Sleep and zombies, or zombies in general

[Nelphine]

I completely disagree.

Anything past werewolves and shadow demons is completely vulnerable to enemy damage. I've played rush death up to death knights and demon lords, getting (in different games) both before the enemy got rares.

Neither of them converts nearly as many enemy units (against uncommons and city troops!) as ghouls. They simply do too much non life steal damage. Both still take too much damage too fast from enemy spellcasting, so I have to focus on keeping them alive, which means killing the enemy quickly, not on making undead.

Enemies get into rare, and it just exacerbates the problem - your units are too fragile as death, you can't afford to spend dozens of combat turns doing nothing but spamming life drain or syphon life.

The only time you can do this is when you're using cheap units (like ghouls and undead) or regenerating units.

But even then, if you're going to win the battle anyway, why would I want to sit around spamming life drain/syphon life, when my units could just win the battle? 

I don't want to waste my time artificially extending the real time of the battle by minutes, every battle, and spending hundreds of mana. That is absurdly unfun when I've already won the battle anyway.

[Seravy]

Okay, so you are saying late game undead creation isn't possible to do because you can't afford the opportunity cost of letting enemies cast spells.
That's unfortunate but has nothing to do with what the spells in the Death realm do and how they scale.
If you deal so much damage to also allow you to end the battle quickly, you are essentially asking for spells that are equally good or better than existing spells of that tier at dealing damage, but also make undead on top of that. It's an absurd and impossible demand, spells like that would break the game - such high damage output would be able to kill even very rares with ease.

Strong units are valuable, so their cost of converting must be high. So you can't be allowed to deal too much undead damage to them in one move, otherwise the cost of convertsion would be too cheap, or the spell would need to have an absurd cost not reasonable for its tier.

Not to mention, the opportunity cost (enemies casting spells at you), is what makes raising better than common fantastic units even realistic - raw MP can't compete with the price of overland casting skill in this phase of the game anymore, where a single point of casting skill can cost 4-600 SP and the raised creatures cost 2-500 overland skill to summon.

Basically you want to have the effect, without paying the cost, it does not work that way. I'm really surprised you don't see this.

[Nelphine]

No.

Right now:
Ghouls fight commons or early-mid city troops. If they win, everything comes back as undead.
Zombies fight commons or early city troops. If they win, everything comes back as undead.
Life drain can (reasonably) kill commons or early-mid city troops; if it does so, they come back as undead.

All of the above, under more difficult circumstances, can kill uncommons or mid-late city troops. If they do, they come back as undead.

Syphon life can (reasonably) kill uncommons and mid-lateish city troops. If it does so, they come back as undead.

In difficult circumstances, it can kill rares, and if it does, they come back as undead.

Up to here (uncommon tier, which you can rush by 1402), the core theme of undead creation holds.

Then we get to rare (so all the later portion of the game):

Wraiths decimate commons and early city troops. But when they do.. they rarely come back as undead.
They can easily kill uncommons and mid-lateish city troops. If they do, they usually come back as undead.
They can reasonably kill rares. But if they do.. they rarely come back as undead.

Death knights and demon lords decimate uncommons and mid-lateish city troops. But when they do, they rarely come back as undead.
They can easily kill rares. But when they do, they only sometimes comeback as undead.
They can reasonably kill very rares. But when they do, they rarely come back as undead.


Why are the first 4 so wildly different than the last 3? That core theme is LOST.


I want to change the paradigm of undead creation. I want it to be more similar to strategic combat - if you have undead creation, it doesn't matter the specifics of what you hurt or how you hurt it, you just get something at the end of the battle based on how much undead creation you had/used.

Lets say we make it so that if you have 9 common undead creation things, you get 1 undead back if all the targets are common. or you use 9 very rare undead creation things, you get 1 undead back if the targets are all very rare. Great. Now we know that's how it will work, so we make sure to add 1/9 the cost to those undead creation things. We do NOT make undead creation a free extra, that therefore has to be extremely limited, because otherwise cost-efficiency ruins the balance of the game. Make the amount of undead scale based on tier compared to target, and that means that the cost scales correctly. Now we actually have undead creation that works, regardless of the source, regardless of the tier, regardless of the target, and is cost balanced. NOW it looks like a core theme.

[Seravy]

Wraiths decimate commons and early city troops. But when they do.. they rarely come back as undead.
They can easily kill uncommons and mid-lateish city troops. If they do, they usually come back as undead.

This is effectively saying the commons and uncommons have their resistances the wrong way (commons having higher). 1 resistance generally accounts for 1 damage, while 1 defense only for 0.3 blocked, so this can't be the result of commons having lower defense.
I'd say commons and uncommons should both usually come back as undead - unless you skip casting your Black Prayer against commons thinking it's unnecessary.

Death Knights are the same thing - yes they do more melee damage but they also do more life steal damage, so they should usually raise commons and uncommons as undead (by usually i mean, about 50-90% of them depending on resistance stats) - don't forget we buffed Death Knight Life Steal recently. A DK figure does 2 more Life Steal damage than a Wraith, but also 2,2 more melee damage - so they are fairly even, I admit it's slightly worse. 

I seriously think you underrate the Wraith's and Death Knight's ability to turn commons and uncommons into undead. (Although I admit I haven't had much chance to test it recently - werewolves won the game before I could.)

Why are the first 4 so wildly different than the last 3?

Because they are different spells that do different things, not direct upgrades like Life Drain is to Syphon Life. I hope you aren't suggesting to add "Gorge Life" as rare which is Syphon Life but saves at -14, and one more for very rare at -18. 

Lets say we make it so that if you have 9 common undead creation things, you get 1 undead back if all the targets are common.

That works for the AI, but the human would want to be able to choose the thing they get and would complain if the one that raises makes no sense - for example his ghouls attacked the enemy fire giant but he raised the griffons anyway who had nothing to do with the ghouls and never touched any, but got killed by his efreets instead.

I don't want a game that treats me as if I was an AI - I have brains and would notice these inconsistencies. So your "undead creation things" have to be bound to the thing getting damaged by the effect. Which means damage would need to put the "undead creation things" on the target. Which is EXACTLY what the current system does, and considering it even weights it by the amount of damage, it does that very well - I would expect the thing that got killed by undead damage to get converted first, not the thing that was eaten by hell hounds and only took 1 damage from a life drain.

So considering what additional requirements exist due to human players playing the game, not AIs, you are effectively suggesting to keep the existing system.

[Nelphine]

No, I want to change the description. I don't want it to be the damage that does it - I want it to be necromantic magic that does it after the battle. So it literally doesn't matter who you killed, it's all about what you get to raise. Heck, you could even make it a picklist if you want so the human COULD choose exactly what it is. You could even make it based purely on BOOKS and not even on the units or spells present in the combat.


But right now, the fact that they ARE different is the problem. You go from 'this ALWAYS works against the standard opponents' to 'this works [somewhere between rarely and usually depending on the math you happen to think exists in actual game scenarios] against weaker opponents, and rarely against the standard opponents'.

That's NOT keeping a core theme. That's losing the theme.

[Seravy]

This game doesn't do that. I mean, this game doesn't give your wizard passive abilities of magic like Heroes of Might and Magic 4 does - any passive ability you have is a retort and any active ability you have is a spell you have to cast either in battle or overland.

If I were to base it on books, people would ask, "and what do I get for my Life/Chaos/Sorcery/etc" books, why does Death get the extra treatment?

If I haven't explained it enough times, the core theme is making undead - lots of free, weak units. Making strong free units is not part of the theme, never was and would be gamebreaking, obviously. When you read "massive hordes of undead appeared" in a book, you assume zombies, skeletons and whatnot. You don't assume 5 thousand vampire lords are coming. That's not in the theme, undead creatures of that level are rare. They are the ones leading those armies of undead, not the free things nercomancers dig out from graves.

The current system matches that theme well enough, sure if Wraiths would convert 100% weak units but only a small percentage of stronger units, it would be better but that means wraiths will stop dealing good damage that's not life steal. We only have one rare Death creature, so that's not very acceptable, it wouldn't be even if we had two.

Anyway, feel free to try to design a new spell that matches your expectations and find a spell slot for it, but I think you are wasting your time. We don't have a spell slot and I think if such a miracle spell existed, we'd have come up with it in the past 3 years when we still had free Death spell slots.

You are chasing after a mirage and you're free to do so but don't ask me to follow.

[Bahgtru]

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.

No that's not the point - 2-3 books don't rely on having 2 specific commons (or choose them at the beginning), so if this is meant to nerf multi-book setups it doesn't work. (I'd suggest a dedicated discussion if you think that's wanted btw)

With this choice you remove options to mono-death mostly - multi-realms have other ways like the ones listed before. For example:
- High armor or HP, resistance 4-6 city troops (examples: beastmen, trolls, pikemen, phalanx, etc): you make it much more difficult for mono-death to obtain these as undead, and in the mid game this can be a big set of your battles. That translates into a slow-down of your strategy.
- flying creatures: sleep is a way to deal with them. So there are cases where the change makes it obligatory to choose between dealing with flyers and getting undead, and life drain can't cope with all of them. Flying is already OP enough...
- Floating island fights?
I could probably come up with more, but the big deal is the first one. All in all, even a randomised undead generation as suggested by Nelphine under sleep would be better than losing this option. (incidentally, it could be made into the same mechanic as werewolves). To his idea you answered that randomness is rage inducing... But how is the randomness of the undead generation any less rage inducing than that of the sleep spell itself? I think that losing a hero to sleep is much more rage inducing, and those don't get raised

Why don't we try to think about the auto improvement at least? Instead of this long discussion... Write down your thoughts on the procedure as it is now and let's give it some thought before deciding. That idea has gained support by others in this thread, and I know that you like to teach the AI tricks.

[Nelphine]

I don't want a new spell. I want to change the mechanics of how the ability 'create undead' works (instead of being a flat 100%) to more closely match what life steal units currently have in strategic combat. Then you could simply add create undead to all abilities/units that currently have life steal, and life steal could become purely damage and healing, allowing us to tweak that ability if we want, without potentially unbalancing the undead creation factor. (Which came up when we were trying to balance death knights, and they're still very fragile for a very rare unit.)

And the 'hordes of undead' that I see in tropes absolutely include animals and beasts.. and things like chimera, giants, and great lizards. Which, strategic combat undead creation manages quite well. Most powerful units in this game are exactly the kind of thing that can be undead in fiction (even great drakes, how often are zombie dragons in stories - and certainly never as a main villain).

[Seravy]

I want to change the mechanics of how the ability 'create undead' works (instead of being a flat 100%) to more closely match what life steal units currently have in strategic combat.

Then suggest a specific such mechanic that matches your criteria but also fits into the game and doesn't defy common sense - if one exists. Books with passive abilities don't fit into the game - retorts do that. Damage not raising the thing it was dealt to defies common sense.

By the way- the AI doesn't have it for those reasons either, they have it because it's a necessary simplification to make the game run in acceptable time on old x86 computers.

Do note your suggestion would not do the same for the human as AI strategic combat anyway - the AI can only exploit this ability against lairs which are a limited resource that quickly runs out, or other AI, but ultimately, other AI's are, from a player's perspective, still the AI's unit. It just puts the unit from one bag to another, instead of fighting the archangel that belongs to the yellow player, I fight one that has a purple flag on it - but I STILL fight 1 archangel, it didn't change the overall position of me vs the game as a whole. So the AI can only get new units from lairs - not the human, they can't use this feature against the human, their real opponent.
Meanwhile, the human would use it on the AI and would turn the units from his enemies to his side.

That's fundamentally different, the former is mostly just for show, while the latter is a real step towards winning the game. Yes, this is a simplified view as one AI cannibalizing another does make the game slightly harder in cases, but not all the time.

[Nelphine]

No, a theme is not just about winning and mechanical balance. So when the AI does it against another AI, the human sees that and says 'that is a cool, appealing result! I want to do that too!' 
Balance and game limitations don't impact that thought.

What's the actual strategic combat mechanism for create undead?