Sleep and zombies, or zombies in general

[Bahgtru]

Werewolves are designed to be one of the strongest early game units. They beat everything else common and uncommon on damage and hit points.

All they have is bad resistance. 

So no, they aren't the same as hell hounds, or any other unit. Werewolves are designed to beat those units. If your ghouls raise those hell hounds, the ai werewolf still beats them.

And the undead hellhounds can still be killed by the chaos wizard. Hell hounds can be killed by fire bolt. Werewolves can't - they have too many hit points.

And this is how strategic strength is calculated, isn't it? Won't a WW using AI steamroll the others? And in the hands of the human this kind of unbalance will make the game too easy. Back to the drawing board?...

It seems to me that you guys have introduced a super strong unit, with a specific weakness, and then removed most of the possible drawbacks from using this unit. I don't know, maybe I'll be wrong but the entire discussion seems to have gone in circles, without much of a result. I guess I'll do some tests using WWs and report the findings - I'm the first one to be sick of all this theorycrafting. Well, glad that I could help with the spell priorities.

Good idea but as you can see they already prioritize picking it for research against everything, assuming they had the wolves. The weak link is providing the RP to finish the research and casting the spell enough times, both of which we can't and/or don't want to modify.

Isn't that exactly what the AI bonus is there for?

[Bahgtru]

Can AIs create undead from death immune units?

[Seravy]

No, they can't if you mean by strategic combat.

[Nelphine]

I may have missed it, but I didn't see a response to my post number 57, http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...#pid692917

[Bahgtru]

Wait, I got this. The solution is super simple.


- you're worried about AIs WWs
- I'd like to be able to raise them, not necessarily from AIs for the fun factor.

New ability: death minded: unitcan't be raised as undead when it dies under the control of a wizard.
Give it to the Ww, instead of DI - which is there only to prevent this. And it could be useful in other cases.

[Seravy]

Yeah I didn't see that one.
Short answer : We don't have that sort of free space in strategic combat. At least I think we don't, been a while. But the existing undead making code is really crammed into several tiny places, I wouldn't do that if I had a larger space still free.

No, more death books don't increase how much of your casting skill goes into death; instead, non death books reduce how much of your casting skill goes into death.

Yeah but that's about the same thing. The number of picks is constant, the amount of nonbook picks available is very limited (max 4 retorts but the average they'll roll is closer to 2.), death books generally take away from their ability to pick nondeath books and vica versa. Basically the AI picks between 8 and 12 books, a deviation of only +/-2 books from what was assumed (10 books = 0-10 death rest nondeath). That's not large enough to be worth a more sophisticated formula, even if we could have one.

Wizard B has 4 death books and no other books.

And this is where you go wrong. That's not a legal AI wizard. It's extremely unlikely even for a human and would require picking 4 cost 2 retorts.


By the way I did try to design a system back when we still had more space, where each spell had its own rating on how much they contribute to spellcasting, but I failed. I realized halfway that this much detail would not only fail to increase accuracy but would even reduce it as it doesn't account for spell redundancy.
Same for your formula - A player only really needs one undead creation spell to be able to spend all their MP on it, and most of them are generic enough to work on anything. The additional spells would not affect this, or would not increase efficiency by a full 100% for each one.

And I think it should be halved overall. Except AI suck at getting undead out of tactical; in late game this doesn't matter (humans also have the problem of having a hard time getting undead in late game), but in early game it does matter. So I want to artificially increase their early game strategic undead by simply leaving it where it is right now to account for that. And it happens that create undead is an early game ability. I'm not suggesting making them different because it isn't working correctly, I'm suggesting it because the broken formula right now, actually works very well for balancing out the early game tactical problems a death AI has. (And in early game, the casting skill doesn't matter much, so the change I'm suggesting for casting skill won't impact early game anyway.)

So early game is fine and late game... you want it nerfed because the human options aren't that great? We've already addressed this, the human has a worse mechanic in the late game, but the effect is more beneficial to them through targeting a different set of players - stealing from enemies vs stealing from neutrals and potential friends. That's making it fair. (Yes, this does make Death AIs snowball better if you let them cannibalize another AI. Meanwhile their curses reducing the population in the targeted cities and slowing the production so there are fewer buildings to conquer make it worse for them. I think that keeps it overall fair too. Chaos gets the short end of the stick as they only destroy, but their late game is so powerful it doesn't matter. A late game chaos AI still expanding is bad enough as is.)

[Seravy]

Wait, I got this. The solution is super simple.


- you're worried about AIs WWs
- I'd like to be able to raise them, not necessarily from AIs for the fun factor.

New ability: death minded: unitcan't be raised as undead when it dies under the control of a wizard.
Give it to the Ww, instead of DI - which is there only to prevent this. And it could be useful in other cases.

Hey, that was my suggestion, Undeath Immunity, and it was rejected by everyone! (even you, or not? I don't remember but it doesn't really matter anyway I guess.)

We're really going in circles omg.

(yes, I see yours allows lairs but that really is the only difference...)

I think we should both start a new game and stay away from the forum for a day or two :D

Life nomads are waiting for me... (I suggest using casterMX.zip for testing, that one is the latest experimental update)

[Bahgtru]

Not a little difference. Unless you care about AIs more than humans ;-p

I have had an illumination: "Reverts to form"

WWs go back to their original form when killed. (If that's impossible just use a swordsman of race of the closest city of that ai, that's going to be 99% right anyway). Wild werewolves were born that way and are raised as such.

Functionally it's what you proposed, but has lots of flavor and allows fun at least with the few neutrals.

[Bahgtru]

And it solves the annoyance of getting few or no undead when fighting a death ai.... It's perfect!

[Seravy]

I don't think affecting wolves in lairs or wizards was the basis for rejecting the idea so it is not a relevant difference anyway. The point is, it's an already rejected idea so we are wasting time.