Quote:he chaos version not only give 6 times more power per tile converted but also makes the tile cursed (no resources).
This gives you power for Forest tiles already present in the game even before it converted any. Armageddon gives you nothing for volcanoes not created by it.
Quote:It's a little bit weird that you cast a Global spell that affect all nodes on rare tier and discover that nodes with a later very rare spell.
That's how it works for all other global spells, so I think that's fine.
Divine Order affects wizards you have never seen.
Armageddon raises volcanoes anywhere on the map.
Great Unsummoning kills creatures anywhere.
etc
Quote:As nodes have a clear effect of "dispelling"-"interrupting" spells from other realms so it's hard to justify how could a nature Global work on Sorcery and Chaos nodes.
Nodes don't counter or affect global effects. A node will not counter your Zombie Mastery or Crusade either. So if you did cast a spell that affects monsters worldwide, nodes won't be able to stop that.
Ideally, the monsters should be coming from "anywhere", but nodes are the only distinguishable feature on the map that are permanent and could serve as a spawning location. (we really shouldn't make it just put the stacks anywhere at random, that's too unpredictable both for deciding if it's useful to cast and to plan a defensive strategy against it.)
...wait, there actually is one more and that one might make better sense, too.
Towers! What if the monsters came from towers?
Quote:Also I still think it would be a case of nature spells affecting creatures from other realms like my previous Call of the Wild suggestion.
This is true, I agree that would be a mistake. A good workaround for that is to reword the spell to do one of the following :
-All nodes (or towers) have a 10% chance to spawn a rampaging monster stack each turn that consist of monsters from realms you own at least 4 spellbooks of.
-All nodes (or towers) have a 10% chance to spawn a rampaging monster stack each turn that consist of monsters that you know how to summon.
Alternately we can ignore the problem here because you aren't actually controlling any monsters. They are for all intent and purpose, still neutrals. You don't control them and when they attack the AI, it won't even use "normal combat", but strategic. Being a global spell, you can't even control which player they'll be attacking, so it might also hurt your allies and probably will have a diplomacy penalty.
One reason why using the node's realm is preferred is because that limits the creatures to Nature/Chaos/Sorcery.
Life and Death creatures are not very suitable for this purpose in my opinion, being both hard to deal with due to special abilities with and lacking variety. Meanwhile Nature/Chaos/Sorcery monsters are threatening but generic enough to be solvable for any realm or strategy. (for this same reason, I think it's better if we don't add Life and Death nodes to the game.)
We definitely need to address this issue on the other spell (if added) that gives you units from nodes however. Unfortunately, spawning only creatures you know how to summon would make it far too redundant with Fairy Ring.
What if the node spell simply made you immune to the countering effect of nodes, like the original retort and current Astrologer, instead of spawning creatures for you (which Fairy Ring does already anyway)? Or did we already consider and discard that idea? I don't remember.
So how about...
Version C
Monster Mastery (rare)
Any tower not owned by the casting wizard has a 10% chance to generate a rampaging monster stack each turn that consists of units you could summon / belong to a realm you have 4+ books of.
Rampaging monsters will never target the caster's cities and will avoid their units.
Whenever you attack a Lair, Node, Tower, or other neutral monster stack, each monster has a 25% chance of not participating in the battle. (they are forced to retreat if you win, but stay in the area if you lose.)
Clairvoyance (very rare)
The casting wizard sees all tiles on the overland map.
The wizard is immune to the countering effect of nodes.
Planetary Mastery(very rare)
Whenever you cast an expensive spell, an earthquake hits a target city.
All nodes under the casting wizard's control produce an additional ?? power.
Version D
Monster Mastery (rare)
Any node not owned by the casting wizard has a 10% chance to generate a rampaging monster stack each turn. (of creatures of the node's realm)
Rampaging monsters will never target the caster's cities and will avoid their units.
Whenever you attack a Lair, Node, Tower, or other neutral monster stack, each monster has a 25% chance of not participating in the battle. (they are forced to retreat if you win, but stay in the area if you lose.)
Clairvoyance (very rare)
The casting wizard sees all tiles on the overland map.
The wizard is immune to the countering effect of nodes.
Planetary Mastery(very rare)
Whenever you cast an expensive spell, an earthquake hits a target city.
All nodes under the casting wizard's control produce an additional ?? power.
The good part about this pair of very rares is that they offer a strong synergy. Seeing the map allows targeting your Earthquake spells, and being immune to node counters allows conquering more nodes to gain extra power.
As Nature is the realm where players are encouraged to take many books as there are lots of "one of the kind" essential spells, adding another such combo probably is good design. (similar to Call Lighting and Entangle, albeit not that powerful)
Also, I think I might be underestimating the "see all map" effect a little, it's not as weak as it used to be. Some maps will be so large that scouting the entire thing will be unlikely to happen even near the end of the game so the effect becomes better.
Unfortunately the reason why people dislike casting the spell - having to choose between watching every enemy unit move which makes turns super slow, and having to disable enemy move display and not seeing any incoming threat at all - will also escalate with larger maps.