The Problem with Counter based Design

[Anskiy]

Yesterday I came across a rather thought provoking comment on the Steam forums:

The old game was a toy - I was so much better than the computer that I merely had to decide which way I wanted to win, and how much silliness to indulge along the way.

The new game (on higher difficulties) is a puzzle - there are a few correct solutions to find and execute accurately, and everything else loses.

I discussed with this a bit among my friends, and I decided that the problem is with the design of counters themselves.. or specifically, how some spells effectively negate many mechanics and only have a few reliable counters.

Take for instance the infamous Focus Magic Cockatrices combo. It really only has a few counters before Rare tier: spamming Resist Magic on your armies, summoning Fire Elementals, or boosting your resistance with a good Prayermaster hero or 2 or more Unicorns. On top of that, some of these counters are not reliable; Cockatrices can shut down low resistance armies like Lizardmen or High Men even with Resist Magic, Fire Elementals are rather wimpy in combat outside of Stoning Immunity, and Unicorns are costly as hell and can't be reliably placed everywhere the AI might attack. Furthermore, Focus Magicked Cockatrices effectively shut off most of the game mechanics, since too many common and uncommon summons simply don't have the resist to survive against 4 - 4 instant death attempts, nor stoning immunity. 


This is a trend with quite a few things in CoM actually. Possession for instance is absurdly deadly against regular troops, and often when it comes up the only good solution is to stop making troops and use summons instead for many spellbook combos, which might not even work since summons are not guaranteed to show up in the book or may be too weak compared to say buffed halberdiers. Not to mention that summon generation is "gated" behind overworld skill, so it might even be futile against the wizard since they can field multiple halberdier stacks against you while you can only hope to fight them with a stack of common or perhaps even uncommon summons. 

The problem is that some spells are way too strong to be reliably fought against without their counters, and the counters are not reliable enough outside of a few specific ones. For the game to reasonably provide more room for creatively organizing strategies, it is necessary to downplay the counter reliant design and allow the player to reasonably fight off spells even without their designed counters.

[Seravy]

Maybe we should try to come up with solutions on how to add more counters to certain spells or effects where there aren't enough, or at least, discuss if there are enough or not.

However I would argue having few counters is already better than having none in the original game. (what counters magic immune paladins? Turn 30 Wraiths from 11 books?)

Possession is countered by Chaos Channels, Bless, Resist Magic, and Blood Lust. So all realms except Nature can counter it with an early game spell, and Nature is supposed to rely on creatures which are immune to begin with.

Cockatrices with Focus Magic are hard to counter, but it's a 2-realm spell combo so it should be more effective than single spells.

[jhsidi]

When it comes to instant-win resistance based attacks, focus magic is really the only commonly available spell that's different in CoM versus original MoM. Confusion, black sleep, possession etc have always been more or less equally dangerous.

I do wish there were more counters; my own style of play is loss averse and focused on high-value units. Which makes it more or less impossible for me to play, for instance, pure Nature. Having a great lizard is worthless when half the wizards in the world can insta-kill it with a resistance based attack. Most commonly I just take 1 book of sorcery to get resist magic, which is overpowered in its own way.

However, I can't really think what the "counters" would be. I think it would be cool if you could actively oppose a casting but that looks impossible with the turn-based nature of the game.

One idea: change how dispel magic works. It's currently an extremely frustrating spell to use, in that you really have no idea how much to spend to get the desired effect and may randomly fail even if you spend more than you think you needed (which is typically a lot more than what the attack spell cost). Personally I'd like dispels better, and actually use them as part of my strategy, if I could target a specific effect and it just spent as much of my casting budget as needed to get rid of it.

[Anskiy]

Possession is countered by Chaos Channels, Bless, Resist Magic, and Blood Lust. So all realms except Nature can counter it with an early game spell, and Nature is supposed to rely on creatures which are immune to begin with.

To begin with, Chaos Channels and Blood Lust are not early game. Being Uncommon effectively means they are very unpredictable in when and if they will appear, unless you a. pick lots of books from their school and b. specifically pick them as early research options. Even so, that effectively cuts into the creativity in strategizing approaches with say regular units, since you are sort of forced to pick them to counter Possession, a spell quite likely to show up which is utterly devastating against them. To say nothing of the "cost" of having to pick many Chaos or Death books.

Further, I have to point out that a lot of these counters are imperfect. Bless and Resist Magic don't help much with protecting armies from low resist races like Lizardmen and High Men. Remember that most decent Death wizards are going to pick Black Prayer which is a -2 resistance to all effect, and so Possession is actually on an effective -5 modifier that cancels out Bless and Resist Magic completely in many cases. 

I also disagree that Nature can subsist on its summons alone. By definition, summons are going to be far more limited than regular units, especially when you consider that the AI on higher difficulties can easily amass 3-4 offensive stacks to your one. Giant Spiders may be able to 1v1 halberdiers, but what about 27 halberdiers against 9 giant spiders? What if the AI throws in spells like Ice Bolt or Fireball? Ultimately summon only strategies simply don't work until you can build a good, secure mana pool to keep throwing them against the problem.

But frankly, the problem here is not with the counters, but with Possession being such a ridiculously powerful anti personnel spell. In the original it was strong, sure. But it was still possible to fight back without its counters, because it didn't have such a huge save modifier. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure you could dispel it, though sadly it was bugged.

[Seravy]

Possession is an expensive to research uncommon spell. Chaos Channels an Blood Lust are cheaper uncommons.
Of course some luck is involved but this is also true on the side of Possession. The AI won't pick it as their guarantee and will generally research other spells first.

But yes, I agree if there is a problem, it's not the counters, it's possession itself. Is there, though?
Yes, it has 1 better save modifier than Black Sleep and kills potentially two units instead of one as they fight each other. But it costs over twice as much MP to cast and 1920 to research. If you also want the Black Prayer effect, that's an extra 35 MP.

At uncommon tier, this means the AI will be able to either cast it twice, or once with Black Prayer. To cast it one more time, they would need 105 combat casting skill which is unrealistic until later. So while it's not much of a counter, "I can afford losing 2 of my 9 units to possession" does work for a while. It only starts to be an issue once the AI can cast it 2-3 times per battle but by then you should be able to rely on higher tier units with more resistance like Paladins, Elven Lords, Dragon turtles, etc, unless you played a rush race with no such unit, but in that case, well, it probably means you rushed too slow. The only non-rush race that might be in trouble is Orcs who don't have a high resistance unit - but their units are so cheap you should be able to spam them and ignore the losses to some extent, also, Orcs are not a very good choice to play a Nature wizard and the other realms do have ways to counter Possession.

[Suppanut]

Due to current resistance setting make some race extremely vulnerable to spell even without -save and even highly resistance one still could not withstand those spell with -save with their naturall resistance alone without bless or resist magic (I have terrible luck, enemy always successful roll against me while I never successful with it unless resistance is extremely low, but not guerentee). I think spell with irreversible effect should not have high -save. I think maybe there are two solutions about this.

1) readjust baseline resistance of normal units across the board (generally go higher)
2) readjust method which spell would get modify or deal with resistance
- Spell with permanent/kill effect should not have high -save
- To prevent resistance roll spell from obsolete late game, each realm which using curse/debuff should have method of avoid resistance as global enchantment
-- Chaos already have fate mastery which allow caster to re-roll, this is good enough for chaos due to most of chaos debuff is not deadly on itself and high -save, too bad that save-or-die spell for chaos not roll at all so its benefit of fate mastery on its own realm is limited to early spells.
-- Death should have combat or global enchantment which half resistance and baseline threshold use in any roll by caster wizard's side against target (like armor piercing, use different method from fate mastery so effect could be stack and there would be some play style like "curse master") so all curse and resistance roll for death wizard would stay valid even against all kind of uber creature late game (possible to curse arch angels, etc) and make spell like pestilence more deadly.
-- for Sorcery, I think sorcery spell should have slider which allow you to boost up its -save by spend more mana on it, wizards should able to modify their own spell to be cost-efficient or ensure its success if they have strong and advance knowledge in theory and foundation of magic itself (which is what sorcery realm imply)
-- (I have no idea what would be nature way of manipulate saving roll, so I would skip it here)

[zitro1987]

The effect of possession goes beyond killing a unit, I think this is a matter of determining its rarity tier and switch to rare (with warp node brought to uncommon). I don’t think possession at its current state and rarity is much of an issue - death’s problem is mono death late game being one-dimensional and rather weak

Focus magic could just grant 1 fewer shot and stay relevant

Unit enchantments as counters don’t work well given units in CoM tend to be cheaper and easier to produce than in MoM so they feel a bit disposable to give stuff like resist magic and too plentiful to have the needed casting skill to mass-enchant

[Suppanut]

You could also keep this combo relevant while prevent it from gone too far by set rule for touch base effect only 1/2 or 1/4 of original power when trigger by non-melee attack.

[massone]

I think there are plenty of "counters", both specific and generalized ones to both the Cockatrice-Focus Magic combo and Possession. There are strengths and weaknesses for every race and Realm, and I think that design is working fine.

The game also shouldn't be balanced around high difficulties with significant AI bonuses. It should be balanced around an assumed similar rate of development between player and AI, and similar forces.

With regards to the specific issues brought up:

Focus Magic Cockatrices aren't very strong besides their stoning immunity. All you need is one unit with 14 resistance to kill an entire stack of them with no losses. It's easy to achieve this with a single Charmed or Resistance boosted hero, or using a high resistance unit with Resist Magic, or Resist Elements, even easier if you stack both. You can also do this with a number of advanced post-Tree of Knowledge Arcanus units, which would come during the early-mid Uncommon tier at Advanced or lower difficulties. Chaos has Gargoyles with Stoning Immunity also at Uncommon. Death has Night Stalker which is invisible and the Cockatrices can't target it. Life has Heavenly Light, Prayer, and +2 from Heroism for +4 Resistance total, without even using Guardian Spirit or Unicorn. Life is also the least concerned with keeping units alive/undamaged, seeing as it can spam gold/production and auto-heal from irrecoverable damage every city battle. So every Realm has reasonable counters at the same tier. Even if you don't have the specific counters, you can also sit on defense and just don't fight that Wizard. If you just defend your own cities, you can take out half or more of the stack in the first turn using your own ranged units while on defence. Considering that Focus Magic Cockatrices cost 230 MP each, it's quite a large investment to make a stack, and it also needs Resist Magic or else it is itself highly vulnerable to resistance roll effects.

Possession is even easier to deal with. First they need Black Prayer, taking up a turn and casting skill. Then it only has about 70-80% chance of working on most elite units without other resistance boosts. With Bless + Resist Magic, the unit is immune. With only one of them, the chance of success is like 40-50%. That means the Wizard will on average be killing 2 units with one successful cast every battle, if they have 105 casting skill (for Black Prayer + 2 Possession casts). That's not overpowered at all. With High Elves, Nomads, or any race's Magicians the chance of success drops even further to like 10%, even before using Priests, Guardian Spirit, Unicorn, or accounting for Heavenly Light/Prayer. Counter Magic or Philosopher's Stone renders Possession almost irrelevant. So neither Life nor Sorcery has any problems handling it. Nature, Chaos, and Death can also deal with it using summons. Chaos can also just trade combat spells for equivalent or even more damage. Nature can cast 4 Crack's Calls with 105 casting skill, so that's an easy trade to kill a more powerful unit, or spam 4 Petrifies for a reasonably similar amount of damage (possibly more, against Death's low resistance units). It also has the extremely cheap spider summons at Uncommon that can definitely be spammed everywhere.

[Suppanut]

If you need 2 main defensive enchantment to survive basic common/uncommon curse/save-or-die spells, those units are dysfunction beyond fix by defensive spells.