Todo list for 5.44

[Seravy]

Annihilate already does that.

Ghouls being affected by Life Drain and Black Sleep would be...weird. I don't really see why they would be different from a zombie or skeleton in that regard.
Werewolves, the problem with that one is, we are reducing their resistance (for Exorcise) and justify it by them being immune to most of the "good" resistance based spells. We can't do that and take their immunity away.

However, this isn't the right direction anyway. What makes Death unable to fight another Death wizard is not those specific two units. It's the massive hordes of undead normal units, and eventually Shadow Demons, Wraiths, etc.
Ghouls are already countered by Mana Leak pretty well, and they are useless against my Death units in the first place. They are not a threat. Werewolves...aren't that great in the hands of the AI. All I need is a city wall and some zombies or undead. So we still need some spell based solution for these tiers.

For rare I was thinking Wrack. Death units have low resistance, so if it wasn't for their immunity, Wrack would be effective against them. We'd probably need to rename the spell and come up with a new description that works for flavor if we pick that one. Another problem with that one is, it's not reusable. Terror already applies the -1 To Hit effect so it's semi-useful. The only remaining rare is Wave of Despair.

For common, I don't think we need anything. Casting skill is still low, hitting that one living unit in the battle uses it up. For uncommon, either Reaper Slash (we can't grant poison immunity to things anymore, so it's not that relevant to have that property) or nothing (Black Prayer works and uses quite a lot of casting skill for that tier. Mana Leak can also be useful.)

The main question is though, do we want to even change this or not. Which spell and how, comes after.

[Bahgtru]

For me - and I play death a lot - there's no need, you can deal with death wizards.

The only thing I don't like is the possibility to have death+life. It becomes easy to beat death when you can bless your undead hordes - something that in lore would melt them, in basically any other fantasy setting, and that is therefore a big surprise for newcomers.

[Seravy]

5. We can use the "poison/save modifier/holy bonus" byte for storing regeneration amount. No regenerating unit has any of those abilities naturally, and they cannot be granted to units. For the regeneration spell and item power, we can redirect their branches of code to keep using the constant "2" and only make the ability use this predefined value. Making the number show up on the unit information will likely be a pain but should be possible too.
Which only leaves the question, how much regeneration do we want on the units?
Troll Spearmen, Swordsmen, Halberiers, Shaman, Magicians, War Trolls, Settlers, Great Lizards, Behemoths, Werewolves, Shadow Demons, I think that's the full list of units? We can have any integer amount starting from 0.

9. Done, allowed commons and uncommons. Makes no sense to leave the uncommons out - you need to research them to be able to add them anyway, so it effectively means you only get extra "MP" to cast them on the hero. It takes a long time after your first uncommon research to reach Create Artifact, and not being able to use uncommon spell charges for all that time serves no purpose.

11. Can't do this one. To begin with, the spells are targeted based on total unit rating, not figure count, and combat situation is not available in the procedure as a parameter. I could add it but it's also called from several secondary places where I can't, so then those sources would need to default to a neutral combat situation anyway. Let's hope the AI manages to pick off the damaged units using ranged attacks to kill the units often enough.

14. I guess I prefer to keep the immunity. Fits the role of the demon lord well, being a hard to kill ranged unit.

That leaves the Guardian change and the Death realm change decisions to make and regen amounts. I'm fine with leaving the first two for a later update.

[Seravy]

Been thinking about regeneration a bit more.

Basically the weak point in regeneration is that if you don't win the battle, you don't get the lost units back. However, in the same package, you get an ability to restore hit points, which allows you to win battles that would otherwise take 2-3 of those stacks, or multiple battles+retreating, in one go. Like, if you are down to 3 units of werewolves after the enemy used up their spells and ranged attacks, you can still use that 3 to fight as if they were a full 9, by hitting once then going back, waiting to restore the hit points and attack again - you restore up to a total of 50 hp during the battle, which in terms of werewolves, is 160% of a unit. Even if I subtract a few initial turns where the enemy still has ammo, that still doubles the strength of the Werewolf unit, but for something like Troll Spearmen (16 health), it quadruples it.

I don't think this is a numerical problem. It's a design flaw.
We have "I get my dead units back if I can win the battle in one go" and "I get to have more than 9 units worth of fighting power in my 9 units, so I always win battles in one go" in a single package. That's bad design, and by allowing two health to be restored, we doubled the problem.

I believe it might be better to separate the two abilities and only have both in exceptional cases. (the very rare Regeneration buff, Hydra and Behemoth, maybe Shadow Demons as they are not particularly melee oriented and generally start using melee around turn 12-15 only due to their slow movement and high ammo.)
As a counterargument, being able to still have a shot at winning a battle, and having high stakes (if you do you get your 6 lost wolves back, but if you're even 1 damage too short, you lose them all) is definitely exciting which is good for the game - although such a Russian Roulette

I also can't think of a unit that really needs the "restore health per turn" ability in the first place. That ability is effectively extra hit points, lots of them. We don't have "this unit gains 50 extra HP" in the game for a reason.

I'd like to hear some opinions about this but I'm starting to think doubling HP regeneration was a huge mistake.

[jhsidi]

I've been playing a Trolls game. Removing the resurrect from regen would definitely limit the cheese strategies, which are really fun the first few times they're used but then get a bit boring and ridiculous.

Actually my most common cheese is Great Lizard. A stack of them around early-mid game just rolls over everything, and their low resistance does not matter because who cares if one dies?

So yes, I'd vote for separating resurrect out as a new ability. I think it's good enough to just split out the resurrect without touching the amount regenerated yet. Not getting free resurrect may feel like a big enough change.

I do think it weakens Nature since Great Lizard is, to me, the best summon and only reliable power strategy for Nature at a certain point in the game. I'm not very impressed with Cockatrices, considering their summon cost and absent Focus Magic, and Giant Spiders are great but more of a supporting creature. Nature is already one of the weaker realms, even though its spell roster looks solid.

[zitro1987]

Separating the two abilities of regeneration would most likely work best. The two abilities are not well related and the coming back from life mechanic always seemed a bit strange to me, at least when combined with hp regeneration.


It would be interesting to see werewolves or great lizard only regenerate … maybe shadow demons only coming back to life

[Seravy]

Interesting.
I always considered the units reviving the main feature, and the restored health as the cheese, not the other way around. While nowadays the AI occasionally stumbles upon the correct tactic of running away with their regenerating creature then attacking again once it's bad at full health, it still cannot really use this ability properly, and it also cannot fight it - it won't try to engage the unit or corner it to prevent it from regaining health. So the hp regen ability is both human only AND unrecognizable for the AI, which is the very definition of unfairness and cheese.
Meanwhile the AI is well aware of the "revive after battle" effect - at least in the mod, let's not pretend the vanilla game had an AI - it actively tries to prevent it via using spells that have irrecoverable effects, and - even if it's not very good at it - tries to build all regeneration stacks by targeting the Regeneration spell where it finds the most already regenerating units. So I consider that fair game.
I also think the revive ability is the weaker one - it doesn't do anything to win your current battle, it only helps winning future battles by reducing your losses. Meanwhile, hp recovery actively increases your chance to win and does so in a way that doesn't otherwise exist in the system and shouldn't really exist - it allows you to have more total force in a stack than 9 units, without having to resort to overland buffing or using up combat casting skill. The units in question don't really have these extra hit points included in their own costs either - if you consider Great Lizard a 80 health creature (30 base +50 regenerated) then the cost of 200 to summon will look insanely cheap. (But we can't include them in the cost as they are situational - they only apply if the unit survives the initial, spell+ranged turns.)

I was able to implement variable regeneration and displaying the number on the unit ability.
Since I received no suggestions on the number of hp regenerated, I added these amounts which I will be using for the next test game :
Werewolves : 1
Shadow Demons : 2
Great Lizard : 2
Behemoth : 3
Hydra : 7
Troll Shaman : 3
War Trolls : 1
Other Troll units : 0

This effectively splits the health regen from the resurrection as "0" means the units can only revive. I'm still unsure on the numbers for trolls - I haven't used that race in years. It might be an excessive nerf to them.

[Bahgtru]

Trolls are terribad already so any nerf seems excessive. 3 for shamans? Are you sure? They are already the most useful troll unit to move around with your stack, best healer unit in the game.

I'd propose 1 for base units and shamans, 2 for halbs and 3 for war trolls.

[zitro1987]

Werewolves : 1
Shadow Demons : 1 or 2
Great Lizard : 2
Behemoth : 2 or 3
Hydra : 6-7 (strongest regen seems logical for hydra)
All Troll units : 1 (maybe add 1 armor or resistance point to compensate?)

[Nelphine]

I don't think behemoth should be that much less than hydra.

Werewolf 1
Shadow demon 0
Great lizard 2
Behemoth 4
Hydra 5
All trolls 1 except 
War troll 2
Regenerate spell: 3 (this could replace a units natural Regen)
Regenerate item 1