Werewolves

[Nelphine]

I find this amusing.

I understand where you're coming from seravy, because of your playstyle. You're using this to take out units from opponent wizards. Which means you can do it the whole game, and it's extremely lopsided - only human death players can get it.

However, ghouls are the same, except they work primarily only against lairs, and instead of using 'high' spell skill, and strong stacks to support the undead creation (which is what the sleep plus zombie does, which is why it's later game, and matches your playstyle), ghouls use all your other wizard picks, and therefore are early game, and only for certain playstyles.

I don't think it makes sense to fix one, without fixing the other.

Undead creation , at 100%, from any common spells, is a problem. Period.

I'd actually rather do something like, zombie mastery adds undead creation to your zombies, but zombies can't create any undead by default. Then do something like giving life drain at no resist modifier (or maybe even +1) to ghouls and dropping the undead creation and the poison.

[Seravy]

Wish it was that simple.

We can't drop poison - required for overall game balance. (mainly Life)
We can't give them Life Drain - It deals more damage than poison and still creates undead, meaning there is no difference whatsoever (other than the interaction with sleep).

We could drop undead creation from both units but that would be extremely boring and plain. Life Drain as the only spell to make undead defeats the purpose of undead being a Death realm special ability.

It's also not related to the spell being common or not.
Spells scale by tiers - an uncommon spell or unit would be stronger, a rare even more so, meaning they'd convert even more things, escalating the problem. We don't have rare or better undead making spells or effects (besides Life Steal on units that deal high physical damage to ensure they only convert weak enough enemies) exactly because such would be too powerful. If you say it's too OP for common, then you're saying it's too OP period. We can't take it out though, as Hadriex pointed out, it's a very important part of the game that defines the realm. It isn't something we can afford to lose entirely.

Ghouls are on my "to test" list, I can't comment on them until I do so. Although it would probably be much more effective if someone who is good at playing them, posted a video. Last time (which was a very long time ago), I didn't really find ghouls all that good to worry. It's not a repeatable source of units, and the things vulnerable to it are quite limited. (Also with Black Sleep being nerfed, things that only convert if you make them sleep are no longer an option)

[Nelphine]

Correct 100% undead creation is too powerful period, for anything against its own tier or better.

However, that's why I suggested adding it to zombie mastery. That's a rare spell, so the idea is that by the time the game has already reached the rare stage, then it should be fine for Commons to have 100% undead creation, precisely because they are already outclassed, even by city units. There are no lairs left to abuse. So the only things you can get are through a lot of effort, at which point it's balanced.

(Recall, I consider zombie mastery very weak as a rare spell currently, because it just gives you mass numbers of weak units, and all that does is let you kill mas numbers of enemy weak units.. but you still need a doomstack to banish/defeat them, and if you can do that, all those weak units already starve/die due to lack of maintenance and as it is. It's a win harder spell, not something that actually adds to your ability to win in the first place.)

Yes life drain does more than poison.. but that's why I suggested 0 or even a +1 resist modifier. Only the very weakest resistance could take damage from it, and it would end up averaging lower than the poison even if it could do more than one damage on occassion.

And sure undead creation needs to be kept in the realm. But we already both agree that it sucks that all units of higher rarity than common can't getting it for balance reasons, and so we end up with all these strategies being built around maximizing common spells. The fact that it's even an option to plan on never summoning stronger units than ghouls, specifically because they have an ability that not even demon lords to replicate, is bad. I should be looking forward to stronger units, not being sad and planning how I can avoid ever wasting time on then (by choosing picks aimed at making ghouls so strong they can replace them).

Another option could be to give undead massive penalties, based on the tier of the creating source. So, an undead created by common units or spells would have -3 to hit and -2 to defend. Uncommon sources would create undead with -2 to hit and -1 to defend. Etc.

Could add penalties to resist and health as well if needed.

Then you could give 100% creation to more units.

Could even make it a table based on the rarity of the victim compared to the rariry of the source. (So a common making an undead very rare, like hydra, would give it like -6 to hit and -5 to defend; a very rare created by a very rare would have -3 to hit and -2 to defend; and a common created by a very rare might actually have a bonus, like +1 to hit.)

[Nelphine]

And for testing ghouls, just take 2 death books, and then every other pick is to get a common buff for them, or a retort to buff them. I'd consider conjuror and focus magic the minimum to try it, but you should have at least 2-4 other buffs, like tactician and endurance, as well.

[Seravy]

Yes life drain does more than poison.. but that's why I suggested 0 or even a +1 resist modifier. Only the very weakest resistance could take damage from it, and it would end up averaging lower than the poison even if it could do more than one damage on occassion.

That's not true. Poison does 0-1 damage, the average depends on target resistance but 0.5 sounds reasonable overall. Life Steal does X damage where X is the amount the roll is failed, so 1-5 damage for 5 resistance targets (at 0 modifier), which still averages 1.25 even if I include the rolls that did zero.
But it's worse - Life Steal heals the ghouls! A single ghoul could beat a stack of 9 whatever weak units with 5 resistance, as it'd heal as much as it takes damage, AND you'd get them all as undead anyway because life steal damage was higher than melee.
It might, possibly, be balanced at +2 or more likely +3 save modifier but then people would say this is a useless ability that does nothing when it matters, and they'd be right. Then enter Black Prayer and we are back to 1 ghoul beating a stack of 9 halberdiers.

Undead can't possibly know their creating source so that's not an option. They could get stat reductions but then the easy to get weaker units would be the most useless ones. And no amount of stat reduction makes undead Chaos Spawn or Cockatrices less deadly.

And for testing ghouls, just take 2 death books, and then every other pick is to get a common buff for them, or a retort to buff them. I'd consider conjuror and focus magic the minimum to try it,

Whatever, my point was, I don't have time to do it, haven't had in the past half year. Maybe next summer at this rate, lol.
We still have barbarians, beastmen, trolls, dwarves left to do, and I want at least one game of Life nomads... but I played so much recently, I need some break first. (and I still have my ongoing game too to finish.)

[Bahgtru]

I'll resist from commenting on ghouls as you seem to desire.

In all the examples you bring up you need over 100 skill (and the mana) to make that happen. If what you describe is a problem, then so are the following cheaper examples:
- web (nice mages! I'll have them)
- weakness
- warp creature
- vertigo (with better save to boot) (no need to research it - the bard and many items offer it)
- shatter
I think I'm forgetting something...

Black sleep would be fine if it went down to 0 modifier and became cheaper. As it is it's just a worse version of confusion - you don't get to use the unit. It's mainly good for freeing up the sees of enemy triremes as they come charging at your experience 0 ones and you have 50% of eliminating one and if that doesn't work, 50% of escaping, for a 75% chance of good outcome - meaning that each of your triremes count as 4 of the enemies' with this big save modifier. Increase the werewolves' resistance, decrease BS's save, and you're good.

With SM 0 the giants would still save 80% even after BP, needing 130 skill for one on average - 5 castings, BP, zombie. They'd be safe from it without BP. Drop the need to 110-120 by reducing the cost of the spell by 4 or 5. And you still need to win the battle. That seems adequate to me. I wouldn't even consider the case where you're already winning the game - when you're in that situation you win anyway, if you balance games around that you just make them longer and more annoying.

I like undead creation as a strategy for higher difficulties - it makes you use the enemy's cheating in a way - and the black sleep tactic is really one that I use minimally, as usually there are better ways to achieve it. I'd nerf the spell gladly too - I really don't understand why you don't consider that way to solve this issue.

[Seravy]

We used Black Sleep as the baseline when setting the save modifier for many other spells.
While the spells you list do disable the melee attack on units, they don't convert incoming damage to doom type so the zombies would still have a hard time beating the more powerful ones. Also those spells are not in Death, fortunately, except Weakness.

[Bahgtru]

We used Black Sleep as the baseline when setting the save modifier for many other spells.

Ok but that doesn't mean that it can't be slightly tweaked itself? Just lower its cost and the save modifier and it remains balanced. Don't you find the use with triremes a bit broken?

For example I've checked your videos, and the one where you write - "this could be 2 undead cockatrices" - well just think about it, as a mono-death player you'd have to choose between getting no undead or abandoning the fight and trying again if you can't finish them off with zombies while they sleep, because they'd start running away... That'd be really annoying if you're using BS as a poor-man's web.
On the other hand, getting 2 cockatrices requires an average of 4 rolls and the zombies, 80 skill, which is already quite high, and you don't find so many lairs with only 2 of them.

Plus, I was forgetting cloak of fear.

[Seravy]

Look, I'm not happy with the change either but I don't have a better idea.
I'm not going to nerf a perfectly balanced and useful spell (Black sleep) and I won't break werewolves (by raising their resistance). If you want the sleep+zombie combo back, you need to come up with something else for the werewolf raising problem.
I'm not overly concerned with the other raised creatures, they are undead so they can't heal. Not saying they aren't a problem though, but it's a problem I'm more willing to ignore. But wolves regenerate and are available early on AI players in limitless quantities. On top of that, they are the perfect counter to the player who is summoning them, once they were turned undead. So raising wolves that way is not acceptable.

[Bahgtru]

Oh well if that's the main issue just give them back death resistance, what can I say.