Balancing the blesses

[Xietor]

It would be nice to see all the blesses give equally powerful effects to sacred units.

As it stands now, I do not think many people would argue the e9 bless of 4 prot is equal to the f9 bless of magic weapon and fire damage.

I would guess a 9e bless of ironskin would be roughly comparable to the fire bless, except you have the vulnerability to lightning, which would make the bless less desirable against caleum, man, and vanaheim.

9 air, same as it is now, but with a 10 percent chance to shock attackers.

Maybe the astral 9 effect should be awe, rather than twist fate.

Just some ideas for balancing the bless effects.

[johnarryn]

I think it also needs to be kept in mind that some schools of magic are not as useful as others... for instance, most people would argue that the Water 9 bless is pretty amazing, but water magic itself is kind of meh. I hink there's a reason for that. The air bless isnt great, but then air magic is quite good.

[Foodstamp]

I agree with john. the schools that have subpar blesses are also the schools with some of the best magic spells. I think the bless system is fine as is. Its just a tad overpowering when used with certain units in the game.

[Sombre]

Yep, John raises a good point. I do sort of wish that the death and blood blesses were a tad more useful though. I like to play Mictlan with a Lord of the Night and the bless just ain't great.

[quantum_mechani]

Xietor said:
It would be nice to see all the blesses give equally powerful effects to sacred units.

As it stands now, I do not think many people would argue the e9 bless of 4 prot is equal to the f9 bless of magic weapon and fire damage.

I would guess a 9e bless of ironskin would be roughly comparable to the fire bless, except you have the vulnerability to lightning, which would make the bless less desirable against caleum, man, and vanaheim.

9 air, same as it is now, but with a 10 percent chance to shock attackers.

Maybe the astral 9 effect should be awe, rather than twist fate.

Just some ideas for balancing the bless effects.

Blesses are indeed unbalanced, but you pick a poor example. Water, Fire, and Earth are all pretty much the top level 9 picks. Astral level 9 is also decent on some chassis. It's Nature (the lower level bless makes up for it though), Death, Air, and especially Blood 9s that have problems.

[Foodstamp]

If you isolate the blesses and compare them against one another with no regard to other aspects of magic including available spells, I agree with quantum as far as how he ranks them.

[Taqwus]

It's usually the synergies that cause the balancing issues, anyway -- like MOO2's Stargate + Warp Dissipator.

You can't really just balance bits by bit -- because the units and nations they're applied to aren't mirror images. Mictlan and the Ashen Empire respond very differently to blesses, to take extreme examples.

[Sombre]

There's a certain amount you can do just balancing bit by bit. For instance some units are clearly underpowered, to the extent that they are never built by anyone looking to win. These units can be improved and all it will increase is variety - it won't make a certain nation overpowered.

Not sure that theory can be applied to blesses though.

[TirAsleen]

Playing around with fire, i do not see many weaknesses, very good bless, an enchantment that can turn archery fire into fire arrows, one that makes you immortal in combat, very powerful evocation magic(Falling Fire). Is all kinda useful. Water....well cleansing water was good vs undead. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I do not know many impressive spells for water yet... I rather go with fire. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Maybe a weakness of fire is, you can't forge any good armor with it.

[Xietor]

Fire is clearly the best bless. E9 is not one of the best. 4 prot? That means zip really. Especially when you are being hit by f9 blessed troops with 2 attacks.

N9 is also very good, mostly because regen plus berserk is very powerful.

Water is good on some units that need the quickness.

Air needs help, earth needs help, Astral 9 needs help. never play blood , so no input there.

D9 is "ok" but d9<f9 imho.

[Foodstamp]

I don't think fire 9 is clearly the best bless.

[SelfishGene]

I'm rather torn on blesses.

OTOH, i hated Dom2s "build your SC" uberlevel gameplay. But i'm fearful Dom3 will be just a matter of spamming masses of the best 9/9 sacred troop by contrast.

I really do like how good sacreds, national troops, can beat all but the buffest SCs. It's just that they're really good against most everything else.

Maybe sleeping Pretenders need to sleep for two years instead of just one?

[Jazzepi]

I really don't understand why people are so bothered by sacred troops. On a properly sized map, because they can almost always only be produced in the capital, as the game wears on the blesses becomes less and less potent.

Sure starting out next to a guy with W9/F9 bless sucks when he blitzes you, but that's part of the game! He's giving up good scales, and early access to his pretender for some awesome early game units.

Jazzepi

[MaxWilson]

Don't blesses become obsolete as the game progresses? What's the difference between a W9 bless on a sacred unit and a Quickening spell on a regular army, except that the Quickening spell costs gems? B9 bless is similar to Strength of Giants (+4 Strength) except for the death curse, and S9 is somewhat similar to Will of the Fates (Twist Fate vs. Luck). There's no bless that's as good as Fog Warriors or Marble Warriors. Blesses are very easy to use and are great in the early game, but later on in the game the ability to cast battlefield enchantments on arbitrary units (either cheap chaff or powerful summons) should be just as good as a high bless[1] and costs zero design points.

-Max

[1] At least in set-piece battles. Blesses are less logistically cumbersome--casters and gems--and are probably better-suited to raiding parties than most battlefield enchantments are.

Edit: corrected misstatement about S9 bless/Sword of Aurgelmer.

[Nick_K]

In terms of effect power, quickening is much better than the W9 bless. Quickening grants an extra action every turn and +3 att/def. the bless is only every other turn and you don't get the att/def bonus from quickness (just the +4 def from the low-level bless).

[Tyrant]

F9 and W9 are the blesses that are problematic. Attack and defence skills are very difficult to buff with spells- there are no easy ways at all. On top of that there are very few mass summons that have high attack. So, to take the classic example of W9 Vans, once you add 4 defense to their already formidable defensive skills and Glamor you end up with a troop type that cannot be countered with regular troops, and then they get the excellent ability of Quickness on top of that. Quickness is a multiplier- the more deadly the unit, the better Quickness is. Same deal to a lesser extent with F9, hitting more often is good, but it better if you also do more damage. Again, it's a multiplier.
And the real kicker is that they work so well together.

So as i see it, it's the pairing of the excellent, universally useful and near unique skill bonuses with two other excellent 9 bless powers that causes the alleged problem.

One way to fix it would be to leave the L9 powers be and replace the L4 effects with something less useful. The other way would be to replace Quickness with another power.

Having said all this, I'm not fully convinced the problem is really all that bad. I've played quite a few games and i have yet to actually encounter the much discussed 9W/9F bless on the field of battle.

[TirAsleen]

Maybe spell path system should be like in aow1, taking fire paths exlude you from taking any water paths, death could exclude nature maybe and so on. Problem would be it would make the game less diverse. Onother solution would be to exclude just the blesses, or limit the game to just 1 single path9/10 bless along with minor blesses.

Depends how much people care for balance or more for diversity and RPG elements.

Just some suggestion as i do not really care about it so far as a w9/f9 costs a lot of design points, and that kind of powerplaying is pretty boring too, wonder where the reward is to see the game over screen more quickly.

[mivayan]

Xietor said:
Fire is clearly the best bless. E9 is not one of the best. 4 prot? That means zip really. Especially when you are being hit by f9 blessed troops with 2 attacks.


If your sacred has 13 prot, E9 should cut down the 6AP damage from flaming weapons by a *lot*. And cuts damage from spear using heavy infantry a lot too.


MaxWilson said:
What's the difference between a W9 bless on a sacred unit and a Quickening spell on a regular army, except that the Quickening spell costs gems?


But both is even more fun.

[Morkilus]

Xietor said:
Fire is clearly the best bless. E9 is not one of the best. 4 prot? That means zip really. Especially when you are being hit by f9 blessed troops with 2 attacks.

N9 is also very good, mostly because regen plus berserk is very powerful.

Water is good on some units that need the quickness.

Air needs help, earth needs help, Astral 9 needs help. never play blood , so no input there.

D9 is "ok" but d9<f9 imho.



Why don't you play the game the way it is first, discuss what may or may not work with some experienced players and maybe win some MP games? You can't be taken seriously when you haven't even played with every path and come in here spouting suggestions for "improving" the game.

[Xietor]

I do not play blood for rp reasons, it has nothing to do with experience. And I have played a ton of mp games.

I also view that reply as a personal attack, rather than one addressing the merits of the argument.

[calmon]

Earth bless is fine! 4 protection is good for your sacred soldiers and 4 reinvigoration (E9) helps your sacred mages a lot. It may be not the best early game bless but in middle/late game the reinvigoration for your hordes of mages is often much more important than a fire bless on some of your troops.

[Foodstamp]

Addressing the fire 9 is obviously the best bless statement.

There are many situations where a nation would be served better by a different bless. A very obvious one that comes to mind is Niefelheim. I would argue that a fire bless is not needed on their sacred units. You would probably be better off with a water, nature or earth bless, or even a combination of these blesses.

This is an example of balance of blesses without taking into consideration the spell picks for each path which some people seem to be ignoring. If you cannot prove without a doubt that some blesses are overpowered compared to all the rest without taking spells into consideration, then surely you have no leg to stand on when comparing the blesses in the overall balance of the game.

[Evilhomer]

Fire is not at all clearly the best bless.... Mostly it depends on what nation and what blessable unit you have available - if you need to make generalisations i would probably pick water as the number 1 bless. The weakest blesses are probably death, air and blood.

Astral 9 doesn't need help either, for certain units the mr is very good (demonic/undead) -and its pretty cheep with an oracle chassis and twist fate is added gravy on top.

For some reason you list earth as one of the weakest blesses when it's clearly one of the best - 4 more protection is not bad at all and the reinvig will help alot on those heavy armor blessables you probably are using (aswell as helping sacred mages).

[Manuk]

I think blood is fine. +strenght make little units swarm better bigger units. combine with water 9 and multiple attacks-weak sacred and they will do some damage.

[UncleYee]

My feeling is that if we were to leave speculation out of this and run some sort of combat simulator, or a mod that lets two of the same nation go against each other with different blesses, F9 would win the lion's share of contests against any other single bless. But my feeling is also that in the absence of such clear proof, there's no reason for anyone to change his point of view.

[Meglobob]

It depends on the nation you are playing, as to what lvl9+ bless is best.

However, blood, death and air blesses are weak compared to the others. With certain nations they do have there uses, a air bless with shadow vestels possibly for example.

Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.

[Evilhomer]

I would rather have s9 and/or w9 on my vestals, i think air is not as good on them. In fact air is probably the weakest bless overall.

[B0rsuk]

I think fire bless is so strong because it's a perfect synergy. It increases chance to hit and damage dealt. It's stronger than just sum of the components.

Air9 bless is verrry strange. In my opinion it's not useful enough. It's basically a combo piece, because otherwise very few enemies can deal lightning damage. (does Smite/Holy Avenger deal lightning damage ? I'm trying to figure out hot to build a priest assassin). If I had a chance, it would replace Air9 with +3 precision. Sounds much more widely useful to me. It would be nice for casters and archers as well. And it fits air very well, too.

I don't like the idea of sacred troops because they often can deal with everything on their own. Wasn't this game supposed to be about combined arms, at least partially ?

Blood bless.... tell me, what distinguishes extra strength from simple +damage bonus of Fire or Death ? Not only is the blood bless weaker, but also bland. In theory, some units can throw javelins further (sun warriors), and commanders could use Fire Bola better. But the difference would be pretty marginal, I think.
Blood9 is a joke. You buy a (typically expensive) sacred unit and hope for it to die ? For a chance of cursing your enemy ? Because then your other units may hurt enemy more instead of simply killing them ? Ridiculous. It should either be made automatic (no MR), or replaced with Horror Mark.

I'd love to see sacred unit price scale depending on bless strength. This is because without a strong enough bless, sacred units are often not worth the price. I would like to use Black Hunters, but with 125 price and no bless it's ridiculous.
Does anyone know - once the rider is gone, does the Black Hunter still collect his large amount of money ? I mean, it's an animal...

[Teraswaerto]

There are big differences between the damage increase you get from Blood, Death and Fire. Flaming weapons cause an additional 6 armor piercing fire damage. It is not added to weapon's own damage roll. Death weapon works like Flaming, except not fire damage, armor negating and MR negates.

Protection, magic resistance, fire resistance all interact differently with the damage bonus from the bless. Imagine casting Weapons of Sharpness on units with +strength or units with an extra 6 damage armor piercing attack. Of course, the actual damage increase it biggest with fire almost always, as it also increases attack skill, but you can take some Fire for +attack, not always go to 9.

Blood is not that great a path IF you are just thinking about the bless, but for some nations taking high Blood on your pretender is still a good idea because Blood magic in general is so powerful. Blood 9 is weak though, as you don't need it that high for spells.

[Sombre]

I actually like Borsuk's idea about precision. It would make sacred battlemages a lot more interesting, that's for sure.

I also agree that the bonus you get at blood9 is pretty silly. I'd prefer to see something like a watered down blood vengeance based on morale or mr (obviously watered down quite a lot).

[thejeff]

The blood 9 bless is one of the worst. It's a little more useful if you apply it to one of the cheap mass-produced sacreds, flagellents or jaguar warriors (are there others?), instead of the standard expensive capital only units.
Still probably not worth it, though.

I wouldn't use Air on Shadow Vestals. They're ethereal and have shields. Arrows aren't a great threat. Again that's for the cheap unshielded sacreds, so they can survive to close and do damages. Astral's the same way. Practically doubles the lifespan of a flagellent, does almost nothing for giants.

Death does work with arrows, so I'd assume it works with spells as well. I had fun with W9D9 Ancestor Vessels. 2 volleys of affliction & fear causing arrows a round until they reach your lines, then they still face serious heavy cavalry.

Fire is nice, but it isn't always the best. With the heavier units, survivability is more important than more damage, so Water, Earth and/or Nature dominate.

I think they're pretty well balanced. At least they all have uses, even if some are more niche than others.

[Ygorl]

Do Death weapons make the base weapons magical? Flaming weapons are not magical, only the wimpy fire strike is, so a fire bless is not useful against high-protection ethereal dudes. Depending on how Death works, that could make it better in some cases... Teraswaerto alluded to cases where a blood bless could be better than a fire bless. A water bless is especially nasty - with more than one or two blessed guys whacking at high speed against an enemy, the multiple-attack defense reduction will often do more to help them hit than the +4 to attack. Think, e.g., of Warriors of the Five Elements... With a water bless, each gets three attacks per turn; that's nine attacks coming out of a single square, for an average defense reduction per attack of -8 (divided amongst the number of different targets, of course). Ozelotls are even scarier.

I do wish blood had a slightly more interesting level-9 bless. Mostly, though, I think things are good; which blesses make sense is hugely a matter of circumstance (Air-9 isn't a terrible idea if you know you'll be starting next to Caelum, eh?) - yeah, yeah, blah blah blah...

[normalphil]

Life drain would fit as a B9 bonus (blood-drinking/soul drinking weapons, people), but it'd be far to powerful.

The problem that I have with the existing B9 bless is that it just doesn't make sense. At all. I'd like it to be something that fit with the magic path. Anything at all, no matter how trivial otherwise.

[mivayan]

B0rsuk said:
Blood9 is a joke. You buy a (typically expensive) sacred unit and hope for it to die ? For a chance of cursing your enemy ? Because then your other units may hurt enemy more instead of simply killing them ? Ridiculous. It should either be made automatic (no MR), or replaced with Horror Mark.


Blood9 causes horror marks too, but even more rarely than curse, probably because of an easier MR save.

Automatic curse plus horror mark with normal MR save would be interesting... annoying as hell for bladewind casters, SCs, superstrong sacreds... perhaps over the top.

And unthematic if it become popular for MA mictlan...

[Baalz]

Meglobob said:
Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.



Hmmm, I'm going to have to try that out. One thing I have found with the death bless is that the affliction bonus does effect missile weapons unlike the damage bonus for f/d level 9. If you have access to holy archers (they're fairly rare) a high death bless is pretty wicked as those little 1 and 2 point damages from the arrows make people's arms fall off! On top of the obvious advantage this gives you, you can imagine the uses for "fire and retreat"....

[Gandalf Parker]

A stay-bless shroud on an assassin would be very interesting also. Even if the assassination fails, you would be likely to inflict crippling damage to leaders far within the enemies territory.

[Meglobob]

Baalz said:

Meglobob said:
Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.



Hmmm, I'm going to have to try that out. One thing I have found with the death bless is that the affliction bonus does effect missile weapons unlike the damage bonus for f/d level 9. If you have access to holy archers (they're fairly rare) a high death bless is pretty wicked as those little 1 and 2 point damages from the arrows make people's arms fall off! On top of the obvious advantage this gives you, you can imagine the uses for "fire and retreat"....



Yep, this makes death bless rather nice if you can pull it off. If it works with sacred mages which are for more plentiful then this could seriously hurt. I rarely have a chance to test, MP is my usual test ground. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif Hence my spectecular battlefield successes and my hideous battlefield flops. It could have been kissblade who mentioned it, I forget now.

[MaxWilson]

Blood bless.... tell me, what distinguishes extra strength from simple +damage bonus of Fire or Death ? Not only is the blood bless weaker, but also bland. In theory, some units can throw javelins further (sun warriors), and commanders could use Fire Bola better. But the difference would be pretty marginal, I think.



Fire and Death aren't a +damage. They're separate attacks, which means armor gets applied again (except that Death is AN,MR and fire is AP). Against a heavily-armored opponent (Prot 20 say), +4 to strength could increase your expected damage more than a separate 6AP fire attack. The following numbers are from a Monte Carlo sim, 2000 runs:

Str 12, Light Lance (3 dmg). Expected damage vs. Prot 20 0.548.
Str 16, Light Lance (3 dmg). Expected damage vs. Prot 20 1.8125.
Str 12, Light Lance (3 dmg) + 6 AP. Expected damage vs. Prot 20 1.322.

The fire bless is non-negligible but it's not as good as the Str +4, if we're not taking attack/defense into account. Expected damage over 2000 hits for the above-given Str 12, Light Lance fellow (Helhirdling):

Prot NoBless +4 Str Fire
1 13.95 18.05 20.18
2 12.84 17.08 18.70
3 11.88 16.19 17.57
4 11.18 15.29 15.93
5 10.26 14.04 14.95
6 9.12 12.74 13.56
7 8.31 11.87 12.14
8 7.37 11.05 10.35
9 6.33 10.18 9.92
10 5.55 9.34 8.19
11 4.90 8.40 7.40
12 4.06 7.23 6.33
13 3.32 6.58 5.42
14 2.73 5.48 4.31
15 2.15 4.72 3.83
16 1.74 3.96 3.00
17 1.27 3.38 2.59
18 0.98 2.75 2.01
19 0.73 2.21 1.60
20 0.46 1.66 1.36

For anything above Prot 8 or so, the fire attack is slightly inferior to the extra strength. To take the attack bonus into account, I simulated a couple of Helhirdlings (Str12,LightLance,Attack12) vs. a Wraith Lord (Def 15, Prot 22).

1 Helhirdling, no bless 0.0725
2 Helhirdlings, no bless 0.1895
1 Helhirdling, +4 str 0.1625
2 Helhirdlings, +4 str 0.6475
1 Helhirdling, F9 bless 0.4745
2 Helhirdlings, F9 bless 1.1065
1 Helhirdling, F4 bless and +4 str 0.392
2 Helhirdlings, F4 bless +4 str 0.971

Take these numbers with a grain of salt (I didn't do variance analysis or test for statistical significance), but it does seem clear that a fire bless's main advantage is indeed the synergy between the attack bonus and the damage bonus, and that against heavily-armored foes it's better to have high strength than an extra fire attack. This may suggest that Wraith Lords are best swarmed by Hoburg Militia under Strength of Giants, but don't try it--6 of them inflict only 0.308 damage per turn.

Python code attached.

-Max Wilson

[MaxWilson]

P.S. About the black hunters--I didn't realize the rider stayed dead. I did a quick test game and killed off all of my army except for two spiders with dead riders. My upkeep was 0. I bought two new black hunters and my upkeep went up to 8. Interesting, no? Sacred units with zero upkeep and 55 hit points.

[MaxWilson]

P.P.S. 3 Att12 Hirdmen under Strength of Giants (Str15, Broadsword) would do 1.9755. This requires no bless at all but does as well as F9 on a per-man basis. I think what's happening is that strength of numbers cancels out the high defense, and SoG cancels out high Prot.

[Meglobob]

To MaxWilson:-

Thanks for those tests, they are very interesting. Did you take the +4 to attack into account that F9 gives? Does F9 bless still do more damage overall because it hits more often because of the +4 attack or did your tests include the +4 attack and still find the B9 inflicted more damage?

[Wyehl]

MaxWilson said:but it does seem clear that a fire bless's main advantage is indeed the synergy between the attack bonus and the damage bonus, and that against heavily-armored foes it's better to have high strength than an extra fire attack.



Fire bless can also be nice in that it is a magic attack and can go through/dispell things like ethereal/mistform.

[Graeme Dice]

MaxWilson said:
Sacred units with zero upkeep and 55 hit points.



Unfortunately they also only have a MR of 5. Don't try and use them against somebody with astral 4 mages and enslave mind researched, as I found out in one game.

[Meglobob]

Graeme Dice said:

MaxWilson said:
Sacred units with zero upkeep and 55 hit points.



Unfortunately they also only have a MR of 5. Don't try and use them against somebody with astral 4 mages and enslave mind researched, as I found out in one game.



Damn, knew it was too good to be true.

[MaxWilson]

In the first set of tests I just assumed 2000 hits, so attack didn't come into play. In the second set of tests I included the +4 attack from F9, the +2 from F2, and the -2 to defense from a second attacker. It was the attack bonus that made F9 clearly better than B9 vs. the Wraith Lords. Of course I forgot to take Etherealness into account, too.

-Max

P.S. You can treat the first set of tests as the limiting case vs. swarms of attackers. You can confidently say that +4 Str (from B9 or SoG) is better than an F9 bless against lone SCs of Prot 20, without Etherealness. The second set of tests, assuming one square vs. one square, is for large numbers of units where the battle front is roughly a line, as often happens. This doesn't necessarily mean equal numbers of units on both sides, but both sides have at least 20-30 units.

[mivayan]

Wyehl said:
Fire bless can also be nice in that it is a magic attack and can go through/dispell things like ethereal/mistform.


I'm pretty sure the following is right but I want a doublecheck:

Mistform is always totally useless for a supercombatant fighting nothing but Fire9 blessed sacreds.

[Xietor]

The Fire Bless is nice(and imho best) when you have a sacred with multiple attacks, especially against low hp ethereal units with high defense, such as MA Ermor.

Every bless has it uses in certain situations, because the game has almost infinite possibilities. But the Melee based
sacred, especially one with 2 or more attacks, fire just stands out. Hit more, hit for more damage, and you negate ethereal to a large degree.

Water bless is very good also, as is nature. I still think Astral, Death, Air, and Earth, in general, are not as useful.

Earth is obviously great for casters, but the 4 protection does not really help that much on low protection units. I like the theme of Earth, but would 8 protection put Earth on scale with Fire, water, and nature?

[Meglobob]

I take a earth bless purely for the reinvigoration, the protection is just a nice bonus. Astral is a perfectly good bless as it is, twist of fate and +3 magic resistance are always useful. S9 magic path is probably the best path of magic in the game as well, for winning the end game.

Air is definetly the weakest, I like adding +3 precision for A9. The E9/A9 combo bless for strong magic nations would be cool.

[Teraswaerto]

On units with high protection +4 prot can be good, the difference between 4 damage and 0 damage can be huge.

[Shovah32]

And on units like knights of the chalice, black templar and living pillars the E4 bless can be a very nice bonus(4 extra prot on a unit with 10 prot is nice. 4 extra prot on a 20 prot unit is great. the reinvig helps these units and your sacred mages too).

Earth is a good bless for nations with tough sacreds/those who need reinvig(niefelheim being the obvious choice) and i also like astral on alot of sacreds(mictlans sacreds, flagellants, shadow vestals and sometimes lanka's sacreds)

[MaxWilson]

Xietor said:
Earth is obviously great for casters, but the 4 protection does not really help that much on low protection units. I like the theme of Earth, but would 8 protection put Earth on scale with Fire, water, and nature?



Too much, IMHO. 8 Protection would make Earth far and away the best bless for too many units. Take the Niefel Giant, for example. 66 hit points, Prot 14, Def 13. Most units of the era have an Attack of no more than 12 and do not more than 15 points of damage per hit. They'll usually get in 1 or 2 swings because the cold aura freezes them solid. Say there are six of these opponents attacking per Niefel Giant. My Monte Carlo says they'll do about 11 points of damage per turn. A +4 water blessing would cut this to 7.3 points per turn. An E9 blessing as it now stands would cut this to 4.3 points per turn, in addition to keeping fatigue low to avoid crit-hits. An E9 blessing that give Prot +8 would cut this to 1.4 points per turn. It's true that an N9 blessing would also net 1 point per turn after counting 10 points of regeneration, but it wouldn't do anything about fatigue and it wouldn't scale as well. (Give each of those attackers 2 stars and it goes up to 12.75 - 10 = 2.75 points per turn for N9, and 1.5 for E9.)

Obviously this isn't true for low-Protection units. Interestingly enough, E9 appears to add to your armor protection and not to your basic protection, so it doesn't work at all on units without armor (Machakan spiders) and it doesn't completely stack with bonuses from Berserk. I suppose you could make it a natural Barkskin instead of a +4 armor bonus; I don't know exactly what the formula is but it makes Niefel Giants go from Prot 9 (14/8 head/body) to Prot 12 (17/12 head/body), so it would help the unarmored warriors without boosting high-end units much. Stoneskin would actually be more thematic than Barkskin but it might be too much. Either is better than a flat +8 to armor Prot.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Here's one more thing: a comparison of death and fire weapons. Again ignoring attack/defense rolls, here are the (Monte Carlo) break-even points. That is, in general fire weapons do more damage than death weapons, but for a given Protection there is a certain MR at which death weapons becomes a better bet. Here's the breakdown for Prot 1-20 and how much expected damage is dealt per-hit at each level. (For Prot 9 and below, fire weapons are always better but I show the expected damage for MR 10 for comparison's sake.)

Prot 1 MR 10 Fire dmg 6.40 Death dmg 1.44
Prot 2 MR 10 Fire dmg 5.70 Death dmg 1.46
Prot 3 MR 10 Fire dmg 5.70 Death dmg 1.42
Prot 4 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.70 Death dmg 1.62
Prot 5 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.65 Death dmg 1.48
Prot 6 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.08 Death dmg 1.46
Prot 7 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.81 Death dmg 1.45
Prot 8 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.20 Death dmg 1.41
Prot 9 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.19 Death dmg 1.51
Prot 10 MR 5 Fire dmg 2.68 Death dmg 2.57
Prot 11 MR 6 Fire dmg 2.68 Death dmg 2.38
Prot 12 MR 8 Fire dmg 2.21 Death dmg 2.15
Prot 13 MR 9 Fire dmg 1.99 Death dmg 1.88
Prot 14 MR 10 Fire dmg 1.63 Death dmg 1.54
Prot 15 MR 10 Fire dmg 1.66 Death dmg 1.53
Prot 16 MR 11 Fire dmg 1.44 Death dmg 1.14
Prot 17 MR 11 Fire dmg 1.40 Death dmg 1.15
Prot 18 MR 13 Fire dmg 0.97 Death dmg 0.82
Prot 19 MR 12 Fire dmg 1.06 Death dmg 0.91
Prot 20 MR 14 Fire dmg 0.71 Death dmg 0.66

Again, take these numbers with a grain of salt since they're empirical. Nevertheless, "he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense," and number-crunching is an old tradition for wargamers. For instance, it's apparent that death weapons are a better bet in LA than in EA.

One thing this doesn't take into account is that it's *possible* that death/fire weapons still take effect on shield-hits. Fire weapons will do negligible damage on a shield-hit, but death weapons are AN, so it's possible that death weapons are a better bet against shielded units. Maybe I'll test this if I learn enough about modding to create a low-def, heavily-shielded unit.

-Max

[Foodstamp]

Your smart

[Taqwus]

With the death weapons, don't forget about the higher affliction chance, too.

Cheap, high- or multi-attack, death-blessed units (flags?) might make good cripplers. A blessed commander with a Bow of War might be really, really annoying. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/redface.gif

[B0rsuk]

Death bless and arrows
Does it really work ? I mean, you can perforate light infantry anyway. As for heavies, especially with shields, they're not likely to get more that 2-4 damage anyway. We know affliction chance is based on damage dealt compared to creature's max health. So 2 damage arrow isn't very likely to cause an affliction. How much does death compensate for this ?

Replacements for Blood9
1. I'd call it Pain Mirror. It would work much like Blood Vengeance, except it mirrors damage instead of redirecting it. Sacred unit still takes damage, it's just likely to cause automatic harm to attacker.

2. Hp increase ! For example max(3, totalhp/5). It would be roughly +15 percent extra health, or +3 hp, depending on which is higher. It would feel a bit like Earth bless, except it would help against some spells/poisons more. In cases where totalhp/5 is more than +3, it wouldn't matter much anyway because big high hp creatures usually have low protection.

3. How about Rotting instead of Curse/Horror Mark ? It wouldn't work at all against many creatures, but would cause serious harm to most living creatures.

Gandalf: unless it's a Horror Mark, Shroud of the Saint wouldn't be of much use on an assasin. I think regular Curse really isn't all that scary on a regular commander, or even priest or mage. He's not likely to go into melee.

Maxwilson: very interesting research. Also thanks for the Python code, I'm trying to learn the language because it puts fun back into programming for me.

Keep in mind that Fire/Death damage probably interacts much better with multiple attacks, because each attack gets +6 damage. As far as I know +1str = +1 damage, potentially.
Also, some of weapons have'strenght of the wielder not added' property. This is actually quite common. All kinds of sacred animals and cavalry have hoof, bite, peck etc attacks. Then there are strange wieldable weapons which don't benefit from extra strength. (20+6ap Lance is an overkill...)
Why is Sling a 'strength not added' weapon, anyway ?

Is the Lance wasted if it doesn't hit ? If true, Fire bless would be even more valuable.

I think that Fire reacts especially well with Water. Fire is a synergy with itself. Water is +50 percent attacks on average, and each of these attacks will get +6ap.

I would look into Earth bless, too. How about
+4 for units with 15+ protection total
+5 for units with total prot between 10 and 15
+6 for units with total prot between 1 and 10*

* total 0 prot means the unit doesn't wear any armor so Earth bless won't help.

[Endoperez]

Sling is a "strength not added" weapon because we there's no #clear command for weapons, and when I had time I didn't have Edi's list which shows all units armed with slings. I'd have modded it a long time ago otherwise.

#selectweapon 22
#clear
#name "Balearic sling"
#dmg -2
#att -2
#ammo 15
#range 33
#end

If I could remove the "strength not added" tag (e.g. with a non-existant #clear tag), this would do str-2 points of damage, so 8 (instead of 9 the sling currently does) in most cases. Enough experience would add to damage, the +str spells would add to damage, and the range is long enough to make slingers useful against archers.

As it is, the most I'll be able to do is a Jotun Slinger. In fact, I'll do that. You better go check the mods subforum.

[Sombre]

For those who don't check the mod forums, here's a mod that puts the strength based sling into the game. No Jotun slingers in this one though.

It's attached. Enjoy :]

[Sir_Dr_D]

Wouldn't a death bless because of the increased infliction chance be deadly against SC's and giants?

[MaxWilson]

I don't know about "deadly." It does increase the amount of protection a given SC needs against his attackers but even a quadrupled chance of afflictions doesn't matter if you can't damage him in melee in the first place, so it's a deterrent but not an absolute one. Except, I haven't played any MP. Do people feel worse about an afflicted SC than they do about a dead one? It might give you a psychological advantage.

-Max

[Evil Dave]

thejeff said:
Death does work with arrows


It does? Hm. Then either it's buggy, or the description is wrong, 'cause the description says:

Death Weapons (2 an+mr damage)
All enemies hit by a melee weapon will suffer extra damage from the death bless effect if they fail a magic resistance roll. The damage is magical and will be effective versus ethereal beings.

[MaxWilson]

I think the claim was that the affliction chance (not the 2 an,mr attack) does work with arrows, and possibly spells. In fact, we can check this.

[1 hour later]

It turns out that death blessings do affect both regular combat spells (Falling Fires) AND battlefield spells (Fire Storm).

I set up a battle between myself as Abysia (good battlefield spells) and Niefelheim (high hp, high chance of surviving wounds so we can see if afflictions hit).

#1. Personal battle spells. 2 Anointed of Rhuax, 30 PD, vs. 1 Niefel Jarl and 40 Jotun Huskarls. Abysia had a D9 blessing and nothing else. Both Anointed of Rhuax are scripted to <Falling Fires x2, Flame Eruption x3>. We compare the baseline scenario vs. a blessed scenario where there's an extra Anointed of Rhuax who does <Divine Blessing, Retreat>. I ran this five times for each scenario. I report the outcome from Niefelheim's perspective (victory/defeat, casualties, # of afflicted survivors).

Baseline:
1. Defeat, 26 killed, 1 afflicted
2. Victory, 24 killed, 4 afflicted
3. Victory, 10 killed, 8 afflicted
4. Defeat, 26 killed, 1 afflicted
5. Defeat, 19 killed, 4 afflicted

Abysia Blessed:
1. Defeat, 27 killed, 4 afflicted
2. Defeat, 20 killed, 7 afflicted
3. Defeat, 23 killed, 7 afflicted
4. Defeat, 24 killed, 7 afflicted
5. Victory, 24 killed, 7 afflicted

Clearly the death blessing is working. Many but not all of the casualties were dealt by the flame spells of the Anointed, so it makes sense that the number of afflicted isn't simply 450% in the blessed case (especially because the chance of an afflicted unit dying goes up). In the unblessed case, the only time 8 afflictions happen is when there are 30 survivors, a roughly 25% affliction rate. Compare this to 7 out of 16 survivors afflicted in a typical blessed case. This is a 43% affliction rate, clearly greater. The death blessing affects spells.

#2 Battlefield enchantments. I was really surprised to find that death blessings still worked on battlefield spells. I upped the number of Niefel Huskarls to 70, and used a single Anointed of Rhuax casting <Phoenix Power, Fire Storm, hold x3, Retreat>. As before, in the blessed scenario a second Anointed does <Divine Blessing, retreat>. The results were so clear that I only ran each scenario twice. Niefelheim always won, but got its army wrecked if death blessing was in effect.

Baseline:
1. Victory, 17 killed, 18 afflicted.
2. Victory, 18 killed, 13 afflicted.

Abysia Blessed:
1. Victory, 17 killed, 36 afflicted.
2. Victory, 8 killed, 42 afflicted.

Observe that if Abysia is blessed, fully 2/3 of the Niefel survivors are afflicted. I didn't count how many afflictions each one had, but my impression is that multiple afflictions were common. Even in the unblessed case, Niefelheim took many afflictions, but the blessing doubled or even tripled the affliction rate.

Does this make anyone re-evaluate the "best blessing" for magic-heavy nations?

-Max Wilson

[B0rsuk]

Death bless and casters: I guess it would depend heavily on what spells I'm going to use, and what enemies I am to face. Mass afflictions wouldn't be of much use against maenads or other chaff.

[Rytek]

I havent played any multi player games yet. But seems to me Death 9 bless would make for interesting multiplay diplomacy. Do you really want to start a war knowing even if you win your armies may be crippled?

On a side note, I am really enjoying my late era giant game with e9, nature8 Earth Mother. I recruit the level 1 sacred giant priests everywhere and thug them out. They have really impressive stats when equipped with a bracer of protection and ring of warrior. Team 1 up with their shapeshifted werewolf spell caster using a sacred shroud, ring of warrior and some kind of weapon. Stack them on top of each other. Script the Priest to cast bless then attack. Script the Skinshifter for quickness and attack.
One thing about the earth bless I noticed: If a Sacred is equipped with 2 bracers of protection the bless effect stacks. A blessed Priest has an Armor factor of 30 when using 2 bracers. I dont usually stack the bracers though. Earth gems are in too high of demand. A ring of the warrior fits so much better in the second slot.

[WraithLord]

MaxWilson said:

Python code attached.

-Max Wilson



Nice!!!

It should be possible to augment this to a full blown combat simulator. Would you mind if I take a shot at this, based on your code?

[Sir_Dr_D]

MaxWilson said:
I don't know about "deadly." It does increase the amount of protection a given SC needs against his attackers but even a quadrupled chance of afflictions doesn't matter if you can't damage him in melee in the first place, so it's a deterrent but not an absolute one. Except, I haven't played any MP. Do people feel worse about an afflicted SC than they do about a dead one? It might give you a psychological advantage.

-Max




What I meant was, even with a fire a bless it will take many hits to bring down a giant. With a high death bless most hits would cause an infliction, which means that with every hit the giant gets weaker. And because you usually have so many units ganging up on a giant, the giants defense means less, so the extra attack rating you get from a fire bless doesn't mean as much. I think fire bless is better against human sized troops, and death bless better against giants.

So the death infliction chance even effects spells. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/shock.gif I wound't have figured that out, but that certainly makes death blessings a lot more usefull. Thanks for doing that research Max.

[MaxWilson]

WraithLord said:
It should be possible to augment this to a full blown combat simulator. Would you mind if I take a shot at this, based on your code?



Not at all. Do whatever you want with that code. I've actually thought about writing a combat simulator--the nice thing about games like Dom3 is that the rules are transparent enough that you could mostly replicate the battles--but I'm not sure how much interest there is. Be my guest, and email me if you need any help with Python.

-Max
wilson.max@gmail.com

[Sandman]

Does the death bonus affect map attacks as well?

[MaxWilson]

Rytek said:
I havent played any multi player games yet. But seems to me Death 9 bless would make for interesting multiplay diplomacy. Do you really want to start a war knowing even if you win your armies may be crippled?




Good point, although you'd want to change your play style to maximize afflictions instead of trying to keep territory. When I was running those tests, it occurred to me that a weak army would fail to take the province vs. 30 PD, and a strong army would get wrecked by the death-blessed Fire Storm. The obvious countermeasure is to send in a tiny little force and try to make Abysia waste gems casting Fire Storm, but it's non-obvious how many men you need to send to make the combat AI still think it's worth casting. Combine the D9 blessing with a "scorched earth" policy of pillaging your own provinces for extra gold vs. an invading army and you could become a really unattractive target.

(Of course the optimal situation is for everyone else to *believe* you'd pillage your own provinces, and thus avoid attacking you, while in reality you leave them intact and thus still have a chance of winning the game.)

-Max

[Foodstamp]

I just tried death 9 out with firestorm using EA Abysia. OUCH! Afflictions for everyone have a nice day.

[MaxWilson]

Sandman said:
Does the death bonus affect map attacks as well?



I think so.

Scenario: Anointed of Rhuax casting Fires from Afar.
Target: 70 Niefel Huskarls. Two runs of each scenario.

Blessed (D9 Prophet):
1 casualty, 8 afflicted.
0 casualties, 10 afflicted.

Unblessed (non-Prophet):
0 casualties, 1 afflicted
0 casualties, 5 afflicted.

I only ran it twice for each but it sure looks to me like it works. That probably also means that things like MR penalties from items and extra paths also work with map-cast spells.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

P.S. AFAIK, Seeking Arrow, Fires From Afar, Flames From the Sky, and Murdering Winter are the only map spells that damage military units and can take advantage of a D9 bless. Am I missing any?

BTW, Leprosy actually looks like a really interesting spell to use with Eye of the Void, Rune Smasher, etc. I wonder how many MP games feature diplomacy along the lines of "Leave me alone and I'll afflict one enemy army of your choice with disease. Otherwise I'll afflict you." Note to self: try out MP as soon as I graduate...

-Max

[Foodstamp]

Leprosy was a very powerful diplomacy tool in an MP game I played recently.

I was playing as Pangaea and Tien Chi invaded my lands. As they invaded my lands, Atlantis followed behind and gobbled up the Tien Chi lands and ventured into mine. In attempt to hold some of my former provinces, Atlantis massed quite a few troops in my former provinces even though we were at peace with one another.

I casted leprosy and on the same turn followed it with a message telling Atlantis to leave my rightful territories. To my surprise it worked pretty effectively. If Atlantis would have pushed the issue, I would have been hard pressed to stand against him after recovering from the war with Tien Chi.

So in that instance Leprosy worked pretty well as a message short of war. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[mathusalem]

about de D9 bless, don't forget the magic scale reduce MR of every body

[Baalz]

B0rsuk said:
Death bless and arrows
Does it really work ? I mean, you can perforate light infantry anyway. As for heavies, especially with shields, they're not likely to get more that 2-4 damage anyway. We know affliction chance is based on damage dealt compared to creature's max health. So 2 damage arrow isn't very likely to cause an affliction. How much does death compensate for this ?

[



Oh yeah, it works pretty good. If you have 400% affliction chance, then that 2 points of arrow damage to a 10 hp human is an 80% chance of an affliction.

[Velusion]

Good info in this thread!

[Xietor]

Death bless afflictions would be pointless against Pangaea. Depends on who your friend(s) is playing as well i think.

And even with Man, by mid game the bulk of my armies are KOA(heal afflictions) and longbows(do not heal but harder to target with mage).

[Shovah32]

Actually death bless wouldnt be pointless, even if the enemys elites are only afflicted for a few battles it could be a big help.

[MaxWilson]

I'm of the mindset that says that afflictions are a form of psychological warfare. Not all afflictions are damaging in combat, and even those that are aren't always crippling. The AI likes to invade me with armies of Niefel Huskarls that it can't feed, and they all wind up diseased, but it doesn't make them noticeably worse at taking down undersized armies. But I know I hate to see that ugly red heart on my commanders (even if it's something harmless like battle fright), and I don't like it on my shiny new armies either.

Anyone who plays Pangaea is probably immune to this feeling. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

-Max