FfH Paring Questions

[DaveV]

Another problem with spell spheres is that they are balanced for single-player by having most of the AIs dislike you for using the more powerful mana types: Death (definitely), Entropy (somewhat), and Chaos (not so much). Using all three of these to build the Tower of Necromancy and buff your undead summons will result in a pretty substantial diplo hit. A "-4 you use death mana!" modifier obviously doesn't mean much in MP, though.

[Mardoc]

Well, I think the current magic system is beyond salvage. It's bloated. Most of the spells are superfluous, very niche or completely redundant. And nobody ever uses over half of the spells on offer. Even in SP.

Tinkering around the edges will not help here, and if there ever was a thing to pair in the mod, it's this.

In principle, I agree. In practice - how do we do that without tilting the balance even more toward Tower wins? At the moment, Tower is probably the easiest non-conquest victory condition - see PBEM XII for details. The main limit on Tower is the need to get 4 nodes + metamagic, in 4 categories.

My first thought on paring the magic system, in a vacuum, would be to eliminate one mana type per category, and combine the useful spells into the remaining manas, eliminating the redundant ones. But that would cut us down to three mana nodes required for Tower, not four, and make Religious/Cultural/Altar victories even more of a pipedream than they have been.

I don't know that I have an answer, but let's not change just half the problem here.

[Bobchillingworth]

They do spawn lightning elementals, unless this is a barbed commentary on how utterly useless lightning elementals are. Because they're pretty useless, and shouldn't even really be considered in choosing a summon spell.

Did this get patched, or something? I've never gotten them to spawn before

[NobleHelium]

In principle, I agree. In practice - how do we do that without tilting the balance even more toward Tower wins? At the moment, Tower is probably the easiest non-conquest victory condition - see PBEM XII for details. The main limit on Tower is the need to get 4 nodes + metamagic, in 4 categories.

My first thought on paring the magic system, in a vacuum, would be to eliminate one mana type per category, and combine the useful spells into the remaining manas, eliminating the redundant ones. But that would cut us down to three mana nodes required for Tower, not four, and make Religious/Cultural/Altar victories even more of a pipedream than they have been.

I don't know that I have an answer, but let's not change just half the problem here.

Require six mana types per tower. Each tower can require its own three mana types plus one of each from the other sets. Not sure if that will be much (if any) harder, but you'll need more mana types at once at least.

[Bobchillingworth]

If you made metamagic a necessity to complete any of the smaller towers, you'd push back the number of nodes needed for a win to 5 (except for amurites). This would indirectly weaken things like spectres though, since you would need Sorcery before you could give them their +1 strength boost.

[uberfish]

Tower of Mastery is relatively easy to fix - just push the final tower back to Omniscience and make it require both Divine Essence and Strength of Will to research.

[Selrahc]

Haven't we already kicked it into a "No rush building" ritual category? That should heavily impact the issue. Without rush building, the tower takes like... 40 turns to build. In a good hammer location.(Okay, potentially less time with overflow tricks). That is a world of time for people to take on the tower maker.

[Selrahc]

As an addendum to Flesh Golems: Vampires are the best users of Flesh Golems ever. Vampire Lords can summon flesh golems. They are immortal and so can be merged into a Flesh Golem without permadeath. They are vampires, so can be used to gain pretty much any promotion you think would be handy.

Best of all, in EitB they aren't all that hard to get to. Divine Essence is a lot more accessible than its FFH incarnation, being positioned in a direct Infernal Pact->Malevolent Designs->Divine Essence beeline. With Infernal Grimoire factored in it's completely possible to get Divine Essence around the same time as a beeline to Strength of Will, probably even a little before. Of course the tradeoff is that Strength of Will unlocks Tower of Mastery victory, while Divine Essence just unlocks some powerful units and maybe gets you a little closer to Omniscience for an altar victory that you won't be able to use unless you convert out of Veil.

Vampire Lords/Flesh Golems are actually a hell of a lot of fun. I've been romping around with them in SP. Since the Vamp Lords can be turned into Liches, what Divine Essence actually does for the Calabim is function as an all you could want shop for national units. Giving 4 Vamp Lords, 4 Liches and 8 Flesh Golems(each one with all the power and promos of a vamp lord). All but the Liches are pretty much disposable in battle due to immortality or ease of re-summon so you can throw them at low odds battles with no fear of losing irreplaceable units. Not that you really need to, since you can also summon plenty of Wraiths (and Spectres with the rest of the army) to weaken people.

[Selrahc]

So again, from messing around with Immortals. I've been thinking about some of the promotions. I think we've got some dead weight cluttering up the tree.

The most egregious offender I think is "Defensive". Defensive is horrible. It doubles unit fortification bonus. At best, that is 25% bonus. It only applies on the defence. It only beats a combat promo if it is at its maximum level, while ruling out offensive action. Does anybody ever take this promo? Would anybody ever say it was "good"? I think it needs to be removed or redesigned. I could see a "defensive" promo being merged with the now defunct "Homeland", doubling fortification bonus, adding a flat 10% in home territory and adding a 10% withdrawal abroad. That is a promotion I might consider taking.

Similarly, the promotions demon slayer and undead slayer I would consider too niche. Demon Slayer is of use for fighting horsemen and Hyborem I suppose... but that is limited use. Particularly undead slayer is never used, since the only undead numerous enough to use it against are all melee units. Spectres, Diseased Corpses, Pyre Zombies... all countered by shock. So undead slayer might be your choice if you need to fight.. um.. wraiths? Liches? That is way too niche to be picked. What I'd reccomend is to combine both these promo's into a single promo giving a bonus against both demons and undead.

Perfect sight seems like it's basically useless since hawks, Empyrean priests and floating eyes all see invisible much more easily. I guess I can see the logic in having it as a promo though, I just wish it did more.

Two promo's that I don't think I've ever taken are keen sight and precision. As promotions only available to highly promoted archery units they don't come up that often in most FFH games. From reading their descriptions though, they seem quite underwhelming. I suppose coupled with the Blitz ability to repeatedly launch defensive strikes against every attacker... maybe they're okay? But they sure sound underwhelming. I'd tentatively suggest merging them to make them more appealing.

Amphibious and magic resistant. Both have a purpose. Both are a bit underwhelming in most circumstances. I think possibly a minor boost to them wouldn't be out of order. Personally, I'd really like the ability for C5(4?) heroes with Magic Resistance to be able to take Magic Immunity. That would probably see Magic Resistance get a bit more play as a stepping stone to a more interesting ability.

[Tasunke]

The most egregious offender I think is "Defensive". Defensive is horrible. It doubles unit fortification bonus. At best, that is 25% bonus. It only applies on the defence. It only beats a combat promo if it is at its maximum level, while ruling out offensive action.

We could remove Defensive from the promotion progression ... and add it to DefenderTrait freepromos.

So have Defender Trait give homeland AND defensive to Melee, Archer, Recon, Adept and Disciple units.

What I'd recommend is to combine both these promo's into a single promo giving a bonus against both demons and undead.

Yes

Perfect sight seems like it's basically useless since hawks, Empyrean priests and floating eyes all see invisible much more easily. I guess I can see the logic in having it as a promo though, I just wish it did more.

Perfect sight doesn't even see invisible units. As no unit is iInvisible in the conventional sense. Try it out, see for yourself. All the promotion does is +50% vs Illusions. Its definitely worth getting rid of.

Two promo's that I don't think I've ever taken are keen sight and precision. As promotions only available to highly promoted archery units they don't come up that often in most FFH games. From reading their descriptions though, they seem quite underwhelming. I suppose coupled with the Blitz ability to repeatedly launch defensive strikes against every attacker... maybe they're okay? But they sure sound underwhelming. I'd tentatively suggest merging them to make them more appealing.

imho these promotions are fine as-is. I normally only use them on a Heroic archer though (like Gilden or Arthendain). Not always useful in MP.

Amphibious and magic resistant. Both have a purpose. Both are a bit underwhelming in most circumstances. I think possibly a minor boost to them wouldn't be out of order. Personally, I'd really like the ability for C5(4?) heroes with Magic Resistance to be able to take Magic Immunity. That would probably see Magic Resistance get a bit more play as a stepping stone to a more interesting ability.

Maybe give +20% strength on Coast (and Ocean?) to Amphibious. (assuming "Boarding" or waterwalking)

As far as Magic Resistance ... its already a stepping stone for Fire Resist, Cold Resist, Lightning Resist, and Poisons Resist. And Don't forget the +20% spell resistance. Its pretty good as is, imho.