Spells: Light touch balancing for release

[Catwalk]

Sounds good to me Thanks kyrub, will save quite a bit of work so we won't have to do resistances all over again.

Vagabond, all units will have resistance values updated to reflect the new system. And the values for normal units are by no means set in stone yet, and don't take that much time to change.

[WhiteMage]

I am not sure I understand. Chaos has fire bolt, lightning bolt and doom bolt, plus a lot more. You changed lightning bolt to make it different from fire bolt, but isn’t it too similar to doom bolt now? I propose changing it to chain lightning if possible, hitting up to 4 units. If not possible then remove the spell since there are too many single unit battle spells in chaos.

[Vagabond]

It is similar to Doom Bolt now, which is one of the reasons I hesitated to make the change. A chain lightning type spell is a good idea and one I've had baking in the back of my head, but outside the realm of the quick fixes here for Christmas. These changes are just numerical and that's an intentional choice. We've got limited time, it's almost December and we're still talking about design. We'll make bigger changes after we pass this hump. That's what the color-specific magic threads are for.

[Vagabond]

So I've spent some time looking at resistance mechanics and here's my plan for resistance bonus/penalties:

Easy: +2 - +4
Medium: -1 - +1
Hard: -4 - -2

Below is a table giving a general idea what these numbers mean. For example, a Regular unit within the standard deviation (roughly 3-6) against a +2 resistance difficulty would have a 47-61% chance to resist, median 52%. When they hit Elite, that becomes 57-69%, median 61%. As a note, only races outside the standard deviation are dwarves and dark elves.

Code:

Calc     Rank      Value  +4    +3    +2    +1     0    -1    -2    -3    -4
Median   Regular   5      61    57    52    47    41    34    27    19    10
Median   Elite     7      69    65    61    57    52    47    41    34    27

These are the guidelines I think will work well against standard units, but I'm holding off on finalizing until I see summon resists.

Also, because each point of resistance has less impact, I've slightly upped the values of the resistance buffs, like resist elements. They still won't be as large as they are currently but hopefully they'll remain relevant.

[Catwalk]

I couldn't quite decipher that, I think I'd better just give you free hands for v2.0 Keep up the good work!

[Vagabond]

Sorry for the confusion, the important thing from my post is the resistance bonus/penalty range:

Easy: +2 - +4
Medium: -1 - +1
Hard: -4 - -2

The table beneath is just there to give an outline of what those modifiers will mean for units at different experience and base racial resistances.

[Catwalk]

It's all good, spells are the area of the game that I have the least ideas for. I'm quite happy to leave it to you. And the better you do your job, the less tough-nosed I'll be about my pet ideas :P

[kyrub]

Without wanting to interfere too much, Vagabond, don't you think it would be better to use only even numbers, to make -to save groups more discernable?

E.g. -6, -4, -2, 0, +2, +4.

Another reason is that -1 or +1 usually makes very little difference, while -2 is already good % value.
And I think that hard spells can have even lower negative values than -4.

[WhiteMage]

I think Vagabond is doing well and I understand the table. I see no reason restricting spells to even numbers. Btm: bottom, tp: top. I think “StdD” should be removed as the shown values are not standard deviations. Also, I don’t understand the labels “easy”, “medium”, “hard”. Is this about spells? Easy spells help target, hard spells hurt target?

[Vagabond]

Easy/medium/hard was just shorthand for how hard it should be to resist. For example: in 1.31 Dispel Evil is hard/very hard (-4/-10). To see the idea in practice, I changed Black Sleep to easy, so it should be resisted by a regular unit more than 50% of the time. That's because a failure to resist for Black Sleep is catastrophic. Weakness I made hard, so chance for a regular unit to resist will be low but the impact is much less, especially with the general increase in weak unit swords in Catnip. I think I'll be putting in resist modifiers later tonight and expanding to -6 as kyrub suggested. They may need to be tweaked once we see summoned units, but it shouldn't be too major.