Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
By the way I have just realised I omitted two new spells from the changelog : "Return from Valhalla" for EA Van, and "Return from Hel" for EA Helheim.
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Very nice; that definitely falls into the fun category! I'm already looking forward to bringing back a magma eruption or rain of stones casting dwarf as a vanadrott.
I like this idea of copying and modifying spells to make national versions of them. Return from Valhalla/Hel is certainly a nice example but even something like the more straightforward Quickening Song is useful as it lets those A1N1 Sidhe Champions cast a spell that would normally be beyond their abilities. National spells/summons help differentiate nations and make the game more interesting.
Speaking of fun things, making tarrasques commanders falls in that category. This seems to be a growing category: non-humanoid monsters that have some nice built-in abilities but limited slots. The most successful examples that come to mind are EDM's shishis and zmeys. It's an interesting change and hopefully tarrasques will find a place in that group.
The Treelord changes are also good and I think they're worth summoning (maybe one research level lower, though?). And the kithaironic lion change is interesting as well; mixing some of those into a formation could be useful.
About the changes to scales, I think it's good that Order/Sloth is no longer a default combination. Tough to say if the spread between order and production should be two or three points. I lean towards the current two point spread, though. I think with a three point spread I'd still go with Order/Sloth. Two point spread I'm not sure... It's also nice how Growth is differentiated - less income upfront but paying off a lot later on.
I've only started to look over the magic items but so far it looks good. One thing that I think is helpful is the increase in protection on some of the lighter armors. For instance, increasing the protection on shambler skin hauberk means that if the commander has mid-range armor built-in he's no longer ending up with lower protection by using this item than if he used one of his misc slots for a water breathing item and kept his built-in armor.
I also like the 15 gem pricing of more powerful items like wraith crowns, robes of invulnerability and bone armor.
So far I've looked over the glamour nations and Man. A couple of things that I think are worth keeping an eye on to see how they play out are:
* Man's Hex spell. Nature has gotten some (welcome) strength on the battlefield recently with improved MR resists spells but this one could be particularly nasty. It's instakill on a failed MR roll just like polymorph but it only has half the fatigue and if it's AI friendly and gets spammed even after the script runs out it could be brutal.
* Vanjarls at 240 gold. I'm certainly not complaining about the boosts to Van but it occurs to me that with dwarves having a forge bonus to help with thugging and half of Vanjarls having B2 a cost of 260 gold or even the original 280 gold might be reasonable. I never thought it was feasible to give two blood boosters to a B1 Vanjarl for a late game cloud trapezing life for a life caster. But one blood booster? That's feasible. I don't think the change to Vanjarls is OP (especially not in EA) but 240 gold may be too cheap a price, all things considered.