You might have noticed this update has disabled the zombie+black sleep combo. This is a temporal solution until we manage to come up with something better (or decide this is the correct solution afterall).
I believe this discussion is worth its own thread.
I'll try to summarize. So the problem is, black sleep is an effective save or die spell with the drawback of the target not actually dying until you attack it with a unit. Zombies are a weak combat summon that can raise things they kill as undead. But combine the two and you get an effective "save or get raised as undead" spell where the drawback of black sleep turns into an advantage.
So basically...
1.The cost of producing a unit this way is tremendously lower than producing it normally. A 120 hammer unit would cost you 240 gold to buy, which, if you have alchemy, costs 240 mana. Making an enemy sleep then summoning a zombie costs about 60 if sleep chance is low (30-40%), but only 30-40 if the chance is high. Even considering distance modifiers, the average cost of these units is about half of normal, or less.
Okay that's not as bad as I thought. At least until the target is a summon - you can't buy those for money and to grow your casting skill to summon more, you need to spend non-linearly, while raised creatures have a linear cost in MP instead.
2.Sleep isn't the only culprit, there are dozen ways to make the enemy unit weaker or your zombie stronger to beat them. So disabling only that one might not be the best solution.
However, Sleep is by far the most powerful, and cost effective. While other methods work, they either only work on low value targets that aren't a threat to balance, or the cost is too high to be a major problem. I mean ok, my high prayer zombies can convert even groups of paladins, but high prayer costs 70 plus distance modifier.
3. Werewolves, now, are a particularly bad case of this problem - they have low resistance (which I can't and don't want to raise) and no longer have death immunity, so they are extra easy to convert - but they are also a unit the AI spams early, and one the AI spamming it is actually weak against if turned to undead (giving them Death Immunity), plus it regenerates, ensuring the advantage to stay and snowball as you can reuse all the stolen wolves in every battle.
4. I generally like combos that require using some brainpower...
...but this one isn't rocket science to be honest so not sure there is merit here.
5. The combo is annoying to use. You have to manually move your zombie at one tile/turn while you hit done on all other units, plus you might need to waste turns waiting for the opponent to run out of casting power (which might kill the zombie).
6. It promotes bad play. Using a full stack of 9 is usually the correct tactic to maximize your chances, but to summon a zombie you need a slot so you either need to use 8, or be absolutely sure the enemy will manage to kill something (in fact you might end up letting a unit die on purpose just to have room). It also promotes being lazy - as making undead with zombies is extremely tedious, you might prefer to skip doing it which actually hides the full power of the problem as there is a lot of untapped potential remaining for more advantage (more undead units).
7. It's a human only tactic. Let's face it, the AI can't do this, although they do get some undead to simulate using combat magic to make undead, it's a more balanced quantity, and doesn't work in battles against the human.
And these are some already discussed solutions :
A. More resistance on werewolves. We can't do this one because we actually balanced werewolves around the fact they have low resistance. This is not an option (and would require a too large increase anyway).
B. Nerf Black Sleep save modifier. Again not an option, the spell is good as is, and changing an already balanced and good spell for an uninteded interaction is a bad move. (Note how zombies can be a problem even without sleep, too)
C. Zombies losing "create undead". This is more viable but honestly I think it would be a major loss to the realm, and would leave the realm with too few options on making undead overall. Especially so as Ghouls are still untested and might need a nerf. So I'm against this one.
D. Zombies becoming an overland summon.
That means you are paying overland skill for them, bring them to combat, and they have to survive the battle to turn anything undead. That balances it much better. However, losing the ability to summon them in combat isn't acceptable - it's the main AI invisibility counter, and the only combat summon for Death before very rare, and one of the few spells Death can use against other Death wizards (albeit they are much less effective now as Weakness can disable them). Which brings us to :
E. Zombies becoming an overland or combat summon, where only the overland version has Create Undead.
Basically a similar hack as Demons, Centaurs, etc - if summoned in combat, change the ability on the unit.
This might work, but it's a solution that effectively turns zombies into much inferior Ghouls as an overland spell - which has no use, summoning Ghouls will always be better - while taking away the combat undead creation, ultimately meaning the realm still loses one common source of making undead.
Furthermore, I most definitely don't want to do this until Ghouls have been tested - if they prove too powerful, overland zombies would have the same problem.
F. G. H. ...your ideas here?
Anything I missed?
I believe this discussion is worth its own thread.
I'll try to summarize. So the problem is, black sleep is an effective save or die spell with the drawback of the target not actually dying until you attack it with a unit. Zombies are a weak combat summon that can raise things they kill as undead. But combine the two and you get an effective "save or get raised as undead" spell where the drawback of black sleep turns into an advantage.
So basically...
1.The cost of producing a unit this way is tremendously lower than producing it normally. A 120 hammer unit would cost you 240 gold to buy, which, if you have alchemy, costs 240 mana. Making an enemy sleep then summoning a zombie costs about 60 if sleep chance is low (30-40%), but only 30-40 if the chance is high. Even considering distance modifiers, the average cost of these units is about half of normal, or less.
Okay that's not as bad as I thought. At least until the target is a summon - you can't buy those for money and to grow your casting skill to summon more, you need to spend non-linearly, while raised creatures have a linear cost in MP instead.
2.Sleep isn't the only culprit, there are dozen ways to make the enemy unit weaker or your zombie stronger to beat them. So disabling only that one might not be the best solution.
However, Sleep is by far the most powerful, and cost effective. While other methods work, they either only work on low value targets that aren't a threat to balance, or the cost is too high to be a major problem. I mean ok, my high prayer zombies can convert even groups of paladins, but high prayer costs 70 plus distance modifier.
3. Werewolves, now, are a particularly bad case of this problem - they have low resistance (which I can't and don't want to raise) and no longer have death immunity, so they are extra easy to convert - but they are also a unit the AI spams early, and one the AI spamming it is actually weak against if turned to undead (giving them Death Immunity), plus it regenerates, ensuring the advantage to stay and snowball as you can reuse all the stolen wolves in every battle.
4. I generally like combos that require using some brainpower...
...but this one isn't rocket science to be honest so not sure there is merit here.
5. The combo is annoying to use. You have to manually move your zombie at one tile/turn while you hit done on all other units, plus you might need to waste turns waiting for the opponent to run out of casting power (which might kill the zombie).
6. It promotes bad play. Using a full stack of 9 is usually the correct tactic to maximize your chances, but to summon a zombie you need a slot so you either need to use 8, or be absolutely sure the enemy will manage to kill something (in fact you might end up letting a unit die on purpose just to have room). It also promotes being lazy - as making undead with zombies is extremely tedious, you might prefer to skip doing it which actually hides the full power of the problem as there is a lot of untapped potential remaining for more advantage (more undead units).
7. It's a human only tactic. Let's face it, the AI can't do this, although they do get some undead to simulate using combat magic to make undead, it's a more balanced quantity, and doesn't work in battles against the human.
And these are some already discussed solutions :
A. More resistance on werewolves. We can't do this one because we actually balanced werewolves around the fact they have low resistance. This is not an option (and would require a too large increase anyway).
B. Nerf Black Sleep save modifier. Again not an option, the spell is good as is, and changing an already balanced and good spell for an uninteded interaction is a bad move. (Note how zombies can be a problem even without sleep, too)
C. Zombies losing "create undead". This is more viable but honestly I think it would be a major loss to the realm, and would leave the realm with too few options on making undead overall. Especially so as Ghouls are still untested and might need a nerf. So I'm against this one.
D. Zombies becoming an overland summon.
That means you are paying overland skill for them, bring them to combat, and they have to survive the battle to turn anything undead. That balances it much better. However, losing the ability to summon them in combat isn't acceptable - it's the main AI invisibility counter, and the only combat summon for Death before very rare, and one of the few spells Death can use against other Death wizards (albeit they are much less effective now as Weakness can disable them). Which brings us to :
E. Zombies becoming an overland or combat summon, where only the overland version has Create Undead.
Basically a similar hack as Demons, Centaurs, etc - if summoned in combat, change the ability on the unit.
This might work, but it's a solution that effectively turns zombies into much inferior Ghouls as an overland spell - which has no use, summoning Ghouls will always be better - while taking away the combat undead creation, ultimately meaning the realm still loses one common source of making undead.
Furthermore, I most definitely don't want to do this until Ghouls have been tested - if they prove too powerful, overland zombies would have the same problem.
F. G. H. ...your ideas here?
Anything I missed?
