The Problem with Counter based Design

[Anskiy]

Basic normal units are not supposed to stay alive for a long time in CoM, they are cannon fodder. Treat them as such.

But if that's intended, aren't you saying Life is "intended" to be a bad school? I mean, how many high tier regular units are good targets for buffing compared to halberdiers, berserkers and hammerhands? And Life's theme is supposed to be about buffing your regular units enough to make them literal juggernauts comparable to powerful creatures, else they are simply not competitive against other realms.

[Seravy]

You have Raise Dead, Prayer, Stream of Life, and Mass Healing to keep them alive, plus Heavenly Light to improve their chances of surviving as garrison units. Later you have High Prayer, Supreme Light, Crusade and Charm of Life as well and let's not forget Holy Bonus and Resistance to All.

That said, even with Life, if you are going to invest relevant resources into keeping a unit alive instead of building another one, that unit better be at a very critical location or be of high value otherwise you are wasting precious mana. For any cheap units not in a critical location, it's better to counter unit destruction spells by casting Prosperity and Inspirations and build twice as many units so losing half is as good as losing none without those spells.

So Life can either keep units alive, or build more, or ideally, do both at the same time for even more overwhelming results. But yes, below a certain value or above a certain investment in protection spells, units are not worth the effort to keep alive, but this really can be said for anything in any 4X game, you don't spend $200 to repair an $10 clock.

[Anskiy]

Quite a few of those spells have problems though. Raise Dead is often worthless on regular units because it revives them without buffs. Prayer is powerful, but not that powerful without additional buffs on the units. Mass Healing doesn't counter anything except Flame Strike, and Stream of Life only applies on the defensive. Not to mention you need to wait one enemy turn before casting Prayer, so against the ubiquitous magician garrisons it is of limited value.

The criticisms for Prayer extend to High Prayer too. Besides, +3 stats on top of regular Prayer is honestly a bit weak for a Very Rare. Supreme Light only really applies to specific units, and most regular units don't have any casting skill or magic attacks. Crusade is not particularly powerful by itself, and Charm of Life is mildly powerful but again has limited utility being endgame only. Holy Bonus 2 is also not very impactful on its own and Resistance to All comes from a fairly weak creature that will likely get limited use later on, since it can't hit airborne targets and can be killed somewhat fast.

Also the idea that you can counter spells by simply throwing more units at the problem doesn't really apply, considering that each stack is limited to 9 units and the AI often tries to stall for time when it can't win, which is also the problem with making spells *too* impactful. There should be a limit to how much you get out of combat casting, else units become worthless outside of being spammed to have combat presence.

But really, my main point is that your insistence that basic regular units(assuming we're talking swordsmen, bowmen, cavalry and halberdiers here) being expendable kind of goes against Life's design, because there are not many Armorer's Guild/Fantastic Stable units that are worth buffing over halberdiers or halberdier like units, thanks to their lower number of figures. So I don't think it actually works out in practice.

[Seravy]

You are probably misunderstanding something there.

UNBUFFED units are expendable.

Buffed units aren't, but buffed units also don't die easily to spells because the buffs will protect them. I don't see how a properly buffed unit under a Life wizard would die to Possession. Assuming a baseline Halberdier with 5 resistance, they have 7 with Heroism and 12 with Bless. With that, even without other buffs they have a 90% chance to not get affected and the AI won't gamble on 10% chances because it's inefficient. If they add Black Prayer you have an extra turn to add Prayer for 1 resistance so their chance is still only 20%, and we assumed a baseline Halberdier and no other resistance buffs. If you know you're fighting a Death wizard, bring a Guardian Spirit with you and then even with Black Prayer they only have 10% chance which is in practice, zero since they don't cast the spell in the first place.
Against pretty much anything that checks resistance, Life can be immune to it, excluding Poison but you can simply avoid fighting those units directly, it's a melee ability. Against anything that deals damage, life grants enough HP, That Halberdier has 4*6 = 24 total HP with just Heroism and Endurance. Backed up by Healing, they are almost unkillable, and effectively unkillable at uncommon tier.

There are only two spells in the game around uncommon that can and should work against those Halberdiers, the two spells designed to counter overbuffing : Dispelling Wave and Crack's Call.

[Anskiy]

I think you're overestimating the buffs here. Yes, a halberdier with Heroism + Bless + Endurace boosted by Prayer is good, but not *that* good. I further disagree with the notion that said halberdiers can only be countered by Dispelling Wave or Crack's Call. Try making 9 of them fight against 9 great lizards, fire giants, water elementals, or chimeras with only Prayer and Healing cast during combat. Bonus points if they can defeat those creatures while in a node. I'm even leaving out Cockatrices since they aren't really countered by Life and focus almost completely on petrification attacks.

[Seravy]

We've been discussing spells here though.

If your unit dies in battle fighting units of similar or higher value in melee, that's completely normal and expected.
Heroism+Bless+Endurance still makes the Halberdier cheaper (and somewhat weaker) than a Great Lizard, although it might be enough to fight the Fire Giants and Water Elementals. Also Bless has no relevance in such a combat except vs the Giants.
Chimeras are not an option for Halberdiers since they fly. Use ranged or flying units against those.

[MrBiscuits]

I think part of the problem is that a "counter" in gaming is usually something you can use to react to someone an opponent does. But in CoM a counter is something you have to apply to your units before the actual thing they are countering is used.

I would consider "build another unit if it was killed" then "reactive" type counter for spells that kill normal units. I mean, the unit is generally cheaper than the spell that killed at least in case of Possession so as long as you didn't lose important cities (why are you garrisoning those with weak units? Put a few uncommon or rare creatures in them) that's a good "counter".
Obviously it's not effective against Fire Storm but Fire Storm isn't really meant to be countered. Chaos at rare and beyond is literally the "can't defend against this" realm and the only way to beat them is to beat them faster than they beat you. I would never try to fight a defensive war against a Chaos wizard, it just doesn't work, except for mono-Life.
I admit Chaotic is not a very healthy trait for the game which is why we actually have a score modifier to disable it, that doesn't reduce your score. Chaos wizards being Chaotic often also doesn't help, but in general, if you see a Chaotic wizard pushing a lot of units to your territory, (which shouldn't happen unless they are located close enough on the world map), it might be best to start preparing for a war and even attack them first, than to get caught unprepared.


Ultimately, low/mid tier units are supposed to be beaten by high end uncommon and rare spells. Certainly buffing helps but it isn't a perfect solution, nor is it meant to be. The "perfect" solution is to build more units than what gets killed in battles, ideally, by reducing the number of battles involving these units, and increasing the battles involving your more up-to-date, stronger stacks, but in case of some races or realms, simply by having a huge production output that can build more units that what gets killed. And of course, fight back using your spells and kill more units on the enemy side than what you lost.

Also the problem here which I just realized, is the perspective.
Possession counters normal units, normal units with buffs don't counter possession, they just avoid losing to it so we were looking at this from the opposite direction than intended the whole time.
Like, if Possession is Scissors then normal units would be Paper and the buff merely enables them to be Scissors, they won't ever be Rock to counter Possession.
A true "counter" scenario would be using Skeletons against Bowmen for example. Or Mass Healing after Flame Strike.
There are no such "true" counters to Possession or many combat spells in general - if your army is completely immune, the enemy won't cast it in the first place so they still haven't lost anything at all - they can simply use their other spells. In general, counters only really make good sense for units, as units are a permanent thing that can't be changed on the spot to suit your needs. Spells can, so even if a perfect counter for spell X exists, you can simply choose not to cast spell X, making that counter useless, as long as you have any other relevant spells to use, which you usually do. Which also means a partial counter that's good enough to reduce the advantage gained by spell X to the level they'd gain from using any other spell, is already effective and any stronger is not really needed. (This ofc doesn't help buffing more units, but does mean reaching 9-10 total resistance with that Bless spell is enough even though the unit still can get possessed. At that point, Possession no longer gives the enemy a better chance at winning the battle than their other spells.)

Basic normal units are not supposed to stay alive for a long time in CoM, they are cannon fodder. Treat them as such.

I understand the concept of losing units, but ultimately "winning" because your opponent used more resources in the exchange than you, but it doesn't really feel right to me. Also because the AI gets a load of bonuses, it makes it impossible to know where that "winning" part is exactly. Battles should be about winning whilst taking as few casualties as possible, rather than tactical wars of attrition whittling down your opponent's resources faster than yours and not caring who actually "wins" each battle in terms of which units are lost.

But the main problem here is where the units are. You can easily replace your units throughout the game, the problem is that when built they are usually in completely the wrong place and it would take ages to inch them across the map to where you actually need them. This is much worse in CoM than the original game since the road movement bonus has gone on Arcanus (although strangely not in the battle screen) and there are no enchanted roads on Myrror anymore. Also Word of Recall has gone too.
So yes you can replace your units, but it might take a 2 movement unit 20 turns to get back to where the last one was killed and by then your enemy has build several new stacks with all their production and mana bonuses. There needs to be a way of moving armies faster particularly in the late game. 

On another note, the removal of Move Fortress has made the end game even longer as all your spells are x3 when trying to fight on the other plane. 

A proper counter to possession would be Bless removing the curse before it has had a chance to move. So a more expensive spell is countered by a less expensive one, so the wizard with the counter has "won" that exchange. With this method you don't need to buff every unit with every possible defence to actually have countered a spell.

[zitro1987]

Part of the reason players may disagree with calling normal units (including from armorers guild) expendable cannon fodder is because of the experience mechanic rewarding keeping them alive. It doesn’t help that on top of losing an elite unit, your city pumping the units may be far away

I could make an argument that summons fit this description better. We can summon from any city and they don’t gain experience, so the attachment is lower when they can be replaced.

I think the game you design treats half of top normal units as being beyond expendable because it is not ideal for a player to lose 7 elite elven lords for attrition war purposes

[Suppanut]

Part of the reason players may disagree with calling normal units (including from armorers guild) expendable cannon fodder is because of the experience mechanic rewarding keeping them alive. It doesn’t help that on top of losing an elite unit, your city pumping the units may be far away

I could make an argument that summons fit this description better. We can summon from any city and they don’t gain experience, so the attachment is lower when they can be replaced.

I think the game you design treats half of top normal units as being beyond expendable because it is not ideal for a player to lose 7 elite elven lords for attrition war purposes

Absolutely agree. Exp system reward player for for keep unit alive, especially elites units. and problem of logistic make replacing loss is much harder and in this sense summons seem to fill more cannon fodder role than normal units (you could replacing them easily anyway as long as you have outpost/base of operation.

Also with amount of resource AI have, attrition war usually not good option (still on table as option but you need proper tool and plan to do it and still net-gain for you) especially when you are at enemy gate (if enemy near your gate, it is easy do so) you always need to win at minimum loss as logistic in far away war is not favor attacker by any bit. So summons are very expandible, you could replace them at full strength anyway and no need to invest time on them, you could replace them at full strength in no-time. So to considered anything from Halberdiers and above as fodders is mis-interpretation of game design.

[Seravy]

the problem is that when built they are usually in completely the wrong place and it would take ages to inch them across the map to where you actually need them. This is much worse in CoM than the original game since the road movement bonus has gone on Arcanus (although strangely not in the battle screen) and there are no enchanted roads on Myrror anymore. Also Word of Recall has gone too.

I agree that moving units is tedious and would be nice if we could improve that but I don't see how. This isn't Master of Orion where we can group 3500 ships in one stack or send any unit from any star to any other directly. Unfortunately travel in this game involves a lot of micromanagement due to small stack size and non-uniform terrain with plenty of roadblocks and bottlenecks.

CoM makes it worse because you generally need and have more units, although that's an indirect necessity - due to improved AI, players can no longer expect to win the game with 1 spearmen in each city + 1 doomstack like in old MoM, so even if economy wasn't changed to support more units, using more units would still be a necessity.

I disagree the changes to movement cost had any relevance though, for two reasons. One, the majority of movement happens on sea, as any larger distance is generally between different continents, and ships are significantly faster in CoM than in MoM. And two, movement is automatic (unless you have a WP with someone settled on your continent which generally isn't something you want, and should either upgrade to an Alliance ASAP or conquer them instead. ), anyway, you still only need to click the destination once, regardless of the travel time being 5 or 10 turns. So movement speed is not relevant to the level of micromanagement though it might lead to a city being poorly defended longer which is of course not that great.
But let's not forget that while removing road bonus, CoM also doubled movement speed on the units, or more. Would you prefer moving your speed 2 Cavalry at 0.5 moves per tile or your speed 5 Cavalry at 1 moves per tile?