5.58 Brainstorming thread

[Seravy]

Progress report, this is the current status of work done :

-Fixed bug : When Gate of Hades damages a unit, it does 1 more damage than it should.
-Fixed bug : When all remaining lairs are Life realm, no rampaging monsters are generated.
-The AI can now disembark from ships onto tiles that have enemy units and initiate combat, if their stack is significantly more powerful.
-The AI will now pick the nearest unoccupied shore tile when sending a transport to a continent.
-The AI will now pick a shore tile to move towards where there are adjacent valid land tiles for disembarking – it won't try to go to a place where the land tiles are already filled by its own (or allied) units.
-When an AI transport reaches the shore, if it was sent there with the intention to disembark, the units will disembark immediately and not wait for the next turn.
-The AI will prioritize unloading transports directly into nearby enemy cities where applicable.
-Fixed bug : Angel monster value in wizards.exe was wrong. (used for EXP, doomstack building and rampaging monster generation)
-Combat against cities containing no units will now be handled the same way as combat against cities, except the attacker automatically wins on turn 1 the same way as if the city only had ships defending it. This eliminates the redundant “conquer empty city” function and makes conquest rules consistent regardless of the presence of defenders.
-Thrown and Breath attacks gain +1 strength from the Veteran level only, Regular and Ultra Elite no longer increases them.
-Flame Blade no longer adds +2 to Thrown attacks.
-Blazing March no longer adds +3 to Thrown attacks.
-Lion Heart no longer adds +3 to Thrown attacks.
-Ghouls lose their +1 to Hit bonus and instead gain 1 more melee and ranged attack. (this should make the common buffs less powerful on them.)

(Blazing March will get updated later if the most popular option ends up different, that's easy to change.)

Before I start my next test game, which will be Trolls, we need to decide if we want to take action on the various lair related problems. Any large scale decisions are better left for a next version (though I don't really see good solutions anyway), but the small things we can do now.

In particular :
-Do we want "undeath immunity" on hydras and air elementals? (especially the latter)
-If not, then what about Death Immunity for Air Elementals? (death creatures can see them so any wizard having at least one non-death spell can likely kill them anyway, and if not, shadow demons or better can, too. So the immunity isn't as bad as I initially thought.)

Oh and there is the possibility of replacing Call Centaurs, I think we better leave that for a next version.
One more idea : what if treasure that's a potential balance threat is limited to lairs containing a primary monster from a list of monsters we consider "difficult enough"? Basically, limit the 1.5k+ items and rare spells to only places that have Storm Giant or better as defenders? So those "many lizards" lairs still contain the same total budget but can't have the high end stuff?

[Sapher]

I dont think that undeath immunity to hydras will change much. All the undead casters can regen HP by life drain so undead angel/efreet is almost as OP as undead hydra. Also you can turn behemoth undead, that is not much harder. So no to first. 
As for air elementals - i dont think they should be different from earth, water, fire elementals so death immunity to all or none.

[Nelphine]

I agree with baghtru.

I like the idea of having a class of treasure that can only appear on particularly strong defenders, even if the budget is the same.!

[Seravy]

Behemoth has like 10 higher defense than Hydra so I don't see how that's even possible.
Don't compere being able to cast Life Drain a few times with Regeneration 7 which is 7*25 = 175 extra hit points on top of their base 90. Even if I assume your other creature casts 4 Life Drains and steals 5 whole HP on average, that's still not even a quarter of a hydra's total durability, and then hydras have many times the attack power, too, and higher magic resistance.
The problem isn't only that they can heal despite being undead. The problem is how much damage they can take in a single combat. 1 Hydra can beat a stack of 9 enemies alone, 1 angel can't. But you're perfectly aware of that, you demonstrated the problem of Regeneration restoring 2 hit points on trolls and werewolves first. If werewolves with regen 2 were too powerful in the early game, how could hydras be ok?
While I understand it makes more sense to have the immunity on all elementals, do we have a gameplay related reason to do that? More precisely, would adding the immunity make game balance better, or worse?
Also, adding Death Immunity to the Air Elemental only makes all Sorcery summons have Death Immunity, which is a different kind of consistency.

Any suggestions for which monsters to include on a list of "strong enough" monsters for high value treasure?

[Nelphine]

In the early part of the game, 175 health is pure overkill. Angels and efreet are powerful enough to take on stacks of 9 that early anyway, and life drain is enough to heal the damage they take. Sure, hydra are much stronger, but stronger than auto win doesn't actually change gameplay.

I think air elementals , due to invisibility, have bigger underlying issues. Invisibility is already worthy of being a very rare buff - air elementals and mass invisibility just make that worse. Nightblades too can be ridiculously abused. If you're not going to fix invisibility in general, I don't think it's worth fixing undead air elementals, and for people who can't abuse invisibility, it takes away a big replay option. I'd put it on the list of 'yep great players can abuse this. Their loss.'

I think I'd almost prefer to just say only towers have a chance at high end treasure, and make it something like 5% per tower. Any creature you list have something that eats them alive if someone like sapher plays it. By not defining exact monsters it'll be actually harder to find it, and putting it in towers will mean it only comes up when the player is either in, or ready for, the late game. In either case it's fine to find those items - if you do it early enough that the item would matter, it won't matter, because simply by clearing towers you're already saying you've won the game.

[Sapher]

Behemoth has like 10 higher defense than Hydra so I don't see how that's even possible.

But i didnt wont to spoil the fun. This was the plan for the next game! Well, ok. It was just a plan and i didnt have time to actualy play...
Imagine we start with an artificer and while our cavalry is doing the same as in my last game we are not summoning a stack of focus magic ghouls but instead we craft 2 +20 spell skill -1spell save amulets and 20spell skill -1spell save x4life drain wand. 
Let's count if that is enough to turn behemoth undead. 
We also started with a warp creature spell. On average to make behemoth have 0 resist we need 2 successfull casts.
Behemoth have 13 resist so if not in a node we need to spend 40MP on average(-3spell save on items) on casting warp creature. If he is in a node that is 66.6MP.
Life drain vs 0 resist deals 1+0,9+..+0,1+5+3=13,5damage if cast by hero or 10,5 if cast by a wizard. He has only 42 health and regen 3. So 5-6 casts of life drain should be enough.
So total MP for 1 behemoth is only 90-100 if not in a node and 115-125 otherwise. Artifacts give +60MP and we have 4 life drains from a wand for free. The real question is can we convert 2 behemoth...1 should be very easy. But if there is more than 1 we just kill one behemoth a turn. Because we kill him with a life drain he will not regen and we will convert the last one.
ps. I also started with a wraith form and added inner fire on one of my amulets to have cold resist and probably added +1 move on something

[Seravy]

Oh, I see. That's extremely specialized though, if you don't find a convenient lair, you lose. You have to invest everything into the artifacts, and need to get a caster hero at random plus an appropriate lair. It also costs 3 extra picks (artificer and 2 chaos).
I think it can work but the odds of success are far from the 100% we've seen so far. I don't mind that.
Hydras are a problem because you're converting them "free", all you need is the ghouls you are using anyway.

"fix invisibility in general"
What do you mean by that? New spells that can counter it?
I think the quantity of spells that can hurt invisible enemies is reasonable in the late game when invisibility is a thing. Death is pretty much immune at all tiers, chaos at rare can spam Flame Strike, Life gets True Sight at uncommon, Nature is weak to illusions so they only have call lighting at very rare. Sorcery itself...I think gets none?

[Nelphine]

Invisibity is binary. If you get it early, or the ai doesn't have the exact spell it needs to see invisible, you win. 

This allow for 1 man garrisons, and 1 unit attacks to destroy whatever they want.

On the other hand, if the AI can see, it does nothing.

It's like mega buffing, all by itself. We've had this discussion before, and the consensus at the time was yes, invisibility is better than rare but that leaves mass invisibility nowhere to go, and nightstalker a, air elementals, nightblades, and the ninja all FEEL great without great stats, so it's not worth fixing.

So if it's not worth fixing then, and I agree it's not, then I don't think you should worry about the specific unit of undead air elementals.

[Bahgtru]

OK continuing there about MoM.

Heroes:
1. then make capacity warriors only, having it on a leader mage that won't ever shoot sucks.
2. isn't the elven archer attack magical? arcane power comes to mind.

1. Typo? Warriors often can't shoot, why would they need capacity?
2. True, forgot about that one. But the average leader abilities are still better than the average mage abilities (Sage, Ritual Master and AEther Master are all pretty bad for a champion, it's too late in the game for them).

Back to this..

OK so about the resource mage abilities: you've introduced something that is OP at start to the point that you've had to delay hero offers, AND useless at the end. Great job!

The elven archer is a freaking champion at least give him the most useful ability for a hero with capacity and baldemaster - arcane power* - instead of the 2 useless randoms.

Or just get rid of the resource abilities? They seem to only generate problems...

[Seravy]

Unfortunately

-Combat against cities containing no units will now be handled the same way as combat against cities, except the attacker automatically wins on turn 1 the same way as if the city only had ships defending it. This eliminates the redundant “conquer empty city” function and makes conquest rules consistent regardless of the presence of defenders.

Causes the game to crash - the game can't find a unit to select (yes, it does select the floating island if it's that kind of battle with no "real" units) and fails to render the screen.
This could probably be still made to work if a check for a winner was forced at the start of the battle instead of only during the first player's first turn but I'm not sure if this feature is really worth that much work...
The abuse potential is definitely high though (if you do it when the AI already has one city capable of producing something good but no more than that) and redundant game code is never a good thing either...