Conceptual Balance (Discussion)

[dirtywick]

UninspiredName said:
With one Wish, you can get enough Astral Pearls to make it pay for itself with intrest. This means that one Mage with Wish can cast the spell, for non-pearl reasons, at least once every third turn while losing no astral gems at all. I understand it's level 9, but this strikes me as sort of overpowered. It might be better to prevent wishing for Astral Pearls, or decrease the amount of Pearls you can wish for.

Unless my calculations are wrong, in which case I apologize.

Just so long as any gems you get are more than what you'd get with Alchemy I think it's fair. After all, genies don't allow you to wish for more wishes

[alexti]

Zen, it's good you've decided to do this again for Dom3. I greatly appreciated your CB work for Dom2.

I have feeling that in Dom3 there're too many design points (due to dormant option and no need to spend points on fortresses). The indication is that I often find that I have spare points (meaning that I already got everything I need to get the nation working but I still have plenty of points left) that I spend on some minor improvements (like taking awake pretender, just for extra research and earlier searching) or couple of growth scales (extra gold won't hurt even though I'd have enough). That is in contrast with Dom2, where the pretender setup was usually full of difficult compromises. I think there're several contributing factors:
1) There's more money in the world, so it's easier to come up with required amount despite worse scales;
2) Magic scale seems somewhat weaker. +1 research for 80 points? Together with fewer cheap mages Magic+3 seems to offer little advantage over Magic+1;
3) Uber pretenders were somewhat weakened and I think that makes fewer reasons to invest a lot of points into powerful multi-path SC.

This issue is also somewhat related with the bless issues on small (and not-so-small maps).

[B0rsuk]

1. Light cavalry archers

Ok, so it makes sense from realism point of view that cavalry can't shoot bows as accurately as infantry. But there seems to be consensus that light infantry is already poor enough and doesn't have a purpose. Why nerf already overpriced unit with lower precision ? I say make their precision 10 for gameplay's sake. It will at least allow to use 'fire and reatreat' tactic with some success, and enable attrition war. Even with precision10, light cavalry with bows:
- costs much more than regular archers. At least twice as much
- bigger size, bigger targets, you can't pack as much firepower into small area
- bigger size probably means they eat twice as much. Bigger base price means higher upkeep cost, as well (correct me if I'm wrong)
- if I wanted archers with acceptable melee ability, I'd take indy archers 10/8, ones with shortbow, short sword, ring mail. 8 morale, but still.
- only advantage light cavalry has is speed, and speed is not THAT big advantage on Dominions battlefield. I think both flyers and heavy cavalry on flank are better for attacking commanders.
... so light cavalry deserves something to make it useful. Even leaving precision out of this, it's already much worse at archery. Increase in precision could be justified by saying they shoot only when all horse's hooves are above earth, or stop before shooting ,etc.

2. I understand reasons for nerving independent mages(to make nationals more important), but they're somewhat too pricey for what they do. Is it intentional ? Two examples (can't remember name) - 1N 1H 10% random mage costs 180 gold. Crystal Sorceress - 1A 1S 10%random costs 180 gold, too. I would decrease the price for many indy mages by 20. Or are they intentionally overpriced ? Is Forest Survival sooo valuable or what ?

3. Slings (damage) aren't affected by strength. Why ? If slings were changed to be affected by strenth, perhaps Blood bless would be marginally more useful, althrough I can't think of a single holy unit with sling. Or are slings already too powerful ?

4. Air9 bless. It certainly has its uses, but they're very narrow. Niche, tricky, combo-ish. Air9 bless basically requires a combo to work. Some people probably are attached to it, but how about replacing Air9 bonus with +2 precision ? I'd be afraid to make it any bigger. But people would have much more to choose from. Precision would help mages as well as archers. I don't think it would overpower archers, because you can't mass sacred archers so easily. Alternatively, it would make a little bit of sense to replace shock resistance with poison resistance (fumes, breath etc; air could help with that). Poison attacks are much more common.
My goal should be clear: not to make air bless simply stronger, but rather give it more general purpose.