Balance Machaka

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by rtyffg

It might need to cost at least 1n gem through, to avoid unecesary ai casting.

Just in case Chris would like to keep the spell gem-less..

It's pretty easy to mod a spell to be only casted in when scripted, especially this type "only affects self" spell. I did a similiar thing in my "Alugra, City of Wonders" mod, which has a spell that heals 100 fatique damage but blinks you around the battlefield (meant to be used to clear thug buffing fatigue). You can likely see what this spell would do if the AI casted it all the time (it's not pretty).

So here is what you do:

You just mod the mainspell into a mr-negates-easily, only targets self spell that gives haste + twist fate and have the all that spider turning as nextspell. In the eyes of the AI (which cannot 'see' nextspell effects), that spell blows and it just will simply refuse to cast it unscripted. There are 'downsides' thought.

1) If the caster has haste and twist fate already, the AI won't cast the spell. (for the same reason it won't cast 'fire shield' if you have one already.)

2) If you cast this spell in a communion, it will affect the slaves too. (since, technically, it's a buffing spell)

[chrispedersen]

Oooooooh!

Interesting concept in conjunction with a communion Burn!

By the way - I have national spell for EA-rlyeh called blink bolt - essentially I chain a blink onto a cold bolt. Breaks up formations awesomely.

Burn, but here's a thing I was trying to do- an earthwalk spell.
I wanted everyone to be able to one time move throught the earth (as a group).

First thought: Flight. Downside: Can't get rid of it.
Second thought: Blink. Problem: units don't move together - they scatter. Any possible ideas, Burn?

[kianduatha]

See, I'd be fine with transforming ~60% of my casters. Remember, each transformation of a sorcerer saves you what, 13 gold/turn? That adds up. This is nice, because it's a backwards way of ensuring that machaka has top-tier research mid/late game--because you'll have castles with 30 spiders in them. Since your troops still suck ***(except for upkeepless spiders, of course!), most of your upkeep is taken up by casters. Take out half your caster upkeep...you start to blossom.

At least for me, the Place Fevers spell idea is a way to try and keep the Machaka of old. It doesn't seem...right, when all the other gem generators are gone. I'd rather go in a new direction.

Maybe something like "Spider Climb"--maybe AOE 5, magic resists easily Flight, meant to be cast on those fun little spiders for some flanking action. N3, probably.

Other than that(which would be pretty awesome and scary) I'm pretty content with Machaka--except that the PD really needs a Voice of the Lord instead of a Machaka Commander at 20.

I'd also be okay with the needles from the totems being stun damage--as is, the needles *do* incur some friendly fire onto your militia, and that just makes them route all the faster. With stun damage, it just racks up the fatigue--and in a serious fight, you were putting down Relief anyways.

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Oooooooh!
Interesting concept in conjunction with a communion Burn!

Yeah, I know. It was purely accidental too, noticed the 'mechanic' while playtesting. I was pretty amazed, "Where did my slaves go!". You could a lot of intresting stuff with that mechanic, like a spell that summoned something centered on each slave, or a battlefield wide buffing spell (mr-negates-easily) that'd be casted once for each slave. However, the fact is that communions are already quite powerful, so there really isn't any reason to make any better.

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Burn, but here's a thing I was trying to do- an earthwalk spell.
I wanted everyone to be able to one time move throught the earth (as a group).

First thought: Flight. Downside: Can't get rid of it.
Second thought: Blink. Problem: units don't move together - they scatter. Any possible ideas, Burn?

I don't think that there is any perfect solution. The best I can come up with is to chain blink and range 0 summoning spell to make the caster appear at a new point in the battlefield (with friends).

[rtyffg]

Tried to make some changes and additions:
- fever fetish should cost 100 gp/turn now (that should make them not too powerful in case of cbm1.6).
- sorcerer can summon 1 disease ward/turn (not autosummon, they were supposed to be makers of these).
- place poisonous and weakening ward spells - to see if these fit tematically.
- ward's needles changed to stun damage - seems to much fatigue from them.
- spider nest2 - just summons some spiders nearby.
- spider nest - launches aoe5 slime and summons spiders at hit location (just seemed tematically fitting like spider ambush).


An another idea - do "risky" spell fit tematically to machaka? Examples: cheap power of the spheres effect with a nextspell of mr negates feeblemind/disease/death or aoe berserking/strentgh of giants followed by mrnegating disease/poison/kill.

[rtyffg]

Got some spare time and decided to tweak this into a more usable form.
What it does include now:
- 3 types of immobile constructs (for enhansing defensive options, all look as machaka bowmen with recolored bows(not too good at drawing)). First type causes fear and disease, created by sorcerers. Second caused poison and decay, const 1. Third causes curse and weakness, const 5;
- wards 1 and 2 included into PD as before.
- Great spiders are not kept after rider's death (and are slightly cheaper)
- Hunter Spider finds another rider after previuous die (returns to first shape, and costs little more)
- Firegem generating summon at ench5 50f, unique, immobile (instead of previuous multiple gem generators)
- Great spider generating summon at const6 30e, unique, immobile
(as a twisted way summoning spiders)
- Low damage evo3 spell which battlesummons spiders
- Turning into spider at alt3
- 2f2n aoe25 version of flaming arrows at ench4

It still seems overpovered, through, and gemgen might not be fitting in case of cbm1.6 (through it is limited to 1 summon this time)

[chrispedersen]

wow =)

[HoneyBadger]

For National summons, how about some demonic lions?
They might come in pairs... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions_of_Tsavo

Or, if you want to stick to West African lore, you could add the following:

Obia, a monstrous animal summoned to serve witches, also the name of the witches, themselves,
Sasabonsam, a vampire with iron teeth and iron hooks in place of hands, and on their feet,
Zin, water spirits that live in the Niger river.

[rtyffg]

Originally Posted by HoneyBadger

For National summons, how about some demonic lions?
They might come in pairs... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions_of_Tsavo

Or, if you want to stick to West African lore, you could add the following:

Obia, a monstrous animal summoned to serve witches, also the name of the witches, themselves,
Sasabonsam, a vampire with iron teeth and iron hooks in place of hands, and on their feet,
Zin, water spirits that live in the Niger river.

Sadly i don't know enough of african lore, so only tried to implement "spiders and sorcerors" theme. Haven't found enough of mentioned creatures by search. Obia - doesn't it sound to similar to Shinuyama's uba, it is used already then? About the others 2 know too litle to start from.

[HoneyBadger]

I think learning more about African lore could be a big help here--or not. More about that in just a moment.

I know it doesn't have anything really concrete to do with the mechanics or the balancing, but I still think it's really important to understand the nature and purpose of a given Nation, and to therefore be able to extrapolate somewhat the manner in which that Nation (prefers to) achieve it's goals.

Balanced strengths and weaknesses are crucial, but I think having the appropriate mix of strengths balanced against the appropriate weaknesses is just as important.

However, I'm not convinced that even knowing everything about the lore would really help here, as Machaka seems to lack both a defined nature, and a real purpose.

You could balance Machaka like a Swiss watch, but until someone makes the theme come alive in some way, I just don't think it will ever be interesting enough to be really fun to play repeatedly.

The biggest problem I have with Machaka is that the Devs don't seem to have used any actual African basis. The closest correlation I can find (believe me, I looked hard) is the Ashanti, but even that is extremely diluted. There's just not a whole lot of reality to be inspired from, or to draw from, which I think makes it difficult to expand upon the central idea, and really hard to find a lasting thematic desire to want to replay them.

We've got a generic, vaguely Maasai (by way of Rome, oddly enough) looking African people.
We've got giant spiders, a royal death-cult, and a dead-but sadly undefined-god.
We've got a forbidden magical mountain where devineish/decadent sorcerors, priests, spiders, and priest-sorceror-spiders live and rule, in a theocracy seemingly reminiscent in it's paranoia, of Stalinist Russia.

There's little present, though, to tie any of these aspects together.

Frankly, these guys are just begging for Conan to get chased onto their scene, despoil their women, steal their treasures, and slay their Pretender, before moving on to the next conquest, and rightly so.
There's not much more development here than one would expect from a 1930's pulp magazine. Infact, the very flavour of the Nation seems to me far more pulpish than epic, let alone mythic.

As an example, this is their most memorable hero (the only one I can remember, anyway):
"Abasi is a strong man. At the age of ten, he strangled a lion. At the age of twelve, he strangled his father, which was harder by far. At the age of fifteen, he was discovered by the Eyes of the Lord and given an army to lead. He immediately attacked a small kingdom and was almost killed. His army was dispersed and Abasi himself had to flee. When he crossed a river, he was attacked by a crocodile. The beast was difficult to strangle, so he grabbed a log and bashed in its skull. He quickly flayed the animal and used the skin to swim unseen past the enemies. When he had passed the guards, he found himself in the camp of the enemy king. He took his log and thrashed the camp before the enemies could react. Now Abasi has returned with his log to bash the enemies of the Lord"
A normal human who hits things with a club, in other words.

Some Nations act well as springboards to the imagination, and even teach us something about cultures, and what/why they believed, that we didn't know before. Others (Agartha) invent sweeping new myths and cultures that seem to tempt the imagination with a world of speculation. Machaka seems to badly fail at that, and I think, apart from mechanics, that it's genericness is a big reason why this Nation is generally considered to be weak and unbalanced, if not plain broken.

There exist plenty of fantasy versions of Africa to borrow from. Everything from King Solomon's Mines to Charles R Saunders' 'Imaro' trilogy, to something like Michael Crichton's 'Congo'.

There's a gigantic body of lore and historical material to be drawn from real world Africa too, enough for a dozen Nations, and yes I think it would be extremely useful and rewarding to anyone interested in the real world mythological aspects of Dom3 to familiarize themselves with it. Sadly, the one really African-themed (as opposed to Egyptian-themed) Nation in the game, Machaka, seems pretty obviously to have been added as an afterthought.

It's not based on anything in the real world, and it's not a fully realized vision of a "fantasy Africa", and I think that hurts it as much or more than any lack of balancing ever could.

In reply:
Obia, AKA Obeah, is a religion/folk magic/mysticism movement that originated in Central and Western Africa, and has since spread to the Caribbean (to the West, rather than East). There's actually quite a lot to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obeah so the Obia mentioned is just a very brief aspect of a whole magical and spiritual tradition.

Shinuyama = Japanese. The two words aren't spelled the same, and probably differ in pronunciation. Most likely it's just a coincidence.

As far as the others, I couldn't find much about the Zin, except that they're of Songhai origin, but here's the result of about 15 minutes research on Google of the Sasanbonsam.

The Sasanbonsam:
AKA the Asanbosam
Please Note: None of the following material is original to me, I'm just using it as an example of what can be easily found on the web.



http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Sasabonsam :
The sasabonsam is a forest vampire which originates from the Ashanti people of Southern Ghana but is also found in Togo and the Ivory Coast.
Little is know about this creature outside of native folklore, which is prone to exaggeration and contradiction. The creature is described as about man sized with short, stubby arms, but has been reputed to have a wingspan of up to 20 feet. It is also often given iron teeth. Sasabonsams are rarely seen nowadays, but they were known to sit on treetops and catch unsuspecting passers-by to suck their blood.
Much like the kongamato, the sasabonsam may be a conflation of representatives from multiple baramins, combined with some Ashanti imagination. More research is definitely needed.


http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/s...asabonsam.html
Africa certainly has its share of mysterious and fantastic animals, and the sasabonsam is no exception. The creature was depicted in an Ashanti(natives of Ghana) carving seen by J.B. Danquah. The sculpture showed the Sasabonsam as a man-faced creature with a beard and small horns. It had two short, stubby arms which were raised to display bat-like wings under them, an emaciated body, and short, twisted legs with toed feet. Although the creature is most likely a creation of mythmakers, some have wondered if it could have been some type of gigantic bat.
A young man present in the crowd observing the sculpture told Danquah that once he had actually seen a Sasabonsam, which had been killed by a man named Agya Wuo. He gave Danquah several details of his sighting. The creature had been a little over 5 feet tall, with a wingspan of almost 20 feet. Its teeth and arms were quite long, it was spotted black and white, and it had scaly ridges over the eyes. Agya Wuo said he had found it sleeping in a tree, and that it made a somewhat bat-like cry. The body had been taken to the home

of the District Commissioner, L.W. Wood, who on February 22, 1928, photographed the carcass.

Danquah contacted Wood later, but Wood was not sure if he had, indeed, taken the photograph He said that he was in Ashanti in February, 1918, but not 1928.
In his discussion of Danquah's story, Bernard Heuvelmans states his belief, backed up in his seminal 1986 checklist, that the Sasabonsam is merely a local name for the kongamato, olitiau, and the other bat-like creatures of eastern and central Africa.
However, the form of the Sasabonsam portrayed in the folklore of the area is quite different than Danquah's bat-like monster. In mythology, it is usually portrayed as an archetypical ogre: according to A Dictionary of World Mythology,

...the hairy Sasabonsam has large blood-shot eyes, long legs, and feet pointing both ways. Its favourite trick is to sit on the high branches of a tree and dangle its legs so as to entangle the unwary hunter.

Matthew Bunson further states that there are three types of Sasabonsam (asanbosam in the text): male, female, and small. Also, he notes it is credited with iron teeth, a common attribute of folkloric ogres and vampires
The mystery of the Sasabonsam shall probably never be completely solved, at least until another body or Wood's photograph surfaces.

http://www.answers.com/topic/sasabonsam
According to the Ashanti, the hairy Sasabonsam has large blood-shot eyes, long legs, and feet pointing both ways. Its favourite trick is to sit on the high branches of a tree and dangle its legs so as to entangle the unwary hunter. Belief in this forest monster is on the wane, but its curious mythical relation might have been the Sciapod of medieval Europe. A Sciapod was a man with one foot so large that he could lie on his back and use it as a sunshade.