Death Realm balance

[Seravy]

I feel we need to discuss this realm because it likely has problems. Specific ones aside (werewolves), I'd like to discuss the global design behind the realm and where I feel it has problems.

Particularly, the early game. Death is one of the two "strong early" realms, but I believe it might go over the top at this.

Death has the following features :
-Free troops. Free as in no maintenance and no cost of production, you get them as a side effect for using certain spells or attacks. However, none of those spells and units really consider the value of this ability in their cost, and it completely bypasses a fairly global game rule, not creating permanent new troops in battle.
-Free casting skill. This is limited to two spells, Life Drain and Syphon Life, both of which are fairly balanced for damage vs cost, but also give you casting skill (AND undead creatures) for free. Drain Power doesn't belong here because casting it costs you overland skill so it's an investment. (a very good one in certain cases, but still an investment)
-Immunity to poison. You might think "no big deal", but poison is a dedicated early game ability, used as the main form of early game damage by three realms : Sorcery (Nagas), Nature (Giant Spiders) and Death itself (Ghouls). Out of these, the latter two have other options, but the former does not, and thus it's an autowin for the Death wizard.
-Immunity to Illusions. Sorcery is already in a bad position by Nagas not doing damage to Death units, but on top of that their phantoms and psionic blasts also don't work. Not that they'd be enough to really fix the problem.
-Immunity to Cold. Only Nature cares about this one and Fairy Dust isn't all that good to begin with, so I think we don't need to worry about this one.
-Immunity to Death. Like the other two realms hit hard by poison immunity, Death also get their share of a double slap in the face. However they are hit by far the hardest, being immune to all spells. While this is mutual, it means combat spells are mostly useless on both sides, aside from summon zombie, and eventually wars are decided by creature combat. As the human is always smarter at positioning their units both overland and in battle, this means Death vs Death is heavily in favor of the human, unless they neglected undead creation or the AI scored some very good undead units from lairs.

Either way, Death hard counters three realms in the early game, while also being very good against Chaos - massive hordes of undead don't really mind a few fire bolts and have immunity to shatter, as well as bypass Fire Elemental's Weapon Immunity. Chaos does have Wall of Fire and Gargoyles, so they aren't as bad as the other realms but it's still in favor of Death, heavily. (and chaos is especially weak in the early game overall)
So Life is about the only realm that isn't an automatic win for the Death wizard - but even they can be overwhelmed easily by numbers as they can't summon so they have the fewest units while the Death wizard has the most numerous. All it takes is Dispel Magic to make sure the buffs won't make their armies unbeatable, or pushing for Blood Lust to counter them anyway.

Overall, I'm pretty sure Death is massively imbalanced in the early game, although I haven't really thought about possible solutions yet.

The other topic is Death being unaffected by spells of other Death wizards. We postponed this discussion until the 5.44 version is released, so it's time to continue it. While this is bad by itself, the fact they are also immune to some other realms makes it even worse - while I had Sorcery books in my last game, even my Sorcery spells were of no use as Death units are immune to both. So we might need to do something about this, but we have to be very careful about it.

[zitro1987]

My thoughts (some radical):
*Ghouls to become more melee oriented than current version, making free units more difficult (or as difficult as with the other 2 spells that raise undead). This could mean removal of poison or most likely reduction in range damage to the point only focus magic or lower-resistance units (poison) can be raised from far.

Ghoul Example:
*80 cost /2 upkeep
*5 melee (+1)
*2 range (-1)
and either +1 on armor, hp, or movement.

Only with the considerable effort of focus magic + darkness you might be able to kill those tough advanced neutral creatures. However, on regular gameplay, you are relying mostly on the poison damage now, limiting effectiveness of free units to less balance-breaking targets (I seriously got 2 hydras in one game, though one was vertigo+black prayer+summon zombie)


I don't like the extreme number of counters death units have.
*I don't see why undead would be immune to illusions . . . especially if thinking of the traditional zombie ('oooh brains' and it's an illusion), making death too much of a counter against sorcery.
*I honestly can't comprehend why undead would be immune to cold - if you smack a unit with blizzard (wind), ice bolt (blunt trauma) … well maybe not the death-oriented cold spells … this could also go.
*Poison immunity is harder to justify removal on a logical sense, but one could argue it is balance-breaking. What if it is applied only to select units instead of all. We can make exceptions to units that could logically suffer poison damage, like werewolves, shadow demons, night stalker, death knights.
*Death Immunity makes death vs death highly boring, but I don't have suggestions.

[Nelphine]

Syphon life and life drain, to me, are fine and well balanced. They're generally too costly to use for undead creation without zombies and ghouls, and we've already tweaked them for skill power.

I think having a dozen units in the game with illusions immunity is great. Phantoms and illusion heroes are incredibly strong, and that helps a lot - you KNOW there are units you have to deal with using alternate means.

However, I'd be much happier if they were scattered across the realms. But this leads to the problem that since most realms only have a few units per rarity, you could easily completely shut illusion damage down entirely if you did it incorrectly. By keeping it all in one realm (almost), while it sucks when sorcery faces death, at least the sorcery player knows illusions WILL work against most opponents.
I think that's very important.
But in some ways, this is the same as dispels against life. Immunity to anything is simply too binary.

(Honestly, magic immunity is worse though. Every single thing you mention, magic immunity does, and more; playing a treasure hunting game with mono sorcery makes EVERYTHING obsolete.)

The same process holds for the other immunities. It sucks when you happen to fight death, but it would suck worse if they were spread across multiple realms, and the abilities (poison, cold, death, etc) are strong - it's nice to force people to use other abilities occasionally, so having a dozen units with those immunities is healthy for the game.

[jhsidi]

Is there some reason that immunities have to be outright, 100% immunities? Magic immunity is the obvious culprit, being so overpowered that it's pretty much "game over" when they player gets it. But the pile of immunities that death gets is definitely second worst. Why couldn't they be shields against magic damage, a la Resist Elements or Bless? As for the "why" on making a change,I don't think lore / "common sense" should be a factor. Poison, for instance, could be like snake venom or it could be like acid, eating away flesh. I imagine a Great Wyrm spitting gouts of incredibly corrosive acid. Currently, some derpy Zombie is a pretty good way to damage my Wyrm.

Overall I think Death is great, it's a lot of fun to try to strategically play to create undead. But... giving ghouls a ranged attack made their mechanic potentially overpowered, and when combined with Focus Magic it's definitely overpowered. E.g. as Death I can get a Chaos Spawn, very easily, 50 turns before an actual Chaos wizard can, with 3-4 Focus Magic ghouls plinking away. I won an entire game with undead Hydra and Behemoth units, which are actually far *more* powerful for Death than they are in their native realms, due to all the immunities. It's fun, but IMO it should take effort to get there, and something higher tier than a Common summon. Currently a stack of one Supply hero + 8 ghouls wins the game.

My idea of what a still fun version but less abusable version of the raise undead mechanic would be: the conversion can only happen on a melee killing blow or spell. Must be Life Drain, Siphon, or Zombie that deals the killing blow. But there would need to be a higher tier version of Zombie to enable conversion of higher tier creatures.

Alternate idea: spell conversion only. New spell, Claim Soul. Creature being "claimed" must have equal to or less than 3 HP left. This would make the mechanic more challenging (but still fun) in a few ways. One, no more raising a whole town of soldiers in five seconds of combat. Two, hard to pull off in a Node without Astrologer. Three, it gets much harder with high-tier creatures, since you're dealing more damage per hit and they have large HP pools. If the Hydra had 5 HP left, you'd have to find a way to knock off 2 to get it in the sweet spot.

[Nelphine]

I don't think that idea would be any better than wraiths and demon lords right now. Overkill is way too common, trying to get that sweet spot would just result in undead not bring created because why bother (as is the case with wraiths and demon lords).

[Sapher]

Currently a stack of one Supply hero + 8 ghouls wins the game.

On what difficulty?

[Nelphine]

Lunatic, although I don't normally use a hero, and instead use more stacks of ghouls.

[Sapher]

Lunatic, although I don't normally use a hero, and instead use more stacks of ghouls.

That is some sort of a challange: win by using only spearmen and such? I guess it is possible. I just dont see why it is the best play. Although i am yet to see your game.

[Nelphine]

No no, you summon stacks of ghouls because of auto undead creation. Then you go lair hunting and get things like chaos spawn and hydra (even angels), before, oh, 1407 (experts can do it much faster than me).

Then you use those undead units to kill anything you want because the AI can't fight rares and very rares that early (especially with undead immunities).

So your main force is undead you created from lairs, and that crushes fortresses, and the ghouls are still plenty strong to capture all the other cities. And because of auto undead creation, every unit, in every city you capture with ghouls, becomes undead, so you never stop because every city had 7-9 units in it, so that means every city has a garrison of 7-9 units created for it as soon as you capture it.

So building werewolves, shadow demons, even wraiths, is literally worse than just summoning ghouls, because why waste time on research when you can just undead create uncommons, rares, or even very rares? So you don't bother with more than 2 death books (you'll get wraithform, darkness, and black prayer from all the treasure hunting you do), so all the extra picks you'd normally spend on books for higher rarity spells, you instead spend on buffing your ghouls.

So if you expect 8 books to be standard for mono death, that means you have 6 picks free to buff ghouls - tactician, conjuror, 2 sorcery and either 2 nature or 2 life. Of course, you still have 4 more picks, so you take the other 2 of either nature (resist elements) or life (bless or endurance), you still have 2 more books, so you could take 1 more death to get wraithform ships, and then 1 more life for the other common buff spell, or 1 more sorcery for resist magic or blur, or really whatever else you want to throw in.

It's a 2 book 'mono' death, auto win strategy.

[jhsidi]

I don't enjoy anything above Expert or Master usually. But yes, Ghouls do very well in those games. It's not like the lairs are any harder, and I usually avoid wizards who can do serious damage to the ghouls (or bring a healer).