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Strengthening Spectres to 4 has the consequence of greatly increasing the likelihood of early game wraith appearances. Let a skeleton kill an exploring warrior or even scout: next turn he upgrades to a strength 4 spectre with several combat promotions, and will have good odds against any non-bronze warriors. Even if the spectre almost dies killing one out of a group of warriors, there's a good chance the survivors will be too scared to attack. Next turn, wraith and game over.
I have to say that Financial feels like it's been overnerfed. It's gone from great to mediocre or poor. Not only that, but the percentage bonus is going to require a fair amount of micromanagement to maximize. Anything that adds more micro to the game is a Bad Thing, IMO.
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Why not change the Spectre->Wraith upgrade requirement from lvl4 to lvl6? That way even a lucky str4, C3 spectre would still need 4-5 more kills to become a wraith.
Alternately, instead of giving spectres death affinity, you could use Wildmana's "aptitude" mechanic (I think that's what it was called), which gives units +1 if you have the right kind of mana but no extra strength for extra sources. That would make spectres 3str with 0 death mana sources (i.e., barbarians, vampires) and 4str with 1+ nodes.
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Because then spectres are crap. They have to be able to get up to 6 strength to actually have a reason to be used. Any less than that and don't bother, there are better collateral methods out there. I understand why they are limited a bit more than that, but I do think it isn't the best solution. when you consider that it's incredibly easy to tech to strength 8 Champions now.
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About Spectres, let's take a look at the other T2 summons. Ice elementals are Str 5, but they require ice mana. Pit Beasts / Hosts are Str 5, and remain a single turn if they kill.
So why not make Spectres Str 5, with the ability to fear?
(Barb Spectres might need something else though).
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My take on spectres: I think they should remain at a base strength of 3. Remember that you can get +1 strength on them by building the Tower of Necromancy (enabled by having 4 useful mana types). For the death affinity, how hard would it be to have +1 strength with 1 death mana, +2 strengh with 3 death mana, +3 strength with 6 death mana, +4 strength with 10 death mana (diminishing returns)?
It should take a lot of effort to make spectres as strong as regular units that cost hammers to build, cost maintenance, and cause war weariness when they die.
Bobchillingworth
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Just making them effective strength 4 units with no affinity sounds best to me. They'll be 1 strength weaker than Hosts or Pit Beasts, but they have two moves and cause fear which makes up for it. So, basically keep them as they are in the current version.
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I forget, did Fear get nerfed in any EitB build? The old Fear effect was so powerful (50% minimum chance for the effect to trigger, with the chance increasing as the spectres got stronger relative to the triggering unit) that I think Str4 max sounds very reasonable for them. If the Fear effect has been nerfed, maybe they should be a little stronger.
Of course, nerfing Fear makes Spirit mana even more useless than it was before...
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Mygdala Wrote:I forget, did Fear get nerfed in any EitB build? The old Fear effect was so powerful (50% minimum chance for the effect to trigger, with the chance increasing as the spectres got stronger relative to the triggering unit) that I think Str4 max sounds very reasonable for them. If the Fear effect has been nerfed, maybe they should be a little stronger.
Of course, nerfing Fear makes Spirit mana even more useless than it was before...
It never works in cities, though...
It turns out that the dragon roar ability does work in cities, but attacking a city with things that have the fear promotion (spectres, wraiths, demonic units that took it as a promotion...) does not.
Admittedly, humans do more fighting outside of cities than the AI does, and, admittedly, fear is a really powerful effect once it kicks in, but the only time I've seen it actually get used effectively was when I was dragon-roaring 90% of a stack of 200 units out of AI cities in FFH2 Adventure 4 here.
I dunno. It leaves me rather unimpressed with the usefulness of Fear, even if the effectiveness, when it is useful, is devastating.
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Rather when when the spectres are attacking, Fear is most effective when the spectres are defending. No matter how good the odds, there's a chance the attacking unit will refuse to attack. This means you need to bring extra attackers to kill off a stack containing spectres. And forget about wearing them down by attacking with lots of weak units.
Bobchillingworth
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Yeah, for a good demonstration of how powerful Specter fear can be, check out my duel with Irgy in the PBEM 5 forum. Although I might have still lost that game for other reasons, the turning point was when an attack of mine with dozens of iron Chariots failed against a major frontline city, as over half my units refused to attack the spectres Irgy was using to defend.
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