Heroes and abilities

[Seravy]

Heroes overpower Common, Uncommon and Rare creatures as well as all normal units even with mediocre items found in treasure.
Yes, you do need great items if you want to fight very rares but there are ~10-15 years of the game before that when heroes are the best.
Doom Bats are dangerous for heroes, you have to be careful about fighting them. No other creatures deal doom damage in the game.

full stacks of very rares are superior to heroes, that's intentional design. But a hero alone can do as much as a stack of 2-3 very rares if fully geared and most importantly, the hero will typically survive the battle without much damage taken and there will be no units lost. If you used your stack of very rares instead, you'd usually lose 1-2 units per combat to enemy spells and ranged attacks.
A full stack of 6 heroes can beat a full stack of 9 very rares or at least it will be an even match. Yes, the heroes are more expensive but unlike the creatures, the gear on heroes can be moved to other units if the hero dies so the investment is permanent (as long as you don't lose yout battles).

Great Drake is weak against ranged heroes, so why compare it to a melee hero. Use the Illusionist and she can kill 3-4 great drakes at the very least before running out of ammo and mp.

Doom Bats are a joke if your hero has regeneration items. So what if the hero dies, it will come back alive and the bats stay dead.

Heroes are strong against higher tier creatures because heroes are versatile, can have abilities from realms you don't have access to, and even if they die, their item will be used by another hero so unless you used up all the heroes in the game, the artifacts are immortal.
(unless they died to irrecoverable damage. Never let that happen to a hero.)

[massone]

Heroes overpower Common, Uncommon and Rare creatures as well as all normal units even with mediocre items found in treasure.
Yes, you do need great items if you want to fight very rares but there are ~10-15 years of the game before that when heroes are the best.
Doom Bats are dangerous for heroes, you have to be careful about fighting them. No other creatures deal doom damage in the game.

full stacks of very rares are superior to heroes, that's intentional design. But a hero alone can do as much as a stack of 2-3 very rares if fully geared and most importantly, the hero will typically survive the battle without much damage taken and there will be no units lost. If you used your stack of very rares instead, you'd usually lose 1-2 units per combat to enemy spells and ranged attacks.
A full stack of 6 heroes can beat a full stack of 9 very rares or at least it will be an even match. Yes, the heroes are more expensive but unlike the creatures, the gear on heroes can be moved to other units if the hero dies so the investment is permanent (as long as you don't lose yout battles).

Great Drake is weak against ranged heroes, so why compare it to a melee hero. Use the Illusionist and she can kill 3-4 great drakes at the very least before running out of ammo and mp.

Doom Bats are a joke if your hero has regeneration items. So what if the hero dies, it will come back alive and the bats stay dead.

Heroes are strong against higher tier creatures because heroes are versatile, can have abilities from realms you don't have access to, and even if they die, their item will be used by another hero so unless you used up all the heroes in the game, the artifacts are immortal.
(unless they died to irrecoverable damage. Never let that happen to a hero.)

My point was that heroes are not competitive and it's not practical to invest 10,000 mana on decking out your hero with items, I didn't mean that they're useless. They add versatility to all wizard builds for many situations where you might otherwise lack the tools to handle with bad spellbook luck or specific times when certain realms are weaker at certain things. But they're not competitive in the sense that there's usually a better way to achieve what heroes can do, unless you get lucky on attracting the right hero without summoning and finding decent treasure. Heroes are definitely good for treasure hunting and attack neutral stacks, but against other wizards they're much weaker.

Warlocks deal doom damage with Doom Bolt too, so do Chaos Spawns through Doom Gaze. I talked about Doom Bats because they're among the best counters to heroes. The main purpose of a hero is not to defend, it's to attack, because you only have so few heroes, and you can't just garrison them anywhere. But when you attack, the defender has first turn advantage, so a 6-move doom bat can attack you before you can do anything. 3 doom bats + a doom bolt on the first turn deals 36 damage, killing pretty much any hero. Or, alternatively, a stack full of Warlocks garrisoning every town for a dark elf (and this should be a common strategy for dark elves, or at least half a full stack + melee troops), and 9 x 12 doom bolts = 108 damage, enough to kill 3 out of your 6-hero "doomstack" on the first turn. IF you lose the battle, you lose the items, and worse yet, you give the items to the enemy, compared to other units that just die without giving advantage to the opponent.

Just because the AI can't handle countering heroes doesn't mean they're competitive. Competitive means relative to other strategies when every player is competent.

I compared Great Drakes against melee because ranged heroes, if they don't have Agility, are even more fragile and easily killed, and because she needs +MP on items, she loses out on 2-3 other critical item powers, not to mention need a slot for Haste or extra +movement to use Quick-casting effectively and stay out of range. A competent Chaos Wizard wouldn't use Great Drakes to fight Illusionist, just as you would want to use Illusionist against Great Drakes, or they could just pair 3 Efreets and cast 3 Mystic Surges on their Great Drakes and then there's no way your Illusionist can stay out of range for even 2 turns, as 3 9-move creatures can cover the entire combat map, even if the Mystic Surge doesn't give Haste, which it seems to do quite often. The Illusionist maxes out defense at like 25 shields or less, which is vulnerable to many more creatures and units, especially ranged ones. The strategy of kiting around opponents that can fight back only works against an incompetent AI, which is not a matter of gameplay balance, but simply AI that can be exploited.

Even comparing two human players, the investment in a stack of 6 heroes for 60,000 mana is extremely inefficient. Just because your items are permanent doesn't mean it makes any sense to spend all those turns and mana casting Create Artifact when you'd end the game faster by casting 6 stacks of Sky Drakes in half the time. It only makes sense to create those artifacts when you simply don't have other good options, like a pure Life play because Archangels are terrible, or if you use heroes and found/bought items so you don't need to actually invest much into having a decent hero.

I absolutely agree that for much of a game in the Common to Rare tier, a good hero is very useful, and I would use them in most of my strategies regardless of build. But I wouldn't rate a specific hero-focused strategy highly compared to other strategies, unless you're playing small maps where you can use a good hero to roll over everyone before they even have Rare spells, before everyone has full stack garrisons of magicians. The reality is that Create Artifact in the latest versions come too late to provide the advanced item powers "early", and the powers themselves are very costly, even 1 high end power can cost 800 which is more than most Very Rare spells, and 3000 for a full item. We're talking about casting costs of longer than a year or two for much of the game that heroes are good for, during which time if the AI was smart enough to hit you with a Spell Blast, you are totally screwed for the rest of the game, in a manner similar to losing 10-20 turns of casting because of being banished. By the time 3000 casting doesn't seem like a big deal, you are far into Very Rare time and heroes aren't that useful anymore. Heroes have great uses, but they're hardly overpowered or a game-winning strategy anymore, especially on higher difficulties. I don't see anything wrong with how they are now with respect to items, but I do think there's a problem with how weak their leveling has become. Items are now much better than leveling them, which is bad because leveling is much harder and riskier now that they're not invincible, especially for non-Life Realms and those without the Warlord retort. It's to the point where a hero-focused strategy = must have Artificer or Life, and I don't think that's a good design. Instead of being real battle-hardened heroes, they end up being sheltered as much as possible while you safely create the best equipment.

I think that the first few levels up to Commander where heroism work fine, but there ought to be much bigger boosts at the later levels that are hard to reach. This lets non-Artificer, non-Life Realms have a path to getting very powerful heroes if they work at training (and risking) them in combat. It might also make sense to make automatic level boosts like Crusade and Warlord to apply to a maximum of Lord level, so that to get the truly powerful boosts at the end, you have to work for it by risking them in battle and earn EXP properly.

[Seravy]

My point was that heroes are not competitive and it's not practical to invest 10,000 mana on decking out your hero with items, I didn't mean that they're useless. They add versatility to all wizard builds for many situations where you might otherwise lack the tools to handle with bad spellbook luck or specific times when certain realms are weaker at certain things. But they're not competitive in the sense that there's usually a better way to achieve what heroes can do, unless you get lucky on attracting the right hero without summoning and finding decent treasure. Heroes are definitely good for treasure hunting and attack neutral stacks, but against other wizards they're much weaker.

That's not the case. Sapher has proven over and over and over every single time he played that heroes are still the most powerful thing in the game. If you want to see, watch almost any of his Lunatic difficulty videos. He transitions into using heroes in midgame 99% of the time and uses them to finish all opponents. (you might want to watch the more recent uploads though as in older ones he demonstrated several very OP strategies no longer possible)

Yes, doom damage hurts heroes. So if you send them against an enemy known for having Doom Bolt, wear a Regeneration artifact (unless you know Exaltation and have large enough maxhp to survive the first turn). If you don't have any, send your heroes after the Life, Sorcery, Death or Nature wizards (assuming you have the proper items against their spells).

Playing heroes is about knowing and choosing the battle you send them into and being prepared for it through equipping the correct artifacts (or casting the correct buffs, whichever is available).

(Honestly, very rare tier Chaos wizards are probably the only thing heroes are not safe to use against due to Apocalypse anyway but you didn't mention that spell in particular and everything else, heroes can counter one way or another)


Item costs will be overhauled in CoM 2 by the way to be non-liear but that's not too large a change to do in CoM 1. So in CoM 2 putting that essential ability on your hero will not require crazy expensive artifacts unless you are greedy and want to max everything on the item.

Just because your items are permanent doesn't mean it makes any sense to spend all those turns and mana casting Create Artifact when you'd end the game faster by casting 6 stacks of Sky Drakes in half the time.

That's the thing. Heroes are Uncommon/Rare tier based on their availability and related spells. They don't compete with Sky Drakes. You don't have the Sky Drake spell yet and won't for another 60-120 turns BUT can have a stack of heroes as powerful as those. More importantly only one hero will be as good as that stack of sky drakes because you're still against uncommons and rares. You don't even need all maxed items, so you can realistically have that unstoppable hero by making one maxed item for 2-3000 mana and equipping the best two things you found in treasure along with it.

But I wouldn't rate a specific hero-focused strategy highly compared to other strategies, unless you're playing small maps

Exactly, see the discussion in the other thread. Heroes are a strategy that gets weaker with increasing map size. You can have a limited number of heroes (6 to be exact) and that number does not scale with map size nor does the items in treasure and even the casting skill to create your own scales less sharply than the map size itself (although amplifying towers help a lot with that so it's not nearly as bad as it would be without them).
This is an inherent trait of the land size setting. Anything that does not scale with land size, will be better or worse (depending on whether it's a cost or asset that is not scaling) as the land size is changed.
It can't be helped. Heroes and even summon based strategies are worse on larger maps while combat spell strategies, normal unit strategies and global enchantment strategies are better.

...and this might actually be the answer to my "scaled research cost" idea in that thread. There are way too many things and strategies that not scale with map size regardless of the research cost so it makes more sense to consider this a feature than trying to fight against it.

even 1 high end power can cost 800 which is more than most Very Rare spells,

CoM will fix that, assuming we don't find during playtesting that cheaper items are OP even if they are not maxed out.

Yes, hero levels are not that great though they aren't really much worse than in the original, the only relevant nerf is losing 2 armor on max level and maybe 1 to hit? They still get the attack, the hit points, less resistance but they are charmed or wear a resist magic item anyway so it's not a relevant stat most of the time, I honestly don't remember about the to hit but I think even that might be unchanged (+2 at max level). In fact heroes have typically more abilities now, many of which scale by level so a high level hero can now do things like have an extra 8 ammo or buff all the stats on your entire army by +3, and they even get more MP on levels than they used to.
I don't really see how levels can be any better. They already gain enough attack power to be equal to very rares assuming even minimal equipment (seriously, 25 attack with +3 to hit is as good as a colossus), their HP is also comparable to rare or better creatures (20+ even on spellcaster heroes, 25+ on most melee), their armor is vastly superior (I admit, not from leveling unless they have agility but it is superior nonetheless) and that's pretty much every stat there is in the game. Seriously what more could they have and if they are more powerful, where does that put heroes that also have equipment on top of it?

[massone]

That's not the case. Sapher has proven over and over and over every single time he played that heroes are still the most powerful thing in the game. If you want to see, watch almost any of his Lunatic difficulty videos. He transitions into using heroes in midgame 99% of the time and uses them to finish all opponents. (you might want to watch the more recent uploads though as in older ones he demonstrated several very OP strategies no longer possible)

Yes, doom damage hurts heroes. So if you send them against an enemy known for having Doom Bolt, wear a Regeneration artifact (unless you know Exaltation and have large enough maxhp to survive the first turn). If you don't have any, send your heroes after the Life, Sorcery, Death or Nature wizards (assuming you have the proper items against their spells).

Playing heroes is about knowing and choosing the battle you send them into and being prepared for it through equipping the correct artifacts (or casting the correct buffs, whichever is available).

(Honestly, very rare tier Chaos wizards are probably the only thing heroes are not safe to use against due to Apocalypse anyway but you didn't mention that spell in particular and everything else, heroes can counter one way or another)

I'm aware, but his recent vids haven't really shown heroes being the strongest IMO. One was a multi-realm that had no choice but to use heroes. One was mono death which has no heavy hitters at Rare, and Demon Lords aren't really rushable because Death's economy is weak, causing a large gap from Uncommon to Demon Lords that needs to be filled by heroes. Finally, the Sorcery one despite being a supposed hero strat, actually used the Omniscient Sagemaster Sorcery research rush combo, and demonstrated the OPness of Magic Immunity, not heroes, while getting almost all items from treasure.

There are plenty of other counters to heroes from Uncommon from every Realm, and several races, except Death. It's far from just Chaos that's a threat, and you don't need to wait until Very Rares at all. Heroes only seem safe to use because the AI doesn't know how to use the counters properly, but that's equally true of many other ways to exploit the AI.

That's the thing. Heroes are Uncommon/Rare tier based on their availability and related spells. They don't compete with Sky Drakes. You don't have the Sky Drake spell yet and won't for another 60-120 turns BUT can have a stack of heroes as powerful as those. More importantly only one hero will be as good as that stack of sky drakes because you're still against uncommons and rares. You don't even need all maxed items, so you can realistically have that unstoppable hero by making one maxed item for 2-3000 mana and equipping the best two things you found in treasure along with it.

That sounds strange to me. When would you cast the artifact? I would consider 200 casting skill a reasonable time to cast a 3000 mana spell, but even then that's still 10-15 turns we're talking about. If I don't take Archmage, even if I funnel all my Power into SP every turn from turn 10, I still reach Very Rare not far after 200 casting skill. Maybe 5-10 turns later at most. If I'm balancing the two uses properly (which is most strategies), it should happen around the same time, and if I concentrate research, it's quite possible to have Very Rares accessible at 150-170 casting skill, or even much sooner relatively if there aren't enough amplifying towers around to inflate the casting skill by 40-70. That's without the Sage Master Omniscient combo. So by the time a player can cast the 3000 mana spell, they should already have access to Very Rares. In a dedicated rush Sky Drake strat that skips spells to get to Very Rare faster and heavily concentrates research, if you get lucky you can have Sky Drakes at turn 100, but certainly 130 at the latest and 15 towns would be enough to pull this off. You think there can be a hero as strong as a Very Rare by turn 60 in the latest versions? It seems crazy to spend two years casting an artifact mid-game if you do it at like only 100 casting skill.

Exactly, see the discussion in the other thread. Heroes are a strategy that gets weaker with increasing map size. You can have a limited number of heroes (6 to be exact) and that number does not scale with map size nor does the items in treasure and even the casting skill to create your own scales less sharply than the map size itself (although amplifying towers help a lot with that so it's not nearly as bad as it would be without them).
This is an inherent trait of the land size setting. Anything that does not scale with land size, will be better or worse (depending on whether it's a cost or asset that is not scaling) as the land size is changed.
It can't be helped. Heroes and even summon based strategies are worse on larger maps while combat spell strategies, normal unit strategies and global enchantment strategies are better.

...and this might actually be the answer to my "scaled research cost" idea in that thread. There are way too many things and strategies that not scale with map size regardless of the research cost so it makes more sense to consider this a feature than trying to fight against it.

True enough.

CoM will fix that, assuming we don't find during playtesting that cheaper items are OP even if they are not maxed out.

Yes, hero levels are not that great though they aren't really much worse than in the original, the only relevant nerf is losing 2 armor on max level and maybe 1 to hit? They still get the attack, the hit points, less resistance but they are charmed or wear a resist magic item anyway so it's not a relevant stat most of the time, I honestly don't remember about the to hit but I think even that might be unchanged (+2 at max level). In fact heroes have typically more abilities now, many of which scale by level so a high level hero can now do things like have an extra 8 ammo or buff all the stats on your entire army by +3, and they even get more MP on levels than they used to.
I don't really see how levels can be any better. They already gain enough attack power to be equal to very rares assuming even minimal equipment (seriously, 25 attack with +3 to hit is as good as a colossus), their HP is also comparable to rare or better creatures (20+ even on spellcaster heroes, 25+ on most melee), their armor is vastly superior (I admit, not from leveling unless they have agility but it is superior nonetheless) and that's pretty much every stat there is in the game. Seriously what more could they have and if they are more powerful, where does that put heroes that also have equipment on top of it?

Heroes that are "Demigods" with 2000 EXP, surviving 100 battles with enemy Wizards (and, as in my suggestion, NOT artificially boosted 2 levels with Warlord/Crusade), with maxed equipment, should certainly be able to outclass anything but another Demigod with maxed equipment. It's only fair. You spent 10,000 mana or a lot of treasure hunting/gold purchases, multiple summons to roll the right one, and risked it in 100 battles and it's still alive, building it up over the course of 50+ turns. Why shouldn't it be able to destroy a few measly 500 mana summons? If it's invincible by then, it should be. The enemy wizard should have killed it before it became a "Demigod". There should only be one power level above Demigod, and that's you ascending to full god with the Spell of Mastery and winning the game.

Most importantly, I'm opposed to the idea that items give a much bigger boost to heroes than the heroes' own experience. Because EXP requires risk-taking to get, while items really don't. With the current EXP rules, they also get more from battling enemy Wizards instead of the easy neutral stacks. Reward should be appropriate to the risk and investment. You also can't just teleport EXP and levels around and replace your dead super hero by giving all the items to a new one, or teleporting items around every turn so your 3 items powers 6 super heroes on different parts of the map.

[Seravy]

That sounds strange to me. When would you cast the artifact?

Assuming Artificer, Create Artifact is the first rare available in research so I have pretty much the full duration of rare tier to cast artifacts and use my heroes which is 6 years, 72 turns. In reality, another 3-4 years are safe to add because it will take the AI more time to actually summon enough very rare creatures to build up stacks of them, or get the particular very rare spell(s) that shut down heroes. It also makes the item cost only 1500-2000 to make.

Without Artificer, I use whatever I found in treasure and don't create artifacts, unless I know heroes are the specific best counter I have against the upcoming final opponent, or I have no better options due to playing low spellbooks and not getting a rare creature.

For example if I play Life and the enemy is heavy Sorcery then I invest into them because no other Life strategy works for that opponent. Heroes are also very effective against Life (no direct damage spells) and Death (get enough resistance and make sure you have enough units to not get hurt by Wave of Despair), or for cracking some particularly hard capitals. (I remember there was a game where casting Holy Word with spell save -6 on the enemy Demon Lord stack was the solution)

I will also cast it if I got a few good heroes with okay treasure items that already snowballed into something worthy of investing more into - basically if I feel I'm already halfway towards using a hero strategy through chance.

But overall, I would say Create Artifact as is is too steep an investment unless that's my core strategy or special circumstances apply. It's not worthless though - even if not going for a full hero strategy, casting a few minor artifacts with only 1-2 critically important powers can contribute a lot to the game. Like if I have a hero with Charmed and the enemy is Death, all I need is some decent armor or an item with Regeneration and nothing else and I'll have a very very good unit that will contribute far more than any rare creature I could summon. This use will be much more viable in CoM 2 though, right now it's probably overcosted.

I apologize for being so incompetent but I have never been able to reseach as fast as some people. I know there are much better players out there, personally I can't even beat Lunatic once (at least the pre 6.0 version of it) and I don't think I have ever researched a very rare on turn 100 or 130, it's normally around turn 180-200 for me, and that is also the normal expectation. We had this 6+ page long thread about economy calculations to set research costs and the baseline was "1 spell tier per 6 years" so that puts very rares (the second one you researched specifically) at 1418 which is turn 216. All costs, power production of nodes, cities, everything is based on that number.
If you get it earlier consistently that can only mean one of the following :
-You play significantly better than a generic Expert level player
-You play on above normal land size
-You play an extremely research heavy strategy that uses less than normal amounts of MP/SP

Neither of these are really the fault of heroes or artifacts.

Heroes that are "Demigods" with 2000 EXP, surviving 100 battles with enemy Wizards (and, as in my suggestion, NOT artificially boosted 2 levels with Warlord/Crusade), with maxed equipment, should certainly be able to outclass anything but another Demigod with maxed equipment. It's only fair. You spent 10,000 mana or a lot of treasure hunting/gold purchases, multiple summons to roll the right one, and risked it in 100 battles and it's still alive, building it up over the course of 50+ turns. Why shouldn't it be able to destroy a few measly 500 mana summons? If it's invincible by then, it should be.

Okay if we are going to look at the numbers, let me counter with numbers. If I spent 15000 RP to research my Sky Drake and an additional 24000 RP+ to research enough of my rare spells first to access it, so a total of 37000+ RP, then why should a hero who costed at most 10000 gold or mana to hire and equip (but more likely only 4000) and provided you with consistent benefits for 100 full turns by clearing out treasure locations and destroying enemies, be stronger? Why would I pay the 24+15k RP for the spells when I can just summon a hero with an Uncommon Spell for 1280 RP and make Artifacts (4000 RP I think) instead, and the hero is paying for itself while their equipment is being created when the Sky Drake does not because it's not even researched yet?

Speaking of Sky Drake. Unless I have 10 Sorcery books there is no guarantee I will have it. Heroes require much less investment in picks, Artificer can work from as little as 5-6 picks (the retort and 4-5 books of one realm that has good item powers for heroes). If I do have the 10 books, I risk Sky Drake not showing up until I researched all my rares and in worst case, 2 very rares on top of that, so the potential total research cost is over 70000 RP for worse case.
If I pick fewer books, I risk not being able to get the spell at all.
Meanwhile I can be sure I will get heroes and Create Artifact in every single game, and the cost to use them will be minimal compared to the Sky Drake's research investment AND the heroes will be killing enemies for me 60-100 turns earlier on top of it.

Most importantly, I'm opposed to the idea that items give a much bigger boost to heroes than the heroes' own experience. Because EXP requires risk-taking to get, while items really don't.

I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding.

Items are a spellcasting and exploration game mechanic. The fundamentals for this particular game (magic) and 4X as a genre (exploration, in this case for treasure). Of course items need to be strong.

Yes, we can have the opposite but then treasure and item creation magic will no longer matter. that would be bad even for an RPG and that's the genre where leveling up is the core game mechanic, in 4X it isn't.

Either way, let's assume a moderately decent hero and compare it to a maxed item set. I prefer not to go overboard so the hero has 3 abilities that grant stats, that's roughly standard for medium tier and to keep it simple I will pretend other hero abilities are equivalent to the ones granting stats to the hero because those aren't available in items at all.

So our imaginary hero rolled to have Constitution, Agility, and Blademaster, neither of them at Super level. (Other abilities might even make items look worse as then Lionheart can't be considered to grant 14 points of matching stats.)

This gives the hero a total of
17 health
10 armor
8 attack
+4 To Hit
4 resistance
some MP, let's assume a low amount of 40. (Casters will almost always get more but melee heroes get none)

Sword
+6 attack
+3 To Hit
+4 Defense
+20 Spell Skill

Armor
+8 defense
Lionheart
+20 MP
+3 Health. (This is not available but probably will be in CoM 2 so let's pretend it is)

So far we have covered 9 attack (items win by 1), 12 defense (items win by 2), all the MP, 3 of +To Hit, and 3 of the resistance.

Health and To Hit are not valid for accessories, but assuming the 6 health and 1 to hit is worth 3 slots (no, without Lionheart available which we used up, 6 health would cost 2 slots at least if it was a possible option), we have one slot left over so the maxed items are slightly better - we got 1 extra ATK, 2 extra armor and a free slot, but this was a medium tier hero, for example the Golden One.
A top tier hero which is more fair to compare to maxed items has 6-8 of these statgain abilities so they easily get 5 full maxed items worth of bonus from their levels.

Honestly, these results are slightly shocking, I thought level benefits weren't this good but it seems I was wrong. Hero levels are already better than items. (although both offer a lot of unique abilities not available in the other so it's not easy to compare.)

[massone]

Assuming Artificer, Create Artifact is the first rare available in research so I have pretty much the full duration of rare tier to cast artifacts and use my heroes which is 6 years, 72 turns. In reality, another 3-4 years are safe to add because it will take the AI more time to actually summon enough very rare creatures to build up stacks of them, or get the particular very rare spell(s) that shut down heroes. It also makes the item cost only 1500-2000 to make.

Without Artificer, I use whatever I found in treasure and don't create artifacts, unless I know heroes are the specific best counter I have against the upcoming final opponent, or I have no better options due to playing low spellbooks and not getting a rare creature.

For example if I play Life and the enemy is heavy Sorcery then I invest into them because no other Life strategy works for that opponent. Heroes are also very effective against Life (no direct damage spells) and Death (get enough resistance and make sure you have enough units to not get hurt by Wave of Despair), or for cracking some particularly hard capitals. (I remember there was a game where casting Holy Word with spell save -6 on the enemy Demon Lord stack was the solution)

I will also cast it if I got a few good heroes with okay treasure items that already snowballed into something worthy of investing more into - basically if I feel I'm already halfway towards using a hero strategy through chance.

But overall, I would say Create Artifact as is is too steep an investment unless that's my core strategy or special circumstances apply. It's not worthless though - even if not going for a full hero strategy, casting a few minor artifacts with only 1-2 critically important powers can contribute a lot to the game. Like if I have a hero with Charmed and the enemy is Death, all I need is some decent armor or an item with Regeneration and nothing else and I'll have a very very good unit that will contribute far more than any rare creature I could summon. This use will be much more viable in CoM 2 though, right now it's probably overcosted.

I apologize for being so incompetent but I have never been able to reseach as fast as some people. I know there are much better players out there, personally I can't even beat Lunatic once (at least the pre 6.0 version of it) and I don't think I have ever researched a very rare on turn 100 or 130, it's normally around turn 180-200 for me, and that is also the normal expectation. We had this 6+ page long thread about economy calculations to set research costs and the baseline was "1 spell tier per 6 years" so that puts very rares (the second one you researched specifically) at 1418 which is turn 216. All costs, power production of nodes, cities, everything is based on that number.
If you get it earlier consistently that can only mean one of the following :
-You play significantly better than a generic Expert level player
-You play on above normal land size
-You play an extremely research heavy strategy that uses less than normal amounts of MP/SP

Neither of these are really the fault of heroes or artifacts.

So the way you described is similar to how I use heroes too. Without Artificer, it's too steep an investment except in special circumstances. I don't consider heroes the strongest thing, just one among many tools, which can do a lot of things but is often worse than an alternate strategy when better tools are available. Their main strength right now is adding versatility, like you said, it's always available regardless of Realm, and you can fall back on it when your Realm/Race matchup is bad, or you don't happen to get the right spells in your spellbook (especially for dual and three realm plays), and you get items from treasure anyways so there's no harm in using them.

For the same reason, I don't actually play hyper specialized strats because they're not versatile enough, so I despite my example of rushing Sky Drakes, I wouldn't consider the Sky Drake rushing strategy to actually be a good one, nor do I always rush it if it's in my spellbook. It's only an example for considering the the relative timelines for rushing heroes vs rushing something else. When I think of "the strongest", or a "metacompetitive" build, in the context of gameplay balance, I think of the builds that consistently win against a variety of situations and OTHER popular/strong builds, especially if it doesn't take advantage of any AI exploits and can be expected to perform the same against human-intelligence opponents.

In short, heroes belong in every strategy, but going back to the original point I was responding to in this thread, creating a "doomstack" of awesome heroes with Create Artifact is neither practical or unstoppable. It's not just not a good strategy for the AI, it's not good for the player either. But getting a group of strong heroes from found/bought items is normal and quite powerful, but it can be done as part of almost any strategy that doesn't particularly focus on heroes.

Okay if we are going to look at the numbers, let me counter with numbers. If I spent 15000 RP to research my Sky Drake and an additional 24000 RP+ to research enough of my rare spells first to access it, so a total of 37000+ RP, then why should a hero who costed at most 10000 gold or mana to hire and equip (but more likely only 4000) and provided you with consistent benefits for 100 full turns by clearing out treasure locations and destroying enemies, be stronger? Why would I pay the 24+15k RP for the spells when I can just summon a hero with an Uncommon Spell for 1280 RP and make Artifacts (4000 RP I think) instead, and the hero is paying for itself while their equipment is being created when the Sky Drake does not because it's not even researched yet?

Speaking of Sky Drake. Unless I have 10 Sorcery books there is no guarantee I will have it. Heroes require much less investment in picks, Artificer can work from as little as 5-6 picks (the retort and 4-5 books of one realm that has good item powers for heroes). If I do have the 10 books, I risk Sky Drake not showing up until I researched all my rares and in worst case, 2 very rares on top of that, so the potential total research cost is over 70000 RP for worse case.
If I pick fewer books, I risk not being able to get the spell at all.
Meanwhile I can be sure I will get heroes and Create Artifact in every single game, and the cost to use them will be minimal compared to the Sky Drake's research investment AND the heroes will be killing enemies for me 60-100 turns earlier on top of it.

Because when you research the Rare spells before the VRs, and the Uncommons too, they benefit you in other ways, and indeed some are even better than Very Rares (looking at Magic Immunity). You're not spending them just to get to the VR, and as I said above, I wouldn't actually consider the rush Sky Drake strat to be a great strategy either, it's merely better to use Sky Drakes when you have access to them, and it's a natural consequence of researching up to Very Rare, which you normally should anyway for most strategies that don't rely on winning the game before Very Rares. Even if you don't get Sky Drake, you get other Very Rares that are just as good for other reasons, and every Realm has some great VRs, not just Sorcery.

If you spend 20 turns or however long it takes to cast the Create Artifact, the trade-off is a lot of other spells you could have cast. For it to be worth it, that one item has to produce more benefit than the 10-20 other spells you could have cast in the same time, and it has to provide a marginal benefit above what you could achieve by using a normally hired hero and standard treasure hunting's items (because there's no real trade-off there, you should always hunt treasure when not at war, you need forces to protect yourself even if you're not at war, and you hunt to find spells too). But is it really worth it? Generally, if I can have one awesome hero that requires 20 turns of casting, vs casting 20 other spells and a somewhat mediocre hero, I'd say the 2nd option is better and less risky. After all, if the AI was actually intelligent, they might spell blast you after a while, negating your casting skill with mere mana reserves. Or you might lose enough advantage from not casting the other spells that you have a massive weakness.

I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding.

Items are a spellcasting and exploration game mechanic. The fundamentals for this particular game (magic) and 4X as a genre (exploration, in this case for treasure). Of course items need to be strong.

Yes, we can have the opposite but then treasure and item creation magic will no longer matter. that would be bad even for an RPG and that's the genre where leveling up is the core game mechanic, in 4X it isn't.

Either way, let's assume a moderately decent hero and compare it to a maxed item set. I prefer not to go overboard so the hero has 3 abilities that grant stats, that's roughly standard for medium tier and to keep it simple I will pretend other hero abilities are equivalent to the ones granting stats to the hero because those aren't available in items at all.

So our imaginary hero rolled to have Constitution, Agility, and Blademaster, neither of them at Super level. (Other abilities might even make items look worse as then Lionheart can't be considered to grant 14 points of matching stats.)

This gives the hero a total of
17 health
10 armor
8 attack
+4 To Hit
4 resistance
some MP, let's assume a low amount of 40. (Casters will almost always get more but melee heroes get none)

Sword
+6 attack
+3 To Hit
+4 Defense
+20 Spell Skill

Armor
+8 defense
Lionheart
+20 MP
+3 Health. (This is not available but probably will be in CoM 2 so let's pretend it is)

So far we have covered 9 attack (items win by 1), 12 defense (items win by 2), all the MP, 3 of +To Hit, and 3 of the resistance.

Health and To Hit are not valid for accessories, but assuming the 6 health and 1 to hit is worth 3 slots (no, without Lionheart available which we used up, 6 health would cost 2 slots at least if it was a possible option), we have one slot left over so the maxed items are slightly better - we got 1 extra ATK, 2 extra armor and a free slot, but this was a medium tier hero, for example the Golden One.
A top tier hero which is more fair to compare to maxed items has 6-8 of these statgain abilities so they easily get 5 full maxed items worth of bonus from their levels.

Honestly, these results are slightly shocking, I thought level benefits weren't this good but it seems I was wrong. Hero levels are already better than items. (although both offer a lot of unique abilities not available in the other so it's not easy to compare.)

It's true they'd be similar if you look at raw stats, but for most of the actual gameplay, items contribute more stats and useful combat powers, especially defense and defensive powers, which are the most important stats. Yet, getting to Demigod is actually extremely hard through regular EXP gains. It's much harder and riskier than getting items worth the same amount of stats (easier to make, but also easier to get by treasure hunting with other units--you don't have to risk the hero itself).

My suggestion wasn't to make levels more important, but to boost the gains at the highest levels. Right now it doesn't feel like there's a big difference when heroes make each additional level above Lord, relative to how hard it is to get them there. Meanwhile, you can equip a 0 EXP hero with 3 good items and still have a beast of a unit. Because of the difficulty in leveling, if you don't have Warlord, or Life, items are much more important than levels. Even for Life and Warlord, items (and unit enchantments) are more important than levels for most of the game.

[massone]

What is supposed to happen when an item has both Doom and Phantasmal? Or if the hero has Illusion and the weapon has Doom?

[Seravy]

Doom takes priority because it makes the attack and defense rolls not happen so ignoring defense becomes no longer relevant.

[mercy]

Is there any wizard type, retort or book type to select at game begin that enhances the chance for Summon Hero to appear in the very first research screen at game begin? I had one Life wizard, who had the Summon Hero in her research available right from the start. Are there any requirements for this to happen, or was I just lucky?

[Seravy]

Assuming Summon Hero counts as an uncommon spell for research purposes, this can only happen if you have fewer than 8 common spells available to research (including Arcane spells), and the leftover slots randomly get Summon Hero from all the available uncommons.

Picking Artificer removes Enchant Item form the common research list, while picking 2-6 books in a single realm gives the fewest (2) common spells for research in that realm.

So the highest chance would be Artificer, 6 Life, 3 other retorts (using 5 picks total so at least two has to be double pick cost). That gives you 5 uncommon spell slots at the beginning. You can further improve the chances by having less non-Arcane uncommons available, so picking 3 double cost retorts, 5 Life books, and Artificer is probably the most effective overall.