Need to vent about "Vengeance of the Dead"

[pole_shift]

I just lost another powerful unit to this spell. Its just annoying. I feel it's unbalanced. You get way too much for way too little. Maybe the attacking units should be weaker. Its supposed to be a SC counter spell. Ok. But what about the sort of situation where you have casters who have to use "artillery" spells to take out the huge number of fodder? Like for instance vs. Ermor. These casters will all be vulnerable to this very cheap spell. Giving a MR resist item to the commander with most kills is logical but you can't always know who has the most in the particular stack. What if he isn't in the Hall of Fame? The unit I just lost was a King of the Deep. Not a wimpy caster and he got creamed. I realize I'm annoyed right now but I still think this spell is probably too powerful.

[pole_shift]

One thing that would help balance VotD a bit is if killing souless undead didn't count. After all, no soul, no reason for vengeance. ...(snip)... Problem is that coding such a thing is probably damn hard if not outright impossible.

Thats the first idea I came up with as well but tossed it out for the same reason: hard to code if certain things aren't in place to begin with (like a running list not only of how many units a commander has killed but what types)

[PvK]

Er, sounds pretty easy to me, since there is a list of the destroyed units, and each unit is identifyiable as undead or mindless. Downright simple loop with two conditions to disqualify them for VotD purposes.

PvK

[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.

[NTJedi]

pole_shift...

if you have developed such important commanders give them a bottle of living water. The water elemental should provide the time and defense for them to survive at least one of these vengenance of the dead attacks.

also if this commander strategy was working then keep pumping new ones out.

[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.

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 ]