Balancing the blesses

[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).

[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...

[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

[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.