Yeah even though summons are relatively weaker in EitB with wraiths losing affinity and high base strength units being easy to get, 4x is still too much
What about giving all puppets the illusionist promotion instead of further reducing the anount of summons?
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Merovech Wrote:What about giving all puppets the illusionist promotion instead of further reducing the anount of summons?
Stronger on the defense, weaker on the offense, but if you're generating 4x summons, you don't care if only 1/4 of those can kill. You just open with the illusions. Even better, if your illusion wins its defensive battle, it goes back to full health.
The downside is that it opens up an Empyrean play that can still only kill n-summons per turn sans Revelation (and puppet spam gets going pre-mage pre-priest).
It's not clear to me that it changes the power level effectively to make puppets summon illusions.
Okay, reasonable, I forgot illusions heal on defense. I think if you do reduce the number of summons, you should give Keeyln some other small bonus. It seems to me like she is a one trick pony, nerfing that trick nerfs her big. I'm just throwing out ideas here, but what about removing the extra turn from the summoner trait and adding a free summoner promotion for all arcane and disciple units, as opposed to all arcane units only, and maybe adding half price alchemy labs and obsidian gates?
Edited because of incorrect information.
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Quote:Okay, reasonable, I forgot illusions heal on defense. I think if you do reduce the number of summons, you should give Keeyln some other small bonus. It seems to me like she is a one trick pony, nerfing that trick nerfs her big. I'm just throwing out ideas here, but what about removing the extra turn from the summoner trait and adding a free summoner promotion for all arcane and disciple units, as opposed to all arcane units only, and maybe adding half price alchemy labs and obsidian gates?
With puppets not getting a duration bonus on summons, Keelyn still gets more summons than a regular summoner. 2, and 2 puppets to draw assassin fire. She can also effectively double up her number of mages for every other spell in the game. Keelyn would still be a powerful and versatile arcane leader with a hell of a draw. She just wouldn't be ridiculously powerful.
Hi. I know this mod is more for balancing the competitive game, but it has improved the SP and so, even though I totally lack the skill to play multi player there's one thing that always bugs me:
Auric Ascended is pathetically weak considering a) he's a God and b) the process of getting him is ridiculous.
Anyway, I had a few ideas to bounce around.
a) Summoning Auric makes a 'hell terrain snow' emanating from the city he was summoned. So a counter sets up on each tile, turns tile to snow (overwriting hell terrain cos y'know, he's a God) and destroys any improvements. Possibly, it should overwrite sea with snow/ice too. Defeating Auric would then halt the spread of snow on the map. This turns Auric into simultaneously an 'I win' button, somewhat Godlike power and makes an interesting end game with a possible last ditch effort. Also, this should cost less in hammers and research than a Tower Victory.
However, I appreciate that this could be hard to code or make the game too resource intensive. An alternative to this is an 'end of winter' effect in reverse; each tile has a random chance of becoming colder.
b) The Illians could perhaps lose the 'Tower of Mastery' victory and get Auric as their unique win condition. I haven't looked at how the hammers line up, but if say, the total process of summoning Auric cost a bit less hammers, but kept the lose pop and declare war on everyone thing, and had the techs lined up with things the Illians could use anyway, it could be interesting. A variation of this and a) could simply be, when Auric is summoned (and survives), after a set number of turns based on game speed, the Illians win.
c) Auric gets cannibalise &/or blitz.
d) Snowfall increases radius, destroys improvements and snow is permanent.
e) A combination of the above.
I understand the Illians generally aren't used here (Although I'm not sure if it's because of Statis or Priest rush or both) so I guess they'd need heavy fixing anyway, but that's just my two cents.
EDITEDIT: My new favourite idea. Another thing Auric can do that makes sense: permanent Statis. While he is alive, everything for all other civs stop. This means:
1) You could change the Illian world spell from Statis, while preserving flavour and the idea, which is more fun. (Perhaps something that slows others players instead of stops? Perhaps The Deepening becomes World Spell instead of ritual?)
2) Auric is a win condition, but is beatable with a hell of a dogpile.
3) This could be a variation of b). So instead of Tower of Mastery victory for Illians, for less investment, they can essentially put a halt to every other player in the game.
Selrahc Wrote:Never use Auric for direct combat. His power is to wipe away armies, not punch people. In that vein, I think he basically already is a win button.
I'd not really be opposed to seeing him buffed up a bit, but I would definitely contest the idea that he is pathetically weak.
He's not pathetically weak as a unit. But considering the investment you go through, the way it's set up is that
a) If you can go through all the hassle to summon him, you have essentially won anyway.
b) As an Avatar, he defends the stack. Which essentially, is a 'kill me now' promotion. I understand if you play him carefully, he can do lots of damage, but he's meant to be a God, not a powerful glass cannon.
c) As he doesn't get promotions, he is relatively easily dispatched by any promoted Dragon, or highly promoted heroes with ice/magic immunity. That's not particularly God like.
d) His snowfall causes temporary ice - that's a bit lame.
Sure, he's a decent unit. But not for the effort you put in.
It just seems that the way he's implemented, to me anyway, he should be a replacement for Tower of Mastery. Which is why I think he should be a cheaper and easier but fallible win condition in a more literal sense.
Of course, I'm a massive noob at FFH, I just would like to see a PBEM where 1) Illians are used and 2) The actual point of the Civ is a viable strategy. I guess it's a bit similar to the Sheaim, but I think more pronounced in the Illians.
TBH, I just really, really like my Statis-Auric idea.
Think of Auric as being extremely powerful mobile artillery.
60 Strength seems pretty Godlike to me, it's just a terrible idea to risk him in direct combat because it only takes a few highly-promoted T4 units to kill him, or a Godslayer anything, or even if he only gets wounded, he takes a long time to heal (which makes sense, the lore describes Succuleus as taking forever to recover from his injuries).
Okay, no more Keeyln suggestions for now because Selrahc makes a good arguement, though I think she becomes a noticible bit worse than Perpentarch if you just remove the puppet spam (maybe he is overpowered too?), but one thing I would really like to se is The Cult of the Dragon back similarily to how it was i vanilla ffh, though probably removing or reducing the units change sides thing and making Drifta cause it too. It came into play so rarely, especially for the AI, but it was so muh fun.
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
