Need to vent about "Vengeance of the Dead"

I find it hard to be considered 'unbalanced' for the effect to be so easily resisted by MR (Which VotD is).

Consider this. You pumped out cheap units with no real survivability and put a 10 Astral Pearl item on them which decimated his armies. In order for him to counter it, he casts a 3 Astral Spell that has the potential to kill those units but is not guarenteed. It seems your opponent just got smart and you fell to the classic blunder of "I found something that works and now it's being countered and I don't like it" that comes from playing with human opponents.

You should be glad that your opponent is savy enough to make you think outside of the box as you more than likely made him. Instead of calling the 'too powerful' card.

Edit: Try using Domes or switching out your commanders with the lances to those without kills, thus you only lose 80 gold and he still loses his armies. There is a counter to everything.

[ February 25, 2004, 05:39: Message edited by: Zen ]

[PvK]

A counterpoint to the balance argument is that you can bLast undead hordes in more cost-effective ways, such as a low-level priest, such as an independent.

And as semi-relevant anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of magic resistance, in Dominions 1, my pretender was attacked by this four or five times IIRC, and always resisted. I did lose a priest or two to it who had banished many undead, but at 50 gold - c'est la morte.

I'd still welcome a change so that undead, soulless, and/or mindless didn't qualify for vengeance, on the basis of meaning more than balance. I think it might be good too if banishing tons of undead didn't get priests so easily into elite status and the hall of fame, but that's mainly just a preference.

By the way, does anyone know whether Vengeance of the Dead will involve people who were killed but ressurrected? Multiple times? E.g. If you kill Bozo the prophet three times do you face him three times in VotD? If he's currently alive does it make a difference to VotD? Mainly just curious...

PvK

[PvK]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Personally, rather than the elemental, I'd go with a Ring of Warning and assign the 10 hardest-to-kill (preferably ethereal) troops you can buy/summon to protect the owner of the ring. And having a damaging aura like Fire Shield (Charcoal Shield) should be a great help.

Bodyguards don't help when you're dreaming. VotD is a dream attack.

PvK

[PvK]

VotD doesn't need to store a seperate list. VotD is an uncommon event, and when it happens, you can just run through the vanquished list and make a temporary list in memory, which you'll need to do anyway, to resolve the battle. (Actually, you'd need to make a list for each commander present, but it will take very little time and is an infrequent event, so it's not a performance issue.) No issue with saved games.

PvK

Originally posted by Arryn:
Perhaps not so easy. There is likely to be a data structure that stores the count of units a leader has killed. The same count is used for both VotD and for XPs. For the idea to work there would need to be a second count stored, that of non-undead/non-mindless, just for VotD purposes. So far so good. The problem comes in the need to expand the size of a data structure to accomodate the extra info to be saved. This may have adverse side effects up to and including invalidating earlier savegames, depending on how IW has coded the program and what the data structures look like. Only IW can tell us how much work it'll be.

It's doable, but that doesn't mean it's also simple. Straightforward != simple.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by PvK:
Bodyguards don't help when you're dreaming. VotD is a dream attack.

You sure about that? Because the Last time I was attacked by VotD there was an actual battle replay. My commander didn't just drop dead on the spot as if by an Arrow ritual. Battle replay = battle. A battle usually means you can defend ...

By the descriptive text in the game it's considered a dream attack (meaning the dead are channeled and funneled to the unit and attack him in his mind. The body cannot live without the mind.) The battle is there because it's not uncommon to defeat the horde.

[velk]

You sure about that? Because the Last time I was attacked by VotD there was an actual battle replay. My commander didn't just drop dead on the spot as if by an Arrow ritual. Battle replay = battle. A battle usually means you can defend

I got hit by it once, my SC killed them all anyway though, but I am pretty sure his bodyguards were not included.

From a common sense point of view it would be pretty silly if they were, given that it's supposedly an enchanted dream.

[Arryn]

Okay, makes sense. But it's sort of silly (and confusing) to include the battle replay. Why treat this ritual differently than getting Arrowed? (that's a rhetorical question, boys)

Thanks for the perspective.

[Arralen]

Battle Replay
Battle replay is there because it's a "real" battle - guess it's (code-wise) some kind of assassination (bodyguards left out), including spellcasting, dying from exhaustion, melee etc.

my opinion
It doesn't make sense to me that undead are counted as kills. It's especially strange that killing the soulless from VotD acutally counts against the rating, too - had a really strange incident with a Sidhe Lord. He got VotD'ed when he had 21 kills and wasn't in the hall of fame. He killed off those soulles and jumped there with 42 kills. Obviously the AI had a good time tracing him with spells or scouts (or blatantly cheated), 'cause he resisted 3 or more castings, killed those 42 souls off again before he finally exhausted himself frying the 3 Last soulless of the attacking 84 when he failed the MR test the third time he(I still wonder why the idiot chose a fat-20 spell when at 90 already, instead of doing melee what would have cost him net 2 pts/turn..)

Last but ..
Could anyone tell me why the attacking souls are actually represented by soulless? Wouldn't be Ghosts or Spirits more appropiate?


edited: faulty memory - the commander got VotD'ed 3 times succesfully - the first 2 times where pretty funny as they gave him a nice boost

[ February 25, 2004, 09:17: Message edited by: Arralen ]

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Arralen:
Could anyone tell me why the attacking souls are actually represented by soulless? Wouldn't be Ghosts or Spirits more appropiate?

It would, but that would make the spell really ugly ...