Trample balance discussion

[Illuminated One]

Originally Posted by Honeybagder

How is it that a mage isn't so self important/self aggrandizing as to toss a bunch of pebbles across a field, with Earth Shard, but is too classy to create a wall of earth to stop an elephant from running him over? That argument doesn't even make any sense.

There's still a big difference in parttaking in a battle (even if it comes to only throwing a bunch of low level spells around) and building field fortifications.
In many medieval cultures the first is honorable and worthy of men and nobles while the latter is a work of the slaves and the peasants.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by HoneyBadger

I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying that it's pointless, and the only reason I'm saying it is that it's potentially harmful, in that it might give some of the newer people the impression that you know what you're talking about when you're just guessing.

I do know what I'm talking about. That's the point of an educated guess. Observation, previous experience and understanding of the mechanics of dom3 lead me to make my statement. I wouldn't make a statement like that if I had just arrived here and had no idea what was going on.

[HoneyBadger]

Illuminated One: That might possibly be the case-if you discount that most of the early Roman armies were citizens, or that their commanders were generally nobles and landowners-but that's not from any prejudices against the type of work involved, it's that they type of work involved was dirty and hard and dangerous. The Romans-again-used engineers and skilled craftspeople on the field, when their own soldiers weren't up to a particular task, and then they trained the soldiers better. They didn't assign peasants or unskilled slaves to do anything other than unskilled labour.

In any case, I assure you that, in all likelyhood, they would have made exceptions for people who could do that kind of work *with the power of their minds*.

And who says mages weren't of the "peasant" class? With the Church being pretty hard on pagan and heretical rulers and all, with the excommunicating and the cruisading and the witch-burning, mages were more likely to be peasants than nobility, or atleast not shout to the world that they had powers of witchcraft and demonology at their fingertips.

[HoneyBadger]

I understand that it's an educated guess-and I respect your opinion, Sombre, I even share it, that yes it's unlikely to go into the game-but you were framing it as a statement, not a guess. It's either one or the other.

A lot of people on these boards, who haven't spent as much time here as you or I have, might look at your stats, and your statement, and assume that you had inside knowledge of what Illwinter's policies were, or even that you were in a position to make those decisions, yourself.

That's where I took exception to what you said, and the way you said it, not at the fact that you *are* very knowledgeable, that you *do* have a lot of experience and know what you're talking about, and that you probably *are* correct.

[vfb]

Instead of creating the fortifications in advance, you could have mages create them on the battlefield.

I don't think it would be difficult to mod, it could be pretty much a clone of the earth elemental spell. Call it 'wall of earth', and give it more range. Make the earth elemental clone immobile and give it a bit more HP. It's fine that the enemy attacks it, that's them tearing it down. You could have the walls shrink like elementals, or just get destroyed when they get to zero HP.

You could make a 'wall of thorns' nature spell too (with poison thorns), 'wall of ice' (cold aura), 'wall of magma' (with heat and fire shield), etc.

If you spammed enough of the spell you could make the battlefield impassible or at least difficult to navigate. The effect wouldn't really be a wall unless you had a line of mages spanning the whole width of the battlefield. But it might give you the effect you're looking for.

[Tifone]

A few opinions from a guy without the experiences of the gurus here

I think barricades would only make battles longer and boring, making soldiers go and attack a barricade over and over. Wouldn't it be terribly annoying to see your Dragon set on "Fire large enemy monsters" fire and attack the barricade instead of the enemy's elephants??

Also, wouldn't that be an mindless, immobile (so not retreating) and high-hp and prot unit? vfb has suggested a summonable one, but I think that the ability to summon lots of these would be easily exploited to make battles end just by turn limit. The discussion about this has gone on fire many times before (NTJedi, are you there? ) and such a thing would bring it to the extreme.

On a final note, I'd say it doesn't seem to me that it would fit dom3's spirit a lot. The battles on dom3 have always been mostly furious battles between soldiers, mages and so on. THere are just a few, limited immobile pretenders. Starting to put in the cauldron immoblie structures on every battlefield seems just unthematic to me and distorting the nature of the game's furious battles.

Obviously just my opinions ^^

[HoneyBadger]

It all depends on how the immobile units work--as in: their stats. If they've got 60 Hp each, and 30 Prot, obviously they become a major factor in the game, but if-for example-you only gave them 1 Hp and just enough Prot that it would require the elephants to do a Crit to destroy them, then that only slows the elephant down for a limited amount of time-and other units can easily remove them in a single shot. And they can still be flown over (by empowered elephants).

And these things would be immobile gem-sinks. You couldn't move them to any other Province-which is why I suggested they be summons. If you make them combat castings, they become a whole lot more powerful. If they're summons, then they have to be permanently assigned to a single Province, which all makes them *very* niche.

[Illuminated One]

@HoneyBadger

Ok, for some mages it might be ok if they did some digging, but then again for most mages I can't see why anyone would want to waste a mage +gems for something a bunch of soldiers with picks and shovels could do as well.
There are possibilities to couter elephants with magic allready (Bonds of Fire, Paralyze). Well I don't know how powerful these are in a real game but then I think it sucks to be forced to use your mages to counter something that could be easily countered by mundane means.
However it occured to me that you could also give some infantry commanders (say ulm's siege engineer) the ability to domsummon barricades which would indeed make sense imo.

Still I don't think it would work very vell in battles as long as units can't differentiate between enemies and obstacles. And while a wooden pallisade torn down by elephants makes sense a couple of spearmen stabbing the palisade to death while under enemy fire does not.

[Tifone]

Originally Posted by Illuminated One

Still I don't think it would work very vell in battles as long as units can't differentiate between enemies and obstacles. And while a wooden pallisade torn down by elephants makes sense a couple of spearmen stabbing the palisade to death while under enemy fire does not.

Yeah, I think this one is the real point of the discussion.

[HoneyBadger]

Well, inevitably it's an abstraction. It has to be, considering the confines of the game. The mage you use to cast the spell, you can assume is the engineer overseeing the work, and the earth gems, special resources and terrain features utilized in the project. Making it cost earth gems, rather than just resources, is again a way to balance this out.

And you're absolutely right, there *are* other ways to stop Elephant Rushes. Good ways, infact, but not always ways that are effective or useable early in the game, for certain Nations.

As far as it cutting into turn limits (which I agree are kind of short, atleast for me), I'm aware of the problem, and there are things that can be done to mitigate the problem (like making them 1 hit=1 kill). Elephants themselves, though, with all their HP, and the possibility of regeneration, are just as much of a potential battle-lengthener as a bunch of barriers would be.

And there are some *really* interesting things that could be done with these kinds of units-Ice, Poison, and Fire have already been mentioned by vfb, but how about phantasmal wall (etherial), wall of clouds (flying), wall of shadows (stronger in darkness-as a deterrant to undead, for Nations which lack other undead/darkness deterrants), etc. (how about a spell that spammed a bunch of blinking walls?) and all the different immobile monster "walls" that could still attack, but couldn't otherwise move?

There's a lot of creative stuff that can be done with this.