5.58 Brainstorming thread

[merlinp]

That kills the intended uses of several strategies while not fixing the underlying problem - you can afford losing 5 units of cavalry to clear out a lair of 5 cockatrices and 4 lizards with confusion or other spells.

What intended strategies would that kill?

Yes, it would still be possible to send in expendable units and cast spells but that wouldn't work very well in the early game. Confused lair monster could also just not disappear at the end of a battle.

[Seravy]

Pretty much everything? Clearing lairs isn't a bad thing, it just shouldn't happen as quickly and effectively as Sapher is doing it... I mean invisible units, fast units, flying units, these are legit strategies but somehow when normal players do it they don't win the game in 1/4 the normal amount of turns...
Confusion killing units is intended and doesn't matter - Black Sleep also kills units at save -2 in common. Also, in the most typical cases the confused unit dies anyway fighting the others.

[merlinp]

Pretty much everything? Clearing lairs isn't a bad thing, it just shouldn't happen as quickly and effectively as Sapher is doing it... I mean invisible units, fast units, flying units, these are legit strategies but somehow when normal players do it they don't win the game in 1/4 the normal amount of turns...

What I suggested would make it harder to apply many grindy strategies for clearing out lairs but doom stack like used by the AI would still work or several stacks of lesser units.

However, it doesn't require any code change to achieve this, just decide to play the game in a certain way.

[Seravy]

No, I mean when I use the same strategies (an invisible unit+spells, an invisible unit+ranged attacks, cheap units + spells, etc) I don't win any faster than usual, but he does somehow. I don't normally have an invisible unit or teleporting hero in 1402, or find a hydra AND many chaos spawns to convert by ghouls. Or a 3x Apocalypse staff. Or an Excalibur. Or an Air Elemental spell. But at the very least, not all of them...
I could say I'm bad at playing the game but I'm pretty sure I'm at least above average so if I did that, 90% of the playerbase would get told "this game is too hard for you, don't bother". No, the truth is, he is unreasonably good at it, godlike level. But the game has to offer challenge even for those players, that's what the highest difficulty level is for. What I see is, currently the game fails at that - he is not only winning consistently but also wins games in only a quarter of the time it takes for "normal" players and what's actually intended. And this is true even if he is not playing some rush strategy - the current game definitely doesn't count as rush. He simply got so far ahead on treasure alone in such a small amount of time that 4 lunatic difficulty AI's couldn't do a thing to even slow him down. (The game is still ongoing but it doesn't take a genius to know he already won.)
However even in his rushes, about 75% of the wins came from hunting a lot of treasure. Even Nelphine is complaining he wins too easily because lairs are too simple to beat (berserker vs great drake but really that's just shard of the core problem, high end lairs being too easy and too rewarding. (low end ones are generally ok I think, it takes 1500+ to get a rare spell or the better items)) - and ofc ghouls adding some "should be impossible" undead units on top of the treasure isn't helping either.

...maybe the simplest solution is best and the AI bonus needs to be higher on Lunatic. We might have reduced it far too much... or maybe we need one more, even higher level of difficulty... but I'd like to exhaust all options we have to improve game balance first before taking that step. But only options that don't make the game harder or less fun for the "average" player.

Anyway, let's see what we can do with the various things that are potential problems :
1. Undead Air Elemental
2. Undead Hydra
These are really the same category. Adding Death Immunity to prevent raising as undead would work but then they are too hard to deal with for Death wizards. While we rejected Undeath Immunity for Werewolves, it could solve these instead.
Note : we did make it less likely for Hydras to appear as primary monsters so maybe they aren't a real problem and he got extremely lucky on that one. But Air Elementals are probably a real problem.

3. Finding high budget items (Helba's Staff, Excalibur), rare spells, or beating high budget lairs early for large sums of money
Unfortunately, save or die spells can kill rare creatures one at a time at a low probability so it's possible to do so. Very rare creatures are generally impossible, but a lair with 4-9 rare creatures is doable and has the same budget as one with 2-3 very rares. Maybe rare and very rare creatures should ramp up the monster and treasure budget less, so these very high budget lairs contain larger quantities of very rare creatures instead of "only" rares and high end uncommons. However doing that makes the lair harder for AI, which is also very bad.
4. AI is at a disadvantage at hunting lairs
Don't see a solution for this unless we make the AI cheat which players will not like or deny the human the ability to crack lairs with multiple attacks which is unfun.
5. Ninja hero
Fame requirement, hero turn requirement, and the cost for summon hero should, in theory, make this one unobtainable too early. It's also limited to at most one unit per game so I think this one is safe overall.

[Ozymandyus]

Regarding Bahgtru's idea on nightshade - I am in favor of making it protect the whole city radius as opposed to just the single main city tile.  As it stands, nightshade is mostly an afterthought in the game...if you're not fighting curse-happy enemies, you don't need it, and if you are then they can render it useless with one cheap spell. 

Besides city protection, another idea might be to have nightshade add a point of resistance to units built in a city that have the correct high-tier building (be it alchemist's guild or something else).  The flavor behind this would be that herbalists within the city have learned to use the nightshade to create tinctures that protect against magic.  This would make the nightshade actually strategically valuable again.

[Seravy]

We've already discussed all possible ideas when the possibility of adding new ores was offered, and in the end we couldn't use the slot for anything.
At this point this is already decided matter that's not going to change - if weak nightshade is so annoying, I can remove it entirely but there is nothing else to replace it. By the way, Nightshade does provide 3 power to cities with cathedrals and alchemist guilds. It's not that much compared to crystals but it counts as religious power (comes from the cathedral) so it is quite good for dark rituals and cult leader.

City protection is already over-the-top powerful in two realms and powerful in a third one : consecration and spell ward offers complete immunity to curses and gaia's blessing can restore corruption and volcanoes, leaving only hybrid wizards who miss these spells, and other chaos/death wizards vulnerable. Meanwhile curses are a niche strategy that can sometimes be very effective but more often not so much. So making a counter that's present on the map itself and is unavoidable more powerful would be a very bad thing to do. If you don't want to get cursed, play Life or Sorcery. Don't rely on the map. (also note setting the climate to wet produces a lot of nightshade because swamps can't have anything else. So it's potentially the most common type of ore on the map. It can't be powerful. )

[Seravy]

I couldn't find this anywhere in the Chaos thread so we should decide how Blazing March should work now :

A. +3 Melee/Thrown/Missile (current)
B. +3 Melee/Breath/Missile (combo with most chaos units, draconian and chaos channel but might be too good at it?)
C. +3 Melee/Missile
D. +3 Melee/Thrown/Breath/Missile (so it affects everything)
E. +3 Melee, +2 Thrown/Missile
F. +3 Melee, +2 Breath/Missile
G. +3 Melee, +2 Missile
H. +3 Melee, +2 Thrown/Breath/Missile

I think these are all the realistic options, we don't want to go as low as +1.
This is not easy to decide because Chaos at rare is already pretty much able to win any combat against anything, so I don't see thrown as a major issue. On the other hand, if the spell could buff the breath on the lower tier chaos summons (hell hounds, chimeras), that might be far too good (basically the same effect as the Chaos Surge global, and cumulative with it), same for breath gained from Chaos Channels.
So overall I'm considering C the best option but I'm not 100% sure.

(surprisingly, none of the spells changed mention adding to thrown in the help so it didn't need to be updated)

[zitro1987]

I couldn't find this anywhere in the Chaos thread so we should decide how Blazing March should work now :

A. +3 Melee/Thrown/Missile (current)
B. +3 Melee/Breath/Missile (combo with most chaos units, draconian and chaos channel but might be too good at it?)
C. +3 Melee/Missile
D. +3 Melee/Thrown/Breath/Missile (so it affects everything)
E. +3 Melee, +2 Thrown/Missile
F. +3 Melee, +2 Breath/Missile
G. +3 Melee, +2 Missile
H. +3 Melee, +2 Thrown/Breath/Missile

I think these are all the realistic options, we don't want to go as low as +1.
This is not easy to decide because Chaos at rare is already pretty much able to win any combat against anything, so I don't see thrown as a major issue. On the other hand, if the spell could buff the breath on the lower tier chaos summons (hell hounds, chimeras), that might be far too good (basically the same effect as the Chaos Surge global, and cumulative with it), same for breath gained from Chaos Channels.
So overall I'm considering C the best option but I'm not 100% sure.

(surprisingly, none of the spells changed mention adding to thrown in the help so it didn't need to be updated)

I like F and H, but the tentative C may be safest choice.

[merlinp]

Idea: maybe thrown should only work once or twice per combat? I mean where do the troops get the endless supply of thrown weapons? You can't just throw your weapons at the enemy lines and then go and pick them up.

As is, from the above choices, I'd pick C, F or G with no thrown buffs.

[Nelphine]

Realistically, if you get blazing March, you either are not playing life at all, or if you are playing life, you've probably already moved past the stage where blazing March will significantly improve any thrown units, much the same as lionheart. Therefore, improving thrown will either only make you win more, or you're not playing a strategy that already massively buffs thrown.

Therefore, removing thrown from blazing March will either do nothing because you didnt play barbarians anyway, or if you did, they aren't super buffed compared to what your enemy actually has, and so there's no reason not to buff them.


In much the same way, +3 breath to hell hounds is either win more so there's no reason not to buff them, or you actually legit need to buff them to have a chance.


Therefore, my vote is either D, or an alternate (my preference) which is +3 melee/breath/thrown, +2 missile.

Ranged units are always better, even than thrown or breath. They don't need the same buff from a rare spell.

(At common I would vote +3 melee, +2 thrown/breath/missile, but not at rare.)