Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!

[nordlys]

Originally Posted by Bananadine

Hm well I don't find Nagot gik fel or whatever very fun!

It should be rebranded "Suddenly, the previous Pantokrator has returned and kicked everybody out into the void"

Could be a S9D9, conj9 ritual even, a nasty last resort for somebody about to bite the dust.

[AdmiralZhao]

In terms of game fiction VotD is not bad. The literature has plenty of examples of people sucked into magical nightmares, where if they cannot emerge in time they will die/be lost forever in the dream. Same thing here; if you can't beat your nightmare in 75 turns, then you are lost forever.

[Bananadine]

Originally Posted by AdmiralZhao

In terms of game fiction VotD is not bad. The literature has plenty of examples of people sucked into magical nightmares, where if they cannot emerge in time they will die/be lost forever in the dream. Same thing here; if you can't beat your nightmare in 75 turns, then you are lost forever.

That's true, it kinda makes sense for the spell to have two ways to kill: by directly killing the target in the fight, and thus subverting their belief in their own life so severely that said life ends--or by distracting the target long enough that they can never find their way back to wakefulness. There's some poetry to that.

But the description doesn't say anything about that, and it's just as easy to imagine the target surviving long enough to awaken, too. Especially if every measure of the battle's progress indicates very clearly that the target has been winning! Judging only from the fiction, and not from the normal mechanical rules of battles, you could easily expect either outcome, I guess.

But how silly is it to think that, after beating 280 out of 300 dead ones, a commander would suddenly become unable to awaken, just because a magical alarm clock went off RIGHT THEN! That's not so poetic. Maybe I will try to make a mod that somehow or another causes Dead Ones to turn into super-strong Horrors at turn 74, ha! Then at least you wouldn't have to feel badly about the extra ten rounds you didn't get. Your commander would go down in style, instead of ignominiously collapsing amidst a bunch of stupid Soulless-looking things!

Hm, I intended that as a joke, but I wonder whether there's really a way to do it.

Originally Posted by nordlys

It should be rebranded "Suddenly, the previous Pantokrator has returned and kicked everybody out into the void"

Could be a S9D9, conj9 ritual even, a nasty last resort for somebody about to bite the dust.

Yes, that's the spirit! It's a dramatic game, everything must be dramatic.

[Burnsaber]

I don't really see much issue in the "kill count doubling" with VotD. Sure, it's unthematic, but the amount of mage-time and pearls that your opponent has to put to get through competetive mr twice or thrice is simply staggering. In that case, I'd say that the SC did his job by taking so much of opponent's resources, especially in this post-clam era.

[Sombre]

I don't think many people are complaining about it being unbalanced, but it's counter intuitive and feels completely unfair when you're on the end of it. The effect doesn't match the flavour and the way it kills you feels buggy/stupid.

[thejeff]

IIRC, attacker routs at 50 turns, defender at 75, autokill at 100. I'm less sure about the autokill.

The difference during assassinations is that there's no place to route to , so you can't survive routing.

[Bananadine]

Huh, that does fit my experience better. Maybe that's what the people in the other thread meant about losing the defender at round 75. I'd thought they meant autokill, but routing kills the defender almost as reliably as autokill, when the attacker can "rout" without fleeing or dissolving.

I'd been thinking this could become significant in ordinary assassinations too--if the defender was killed at 75, then the attacker would only need to keep them still until then in order to succeed at assassinating. But the attacker routs at 50, so that wouldn't really work unless the attacker were berserk or unconscious. So, you could send in an Abysian Slayer with a barkskin amulet and... oh boy it'd be hard to keep the target still, when the assassin must also be unconscious in order to succeed! But maybe a berserk assassin could succeed by this rout. It'd be pretty sketchy though. I guess this is why I never heard anybody complain about defenders automatically dying at round 75 during assassinations... except in the context of Vengeance of the Dead, where the attackers never ever give up.

[thejeff]

It's also pretty uncommon in a normal assassination to not have one side or the other dead or fleeing long before turn 50.

It would be a pretty odd situation. You'd need to be completely invulnerable to your enemy to last long enough. And he have to be invulnerable to anything you could equip yourself with or why bother.

Knocking yourself out with your own aura probably won't work, since you'll hit 200 and start taking damage.
A berserk, blinking assassin with 2 Life Long Protections and very low movement (crippled?) might stay out of the way long enough to trigger the defender's route even if the imps couldn't scratch him. Probably wouldn't work, but it would be fun to watch.

[Loren]

Originally Posted by thejeff

It's also pretty uncommon in a normal assassination to not have one side or the other dead or fleeing long before turn 50.

It would be a pretty odd situation. You'd need to be completely invulnerable to your enemy to last long enough. And he have to be invulnerable to anything you could equip yourself with or why bother.

Knocking yourself out with your own aura probably won't work, since you'll hit 200 and start taking damage.
A berserk, blinking assassin with 2 Life Long Protections and very low movement (crippled?) might stay out of the way long enough to trigger the defender's route even if the imps couldn't scratch him. Probably wouldn't work, but it would be fun to watch.

I've been in a battle that due to a lack of adequate scripting ended up with two guys who couldn't touch each other. This was against the AI so I played around with it a bit and there's no question, it was always a stalemate.

One guy kept summoning junk, the other guy kept frying the junk before it closed. This kept up until the autorout kicked in--neither side having been hit for a single point of damage.

[Bananadine]

I RAN INTO THIS AGAIN AND IT MADE ME MAD AGAIN

Not via Vengeance of the Dead though. I've gotten used to that. But somehow the unforgettable loss of my most unkillable commander to that spell still didn't teach me that basically the same rules apply in normal battles too: If the battle is too big to be finished in time, then even the winners are liable to flee, and when trolls, fatigue-making spells, and Army of Lead are involved, there's a decent chance that it's gonna be that big.

So, even demiliches in friendly dominion will get scared and run away from the things that they are totally succeeding at killing (but not quickly enough). And then perhaps they will flee into an enemy province (maybe still in friendly dominion!) and invisibly, permanently die. I AM ANGRY ABOUT THIS okay I feel better now.

The simple solution is of course to prepare a good escape route. I kinda wish there weren't a simple solution, because these routing rules are really quite bad, and if they were truly game-breaking (instead of just one more subtle but extremely important detail one must learn the hard way and then remember forever in order to become excellent at this game) then maybe the problem would get fixed. (N.B.: My problem here, as with Vengeance of the Dead, is not that the painful lesson is painful, but that in these few cases it is ugly, nonintuitive, fiction-breaking, and seemingly easy to fix.)

Well, there's always the possibility that an eccentric billionaire will come along, purchase the source from Illwinter, and release it on SourceForge. Hey, with open-ended die rolls anything can happen.