5.58 Brainstorming thread

[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

I made a video on how to play by this strategy. part 1

[Bahgtru]

Eh eh, strategy: be so lucky that you get a hero caster?
You need famous to make it less chancey. Yeah, crafter+famous lets you do all kinds of nasties.

[Sapher]

Famous doesnt increase a chance for a mage hero to appear.

[Seravy]

Might as well rename this to 5.58 thread instead of opening a new one.
Watched all 3 parts. Only undead Chaos Spawn so far which are good but not that gamebreaking.
However I think we've seen proof that
-Abusing "no building destruction in empty cities" is a major issue that can be consistently reproduced in almost every battle (using confusion)
-The good old "spearmen tactic" of sending 1-2 weak units (in this case mostly cavalry) and casting spells to destroy everything is still as unstoppable as ever (as long as you have Channeller to afford the mana costs). Don't think anything can be done about that though. Combat spellcasting is what makes the AI a real threat so we can't make it weaker.
-Astrologer + max power map setting is unbalanced. I keep calculating every time I see this and conclude max power isn't that much higher than normal power to be the problem but then what? Astrologer itself? Or the fact you can "spearmen tactic" half the nodes in the game if they don't counter? Is he just lucky and finds too many easy nodes? Where are all the storm giants, fire giants and other "pain to deal with" nodes this game?

[Seravy]

No matter how much I think about it, what causes Sapher to snowball this badly are the lairs.
Simple math : If investing X resources gets you Y treasure and that's balanced, then doing the same with Chanaller which halves X and Astrologer which kinda doubles Y (you get to conquer nodes you otherwise can't due to the countering effect and they produce slightly more),  is crazy OP : lairs have double and nodes have a 4 times better return of investment.
Add Archmage and Alchemy which raises casting skill so the same lairs become viable to conquer earlier, again basically doubling your viable targets and we see the result. The amount of spellcasting we've seen and casting skill he gains shouldn't be possible in this amount of time. What makes it possible is lairs providing free money, and it never runs out because there is always more lairs to conquer (as with Archmage and killing monsters a few at a time, even most high end targets are doable). This might even be why the "spearmen tactic" seems too good : it works on combat spellcasting and the mp cost is what makes it balanced. If you have near endless resources from lair hunting, it breaks.

I think we have several different possible routes to take (which are not mutually exclusive, we can pick more than one) :
1. Make it so that lair generation depends on the human player's retorts. Basically for each of those 4 retorts picked, reduce the odds of finding gold and mana crystals or reduce the quantity. This still leaves astrologer quite powerful as Nodes generate a lot of resources independently of the treasure in them, but that's what the retort is for.
The advantage of this is that it's a nerf to those retorts that's subtle. Most players won't know the treasure generation process and won't notice the effect at all. Especially if the overall treasure isn't lower, it just contains less raw gold or mana. However only Chaneller and Alchemy directly affects investment vs return. Astrologer and Archmage don't, they are just enablers for targeting stronger lairs than otherwise possible.

2. Even out the odds on lairs for the human and AI by making the monsters respawn over time or immediately.
This cuts down on early game treasure snowballing most and is probably the fairest solution. The downside is, counterintuitive and bad for flavor, which can even get outright ridiculous (oh look that lair respawned 5 great drakes this turn, where did they come from?). It's a strong nerf to the sprites tactic, probably more than intended so they might need to get a buff, at least enough that a large stack of them can reliably finish off the intended targets. On the other hand it does fit the games existing issues : monsters already recover all health in nodes immediately, and when spawning rampaging monsters, those also come out of nowhere, they aren't the monsters actually in the lair. Not only are they not removed from the lair but types that aren't there can spawn, too. A skeletons lair can even send out demon lords if it's late enough in the game.

3. Ignore it. Sapher plays much better than the average and in the hands of a "normal" player, this snowballing never happens anyway.
Might be a good idea actually, he has been beating the game with pretty much anything he ever tried. So it's not trivial to say this or that is specifically overpowered.


4. Raise the AI's resource advantage on Lunatic or add a higher difficulty level. If there are players and strategies out there that are this effective, we might need a greater challenge for them.
basically an extension of the above option.

5. We can reduce the "treasure points per gold" ratio which is currently 1. If 1 treasure point adds 0.6 gold instead, the overall treasure is the same but the part you can spend and snowball in the early game, raw resources, is less anyway. Items, if destroyed, already provide such reduced ratio anyway (you only get 50% of the item's cost as mana and 1 treasure point buys 1 item value.)

6. Nerf "max power" setting anyway, or remove it (for example, have settings for 0.5,1 and 1.5 power only, or have it scale as 0.5-0.75-1-1.25-1.5 instead of the current 0.5-1-1.5-2-2.5)
while nerfing the node power settings isn't going to fix anything by itself, Astrologer+Max node power is a too trivial choice, kinda how Dwarf+Rich was before we nerfed the Rich mineral setting. So maybe it isn't such a bad idea to do anyway.
More importantly, while this only applies to nodes, more node power means stronger monsters, which indirectly means, higher treasure and ofc nodes that are more difficult for the AI to clear. Reducing the power can also reduce these side effects.

7. Get rid of the "Nodes can't counter spells" effect on Astrologer.
Not a fan of this, as it is what makes it playable in the first half of the game.
However there is one unintended effect : you can leave your nodes empty, bait the enemy to move troops there then kill those troops while the node counters the wizard's spells. This is less relevant in the late game as expensive spells are countered less, but it's a huge early game advantage, completely unintended for this otherwise late game retort. (in fact the ability to conquer hard nodes without getting countered is probably already a huge benefit : the counter effect is about the only thing that makes nodes difficulty to cheese with the "spearmen+combat spell" tactic. (or as we've seen cavalry works even better)

[Nelphine]

So, for me, the real thing is that the balance of retorts should be based around this.

For instance, cult leader adds 75% of late game city religion economy. This is equivalent to some actual amount of economy (1/12 or something).

A retort which lets you get lairs, is an early game retort, and gives you a percent of your lair economy. At this stage, lairs are like 90% of your economy, so of we want similar economy as cult leader, then you should get 1/6 more lairs. 

So balance channeler and astrologer to be 1/6 more lairs for astrologer, and 2/6 more lairs for channeler.

Which I think astrologer is already roughly there, so as much as you see issues, I still see max power being the problem, as the human CHOOSES max power and CHOOSES retorts that allow them to take advantage of that, whereas the AI has to randomly choose.

It's the same as playing on rich. Play rich dwarves, and you'll absolutely go crazy - see my old 'summon a stack of chimera' games. We fixed that by reducing mana crystals. You could fix max power by increasing monsters in nodes on max power without increasing treasure budget. If there were 2.5 times as many monsters as on normal power, with no change in treasure, that would absolutely hurt saphers game, and choosing different power settings would have inherent problems.

For channeler, I think it comes down to 'cavalry or early flyer or spearmen spam' plus combat spells is too strong. Channeler itself isn't a problem, but the abuse a human can do absolutely is.

That's a much bigger problem AND channeler is simply not required. Sire it lets sapher do crazy things on lunatic, but you can do the same on expert without channeler.

The ai counters it by using its own combat spells. 

Neutrals (including all lairs/nodes/towers as neutrals for this conversation) simply don't have a counter. They might have lucky units, but that's it.

This is why I think ai sshould account for their own spell power when attacking neutrals - the later in the game (and the higher difficulty!) absolutely makes a huge difference for when the AI could conquer neutrals, but the current over and targetting algorithm won't let them.

However, that would result in lunatic AI just getting all lairs ultra fast, and only sapher level players would have any chance at all.

So a better solution is to somehow shrink the gap between ai and neutrals so that humans can't abuse combat spells in the same way.

Regenerating neutrals would accomplish this, but that's extremely inelegant.

I'd rather do something like giving neutrals some very limited combat spell capacity of their own, enough to stop the worst abuse, and that's it. Like 20 casting skill per tier of the best unit the neutral has. (That's a random thought, not overly serious, just to point the direction of my suggestion.)

[Seravy]

I still see max power being the problem, as the human CHOOSES max power and CHOOSES retorts that allow them to take advantage of that, whereas the AI has to randomly choose.

I completely agree with that but when I did the math the result was basically "yeah, sure you get 1-1.5 extra Magic Market worth of power per node, no big deal". I mean, that sounds great and all until you realize there are much less (easy enough) nodes than room for cities, and a magic market is a really cheap building you can get as the very first thing even. Which is why I never took action, it is a problem, but I feel it only escalates other problems. Changing it is a good plan but unlikely to be enough.

For channeler, I think it comes down to 'cavalry or early flyer or spearmen spam' plus combat spells is too strong. Channeler itself isn't a problem, but the abuse a human can do absolutely is.

On a more philosophical level, this strategy is basically unbeatable : You can only lose units that participate in a battle - so if you don't ever risk a valuable unit, you have nothing to lose, while you can still damage the enemy significantly. Your "loss" would be the mana crystals but combat spells are all a net positive : they do more damage (in unit total value killed) than their MP cost, even without Channeller. This is because combat casting is meant to be a limited resource - you can only have 1x casting skill amount per... and this word is where the game's design breaks. Per what? Per battle doesn't work : you have an almost unlimited ability to start new battles each turn. It really should be "per major battle" but there is no way to define or code that, even less so make it AI friendly.
btw no, the AI doesn't have a counter either. They can't counter it by using spells - you don't bring units worth anything into the battle. So they can't hurt you, at best they might be able to avoid taking as much losses but plenty of spells bypass various defensive effects so it's not effective. The spearmen tactic has no counter - it's no different from using remote controlled drones (that cost 0.001 cents each to build) in a war against real human soldiers. For this reason, neutrals casting spells would make no difference. (ok you might need more spearmen to win but even if you need 10 extra spearmen that's still only 100 production or 200 gold total and the treasure is probably a thousand. But Sapher demonstrated this isn't the case : You don't use more spearmen, you summon combat creatures to prolong the battle instead. Which in the end will also damage the enemy once they are not needed to buy time.)

[Nelphine]

Correct. This is why 'bathroom psychics' (superheroes with the ability to defeat their enemies without leaving their own home) are a problem in RPGs, and why there are such pains to make games all about 'you' whether that's your character or your particular vehicle or whatever. Bring able to win without risk is always game breaking.

Personally I don't play the way sapher does, so I don't have great solutions.

But giving neutrals casting ability at least forces sapher to use slightly more units and will delay the snowball (he'll require a minimum of 2 units to avoid things like confusion, and can't use minimal 1 HP spearmen against things like firebolt. Over multiple lairs, especially if he needs to attack one lair multiple times, that adds up to a lot more than 10 extra spearmen, and every extra unit delays the snowball by a noticeable amount).

Whether you can stop it? I don't think any of your proposed solutions will be more effective than mine, but yours will be very detrimental to more standard game play, so I don't think they should be implemented. Not saying mine are particularly great either, but I'll leave the comments about mine to others.

Except solution 3 of course. That might be the way to go, but I wish that's not the case.

[merlinp]

I know there is not much that can be done about this but AI turns take a long time mid game onwards. Maybe profiling could identify some easy optimization targets.

Also in later game there are so many units that it tiresome to move them all. It might help to increase unit production and summoning costs or doing something else that makes there be less units overall which would also speed up AI turns.

edit: MOO1 is so elegant here in many ways. No city screen, 6 different unit types maximum at a time which are all stacked in strategic and combat views, automatic movement of units to pointed destination after production.

[Seravy]

Actually, neutrals casting would be extremely detrimental to sprites tactics, even more so than respawning monsters.

This is a DOS game modded by hex editing. I can't use "elegant" solutions or advanced coding practices here and the large amount of units is necessary for the AI to be able to overwhelm the player on higher difficulties. When the unit cap is reached, AI turns still only take about 1-2 minutes, I think that's fairly acceptable. Note this number is based on a computer bought in 2008, my new one is more than twice as fast.