Caster of Magic II - Current open decisions

[Seravy]

As there were no responses to "5", I assume the current costs and effect is good as is and remove this from my list.


"6" was already implemented in the previous update.

3. I agree Mystic Surge is probably good enough as is.

2. The suggested solution was implemented several updates ago.

4. Drain Power.

I'll change this to give the player MP instead of SP. Skill is great but it's simply an investment into the future (you spend your skill to cast Drain Power) and there is a positive feedback issue (more skill allows you to cast more Drain Power which gives you even more skill.) so it's either OP if you have the opportunity to spam it or useless because you're too busy fighting things to invest into winning the game 150 turns later.
MP is way more versatile.

However draining percentage MP is pretty much broken as it throws the core game mechanic of "economy matters" out the window. Cast it enough times that add up to 50% and you now have as much MP as your opponent and in the late game that's easy to do, it's trivial to use it 2-3 times each turn. What's worse, the AI will aim to refill their missing mana reserves so this indirectly drains their research and SP production as well.

The spell costs 100, but including the opportunity cost of used up casting skill it's more like a cost of 500.
If it takes away 500 from the enemy and gives 500 to you then it's a total of 1000 advantage, basically a +500 net gain on each use and it's reusable. That's slightly better than Raise Volcano but it's also an instant transfer instead of it happening over time so I guess it's good enough?

...this might be too efficient at reducing a wizard to zero mana though.
Being able to cast this twice and having a power income around 800 is realistic. Which basically equals the capability of taking away all the MP the enemy can produce in a turn.

But if it drains much less then it's not worth using up 100 casting skill for.

idk, it's broken either way no matter what.

Maybe we should discard the current effect entirely and let it drain SP from the enemy instead? Then Death loses their theme of draining mana though.

For now I'll leave it unchanged, I'm out of ideas.

[jhsidi]

But if it drains much less then it's not worth using up 100 casting skill for.

idk, it's broken either way no matter what.

Maybe we should discard the current effect entirely and let it drain SP from the enemy instead? Then Death loses their theme of draining mana though.

For now I'll leave it unchanged, I'm out of ideas.

In my opinion that's fine, this skill didn't really need a change. A mana gain would possibly be too good a benefit and the minor SP gain it had was OK. Not amazing, but this is Death; the point is more about hurting someone else than helping yourself.

Now that I've played a few games, I'm actually more concerned about the city curses. In MoM there was usually just one opponent you really cared about. Even if you had to be at war with all three, it was somewhat viable to curse them individually. But now, there are many wizards. If you grind one down with curses the result is just going to be half a dozen others pulling ahead. Even the "Small" size world now has room for 150 cities; that's a lot of curses that need to be spread around.

Only one of my Death games has progressed far enough that I had a city curse to use, so I'm not sure how much they've suffered yet. But in that game, I did end up feeling like it was pointless to use that curse. I had 4-5 enemies at any given time, each with many cities, and a few more wizards waiting in the wings to declare war on me; a few cursed cities here and there would have had no measurable impact on the threats I was facing. Even at the very rare tier -- what's worth more, one cast of evil omens, which hurts everyone in both worlds, or at equivalent cost, 5 casts of pestilence? The latter is a drop in the bucket and probably not worth doing at all.

[Seravy]

In theory, casting skill should scale up with owned city amount so cursing more enemy cities isn't too much of an issue. (Yes, some of the skill isn't linear but the Amplifying Towers are linear exactly for this reason.)
What is an issue is the number of wizards - clearly curses are meant to be used when you fight one person at a time.
However, all curses are Rare spells or higher. By then the player could should have dropped by at least 30-40%, and by very rares 60-80% if not then that is the root of the problem (already listed at http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...?tid=10139 /4 ) and the game is broken either way : if AI's fail to cannibalize each other then they'll be outclasses by the player who conquered 2-3 others already, and other spells will be a greater problem : fairy ring, power link, etc all assume there are fewer, stronger players remaining. Myrror is probably safe because the player count there was low to begin with, but on Arcanus even if the human player does their job and conquers 3 other wizards, the remaining AIs should also end up with 1-2 survivors out of every 4 otherwise we'll have a bunch of weak wizards who can't compete and only serve as food for the Myrran AIs and human player. (and these wizards are fortunately not relevant for city curses - you can ignore them and curse the important ones - but they will trigger fairy ring and power link and whatever else other issues I no longer remember, oh yes, having too many Spell Blast and Divine Order holders is bad too...)

Either way this is (part of) the problem listed in that thread as "4".