(November 22nd, 2021, 22:20)Suppanut Wrote:(November 22nd, 2021, 08:58)MrBiscuits Wrote: I've played some more and killer wasps really are a pain. Three raider wasp units beat my walled city with wall of fire and 6 bowmen, 2 shaman and a hell hound.
Two fire bolts did almost zero damage to them and they just picked off the units one by one. The bowmen couldn't harm them because of missile immunity and the shaman magic attacks did almost no damage.
You could not use bowmen fight against wasp, it is intentional as you should try shooting guns or arrow to wasp or bee to understand the problem. And it is multifigure high armor unit, you should use other spell like flame blade (in case you are on defend and let's them go to melee you) or fireball (which now also common spell).
flame blade, fireball, web, anything with good melee buff, anything with breath, for other summon, number does, anything that have poison working well against wasp in defense such as naga on the wall, and ghouls would turn them into horde of undead quite easily. It even weak against some very basic spell such as weakness and also not doing well against resistance roll such as black sleep or confusion.
For some guidance, wasp has 9 figures so damage would go down a lot as they damage, buff/debuff mean a lot of them.
I think having some of flying, missile immunity, high armour, 9 figures, armour piercing would be fine on a common early unit. But all of them makes them too hard to deal with, you need to completely plan your whole game around them.
Think about units and methods that should be early counters to wasps:
Hell hounds - do very little damage to them. I think it takes about 3 hell hounds to kill one wasp unit.
Fire bolt - does almost nothing due to high armour
Fireball - good, but takes 18 mana so you can only cast one in the early game. 2-3 wasp units will still win the battle easily. Also nature has resist elements, so even this is likely to fail when they are buffed.
Shaman - magic attack too weak to penetrate the high armour.
Flame blade - is useless if you can't hit flying units.
Confusions/black sleep - effective against 1 unit - but early game you can not cast them more than once and if it fails then you've essentially lost your city.
Psionic blast - good, but again you can only cast it at most once in the early game, so doesn't solve the problem against more than 1 wasp.
Nagas/war bears - good for defence, but wasps can just ignore them and pick off all the other units and completely trash your cities and there's nothing you can do about it as you can't harm them. Also 1 on 1 I think they still do ok against war bears. I've not tried them against nagas yet.
Ghouls/weakness - yes it seems that death has some way of dealing with them. Although that means having ghouls in every city, since wasps are everywhere in the game.
An early unit where even the best ways of countering them are not especially effective is unbalanced, not to mention the fact that the normal early defensive strategies like bowmen, walls and wall of fire are completely useless against them.
I think I'll remove missile immunity from them in my version. Yes I know it doesn't make sense with a swarm of insects, but it's the best way of balancing them I can think of.
Do I just modify the UNITS.INI file to remove the missile immunity line from wasps or do I have to do something to get the changes in the Units.dat file?