Reinforce magic: good the way it is. The +3 resistance as you previously said "might be to good against death" (or even to anything "save" based). I do get the idea of making magical ranged units more relevant for life realm but it does have 2 effects that I consider to be suited for other realms: buffing magical damage (sorcery) and the previous health regain effect (nature). Maybe life's source of buffing their damage should be only the + hit bonus granted on other spells.
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Caster of Magic II Spell System overhaul discussion
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So about the new spells, assuming we are are happy with adding
Call of the Wild, Clairvoyance, Planetary Mastery Reinforce Magic Fire Mastery, Blazing Eyes Vampire, Mourning, Darkest Hour to the "decided" section, that leaves Reaper's Favor (Common or uncommon? What save modifier? Do we have any better idea?) from Death and the Life spells before we have all slots filled. (I don't think Stone Age is good enough to remove Blizzard for it. Normal unit buffing is even less thematic than overland damage for Nature.) -One of the Life spells should be the one that buffs the normal unit into something equal to a rare or very rare creature. -I don't remember if I posted this idea before but we could have a unit buff that has the effect of "enchanted unit has all buffs you can cast". While it doesn't add anything new to the table, it does basically offer you a big discount on buffing a unit, and a weaker, hidden Spell Lock effect (even if something is dispelled, unless this enchantment is also dispelled at the same time, it'll simply passively readd the other enchantment.), but most likely shouldn't add the other new buff that turns the unit supernatural. So you'd have a choice of either making a creature super powerful by directly raising its stats, or by giving it every buff you have. -We still need one more spell and it likely should be a creature. Possible mechanics for the creature to choose from : Prevent enemy attacks? Force enemy units to retreat? Convert enemy normal units to your side? (probably too powerful and hard to balance?) Something else? It likely should be a creature worth occasionally using instead of Archangels. So if we manage to design these last 4 spells, we'll be done with the hard part of the work, and only the open questions about old spells remain, as well as deciding how many rare and very rare spells (or other effects) should be given for 7,8,9, and 10 books.
July 24th, 2020, 21:39
(This post was last modified: July 24th, 2020, 22:44 by htester.
Edit Reason: My bad included rare tier on tiers that doesn't provide city curses
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The problem with reapers favor is that actually make Weakness spell useless. If I can kill the unit why should I cast weakness on it? The same problem death has at rare tier. You can say that you should use weakeness against high resistance races (nomads, elfs etc) or as a "counter" to resist magic and Reaper's Favor on less resistance races (barbarians, lizardman etc) but... Can a city curse work on death common tier? Death basically does nothing about city curses on common, uncommon (draining mana isn't exactly a city curse- and the spell was moved to rare tier anyway) and them all of a sudden start cursing players cities. Chaos on the other hand have corruption and volcanos . The transition to Armageddon and other globals is way more smooth.
Edit: Well lots of edits...
Well, the common "curse" in Death is Mana Leak, uncommon is Drain Power, both following the them of mana draining.
There are no common city curses mainly because at common tier, players often cannot afford to deal with it. The solution to curses is either eliminating that wizard who casts them which is very hard because Death is strong in the early game, or diplomacy which is not that easy either unless you are specialized in it - you won't have gold to spend on it, and tributing spells is difficult due to the limited research available. The other problem is, even if you solve the problem by eliminating the wizard, you have likely lost enough momentum to lose the game after 10-15 hours of struggling which results in a horrible game experience and one where it's fairly hard to spot the reason for losing the game. So no, curses are not a game mechanic suitable for common tier, even less so because that means a wizard with only 1 Death book has a high chance of being able to cast them. Chaos common "curses" are basically spells that do low enough damage that they can be safely ignored in 95% of the cases - disabling only one out of the 21 tiles that belong to one of the player's cities is not relevant, and disabling ores are not a real "curse", merely an equalizer mechanic that reduces the chance of good starts. Most players don't have mithril and adamantium so losing any doesn't make you weaker than if you started without them in the first place. Death does have curses at rare : Drought, Evil presence, Warp Node and now also Drain Power are rares. Chaos only has Chaos Rift at rare. (Magic Vortex is a combat spell. It's not a city curse although it can destroy buildings as a side effect.) Quote:The problem with reapers favor is that actually make Weakness spell useless. If I can kill the unit why should I cast weakness on it?I don't think this is any more applicable to Reaper's Favor than to Black Sleep. Well, I guess the "you cast weakness because it only costs half as much" no longer applies as Reaper is basically free..if it works. But over a 100% chance of disabling a unit, would you pick the 40-70% chance to kill it for free and 30-60% chance of failure and losing 2 Weakness's worth of casting skill? But I admit I have doubts about Reaper's Favor too. Let's try something else entirely... the good part in Reaper's Favor is that it hurts normal units, and through that encourages using spells that turn a unit fantastic, similarly to Possession and Blood Lust. So how about a combat global : All normal units lose <stats>. ...ok this would be possibly bad if stacked with Black Prayer as it leads to all units having too low attack or defense, becoming useless. So some other way to penalize normal untis? Amplify Pain Whenever a normal unit takes damage, it takes 1 more damage. (2 if we add this as an uncommon) Doesn't sound like a big deal but it adds up significantly if many lesser units fight each other. Death's undead units, skeletons, zombies, etc would be unaffected. Of course it has to be once per "fight" not once per figure or attack type on the unit. Or, it could be 1 damage, but per enemy attack and figure. Attacks successfully blocked by shields wouldn't trigger the effect so on average a 6 figure unit will still deal 4-5 more damage which might be too much? Mortality Whenever a normal unit takes damage, it has a 5% chance to die instantly for each point of damage taken, unless it saves at +0. A variation of the previous idea. Unlike the first, this does allow Life and Sorcery to have their own answer - Resist Magic or Bless, as they both cannot convert units to fantastic and don't have good summons. Nature is fine as it has good summons. Probably needs to be uncommon - lower tier units have too little health for the spell to be relevant and would die most of the time anyway. However a halberdier tier unit has to go through 12 damage before it dies which is, assuming only the first half is really relevant, a 6*5 = 30% chance to kill the unit unless it resists the spell. Compared to Blood Lust it actually isn't that great - doubled attack strength is way more effective and requires no saves - but that isn't available in battle, and this is, assuming you did have summoned or undead units available. It also works on ranged attacks (Ghouls, shadow demons, undead bowmen) which Blood Lust cannot do but there is a downside of killing your own units if you also had normal units. A logical flaw is that damage, even if it's a critical hit, should really only kill one figure, not a whole unit, but that would make the spell useless. Mortality also has combo potential with Wrack, maybe too much, even. Dull Senses Whenever a normal unit is attacks or is attacked by a fantastic unit, the Fantastic unit has First Strike and Negate First Strike. This is probably not that great as it has zero relevance if the units are not melee, and the AI is bad at positioning which is a necessity to be able to take advantage of (or avoid) the first strike effect. I can't say I'm satisfied with any of these, really. Also, maybe Blood Lust+Possession are already enough to cover the "hurts normal units" theme and a third spell of that kind might be overkill. The only thing Death has very little of and probably could use more is unit buffs in my opinion, but it's hard to design one for a realm that's so heavily "anti-buffing" at its core that it is all about using lots of weaker, low cost units, and has none of the themes that would work for buffing (defense, offense, mobility, etc.) so then what would the buff do? If we could do something like Chaos, a buff that makes Death more capable of protecting its heroes or just units in general... but Mana Leak covers defense from magic ranged, Fear covers melee, and missile is not really a threat to heroes. Spells would be but spell immunity is Sorcery and also too good for uncommon. ...Do we even need that? Death heroes are fairly capable if equipped with a weapon that has Life Drain charges...
About death curses at rare and magical vortex (just my usual nonsense that comes once in a while...switching names tiers etc). Amplyfing pain does seems a big deal if you cast it and have units with poison. It would be good to add something that gives you something as a "economy" spell. Could be a spell like: Blood Ritual - sacrifice a normal unit gain X casting skill or X Research or X Mana according to its production cost. Maybe cursing units on overland map? Something that could be dispelled by a shaman.
Edit: If it was an enchament them it would require dispelling wave. Hmmm... I guess shaman wouldn't be able to dispel that.
About Death Buffs. Would the Shadow buff (+ thrown) be viable at common tier (holy weapons, flame blade option for death)?. Maybe you could use it to buff skeletons and make them even better.
*Blood ritual was a bad idea. I just remembered Nature's Eye discussion and how any too good economy spell is hard to implement at common tier. The oposity of santificy option was also bad and fit on the category of spells that you can't deal with on early game.
Shadow, no. Death is one of two realms that does not do anti-flight.
Wraith Form already does the "has magical weapons" effect. Oh, I might have a good idea. Mislead Combat Instant, Cost 20 Target normal unit must resist, or becomes demoralizing. All other normal units fighting in the same army as a demoralizing unit lose 1 attack, defense and resistance. The target suffers a -1 save penalty when attempting to resist this spell for each two fantastic units on your side. This is a unit curse, but it's better than outright killing a unit when you have enough undead against enough normal enemies which combines pretty much all the previous ideas (anti-normal unit, beneficial for own non-normal units indirectly, can be resisted). The resistance penalty of -1 can keep the spell useful even in late game battles against normal units, by making other spells (Wrack, Massacre) more effective, as long as their is a weak link in the enemy army that can be exploited. Probably should be uncommon, as punishing low resistance normal units in armies that hard is a game changer, which implies Mana Leak stays at common. Redundancy with Black Prayer is a bit of an issue but the two stack, and this can be useful before you have enough casting skill to be able to use Black Prayer we could push the casting cost further down to emphasize this part, considering the benefit is only about half as good as Darkness (stat difference is almost the same but this has a resistance roll and requires the enemy army to be made of mostly non-summons so it's situational enough to be considered only half as good and cost 10-12 MP.)
July 25th, 2020, 09:56
(This post was last modified: July 25th, 2020, 18:23 by htester.
Edit Reason: removed incorrect stuff
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About new death spells
Mislead seems to be good enough as a new death spell at c/u tier but I would still insist on trying to make the spell overland. Whatever new spell comes in death players will most likely cast tons of skeletons or ghouls and maybe one or 2 wraith forms (for water movement-heroes on overland at least). I never actually cast cloak of fear outside battle (maybe in heroes but when they come you are already at uncommon tier of spells). If the new combat spell is good it will take the place/ overlap with current spells, if it is situational well... It's situacional so it will kinda have the same problem as mana leak: a spell that you barely cast on earlier stages of the game. Ok death was doing fine with 2 combat globals here but another one at this tier would increase the total number of combat globals on the realm. Well what about OVERLAND globals? It doesn't have one this time it includes normal, uncommon tiers. Might not be the best criteria but if we add a new OVERLAND global it's a spell that will always be cast by ai at least and ceirtanly more times than a situational combat global. Virtually every realm has overland globals at least on rare tier know. What are you thoughts on an overland global that apply Mislead effects before battle (like when the enemy unit stack engages you their units pass the -1 save modifier before battle and if they fail to resist they already start with mislead effect)? If they are "scared"/ demoralized makes sense that they show signs of that on the beggining of battle. Life's heavenly light + guardian retort certainly is more powerfful than that for defending, it won't make nature's worse either as it only affects normal units, sorcery can deal with that, and chaos is about damage anyway and can cast wall of fire just in case. Edit: I was talking like mislead would be at common tier but it seems it was uncommon. Anyway I would apply the -1 resistance, atack, defense reduction on the demoralized unit and not the "all units effect" that implies that if one normal unit was cursed all others would be too. Also Death kinda have a "tradition" of having similar spells so... I don't mind that much that the spell is similar to black prayer. |
