and retorts, which means I have to beat the AI to it (and the AI has to be strong enough that I don't accidentally wipe them out while going after lairs/nodes, so I can't just play normal.)

If we magically fixed strategic strength over night, I would simply reduce the difficulty until I found the same balance of maximized dungeon crawling, with AI that make the game dangerous while I do my dungeon crawling. If we change bezerkers I MIGHT have to change my gameplay, but unless Seravy completely changes them, I probably won't. They're too good at dungeon crawling.

Note that I don't base my balance and discussion ideas around my preference for what makes the game awesome. I'm aware the game is still meant to be played to win, so I discuss strategy and balance with that in mind.  It just isn't what actually makes the game awesome for me (even if it makes the theorycrafting and discussion awesome.)


TLDR: Not remotely offended. I know my strategy is effective (albeit very difficult to master), and in some ways its for the wrong reasons.  But really, at lunatic, is it any worse than kiting around hydras/chaos spawn for ghouls? Or draconic archers? Etc? (Actually I don't even know if there is an etc.  Are there any other strategies that work at lunatic right now?) These are things the AI simply can't be taught, and has no way to counter.  They're also things that are very difficult to remove from the game without losing a lot of other very good things.  As much as we talk about reducing cheating and then nerfing the lunatic strategies... Seravy has done a LOT of work in balancing this game.  I've put in a lot of time suggesting balance issues, and many others have made great suggestions.  All the things that remain, remain because they are very very difficult to remove without giving up very important gameplay. If they weren't, they'd be fixed already. That's not to say we can't fix these things; just that it's not remotely a simple task.

Very good post, would read again.

100% agreed on the lot that Seravy's done. I hope that we can keep improving! Of course balancing is hard work and probably can hit drastically diminishing returns in results, but hopefully we're not there yet

[Nelphine]

Incidentally, this lunatic game, I ended up with 21 picks. I found a life book, 4 sorcery books, 3 nature books, and a death book.

Missed all the nature spells I wanted except water walking and resist elements. And no AI with any nature to trade to.
For sorcery, I missed magic immunity and spell lock; I got creature binding and spell ward. Probably the two blandest sorcery very rare BUT I missed consecration, so at least spell ward let me clean up the famines - 11 YEARS after the famines started. However, with 3 dual sorcery realm AI, I'm hoping to get some strong sorcery stuff yet.

In life I missed: call to arms (thank god), crusade (boooooo best global), archangel (boooooooo best summon except demon lord), enlightenment (playing inquisitor barbarian, and doing minimum research means I will not research SoM until ~1443. Insane! But the hero XP is actually super good, so I'm sad about missing this), and the previously mentioned consecration (boooo since I'm against 3 ai with death and 1 with chaos - but I got spell ward, which is a poor man consecration, and is AMAZING against those 7 focus magic wraith/2 undead angel doomstacks).

I also missed incarnation for the first time in about 34 games!

But the real kicker is Raven found a sorcery book! SO CLOSE TO 22!

[Nelphine]

Current game shall be epic:

January 1412.

I control all of arcanus (defeated all 3 wizards), but I had to take a burn-it-all approach. So I only have about 1/3 of it populated.

I've cracked, and control, 2 towers.

I have 2 myrran nodes, but no cities on myrror (I'm going to try to grab a beastman city - no dark elves - to populate arcanus with.)

I've found 1 sorcery book, so I have resist magic and focus magic. I found archangel and life force, plus researched enlightenment and high prayer. I've barely started exploring myrror, and I know there are nodes and lairs not yet conquered.

My opponent (Jafar) controls the rest of myrror. He has found 1 book as well, so he is: 5 nature, 6 sorcery, 1 life, Myrran, Conjuror.

The ultimate bad news for my life heavy bezerker game - and yes he has dispelling wave, and is maniacal.

I lost more than half my archangels conquering arcanus (and some failed attacks against myrror) so I'm not well prepared to attack. But I have enough bezerkers to put 9 in all 6 towers, which SHOULD mean he'll never break onto arcanus (thankfully he did not get astral gate or planar travel from his life book), so even if he has earthquake (or gets seismic mastery) it won't matter, unless he gets awareness. Conveniently, I also don't much care if he gets spell binding, nor time stop. Similarly great unsummoning and creature binding will be useless, regeneration will be almost useless making behemoths mostly useless. Fairy ring will be mostly useless. Sky drakes I'm not concerned about, but djinn, colossus, and great wyrms would all be Very Bad. Earth gate I'm indifferent about, herb mastery would be as useless as regeneration, but Entangle would be Very Bad. Call lightning I'm really not sure about. Depends on what else is in play. Spell ward I wouldn't care about - yeah it would bother archangels, but those aren't for actually killing. I would hate suppress magic, but maniacal dispelling wave is almost the sane anyway so it wouldn't change much. Haste again depends on what else there is (haste could make sjy drakes bad). I can't remember the 10th sorcery very rare right now. Edit: oh. Mass invidibioty. Life doesn't care.

Since he never met the other wizards, he's never been at war until very recently against me. So his army strength is almost identical to mine - since I have 20 nodes, our power production is almost identical. However, he has aether binding (and presumably a ton of amp towers) so his spell power is ahead of mine by about 25%.

Totally looking forward to how this plays out.