Communion Help

[Endoperez]

See the Conceptual Balance mods, and compare prices with/without it. It gives the balancers' view on how worthy the spells are in MP. Wrathful Skies is very good, for one, but the Army Of X spells are considerably cheaper IIRC. And the Will'O'Wisp becomes Conjuration 1, but retains the 1-gem cost, so it's probably not worth it at such high levels.

[Cainehill]

OG_Gleep said:
It would be nice though, I had to stop using clockwork horrors in any stack that had archers...I was one battle away from punching my monitor. If you've ever done that before, you would know that the monitor never loses.

Yes, the monitor does lose sometimes - but it's a bit of a pyrhic victory, as you lose also : you hurt your hand, and you have to buy a new monitor.

Question: How often do you supply gems to your mages? I have a hard time doing this, as gems are so valuable, seems like a waste to use them on anything but critical battles. And unless you stop and build labs in every zone, there is no easy way to do that. Granted there are some awesome spells, but when you can get a one troll/Two Vine Ogres for one gem...or a nifty item for a couple more it seems like a waste. Unless the spell will dramatically alter the course of the battle. But how many spells will do that?

Thats actually a good question: What spells do you see as worth its weight (read: Cost) in gems? What spells do you script with a gem cost regularly?

Supply gems to the mages is best done via scouts : load as many as 30 gems onto the scout, and after each turn move some gems onto the mages, as required.

Spells I script regularly that cost gems : depends somewhat on gem income (and whether it's a big battle), but for example : Swarm (1 nature) and Shadow Blast (1 death).

[KissBlade]

Someone should really just mod the damn thing and make battle spells not cost gems but raised level of magic mastery required to cast it. That way you can use gems to empower them and it won't be such a pain on the micromanagement. Don't get me wrong, micromanagement is fun when it's not TEDIOUS.

[shovah]

but just raising the lever dosnt really work out too well with balance imo

[Endoperez]

Taking gem-cost out of the equation would make pretenders and communion-users much cheaper than other nations. This would give few nations and strategies much more powerful magically, and because powerful spells control the late game, it would remove variability.

Just as shovah said, there are balance problems with that.

It has been suggested that items and gems could be moved to/from the laboratory even without a laboratory being present in the province. I'm not sure if that would be any better, balance-wise...