Sleep and zombies, or zombies in general

[Seravy]

Creating undead is NOT the effect of black sleep and taking it away doesn't affect the spell's intended use or any of the calculations we did when balancing it. We never considered that size effect when designing the spell's costs and modifiers.

Either way, since I finally figured out we are not losing anything at all by keeping this combo disabled, you'd need to convince me that enabling it does contribute something valuable before I'll be willing to consider doing that.

Meanwhile, something else : while raising undead fantastic unit maintenance wasn't accepted as a means to fix the werewolf problem or sleep problem, we might want to consider doing it in general. Assuming we consider fantastic undead creatures as a too powerful game mechanic in general, I don't remember if we did, or it was just the two regenerating things. But since those normally cost you overland casting skill, and as undead you get the same thing without spending any, there is a valid argument for doing it.

[Nelphine]

Depends on your goal for undead creation abilities. If for instance, ghouls cost as much as they do because they can create undead, then that already accounts for the maintenance of their targets. If undead is 'free' when balancing the ability that actually creates the undead, then higher maintenance would be warranted.

[Bahgtru]

Either way, since I finally figured out we are not losing anything at all by keeping this combo disabled, you'd need to convince me that enabling it does contribute something valuable before I'll be willing to consider doing that.

Yes. How cool would it be to write in the patch notes (advertising in the larger forum here, maybe): tought to the AI to use the black sleep+zombie combo? I'd love to see it used against me. It would be a nice little but meaningful change.

Black sleep doesn't do undead? That combo has been there forever, just because you didn't use it doesn't mean that the others didn't. It's not a major contributor but it's there and it has its part in the game. What does black sleep do that were-wolves couldn't? With this, it basically becomes the anti-cockatrices spell only. Ah, and anti-triremes. In any other case you don't actually need it. It's a major nerf, that you admit it or not...

Why remove little things like this when they can be fixed rather easily instead?

[Seravy]

I'd say undead are currently free on zombies, Life Drain and Syphon Life - zombies are a fairly good summon for their cost, as they have hp and figures equal to an elite halberdier, and their attack power also falls between swordsmen and halberdiers. And that's without them gaining a bonus from Darkness which you will often have in your battles. Life Drain and Syphon Life are balanced around their damage dealing ability and tier while the rest are extras.
On ghouls, making undead is their only real function so their cost includes it, maybe. Kinda unsure though considering they have more than 3 times the health of a sprites unit and their capacity to deal damage is about the same. Ghouls wouldn't be a good unit without undead creation but they wouldn't be that far below what you can expect from a 88 cost common. Basically you trade the flight on sprites for extra hp and poison.
So I guess we can say it's also free on ghouls, especially considering ghouls themselves have low maintenance - other similar units would cost 2.

So I guess that means higher maintenance is justified, question is, do we want it and how much. I already feel the maintenance on raised nagas and sprites is a burden, but probably because I don't really need the units and got them as extras, in larger quantities than I have use for. (I had to use Life Drain to kill the flying sprites, for example, so I end up with 8-10 of them scattered around the map doing nothing.)
I'd say if they cost 4 a turn I might end up disbanding them (or throw them at an enemy so they waste their mana killing them) instead of using them for garrison, even if they were free. At 3 mana I might keep some, but likely not more than 2-3 in a city (even that eats the whole magic market and shrine, but at least the place is defended). At the current 2 mana I keep everything even if that might not be the best play.
However having alchemy makes a big difference - if I can have the marketplace pay for them and still get my power from the buildings anyway, then I'd probably even pay the 4 for the better units (and hope the city gets attacked ASAP and they die anyway in a useful way).

In a generic sense the higher we set the maintenance the less it'll be viable to hold on to the gained units, and the more important it'll be to send them into fights where they die (or win and earn their cost back). So basically the decision is this :

"Do we want the human player to be able to garrision their cities with raised undead fantastic creatures?"

If yes, keep the maintenance, if no, raise it. (The AI will be unaffected mostly, they don't pay that much maintenance anyway, and their undead units will not end up guarding cities 99% of the time - although they'll remain idle on nodes or anywhere during peace.)

[Nelphine]

If you're removing the major sources of gaining fantastic units (djinn with magic immunity, hydra with increased regen, chaos spawn with death immunity, , black sleep + zombie later in the game), then most of the undead fantastic units you'll create will be relatively wimpy. Which means, they won't be able to go and win, and they won't make good garrisons. Giving them high maintenance will just penalize the human for doing it. I think it's a bad idea given the other changes being made.

I'm still unhappy with the whole discussion. The AI follows completely different rules - obtaining wraiths supported by undead angels is relatively easy for the AI to manage (using wraiths!!!!), while the human has to do a lot of tricks to get even basic undead units, and could absolutely never get undead angels using wraiths. The problem is that those tricks allow commons to kill rares and very rares. The whole trend of this discussion has to simply been ban undead creation for humans, instead of trying to solve the underlying problem of common vs rare/very rare. AI will still get their rare undead by using rare creatures; but the human generally doesn't actually get the opportunity to make undead rare units once the rare stage of the game has actually been reached.

So we're going to end up with a game where AI undead creation is what we WANT, but the human can't actually do it.

I'd like to see death units/spells that create undead cost extra (say 10%), but for every 10 units/spells that create undead that the human uses successfully, they get a single undead unit out of it, assuming the target is the same tier as the unit/spell that's used. Increase or decrease how many units/spells must be used in order to get one undead unit if the target is a different tier than the unit/spell that's used.

And since that's somewhat too random for you, then in addition, make a spell that's actually specifically for creating undead, that's expensive. It could be a slider spell, overland, and it just creates an undead of any summon that is known to any wizard (alive or banished or defeated) that costs less than 80% of the slider cost of the spell.

[Seravy]

Black sleep doesn't do undead? That combo has been there forever, just because you didn't use it doesn't mean that the others didn't. It's not a major contributor but it's there and it has its part in the game. What does black sleep do that were-wolves couldn't? With this, it basically becomes the anti-cockatrices spell only. Ah, and anti-triremes. In any other case you don't actually need it. It's a major nerf, that you admit it or not...

Why remove little things like this when they can be fixed rather easily instead?

I used black sleep+zombies a lot, probably more than life drain and syphon life combined.

Did you even read my post? Prove me sleep+undead fills a relevant role in the game that's not redundant with existing spells, and at the case where it is not redundant, it's also not too powerful. If you can't prove there is a merit to having that combo, there is no point discussing further.

Also if you think it's easy, go ahead and code the "auto holds back normal units and lets zombies do it" feature. But don't try to make me do the work for something that isn't meaningful to have.

...anyway, if you want to argue Black Sleep, "save at -2 or pretty much die" is underpowered as is, for only 15 MP, you can try but it'll be a difficult thing to do to be honest. But hey, if you manage to do it, I'll buff the spell. Not by restoring making undead though - for that you instead have to prove doing so improves the game - but by raising the save modifier.

[Bahgtru]

Eh, don't let this aggravate you. It's just that it's sad to lose options, even a non-efficient one, but sometimes the random rolls of the spellbook don't give you the other options or give them too late to matter. So removing it, you remove some chance at raising. But raising undead is fun, and that improves the game, IMHO. If these options are OP we could balance them in other ways instead. Personally, I don't choose either of the two spells at start time, but I consider it a nice and fun change when I happen to get the two spells. Maybe this shows to you why I am arguing. Anyway, if you really don't like the zombies doing that - why don't you limit the sleep nerf to zombies?

For the auto: I would love to try being able to say that we thought the AI to use that trick would be a good reason for a lot of smugness! And you know that I've helped when I could - debugging, the spell rarities... But I can't understand ASM, so you'll need to write some hints of the procedure in pseudocode - to know where to start - and I'll really try to help. You've done things that seemed completely impossible so it's difficult to judge on difficulties.

[Seravy]

Because the undead damage isn't keeping track of where it came from.

Fortunately all the spells involved are commons - if you are actually playing heavy death where undead creation is the theme, you can't possibly miss them. Playing 2-3 books is a different story but that doesn't deserve the additional chance anyway. At 6 (or 7?) books you have every common, and even if you have fewer books (which you can't really do playing mono-Death due to the 4 retort limit), as long as you are mono-death, the common spells in treasure will automatically fill the holes, even if you never trade - they can't be anything else but those 2-3 spells you missed. Of course if you play multiple realms, that's a different story, then you have to pick the spells, but that's the price for playing more realms, you are weaker in each of them individually.

[Nelphine]

Did you happen to see my last post, re: maintenance cost? About 4 up

[Seravy]

No, I seem to have missed it somehow.

There is no common vs very rare problem, see zitro's post...somewhere in the werewolf thread. I think spell tiers scale up reasonably well between tiers. He explained perfectly why, probably better than I could. You're trying to fix something that's already working exactly how you want - you're just biased towards ghouls and fail to realize higher tiers spells do work better. (or you have completely different definitions of what's a good undead making ability, in that case I can't help it. )

Either way I try to summarize :

Common
Ghouls - These have a hard time damaging anything better than uncommon, are very fragile, can't heal themselves. You need a large number of them to convert anything meaningful whatsoever. They are slow and not very cost efficient.
Zombies - With black sleep out of picture, these can mostly convert a limited quantity of common tier units (generally 2-3 per zombie) and can only convert uncommons with help or by summoning multiples, while rares and better are usually beyond  their reach unless you can support them with very high tier buffs.
Life Drain - Offers much more presence, cost effectiveness and versatility than ghouls, but doesn't work on anything with high resistance and health so works pretty much up to uncommon targets.

Uncommon
Syphon Life - Stronger spell that can convert almost anything if you can afford the casting skill, which scales well with the tier of the target. A clear upgrade to Life Drain. (Especially now with buffs)
Black Prayer - Upgrades the effectiveness of your Ghouls a lot more than Darkness, can upgrade the effectiveness of zombies, Life Drain and Syphon Life.

Rare
Wraiths - A strong creature that heals itself, and while it can still only create lesser undead, it's extremely efficient at doing that and isn't vulnerable due to self-healing. More cost effective than ghouls as well - a Single one of these can do the job of a 9 ghoul stack. A clear upgrade to ghouls.
Zombie Mastery - You get undead from all enemy units, without having to use spells to do so. (yes, most will be zombies, but you aren't paying to make them. That's a huge upgrade to anything that creates lesser undead in the previous tier, while yes, it isn't helping to create greater undead as much. But a zombie is at least as good as a halberdier so half the enemy army is still worth converting to them instead of raising otherwise.)

Very Rare
Demon - Each of these can cast Syphon Life once, allowing you to easily spam enough of it to convert even some of the very rares using a stack of these, a better upgrade to ghouls than Wraiths with no side effect of dealing high melee damage (since they'll be casting). Unfortunately, the combat summoned version has a 50% chance to be a Death Demon - while their Life Steal still helps converting units, their Death Touch prevents that. If we consider undead making a priority, removing the Death Touch can be a way to go. (but considering their name is Death Demon, that would be a bit sad)
Death Knights - Marginally better at making undead than Wraiths but this unit has a reasonable chance of scoring a few rares for you, and is much stronger in all other aspects - a clear upgrade to Wraiths albeit the upgrade in undead making specifically isn't that large.
Eternal Night - upgrades all your undead making spells quite a lot.
Demon Lord - Summons 3 demons in battle so casts even more Syphon Life to convert things. Unfortunately not all Demons will be caster types, so not as great as Demons themselves at it, but you get a unit that ensures you'll be the winner of the battle at the end which Demons don't do, so it's a good alternative.
Evil Omens - reduces enemy capacity to cast combat spells, reducing the opportunity cost of having to stay engaged long enough to convert higher tier targets significantly.