Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

I was wondering, am I the only one who thinks that this is quite a powerfull spell verging on OP.

Also I am not too sure about its mechanics fully , but I cannot see any counters to it.(MR doesnt seem to negate it) So with this spell(Ulm that already has really good early game with the recend reduction of the enc of their troops) gets a way to counter everything the other nations may have as a strategy this spell is like deamon cleansing, unravelling and wither bones in one. It has a great synergy with tough 20+ protection unbuffed soldiers for a nation with an easy access to earth magic. So you cast that spell and you wait for any special units your opponents might rely on to die from exhaustion(it does take about 10ish battle turns but you can easily outlast them with your high prot units also every turn their creatures become more and more useless(because of the increased chance of crit)).
Also as Ulm you get the easy forge and you get really good thugs/Scs (iron angels) with extremely cheap equipment aswell.

So my question is didnt CBM buff MA Ulm a bit too much?

Also I don't want this to sound like a rant, but if you can point me to any counters to this spell I'll appreciate that.

P.S an additional question if drain magic works like rigor mortis would will of fates(luck) give you 50% chance to ignore the fatigue damage?

Re: Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

I think there are a lot of people that share your opinion about the current state of MA Ulm. With all the recent changes they have been pushed very far in the direction of OP.

Elite super soldiers with some of the highest protection in the game, and relatively low encumberance for 10 gold apiece. Check.

Easy way to buff those high levels of protection right out of the gate. Check.

Highly spammable AP evo that can be easily casted by your cheapest mages. Check.

Native forge bonus. Check.

Level 0 forge of the ancients. Check.

Resource boost for the capital. Check.

National mass parilization spells that render elite units of other nations useless. Check.

Spell that renders any summoned units your enemy fields useless. Check.

Any one of these changes would have done a huge amount to buff ulm up to a respectable MA power. All of them together make them insane.

Re: Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

What puzzles me is that while MA Ulm gets this kind of treatment, a nation like LA Man or Eriu gets left in the dust.

Not complaining too much, mind. I like playing the new Ulm (in SP, though).

Re: Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

Drain Magic only works for 9 turns. I think the total fatigue it gives is 45, maybe slightly higher. Obviously it is fairly powerful but it's meant to be a key spell for the nation.

Balancing Ulm is difficult - it's easy to make them strong in the early game (which it seems CBM has possibly overdone), but keeping them competitive later on is very difficult. Drain Magic is an attempt to help with that.

In the next release the following changes are planned:

- Change the H3 Blessing of Iron spell. Either make it H4 or make it require research.
- Remove the 50 resource capital site.
- Do something with the national Forge spell. Probably remove it.

I think those changes will make quite a big difference in moving Ulm back into the middle of the power spectrum. The Blessing of Iron spell is probably the worst culprit in making them currently a bit OP.

Also, fair point about LA Man, but the last couple of patches have added content and buffs to most of the weaker nations (including Eriu to some extent), so I think LA Man is the exception rather than the rule. The trouble with LA Man is I can't figure out what the theme is. It just seems dull.

Re: Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

Drain Magic only works for 9 turns. I think the total fatigue it gives is 45, maybe slightly higher. Obviously it is fairly powerful but it's meant to be a key spell for the nation.

Balancing Ulm is difficult - it's easy to make them strong in the early game (which it seems CBM has possibly overdone), but keeping them competitive later on is very difficult. Drain Magic is an attempt to help with that.

In the next release the following changes are planned:

- Change the H3 Blessing of Iron spell. Either make it H4 or make it require research.
- Remove the 50 resource capital site.
- Do something with the national Forge spell. Probably remove it.

I think those changes will make quite a big difference in moving Ulm back into the middle of the power spectrum. The Blessing of Iron spell is probably the worst culprit in making them currently a bit OP.

Also, fair point about LA Man, but the last couple of patches have added content and buffs to most of the weaker nations (including Eriu to some extent), so I think LA Man is the exception rather than the rule. The trouble with LA Man is I can't figure out what the theme is. It just seems dull.

I see so it should work like rigor mortis. I assume 10AN damage and 50% chance of getting hit by it. Although when I tested it on turn 7-8 of the battle with of force of 60 undead units 90% fo them were with fatigue 100+ most of them 120-30 and some of them 177,150 etc. Out of 60 I had 5ish units with 20 or less fatigue 10 with 50+ reaching 90s. and the rest had fatigued out some taking damage from fatigue(thats at the end of the spell)



Can I make a suggestion: can the damage be changed from 10AN to 10-15 normal damage(subject to tweaking) this way the spell can take care of the chaff units wheres your troops buffed by the standard (for everyone) weapons of sharpness buff can take care of the elite units the enemies has. (if the damage is normal you will still do 20ish fatigues to most units I think or at least judging by the way the spell behaved) and the more so on lightly protected targets. This give the opponents a chance to counter it by casting Army of X. or spells that buff prot. Hence you have a counter to the spell and its not too powerull late game but its still usefull against masses of chaff early on.:)

Reasons for my suggestion: Ulm also hasn't got a huge reason to for construction 7-8 since it has most of the gear that it needs.(well as much as other nations) since it has the means to deal with elite units of other nations easily via this spell. and since it has the forge:). (well lets say less reason than most nations)
So all they need to deal with the elite units (witch come for other nations rather late) is this spell. so they have the counters before the threat has come(which is not good I think since it gives ulm time to creat threats before the other nations even think of getting a counter for it).


P.s Observation: luck didnt seem to counter the fatigue damage.

P.s also if its meant to be a key spell for the nation why the research for it is lvl 4?(Agartha gets its key spell at level 9 and most other nations get them lvl7-8-9)

Also I Like the Idea of the blessing requireing H4 rather then research since in a late game battle it is equial to 5-6 castings = 5-6 mages not casting legions of steel and casting evoc. so I think it will be fairly powerfull even if you move it to higher research.(5-6 casting less per army freeing your mages to cast other earth buffs) or evoc. If you make it H4 then only a prophet with crystal shield can cast it. But crystal shields are easily obtainable for ulm. Or if the games goes on till late late game you can use one of the holy-boosting artifacts to field 2-3 armies with this buff on.(hence it gives a reason for ulm to use holy arifacts(which is quite thematic aswell:)))

Re: Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

I'm very surprised if it caused fatigue of >100. Has anyone else observed this? That wasn't what I found during testing. I would agree that that would be OP.

Drain Magic is meant to allow "fair fights" between mundane troops. Nations which rely heavily on demons, undead or constructs should see Ulm as a challenging opponent. This makes a lot of sense to me thematically. The "counter" is to use a different tactic, for example mundane troops, sacreds, living summons or (best of all) lots of battlefield evocations. Or raiding!

Dominions has a lot of things like this to which there is no direct counter. For example how do you counter Wither Bones?

"Key spell" doesn't mean "endgame spell".

Re: Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

With fog warriors:) (I guess that doesnt classify as direct counter true :) but casting it turn 1 and turn 3 say. gives you decent enough protection)

Regarding drain magic making it dmg 15-20(fatigue) spell doesnt make army of gold/lead a full counter(although I admit its more direct than the fog/wither bones)
Although if it did 45 fatigue damage that would make it balanced I guess. And if it still feels too you could just prolongue the ammount of time it lasts to 18 turns and reduce damage by half;)

and yea I know that there are things that dont have counters in dominions, although I feel that its better for the balance to have a counter for something( Its like with the vine whips when they were always hitting making them the perfect weapon for any low attack SC's) As they were made to entangle low defence stuff they became balanced since it gave them a counter at certain cost(so another SC can decide to forego MR so that it can obtain more defence- if you are fielding huge armies of SC's hoding vine whips) Also I think giving everything a way to be countered contributes towards balance.

About the fatigue it surprised me aswell it could be because it wasnt the only spell that was on at the time. so all of them working together might have caused some bug. I'll test it again couple of times when I get the time to and give you results/ send you the files if you want to see what happened. I have cbm1.92 debug mod, singleagemod and llamastreamersandstandards. But I dont think its that.

My bad there I misunderstood you about that.

P.s. Also dont get me wrong about the fog warriors comment, I am not trying to tease you (maybe a little bit:) so just disregard it )

Although I do think you are doing a great job for this community and I am really thankful for that.
I am just trying to give some suggestions which seem reasonable to me and try to get other people from the community to state their opinions aswell. Since the last time I gave suggestions about some things that cant be modded thus aggravating some of the people on the other forums. Now I am trying to keep the suggestions simple : chance AN damage to Normal or AP. That kindoff thing.

Re: Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

It's good feedback, I appreciate the post.

Incidentally I think Drain Magic has an additional effect for each of the magic being, undead and demon tags. So Bone Fiends (undead demons) would suffer double fatigue. You weren't using Bone Fiends were you?

Re: Ulmish Drain magic spell
 

Llama, first just want to emphasize that you are doing a great job at what is by no means an easy task.

I guess the problem I have with the particular spell that were discussing is that its just so easy for Ulm to cast. Its an extremely powerful spell that's basically castable by every single cheap mage that ulm will have plenty of. Its E4 with a cost of two gems.

E2 mage + summon E power + 3 gems
E2 mage + cheap E boots + 3 gems

So it makes it very tough to get around it with say, raiding. They can deploy it everywhere and anywhere. Spells of equivalent power usually seem to require a more specialized or cap only mage.

And the problem with the other two counters, battlefield evo and mundane troops, is that this is exactly where MA Ulm wants to fight. What you're saying is that one counter to an unresistabel spell that any one of Ulm's mages can cast is to use mundane troops against the nation with the most powerful mundane troops in the game? So yes, technically this is a counters, but it's a pretty bad one. It basically requires any nation fighting Ulm to bring significantly more resources to bear than Ulm itself is committing.

Battlefield evocs are a little better, but Ulm is not exactly a slacker when it comes to this area either. They're going to have loads of cheap summon E-power mages who just love to spam Iron blizzard, magma eruption, blade wind, earthquake, etc.

On a broader note. I think the big problem with the changes to MA Ulm is that they just all came too fast and in one big lump. Ulm went from being underpowered to crazy OP in one leap.

The biggest problem is probably the reduced encumbrance and increased attack on their troops without an equivalent cost increase. Bump the gold price up to actually be comparable to other troops of their quality and you would have much better balance in the early game.