Any units or combos too strong / too weak?

[unmerged(494208)]

Thanks for all the replies so far! Some comments:
I have to disagree with this. It's good that they slow up taking Holy Grounds at least a little bit. They are pretty easy to overwhelm with numbers or strong units. For humans, two mages plus one or two cheap units to soak up the damage will help. Four rangers also worked for me. For orcs, try one troll and one shaman. Undead have most trouble because vampires do no damage to fire elementals. For them try a zombie to soak up damage and mass skeleton snipers maybe? Summons will also help: imps, Fervus bears and strong rats will all die against elementals, but at least they will soak damage. Oh, and like SolaceAvatar said, put elemental/spirit damage buffs on your archers/mages, that will help.

Never had issues with GFEs playing undead. I used a pair of Flying Galleuses (Gallei? Oo) to whittle them down. After a bit of xp with the proper perks (elemental resist and regen) and Regen/Elemental Resist spells (both easily acquired early in game) they dish out more to the elemental than they take. Just gotta remember to park one beside it at all times so it can't rest (a tactic I use with ships vs Sea Serpents quite a bit as well). If one gets hammered a bit you have it rest a turn to heal while the other keeps firing (being a ranged unit the GFE - and Sea Serpent - will almost always move away from your unit before attacking meaning you are clear to rest if needed while moving another adjacent to prevent him doing the same). And the advantage to using a Flying Galleus is ignoring all the trash melee mobs that might be in the vicintiy since they can't attack you and even the demons/winged serpents with range tend to be almost one-shotted by an un-upgraded/leveled Galleus.

The biggest issue I encountered battling GFEs was them kiting me into other crap (almost lost my Demonic Advisor one game because it dragged me towards a few evil trees and a second GFE - gotta love teleport to fix crap situations like that and pull back to heal up, buff some more and churn out a damage sponge unit to distract the others).

 

[camelotcrusade]

Actually, I personally believe nothing is more broken than Black Minotaurs with all buffs.

Not even a Gold Dragon.

The reason is because Black Minotaurs are cheap to produce, only 600 gold, have high damage, and essentially have 2 attacks, 1 AOE and 1 normal every 2 turns.

Not to mention, Black Minotaurs are able to attack and retreat if they kill off any unit.

Oh yes. I always make Black Minotaurs into my super stack. Well, those and ancient liches. Those are the two units whose turns I am happiest to take. Something is gonna die.

 

[unmerged(489564)]

Thing is, the Frenzy perk allows a unit to both use its ability and attack normally if they make a kill with the first move. Adepts of Lunord don't even need to kill to do so.

I'd say Krolms berserkers once levelled up to get frenzy are actually better than black minotaurs, but they take time to get frenzy which is the perk that makes them strong.

 

[redrum68]

One of the most overpowered units are rats. They only cost 10 gold to build, 1 food upkeep, and are built from a building that is on the gold focus path. They have the plague spell to reduce enemies power and move fast. It is very easy to just flood enemies with them and follow up with strong troops while they waste spells and attacks on the rats. They are also very good for early naval invasions since they are almost just as strong as a transport as they are on land. Obviously since the level 10 capitals now do AOE damage they aren't so good for that but everything else they can really take lots of damage.

 

[unmerged(494828)]

I think the original post has 2 exploits need fixing:

1. Fervos Bears are just to strong for their cost. I understand what divine spells are more powerful than arcane, but it's even much more powerful than Grum Grog Rats with really little difference in mana cost. Casting time for bears is greater, but it means nothing when building an early army. I'd expect more mana cost for them.

2. Low penalties for negative food, especially for undead. I think their cities shouldn't grow as well. Plus I think it would be good to have additional penalties, like decreased unit cost on negative food, probably proportional to amount of food lost. I remember how in Civ 5 they were balancing negative happiness which had the same issues.

 

[LTK]

The ability to ignore that there is no food being produced is really problematic. Given how much Warlock is focused on military conquest you'd think that all the food produced in the cities is used to pay the upkeep costs for your units, and the surplus is given to the cities' population. But once you don't produce any food at all, then for some reason you're still able to support units that require food for upkeep, even though everyone in your cities is starving. A good solution would be to introduce penalties to units that aren't receiving their required upkeep costs - be it food, gold or mana. The player is going to want to have some control over this, so we'd also need to be able to decide how to distribute our resources. The best way to do this is probably by using a slider that allows you to control the percentage of resources that goes into paying upkeep costs for units and buildings versus the percentage that goes into population growth, or into your own coffers. Any unit that doesn't receive upkeep costs receives penalties to HP and attack, and any building that doesn't receive upkeep costs is disabled for the following turn. So you might decide that, in order to pay for the Enchanted Weapons upgrade, the wage of your Cutthroats is going into your own coffers for a few turns. Of course, the default option is to balance this automatically, with any resources that are left after upkeep costs going into your own coffers.

Something completely unrelated but also completely overpowered is the Elemental Resurrection spell. By the time you research it, you'll probably have a large enough empire that you'll have stopped worrying about your mana income. This means that you can completely disregard any threat to your most powerful units, because no matter what, they'll only be a few turns away from being dead to being at full health and back into the place they were before. Resurrect, teleport. Resurrecting a unit removes any blessings and banes that affected them at the time of their death, so my suggestion here is to also remove the building perks that have been purchased for them. After all, you're only bringing the unit back from the dead, and all the fancy armor and weapons that they died with isn't coming to the afterlife with them, so why should they come back with it?

 

[unmerged(494828)]

A good solution would be to introduce penalties to units that aren't receiving their required upkeep costs - be it food, gold or mana. The player is going to want to have some control over this, so we'd also need to be able to decide how to distribute our resources. The best way to do this is probably by using a slider that allows you to control the percentage of resources that goes into paying upkeep costs for units and buildings versus the percentage that goes into population growth, or into your own coffers. Any unit that doesn't receive upkeep costs receives penalties to HP and attack, and any building that doesn't receive upkeep costs is disabled for the following turn. So you might decide that, in order to pay for the Enchanted Weapons upgrade, the wage of your Cutthroats is going into your own coffers for a few turns. Of course, the default option is to balance this automatically, with any resources that are left after upkeep costs going into your own coffers.

I don't think penalties should depend on the upkeep resource. First, there are units having more than resource. Second, the food income is calculated in different way than gold and mana (it isn't stored), so the same rules will not work.

Also, I don't think sliders are needed there. It will be just an exploit - during peace put everything to cities. At combat clashes, put maximum to units.

The best option, IMHO, to just have combat penalties to ALL units if food isn't enough, probably based on the amount of food shortage.

 

[unmerged(485924)]

I think if food is negative then all units which are not dead should not be allowed to rest, regenerate, or be healed.

 

[unmerged(494828)]

I think if food is negative then all units which are not dead should not be allowed to rest, regenerate, or be healed.

Good idea, the only thing which doesn't fit this is zombie unit, which requires food as well. So if dead will not be affected, you'll be able to spam zombies.

 

[The Apprentice]

A combat penalty (a severe one, like -50%) makes sense to apply to units with food related upkeep. The Fervus bears "exploit" would then be nerfed (15 mana for a 5 strength unit? Whoopee!), and player breadbasket cities would be a target in multi-player. The drought spells from Helia would be more useful as well.

I know Humans have Rogues as a unit that doesn't require food upkeep- do the monsters have anything? Undead obviously have several options. :happy:

 

[LTK]

I don't think penalties should depend on the upkeep resource. First, there are units having more than resource. Second, the food income is calculated in different way than gold and mana (it isn't stored), so the same rules will not work.

Also, I don't think sliders are needed there. It will be just an exploit - during peace put everything to cities. At combat clashes, put maximum to units.

The best option, IMHO, to just have combat penalties to ALL units if food isn't enough, probably based on the amount of food shortage.

More types of resources aren't really a problem. Food isn't actually calculated differently from gold and mana. The only difference is that the surplus adds to your gold income, which doesn't change your food production value. If we assume that all resources are equal it's actually very easy.

Here's my idea: Shamans have an upkeep of 1 gold, 3 food and 2 mana. Not being able to afford one of these gives them a penalty of -5% to attack and HP, up to a maximum of -50%. So a player who has plenty of gold and mana but zero food would get Shamans with -15% less attack and HP. In an extreme case, when you have a Gold Dragon and you're only 10 food short of its required upkeep, it will be reduced to only half of its power. This adds a risk factor to creating high-tier units that you can't actually afford to have.

Regarding the slider - you say exploit, I say strategy. You never know when an ogre is going to show up in your town and beats all your units to a pulp just because you haven't been feeding them enough.

I think if food is negative then all units which are not dead should not be allowed to rest, regenerate, or be healed.

That's a good idea, and much simpler than my suggestion. I disagree about the healing though; Life Magic costs mana and has nothing to do with food. I think you should still be able to magically fill your units' bellies if you have enough mana to do it.

This still leaves the upkeep of gold and mana, which should be just as important to keeping a unit at full power. What would the consequences be for having zero gold or zero mana in your reserves?

 

[The Apprentice]

So, -50% for a single negative is too severe in your opinion?

Re gold, I would propose the same penalty, actually. Hard to fight if your equipment is wearing out, you don't have any more arrows, and that was the last eye of newt! Why not have mana mean the same penalty?

There is nothing inherently wrong with tying a -5% to each unit of missing upkeep, but its complicated. Why add that level of calculation? If the goal is keep force the player to create a positive resource flow and allow for resource sniping, a flat penalty gets the point across.

Re the healing, it makes sense that sources aside from natural rest or regen would be unaffected. So anything added by perks (like the Old Trolls +20 regen) would remain active even if starving. Simplicity for the player and programming. If, you know, this armchair game dev does anything besides amuse us.

 

[unmerged(493174)]

Well, what about if, the more negative food you had, the greater a negative to your population? As in, a little negative food means slower growth, a lot means your cities start unbuilding themselves, because having way too little food means all your people are starving to death. Obviously, this would have to affect undead too, or have some other, similar negative to that side.

 

[UncleJJ]

Concerning the negative food problem, I think it can be dealt with simply by adding the first turns maintenace to the building cost of units or summon spell cost. So you would not be able to cast a summon bear spell if you don't have 3 spare food and similarly you can't build a green bat if you don't have a surplus of 2 food, and the build queue stops if you pre-ordered several units. Elite units with summon effects that require food upkeep would also be deactivated.

So although this would not do anything about existing units and starving cities at least it would stop more units being added until some were killed or something was done about the severe food shortage. I've had a serious food problem brought on by an AI casting the food malus spell Locust Swarm when I didn't have the city dispel spell. Several of my cities lost population while others (small ones) were growing slowly. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find I could still build more food eating units.

 

[LTK]

So, -50% for a single negative is too severe in your opinion?

Re gold, I would propose the same penalty, actually. Hard to fight if your equipment is wearing out, you don't have any more arrows, and that was the last eye of newt! Why not have mana mean the same penalty?

There is nothing inherently wrong with tying a -5% to each unit of missing upkeep, but its complicated. Why add that level of calculation? If the goal is keep force the player to create a positive resource flow and allow for resource sniping, a flat penalty gets the point across.

Re the healing, it makes sense that sources aside from natural rest or regen would be unaffected. So anything added by perks (like the Old Trolls +20 regen) would remain active even if starving. Simplicity for the player and programming. If, you know, this armchair game dev does anything besides amuse us.

Oh yeah, definitely too severe. I mean, imagine this. "Sorry, Veterans, but because of a locust plague on our cities, you're only going to get one roast pig instead of the usual three." Half of the Veterans die of sheer shock. We don't want that, do we?

You're right about the 5% being needlessly complicated; Fillmore's method is much better in that regard. Food is a primary requirement for life after all, and units who aren't getting enough to eat will not be as good at fighting. It doesn't make sense to impose a regeneration penalty when you lack gold or mana, though. But the interesting thing about gold is that it can be owed. If you currently can't pay your soldiers' wages, then you're going to have to give them an IOU, and pay them the next turn if possible. This can actually give you a negative gold reserve when you have no gold and no income. I don't know if that's the case right now, given that I've never been completely out of gold in any of my games, but it should be possible.

I think mana works a lot like food as far as upkeep is concerned. A magic caster will consume mana, but the resource is kind of raw and abstract, so it won't be able to accumulate it like gold. Only Great Mages can do that. So I'd say that a lack of mana would negatively impact a caster's attack power. Similarly with a skeleton: if the magic holding its bones together is faltering, it won't be able to swing a sword as effectively.

Magic may be able to bypass a unit's need for food, but perks gained by experience are still innate to the unit itself, and so they should also suffer from the effects of starvation. Fillmore said that a hungry unit cannot rest or regenerate. In practice, that might mean a 100% reduction of the unit's Regeneration attribute. If that's too drastic, you could reduce it by 25% for each 1 food that the unit lacks.

So, in short: No gold means you have to pay the rest in the future, no food means no regeneration, and no mana means no attack. How's that sound?

 

[unmerged(493819)]

I don't like the slider idea - I would just be adjusting this every turn to optimize, and it would be tedious. It's a needlessly complicated way to solve this simple problem, and I would prefer the developers to spend their time on other issues. Otherwise, some really nice ideas for solving my Fervus Bear exploit here! Reducing the strenght of bears when under negative food sounds good. But making it an instant -50% reduction when you reach -1 food sounds really drastic. Its easy to go to negative food by accident, for example when finding a unit from a monster lair.

 

[The Apprentice]

Preventing new unit creation if it would cause a resource deficit makes sense and sounds good to me. The -50% penalty to existing units Attack (not HP) could be a little much, but its drastic penalty and potential invigoration of MP tactics appeals to me. But as long as the Dev's do something to prevent the starving bears of Fervus from dominating MP, I'll be happy.

 

[shanadir]

doesn't cities starve faster the bigger your food deficit is though? or at least it did earlier. I remember playing a game as undead completely ignoring my rising red food number, since all my cities were undead. (i got the starvation from units from quests and lairs)
then i invaded the Hat and captured his quite large cities and noticed that i lost over a hundred pops a turn in most of my new cities and that doesn't happen when i accidentaly go a bit into negative playing humans or monsters

 

[unmerged(485924)]

Concerning the negative food problem, I think it can be dealt with simply by adding the first turns maintenace to the building cost of units or summon spell cost. So you would not be able to cast a summon bear spell if you don't have 3 spare food and similarly you can't build a green bat if you don't have a surplus of 2 food, and the build queue stops if you pre-ordered several units. Elite units with summon effects that require food upkeep would also be deactivated.

So although this would not do anything about existing units and starving cities at least it would stop more units being added until some were killed or something was done about the severe food shortage. I've had a serious food problem brought on by an AI casting the food malus spell Locust Swarm when I didn't have the city dispel spell. Several of my cities lost population while others (small ones) were growing slowly. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find I could still build more food eating units.

I like this idea, but it isn't quite enough. I recently played a game where I had one major food city and when an enemy captured it my food went below -40, it seems there should be a bit more penalty; I wasn't undead but with your idea you could make a food city to build up and then just demolish the city and replace with another type.

To modify my original idea, since I now agree that preventing healing is a bit too harsh, when food is negative block all regeneration abilities (including resting and being in friendly area) for units that require food upkeep (living or not) and have them take damage every turn in proportion to how negative the food is. Also prohibit the construction of units or buildings which require food upkeep when food is negative (not so sure about casting, that might be hard to implement).

 

[unmerged(487513)]

How about using gold to subsidize food? As food can be converted to gold (by exporting the food to somewhere), I think it is logical to have gold can be converted to food (by importing the food from somewhere). The ratio can be 2 gold : 1 food, or more than that. Whenever the gold income also in deficit (both gold and food in deficit), then troops started to rebel. Maybe cities with deficit in gold and food will also fall into rebellion.