Yomi - Oni Kings analysis. Developers please read

[Corwin]

I would like to share some of my observations on the new Dom3 nation of Oni Kings in the Early Era.


First of all - the disclaimer: I've played Oni Kings in 2 of my large SP games vs mighy AIs, which are finished now (I won). I am also currently playing it in my 3rd SP game.

Therefore I don't have any MP experience with Oni Kings yet. However, I do have a lot of experience with Dominions competitive MP in general, having played it for more than 2 years, perhaps 60+ games total. That gives me some ability to have certain ideas on how good or how bad the nation would fare in competitive MP games.

Nevertheless, even with this understanding it's not the same as actually playing the nation in MP, and I fully admit and understand that. Therefore below are my current observations and thoughts. I'll reserve the final judgement until I'll give it a spin in MP.


So here are my feelings so far about this interesting new nation:


I really like the idea behind this nation. It certainly has a unique personality and flavor. Unfortunately I am far from sure how well it will fare in MP in its current state. In fact I strongly suspect that it'll not fare very well against other nations played by competent players.


Here are the reasons for my feelings how this nation may not be well suited for MP in its current state, based upon my observations so far:



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List of Oni Kings weaknesses:


1. Very low protection on ALL (!) demonic regular units. We are talking about protection 3, 4 and 6, with prot 6 for the best and most expensive 50gp and 65 gp troops. Combined with average defense, and low hps (9) for cheaper troops, and only 24hp for their best 50-65gp troops means that demons (in their normal form) are extremely fragile to both melee and archer attacks. (Which was clearly design and balancing decision, which I have no problem with for the most part)


2. (This is a huge deal breaker) Both spiritual and regular forms of demons can be banished relatively easily by cheap lvl 1 priests. >;( And unlike Ermor with its free or cheap undead hordes, demons are quite expensive to buy, so their loss really hurts. What makes things even worse, 12 gp demons (the only relatively cheap demons available to Oni player) are size 1! That means lvl 1 priest with the single cast of banishment can affect 5x6 = 30 demons in any of their two forms! Each unit has only 9hp or 5hp for ghost form, in addition to only slightly above average MR. (13MR). That makes attacking armies with more than few priests to be VERY cost ineffective for Oni, and if its more than several priests, its almost suicidal using demonic troops (which are main Oni troop type). Larger demons fare slightly better due to larger size, slightly higher MR and more hitpoints, but still suffer a lot from banishment, since their both primarily and secondary forms can be banished relatively easy by lvl 1 indep priests. I am not even talking about priests with level higher than 1, which many nations have, which makes banishment both larger in AoE and makes it even harderer to resist . Also demons have no easy way to make their demonic armies less banishable.


3. No sacred regular troops at all. Only two sacred commanders, with only one of them being cost effective option - the most expensive capital only 500gp Oni King. Few summoned sacred low level demons, but nothing to write home about. Therefore bless strategy - not very powerful, at least in the early/medium game before Oni Kings units have buffs they need to make them worth producing in significant numbers.


4. No heavy infantry at all and very mediocre human medium infantry. No cavalry, no units with any type of shields to withstand missile fire. basically Oni armies are extremely weak against any type of archers.


5. Quite average archers, worse than some of the common indep archers for the same price. Their only advantage is low resource cost, but as I said common indep tribe archers have better stats for the same cost in money and resources.


6. Below average researchers .


7. Relatively limited magic path selection Only 3 schools of magic. (Death, Fire and Earth only, nothing else other than sometimes air one, which is not very useful).


8. Small selection of pretenders, no unique *and* interesting pretenders.


9. No priest other than movement 1 lvl 1 priest, which is actually inferior to indep priest. (Most useless of Oni unit IMHO, in most situations -10 gp on its price is not worth having 1mp unit where almost all other Oni units are 2 mps)


10. Most of national summons are not very interesting, considering their price and also the amount of units they bring. Many summons, including the best ones, are impossible to cast not only by national mages, but even by mages summoned by national mages). So unless you design your pretender specifically to be able to cast these spells, you can pretty much forget about many of them, including those actually worth casting.

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Now after reading this whole list you may come to conclusion that Oni Kings is a totally hopeless and weak nation. That would not be true. So to be totally fair, let me list their strengths as well, based upon my observations so far.





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List of Oni Kings strengths:


1. The Oni King unit (of course!). It's a good commander, no doubts about that. That's IMO the main strength of this nation in MP.

Basically its strategic role is quite similar to Niefel Jarls. It costs the same 500gp. It has about 30% less HPs than Niefel Jarl (Oni King only has 50hps). It makes it significantly less powerful in the early game, especially considering the fact that high bless strategy is *much* more beneficial to Niefelheim than to Oni Kings, therefore Oni King player is much less likely to go with the high bless strategy then Niefel player, which indirectly makes Jarls even better comparable to Oni Kings.

However in the late game (assuming Oni player have managed to survive to see it), and with good research Oni King can be more powerful than Niefel Jarl. Invulnerability plus Soul Vortex is a powerful combo. Fire magic and (rarely) air magic also add diversity. So basically in the late game Oni King can be a very powerful unit.

At the same time late game nations have a lot of different means to deal with SCs, and SCs overall are significantly less powerful in Dom3 than in Dom2 due to multiply balancing changes. Which, together with the fact that Oni Kings are capital only units, significantly reduces the value of Oni Kings in MP games during its later stages of the game, where Oni Kings finally have buffs they need to be really effective.

This being said, Oni Kings units are still the major strength of the Oni Kings nation. In fact they are their main strength, because frankly it doesn't have that many others.



2. Many demon units are only res 1. That allows to produce a lot of them quickly, which can be quite useful if your castle is in danger of being assaulted by enemy. Mortal archers cost only 4 res as well. All this allows Oni player to raise army quickly and to experiment with sloth scale, if he chooses to. Demons are non sacred and cost a lot though, other than wimpy 12 gps ones.


3. Demons troops need to be killed twice, after death they revert to very weak but ethereal form. If this form is not destroyed by the time the battle ends AND the battle is won, the demon will reform in its normal form.

It may sounds great on paper, and it works well enough against AI because AI rarely brings enough priests to battle. In MP is not that big of a bonus, since lvl 1 priests can banish BOTH demon primary form and its spiritual form, making them doubly effective against Oni. Also it makes recruiting the only inexpensive demons (12 gp one) almost meaningless against any human player due to their size 1 and low MR. Finally all demon secondary forms only have phantasmal weapons, which require MR checks on each successful hit, and they all have low hps and prot 0.

Overall, being able to survive immediate death even for a little while is still an advantage of the nation, not to mention it adds unique flavor to the nation.


4. Battle mages are decent. Only level 1 and 2 mages, except Oni King themselves, which are rare and much better to be used in their SC role most of the time. However Earth, Death and Fire are good magic schools for battlefield, and so Oni Kings do have relatively good battle mages.


5. Oni have 2 good battlefield-wide spells. Both require level 6 research in two different schools. One gives demon troops prot 10 (which demon units desperately need, because most of them have crappy prot 3 and 4. The side effect is additional damage from fire, but most of the time its worth it). The other spell grants demons berserk ability. Both spells are must have for any serious battles). Although these spells do nothing to alienate the main Oni critical weakness - banishment by lvl 1 priests, they do help to balance odds somewhat when battling other nations national armies.


6. Few low level human troops and human commander have stealth attribute.

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So here is is.



As you of course realize by now, I think Oni Kings really need some boost to make them stand up to other nations in MP. I have created few suggestions of mine that IMHO would help to even the odds. They are by no means the only possible solutions, but I do think that implementing them, or something along their lines, would be a good step to improve the overall balance of this interesting new nation.


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NOTE: When I was creating this list of suggestions I've tried to be VERY careful not to go too far, making Oni too powerful and/or unbalanced. Basically, I've tried my best to preserve the balance as well as unique feeling of the nation, not to make it more powerful than other nations.


1. Add 4 MR to all demon troops. Or if it's too much - consider Oni national demons as having +4MR when it comes to checks against banishment. After all, demons are supposed to be significantly more difficult to banish than undeads. But as it turns out, their current 13 MR, 14 MR and 15 MR is absolutely not enough. Either that, or banishment should only affect undeads and not demons.

Unlike free or very cheap undead hordes, demons armies are VERY expensive, money wise. Yes, their spiritual forms is a interesting bonus unique to Oni nation, but it mostly delays enemy melee units (unless they have magic weapons), but does not affect the outcome of the battle that much. Demon troops are still weaker that most of national armies with similar cost, due to their high cost and extremely low protection, even with their bonus of spiritual form.

With this in mind, giving Oni's national armies such a critical weakness by allowing few lvl 1 priest easily annihilate huge (and very expensive) demon armies is too much. In the current state of the game, all human player have to do is to field some medium-quality melee screen troops and some archers, with 5 or 10 cheap lvl 1 priests, and arrange them in defensive position with "hold than attack" orders to melee. That's all.


Archers and melee units, backed by barrage of banishments would quickly revert half of the demons to their weak ethereal form, by the time demon melee troops advance to engage in melee. After round or two in melee, most of the demon melee troops will be in their ghost form due to their protection 3 or 4 and relatively low hps, and many weaker ones will be destroyed completely. At that point melee combat becomes much less casualties-intensive for both sides, due to oni ghost being ethereal (difficult to hit with normal weapons), and their own weapons being phantasmal (only hit when MR check is failed)

Than these ghost forms, who have even lower hps than original forms (twice as low), are very quickly banished by the same lvl 1 indep priests.


This setup can and does annihilate huge Oni armies with the armies of almost any nation plus bunch of 50gp priests, which all together would cost the fraction of what Oni player would have to pay to recruit such an army. I am not even talking about nations which have cheap priests with levels higher than 1. That makes recruiting demonic armies (which is what Oni Kings theme is all about) to be very cost-ineffective in MP, forcing player to recruit mostly archers and bland human medium/light infantry in its castles, both being same or worse than common indep troops. Not very exciting.


2. Make the cheapest 12 gp demon troops (Ko-Oni) size 2 instead of their current size 1. Yes, it would make them less powerful in melee, because they won't not benefit as much from the reduced defense of their enemies when they swarm them. But considering that it makes then TWICE as weak against banishment as normal sized one, combined with the fact that they have lowest MR of all demons(13MR) and very low hps, them being small actually makes them much weaker in MP instead of benefiting them.


3. Make ghost forms of oni have the same HPs as a normal form, instead of having 50% of HPs . The demons do not have that many hps to begin with. (HP9 and HP14 for low land and medium level troops, so their ghost forms currently have meager HP5 and HP7). Their ghosts have 0 protection. Ghost forms will not be able to deal much damage anyway, but at least they would stick around a bit longer if they would have full HP of the demon instead of only half.


4. Raise protection on best oni troops (50gp and 65gp "Oni" and "Koni Oni") from prot 6 to prot 11-12 by giving them at least *some* armor. 65 gp mostly melee-oriented units should be able to last longer than 1-2 rounds in melee, or not to be killed by few arrows. And once in ghost form they die almost as easily as 5 times cheaper lesser demon due to low hp and 0 protection. That doesn't sound right, their ghost form should also be significantly more difficult to kill than ghost form of weakest demon, to justify their high cost)

Protection 11-12 and size 3 would still leave them very vulnerable to both missile fire and melee attacks, but it would make to survive slightly longer. Make them more resource intensive to compensate for their better armor. Currently Sloth 3 is almost no brainer for Oni Kings player.


5. Make low level Oni national summons to summon multiply demons with appropriately increased costs, instead of summoning them one by one. Research is hard for Oni as it is, and it does not make any sense for the player to spend valuable mages time to summon 1 cheap and weak demon per turn for 1 gem for example. Considering their stats, to make any difference on the battlefield these summoned demons need to be used in large numbers. But by the time Oni mages are able to gather enough of them, there are much better summons available. So they need to come at groups of 5-15 with the gem price being multiplied as well. As of now many of Oni's national summons simply not worth it.


6. Make "End of Culture" and "End of Weakness" Oni's spells Thaumaturgy 4 and Alteration 4 instead of Thaumaturgy 6 and Alteration 6 as it is now. Level 6 is very high for the slow pace of Dom3 research in general, especially so for Oni with their relatively weak reseachers. At the same time in the late game Oni have powerful Oni King unit to work as SC and to help them in their battles. They also will have access to better summoned troops and good battle spells for their strong mages. Where Oni really need help is more in the early to mid game, where they are having hard time against other nations.


7. Give Oni demon troops with ranged attack prec 11 instead of their terrible prec 9 . Currently with -2 prec on javelin for example, which makes their effective prec 7, your demons who has this type of attack can hit anybody except the enemy they are shooting at, even at point blank! In fact, they are more dangerous to your own troops, since your troops have very low protection to begin with, and high level demons are strong. What the point of giving them missile attack for additional cost, if this attack is quite useless?

The flame attack, for units that have it, while slightly more accurate, is still not very effective.

As I said, "friendly" fire is especially deadly to your own demonic troops, so precision is really needed for you to not be afraid to use your own troops ranged attack.

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Sorry for the very long post. I've tried to give detailed explanations to the reasoning behind both my observations and my suggestions. Please feel free to post your own comments and observations on the subject of this thread if you like.



I would be very excited to hear one of the developers thoughts on this topic.