Caster of Magic II Spell System overhaul discussion

[massone]

Normally in the early game other wizards have sprites or ghouls in their cities, so skeletons would not be able to harm the former and darkness would buff the latter. Hell Hounds would still beat them even with darkness, I guess they would do well against Nagas with their poison immunity (although still not sure they would actually beat them).

In the early game, sprites and ghouls dominate you can't expect skeletons to beat them...skeletons can win with quantity against nagas and hell hounds. They're definitely more cost efficient and will win head to head in terms of casting skill used (not unit 1 on 1, ofc, that'd be an unfair comparison). 3 7-figure skeletons units vs 1 3-figure naga? Nagas will get destroyed, even without darkness.

Sure you don't use any overland casting skill with darkness, but it uses up mana and all your combat skill early on. I would run out of mana very quickly casting darkness in every battle, especially away from the fortress, for what seems like a marginal benefit. It also means you can't use resist elements or anything else if the enemy has magic ranged or wall of fire. 

Then maybe you're overusing it, and using it too early. For much of the early game, spells like Black Sleep and Cloak of Fear have more impact.

Maybe it is very useful and I'm missing the point, but it doesn't seem to have much synergy with death units where the more powerful ones have less figures so it is not so helpful.

It's not all about figures. Werewolves and Shadow Demons have +2 To Hit, and regen. These synergize well with higher attack and defense boosts. It also boosts their resistance a bit, which is a serious weakness. A 9-stack of Shadow Demons is both powerful and highly efficient when used with Darkness.

I find Zombie Mastery just useful for slowing down enemy stacks and using up their resources. By then enemies often have Flame Strike, so even if you cast darkness first they will all be destroyed the next turn anyway. They almost always have ranged and flying units, so even with an enemy without flamestrike you can't ever reach the enemy with your zombies to actually do any damage. Also it creates the zombies in a stack of 3-4 on their own which get destroyed by the AI the next turn before you can stack them with any of your stronger units. 

That should be the expected result. Chaos is very strong then, and has Flame Strike precisely because it's meant to be good against large quantities of weak units. Nature has no flying creatures at rare. Life usually buffs units more than summoning Angels. It's hard to fight against flying and ranged creatures because flying and ranged is good and zombies are super slow.

The advantage of buffing zombies or ghouls is that it can make them strong enough to kill more powerful enemy units to turn them into undead, which also benefit from Darkness. Through a combination of buffing your own units and cursing the enemy units, it's quite feasible to turn Rare and even Very Rare creatures like Efreets and Djinns using zombies/ghouls, because all higher end summons have pretty low defense compared to attack. Then the issue is a matter of dealing enough create undead damage--which is why Zombies/Ghouls are useful even later on. Wraiths have a hard time creating undead because their melee counts as normal damage, you need life-steal to deal more than 50%. Zombies and Ghouls deal 100% create undead damage.

Blur works on all your units and none of your enemy units. Most of your stacks will be made of death and non death units.
Is one extra defence on a single high armour unit as useful as on a multi figure low defence unit? I thought it wasn't.

It's the other way around. Blur works all on your ENEMY units by blocking 20% of attack damage before defense rolls. The more attack your opponents have, the more damage it blocks.

And 1 extra defense on a high armour unit is BETTER than on multi-figure low defense unit. Defense is always better when concentrated on a single figure because it gets to make the same high defense roll against every attack.

Suppose we are defending against a 10 sword 30% to Hit attack. This deals 3.0 potential damage, average.
Blur blocks 20%, or 0.6 damage, before defense rolls, effectively making it as if they only had 8 swords.

Without Blur, A unit with 4 def will block 1.2 and take 1.8 damage.
So going from 4 to 5 def to get 0.3 extra reduction only protects against 16.6% of the damage (0.3/1.8).
Going from 5 to 6 now protects against 20% of what the unit would have taken (0.3 reduction/1.5 average taken when def is 5).
6 to 7 protects against (0.3/1.2 = 25%)
7 to 8 protects against (0.3/0.9) = 33%)
You see the pattern? The higher defense, the bigger the marginal benefit, as you get closer to blocking 100% damage with the next extra defense, and effectively become "invincible", which is why hero strategies are so strong.

The same principle is true with Blur. With an effective 8 attack instead and 2.4 potential damage from the attack, the same 4 def now results in average 1.2 damage taken, compared to 1.8 before, so the benefit was blocking 0.6/1.8 = 33% of actual damage). The 8 def has 2.4 average damage reduction, so it averages 0 damage received compared to 0.6 without Blur. Blur now blocks near 100% of the damage for the higher def unit.

But Blur scales with your enemy's attacks, so in the early game, it blocks very little. Against a 3 atk enemy, it blocks only 0.18, whereas a straight extra shield blocks 0.3. Your enemy needs to have at least 5 attack 30% to Hit (actually 40% in COM II) before Blur is as good as 1 extra shield, while Darkness also adds attack and resistance.

[Seravy]

Let's try to summarize the current state so we can make progress!

DECIDED (not yet implemented)
A. New Nature Very rare : Each turn, X land tiles at random are converted into Forests. Gain +0.5 power for each Forest tile on the map.
B. Split Dispelling Wave : it loses the ability to dispel city enchantments
C. Add Sorcery Rare : Dispel City - dispel city enchantments, the same way Dispelling Wave could. Probably overland only.
-Name for this spell?
D. Split Uranus Blessing : lose unit buffing and combat effect, boost new skill buildings instead.
-By how much?
E. New Sorcery Uncommon : Philosopher's Stone. The two effects removed from Uranus' Blessing.
F. Spell Blast becomes Sorcery Rare

G. Magic Immunity becomes Sorcery Very Rare
H. Add new Wind Mastery Sorcery very Rare spell : all units gain Flight and +1 movement.

I. Immolation should gain Cold Immunity.
J. New Chaos Uncommon spell : Insulation : enchanted unit gains Fire Immunity and Lightning Resistance. (and same change to item creation)
K. Fire Storm becomes Chaos Rare
L. Divine Order becomes Life Rare

M. New effect for Holy Arms : chance for the unit to add any random buff the player knows to all normal units.
N. Drain Power becomes a Death Rare
O. Eternal Night loses "halved power" effect.
-Possibly change to be +2/+2 for Death creatures through Darkness?

UNDECIDED
1. Earth To Mud - keep it making swamps or improve to have the original effects?
2. Earthquake - Are we satisfied with the 40% rate and 150 cost of this spell? Are we satisfied with the unit destruction percentage?

3. Blizzard - Overland unit destruction really shouldn't be a Nature thing outside of Earthquake so this spell should be removed in my opinion.
However in that case we need a replacement. Any ideas? Best would be if we could reuse the spell animation but if not, that's fine as well.
Maybe a combat spell that deals damage (stronger Fairy Dust) and freezes enemy units for a turn? But we have that in Web.
4. If we select 11 rares per realm, we need another Nature Rare. If we select 12, we need two.
5. Seismic Mastery - how do we split up the effects into two spells?
6. If we want 12 rares per realm, we need another Sorcery Rare. This could be a global enchantment to buff unit resistances.
7. How to improve Wind Walking?

8. Fire Elemental. Do we want to raise its attack power or add hitchance? Currently, it deals enough damage to kill roughly 3 figures of a swordsmen unit per attack which is pretty good for a common tier combat summon in a realm that's bad at combat summoning.
9. Efreet and Doom Bat, do we want to exchange their resistance stats?
10. Magic Vortex, do we want to reduce the doom damage? The lightning damage? Do we want to keep the original movement behavior of not turning more than 90 degrees at a time?
11. If we want 12 rare spells per realm, we need a new Chaos Rare spell.
12. Warp Reality, keep -20% hit chance or adjust to 15-16-17-18%?
13. If we want 12 very rare spells per tier, we need two new Chaos Very Rares. Any ideas? Direct Damage would be nice, or there are the two ideas for globals I posted.
14. Do we want Prayer to be 9% instead of 10%?
15. We need to add a new Life uncommon unit buff. Two basic ideas have been posted and many versions of them, basically, a buff that scales with experience and/or a buff that raises hit points.
16. If we want 12 rare spells then we need 1 more Life Rare.
17. Archangels are way too good. How to change that?
18. New Life Very Rare spell : some expensive overland only buff that turns a normal unit into something nearly as good as a very rare creature.
What effects should be granted by the buff?
19. New Life Very Rare creature. Prophet : some sort of a "save or retreat" or "save or change sides" effect.
20. Mana Leak, does this really need to be a common? Other anti-magician spells are Rare. 
21. We have 1 free uncommon slot in Death after moving Drain Power. We have a common slot if we move Mana Leak to uncommon. Add a Vampirism buff to it? Should it also deal damage equal to the stolen life? Should the amount be the same regardless of figure could or should somehow scale with figures?
22. If we want 12 rare spells then we need 1 more Death Rare which can be Vampires if we add it, otherwise we need something new.
23. Vampires/Death Knights/Wraiths have similar role problem, so if we want Vampires then...
Idea 1 :
Vampires - they gain the exact same abilities and stats as wraiths : a fast, melee unit with life steal. Possibly add +1 attack strength, maybe health, and remove 1 Life Steal?
Wraiths - redesigned to have Death Gaze and Life Steal, but weak attack power. What if it also teleported? Basically, visible, but much more durable and faster Nigh Stalker. Could be effective at making undead from weaker enemy units, as Death only does as much damage as the health of the figure, but Life Steal deals as much as the resistance roll was missed. Will rarely convert anything stronger as Death deals most of the damage there.
Death Knights - Add Death Touch. So basically, same as Vampires (or currently wraiths) with first strike, armor piercing, and now death.

Idea 2 :
Keep things as is, possibly add Death Touch to Death Knights anyway. Vampires are a new unit that have the same effect as the new common "Vampirism" spell but twice as powerful.

Idea 3 :
Vampire has 1 figure and low resistance with the usual immunities. High defense, high regeneration, not-so-great maximal hp. Percentage of the melee damage dealt is recovered as hp.
Basically, much more durable than Wraiths against ranged enemies, more effective against other summons, better for stalling, but more vulnerable to exorcism and spells in general and doesn't create undead.
Potentially overpowered?

(In any case Vampires should be Rare.)
24. De we want to keep "Death Demon"? Or make Demons always the Caster type?
25. Demon Lords would be too good if they summoned 3 Caster demons? In general, summoning Demons is much more powerful now because it doesn't require a free combat unit slot so we need to nerf this somehow? What if Summon Demon wasn't cumulative, in the sense that if any Demon Lord summons one, all of them lose 1 charge of the summoning spell? (So even 9 Demon Lords only summon 3 Demons per battle.)
What if Demon Lords summoned different Demons than the Summon Demon spell, one Caster type and two others? (possibly the Death demon we already have and a third new type.)
26. Evil Omens, do we want to nerf this?
27. We need 2 more Death Very Rares if we want 12 very rare spell per tier. Ideas :
27a. Global spell that kills the strongest unit for each (or each enemy) player. (exclude heroes?)
27b. Global spell that halves religious power and city research for all other players.
27c. Global spell that reduces all city resources by 20%.
27d. Unit curse that can spread between enemy units
27e. Unit curse that stays after combat.
(might be bad because you need to lose a battle for this to be useful)
27f. Global enchantment that's the opposite of Charm of Life : all enemy units lose 25% hit points but a minimum of 1. (units with zero hit points per figure die instantly.)
I like a, b and f the most but we don't have 3 slots (unless we remove a Death Very Rare or move one down a tier. Is Summon Demon worth being a Very Rare spell?
28. How do we distribute the additional spells between book picks? Do we still want 10 books to have all spells? If not, do we want guaranteed very rares?

29. Darkness, do we want this to cost 20 instead of 25? or maybe 18?

[roarmalf]

Blur works on all your units and none of your enemy units. Most of your stacks will be made of death and non death units.
Is one extra defence on a single high armour unit as useful as on a multi figure low defence unit? I thought it wasn't.

Suppose we are defending against a 10 sword 30% to Hit attack. This deals 3.0 potential damage, average.
Blur blocks 20%, or 0.6 damage, before defense rolls, effectively making it as if they only had 8 swords.

Clarifying here, Blur reduces damage from all attacks before defense rolls?

What attacks/damage does it include? 

I always thought it was calculated when damage took place after all defenses and each point was individually checked to see if it went through (which is much worse than what you're saying).

[Seravy]

Clarifying here, Blur reduces damage from all attacks before defense rolls?

Yes.

All attacks that use a normal "attack roll" but none of the added effects like touch or immolation.

[massone]

17. I don't see Archangels as too strong. They're one of the best summons, but not really any more overpowered than Demon Lord or Sky Drake, which are both highly spammable too. Demon Lords for the ranged and free spell, Sky Drakes with undispellable Magic Immunity. I only think that from a flavor perspective, it's strange to be spamming Archangels (but that goes for Demon Lords too).

18. Some way of attacking Flying creatures would be good. Life has no other counters to flight except the angel and archangel summons. For the stats, I'm not sure...but what about something that scales with enemy unit's stats, but receives buffs from your own side normally? Something like:

Divine Insight: Guided by divine powers, the unit obtains supernatural insight. No matter what enemy they face or how impossible the odds, they see a path to victory. The unit gains Supernatural, Charmed, and Illusion Immunity. When in combat its effective base stats become equal to 90% of the opposing unit, or equal to 90% of the strongest enemy unit adjacent to it, or whichever one has higher stats, unless its own base stats were already higher (including stat bonuses from Items and Artifacts on Heros). Bonuses from active enchantments or abilities are applied after this effect (but not base stats on items). When attacking, the unit's attacks also ignore all to Hit and Defend penalties, immunities/resistances, and can attack flying creatures even when it is not flying. When defending, the unit ignores armor piercing or Doom effects (the unit can make defense rolls normally).

20. Mana Leak can go up to Uncommon or Rare. Who uses it that early in common anyway?

23. I don't think Wraiths should teleport. Teleporting units are very difficult to kill without ranged units, which are usually also just as vulnerable in return. Teleportation killing such vulnerable ranged units and life-steal them for regen seems excessive. It would basically mean that only the Rare ranged units can handle Wraiths, anything else would be forced to a draw at best. I think that anything with the ability to create more Undead shouldn't be so powerful. It should be strictly weaker than the top summons of the same level, because it generates more efficiency. An adjustment to increase undead creation would be better, perhaps by giving a chance for undead creation even when gaze/melee deals more than 50% of the damage.

Another alternative is the vampire idea. Maybe it can have a Bat Transformation unique combat spell ability. Turns into a faster 8-figure unit with a lot more life steal because there's more figures on it, but has weaker melee and spell save than the vampire form. So it'd be super effective on low resistance units as bats, but also can deal some damage to stronger units in the vamp form. Health is the same and carries over between forms.

25. Demon Lords are powerful enough just with the power generation and ranged magical attacks. Summoning 27 demons in one battle with a 9-stack is way too excessive, so I'd agree with limiting it.

27. I like 27d. An effect like that for either combat or overland would be interest. For example, an overland city (global?) curse that starts to debuff the garrison (all units if global) every turn if not dispelled. Don't like e and really don't like f. By affecting enemy units, what happens when multiple Death wizards stack this? And losing 25% is too much. When something goes up 25% then down 25%, it ends up at 93% of the original. Even if they cancel out, for most units, losing that HP is a lot more problematic than the benefit from gaining the same amount. Ambivalent on a-c.

29. 20 sounds good to me.

[Seravy]

27f.
How about losing 1 hp then, without the 25% effect?
It most likely shouldn't stack if there is more than one in play.

23. I agree that teleporting wraiths was a bad idea.
I don't think a Vampire should be basically a unit that can change modes between bats = same functionality as wraiths, and a stronger creature that is single figure. That makes Wraiths obsolete. (Also Life Steal with 8 figures would be obscenely powerful.)

[Seravy]

Also one more question.
Would it make more sense if Immolation added Fire Immunity and Insulation added Cold Immunity or the other way around?
I think keeping Fire and Lightning on the same spell might work better as both cover the Chaos realm spells, while Cold covers Nature?

[massone]

27f.
How about losing 1 hp then, without the 25% effect?
It most likely shouldn't stack if there is more than one in play.

23. I agree that teleporting wraiths was a bad idea.
I don't think a Vampire should be basically a unit that can change modes between bats = same functionality as wraiths, and a stronger creature that is single figure. That makes Wraiths obsolete. (Also Life Steal with 8 figures would be obscenely powerful.)

I was actually thinking it would effectively replace Wraiths. But if you want to have both units, idea #3 seems okay.

Also one more question.
Would it make more sense if Immolation added Fire Immunity and Insulation added Cold Immunity or the other way around?

Well, immolation means they're burning themselves right? So logically they'd have to have fire immunity. One might argue they should become weak to cold putting out the fire, but there's no mechanism for that in CoM/MoM. Insulation adding Cold Immunity makes sense, as it blocks the transfer of heat. It doesn't necessarily stop the combustion. Wood is a good insulator. It also burns pretty well.

[massone]

27f.
How about losing 1 hp then, without the 25% effect?
It most likely shouldn't stack if there is more than one in play.

Missed this in my last post. Losing 1 seems reasonable but might be underpowered for higher end units with more than 15 HP. Hard to find a balance there, but maybe 20% would be okay.

Another possibility is to make it into a global version of Gates of Hades. So it causes all units to lose 10% of HP every turn, irrecoverable every battle up to a maximum of 25% of their HP rounded up and minimum 1, but doesn't do a resistance check, and stacks with the actual Gates of Hades. Because it's global, it also affects other wizards' combats, though not sure how to handle the strategic strength calculations with that.

[Seravy]

I was actually thinking it would effectively replace Wraiths. But if you want to have both units, idea #3 seems okay.

I just realized we only have room for adding them as rare if we want 12 rares (which might be for the best but so far every realm has ideas for 11) or don't move drain power up/remove it entirely/move it to very rare instead.

I do believe a second rare creature would be nice to have in Death.