Wild Hunt & Ghost Ship Armada too weak?

[SelfishGene]

I'm suprised you rated Astral Corruption so low.

What good does a million astral pearls do if you can't cast anything with them without dying?

Unless i'm misunderstood how AC works, don't you have to beat the horror in order for the spell to "go through" and be considered to have happened. IE, you can't cast dispel successfully unless you beat the horror that follows.

[Micah]

No, the spell is cast first, then the attack happens. Low-level horror attacks also don't pose much of a threat to a prepared mage. Astral mages can cast returning, naure mages can spam a couple of swarms, death mages can skel-spam and follow up with drain life, fire, water, and air all have direct attack spells that will kill a horror as long as it gets stuck on bodyguards for a few rounds. Blood has leech and life for a life. Earth lacks anything stellar to deal with them, but that's a pretty small segment of the mage population.

Every so often you'll get unlucky, or something really big and nasty will show up, but there are plenty of ways around it.

[SelfishGene]

If you forge an item, though, and the forging mage dies, the item dissapears.

[Sir_Dr_D]

Being allowed infinite globals would be interesting. I would like that on the wish list.

[Jazzepi]

Hadrian_II said:
I think every global has some use, but the problem is more that there are only 5 slots. If every global would get his own slot someone might even care to caste Riches from Beneath.

I dont understand anyway why the globals are limited to 5.

I think it would be a mistake to remove the cap. Perhaps it could be adjusted to scale with the number of players, or simply be an option that you can set during server setup.

In any case, having a limit creates game tension. Tension is what makes decisions hard. When decisions are hard, you have to be good to make the correct ones. This is what separates bad players from good players and makes intricate, complex games like Dominions 3, with lots of tension, good.

If you remove the limit, then you remove some of the tension about casting globals, and therefore some of the interesting decisions you have to make.

You don't have to worry about filling up slots anymore, and you can't randomly get your global dispelled by someone else's. You also don't have to worry about having to put enough gems into your global enchantment that'll dispel someone else's when all 5 slots are filled. By taking out these things, and having no cap Dominions 3 would be a more shallow game.

Jazzepi

[Ubercat]

Jazzepi said:

I think it would be a mistake to remove the cap. Perhaps it could be adjusted to scale with the number of players, or simply be an option that you can set during server setup.

In any case, having a limit creates game tension. Tension is what makes decisions hard. When decisions are hard, you have to be good to make the correct ones. This is what separates bad players from good players and makes intricate, complex games like Dominions 3, with lots of tension, good.

If you remove the limit, then you remove some of the tension about casting globals, and therefore some of the interesting decisions you have to make.

You don't have to worry about filling up slots anymore, and you can't randomly get your global dispelled by someone else's. You also don't have to worry about having to put enough gems into your global enchantment that'll dispel someone else's when all 5 slots are filled. By taking out these things, and having no cap Dominions 3 would be a more shallow game.

Jazzepi

Then you're stuck with the problem of there being a ton of globals which no experienced player will waste their time casting, expecially in MP. Why not up the global cap to eight? or 1/2 the number of players, minimum 5?

[lch]

Ubercat said:
Then you're stuck with the problem of there being a ton of globals which no experienced player will waste their time casting, expecially in MP. Why not up the global cap to eight? or 1/2 the number of players, minimum 5?

How should any arbitrarily picked value be better than another? I think this should be configurable when you create a game just like the size of the HoF is, too.

[Loren]

Hadrian_II said:
I think every global has some use, but the problem is more that there are only 5 slots. If every global would get his own slot someone might even care to caste Riches from Beneath.

I dont understand anyway why the globals are limited to 5.

Actually, I'm thinking maybe somewhere in between.

No limit on the number of globals, it's just the more globals that are up the harder it is to cast (the gem cost is increased) any new one.

[Jazzepi]

Ubercat said:

Then you're stuck with the problem of there being a ton of globals which no experienced player will waste their time casting, expecially in MP. Why not up the global cap to eight? or 1/2 the number of players, minimum 5?

The problem with the globals that nobody casts is that they simply are not good enough for their cost. Raising the cap isn't the solution. Making the globals worth casting, is. Even if you raise the cap to 8-15, nobody is ever going to cast wild hunt.

Jazzepi

[SelfishGene]

Eh, i disagree to some extent. Blood is easy to get; easier than Astral pearls. AC is level 6 research spell.

Yea, if you wait until the point in the game where everyone has fully decked out SCs with Sunslayers ect, i'm sure it's not quite as potent. But it certainly seems like a game winning spell the few times i've cast it. If it doesn't exactly end the game, it certainly creates a pretty mean bottleneck that other factions have to really work around, and that they may not. Saying a unequipped generalized 2N haruspex caster can always beat an attacking horror is a bit of a stretch imo.