Conceptual Balance Mod 1.5

[Frozen Lama]

what about Jotun boulder throwers? they are pretty useless too

[kianduatha]

Minor blood bless, with Agartha? Egads. Never thought about doing that before. Blood stones would be nice to have, though. Given the metagame's tendency towards no gem generator games, though, I'm a bit leery of using that as a reason to keep them as-is.

They are indeed quite effective in CBM--at least when they're not hitting your own troops or wading into melee with their fists.

Edit: Jotunheim doesn't really feel the pain with boulder throwers(except for niche uses and sieging), mostly because they could recruit a javelin thrower instead; 20 range on their weapons, and a perfectly acceptable melee combatant to boot!

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Fantomen

They ARE AoE 1 in CBM, and quite effective. A minor blood bless pushes the range to 7, enough to throw them over a front rank of Ancient ones or other melee troops.

Hey thats a neat factzoid to remember. Thanks fant!

[Squirrelloid]

While i understand the desire to remove bloodstones because of gem gen, earth really needs a miscellaneous slot booster to replace it if its becoming unique.

Thinking on some different topics:

Magma Eruption - this should be castable underwater. seriously.

Bone Melter - this needs something done to it. AoE 1 means it tends to get dropped on worthless chaff by your mages, rather than high value targets. For a W3N2 spell that requires alteration 5, this is underwhelming. Either make it single target (so autotargetting will choose large monsters) or give it improved AoE. Possibly 1+ rather than 1 (so it kills enough chaff that you don't feel like you're wasting mage turns). I suppose another alternative is to make it W1N1 or W2N1 so you don't need to put boosters on most mages with W and N to be able to cast it. (Basically, the effect is not commensurate with the necessary investment of research time, gems for gear, and mage turns in combat).

Bone Melter is of course a natural spell for MA Oceania, and useable UW, so this improves their UW combat options (probably works for EA Oceania too). Magma Eruption is a natural for EA Atlantis's BKs. And having some alternatives to cold attacks, bad water offensive spells otherwise, and buffs would make UW combat less stupid.

[Sombre]

To make it target single high hp targets wouldn't be hard. You make a single target version with a nextspell of the aoe version.

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by Sombre

To make it target single high hp targets wouldn't be hard. You make a single target version with a nextspell of the aoe version.

Yeah, that would work, but it would force two mr checks on the primary target then (one for the main single targe spell and then a second check when AoE kicks in). That effect would make it pretty powerful insta-kill spell.

But I quess he spell could use the boost.

[Fantomen]

I was playing about with EA Agartha again. It came to me that a good and reasonably thematic boost would be heat preference 2. That would give them some points to buy a blessing and some heat to push against cold dominions.

With that change they would be good enough I think, and Umbrals could stay at conj 7.

[Sombre]

I think heat preference would be ok for agartha too, but it isn't really suggested anywhere in their descriptions etc. Though they do summon up fire elementals and earth elementals rather than water elementals, which suggests some ties with lava/geothermal stuff.

[Trumanator]

Uhm, if in 1.6 you are making bloodstones unique/removing them, do you think that maybe you can reduce the E level required for a lot of the higher level spells? w/out bloodstones, I think even a lot of real earth nations are going to have issues casting stuff like E attack, Deepwell, army of __, etc.

[Sombre]

There will hopefully be an earth booster to compensate, though it will not be without extra baggage (such as turning you into something or boosting nature).