Which nations need bennies?

[DrPraetorious]

I dislike the conceptual balance mods, and wish to pursue balance by an additive, rather than subtractive route (also Growth is only underpowered if you play on a postage stamp). I will fold these modifications into my megamod once I can get it working .

Here are the changes I would like to make:
1) Every nation should get a full slate of national heroes. This is an extension of the worthy heroes mod to 7 heroes per nation. Part of the rationale for this is, in spite of the addition of extra income events, Fortune/Turmoil is still somewhat weaker for most positions than Order/Misfortune. So, we can make Fortune better without changing the event frequencies or anything else coarse. Those nations (Panga-cough) which already thrive on turmoil get loser heroes.

2) I'd like to add a lot of national spells. National spells are less likely to muddle the existing theme or feel of a nation, and are intrinsically easier to balance than additions or changes of national units.

For a weakness to be "problematic", it should meet most or all of the following criteria:
a) It should render the nation significantly un-fun (hopeless) to play under a common circumstance.

b) There should be no easy way to adjust your tactics around the weakness already in game. We are not trying to encourage turtling here - "I can't ignore the world until turn 60 and then launch my space armada" != a weakness.

c) It should lead to defeat with >80% certainty. There are only a few nations (Abyssia and Jotunheim only, I think) that beat a double-bless Helheim in a cage match reliably. I don't view this as unbalanced - if you can go 1:2 against helheim under such circumstances the game is still worth playing, and weaknesses of the helheim position later in the game will tell.

The additions we make to correct these weaknesses should:
a) By preference, be new heroes. If not new heroes, new spells. If not new spells, new national units. I'd like to add new units only as a last resort. OTOH, if someone has a really cool idea for a new national unit (those guys added to Pythium are neat), we should use it.

b) Preserve both the feel and main tactics of the nation - preferably, they should enhance them. If a nation has critically weak national mages, for example, we should give them national spells that make those national mages more useful in conjunction with their existing national units.

Let me give an example. I tend to think that Caelum is somewhat weak - especially against forces consisting of craptons of crap (existing lightning magic does great against small numbers of elite units.) This spell is drawn from the classic RPG Powers and Perils.

#newspell
#name "Darkling Light"
#descr "This spell calls down several bolts of the black lightning of the dark, which arcs among the stormclouds of the underworld. Each bolt of the black lightning can strike several foes, but it is silent and produces no shockwave."
#school 2
#researchlevel 4
#path 0 5
#path 1 1
#pathlevel 0 1
#pathlevel 1 1
#fatiguecost 70
#aoe 1
#effect 2
#nreff 1003
#damage 1008
#precision 5
#range 5025
#flightspr 339
#explspr 10009
#spec 64
-- Does anyone know how to make the zots blind people, do shock damage and cause lesser fear?
#restricted 9
#restricted 59
#end

[FrankTrollman]

I think mid-era Agartha blows. No archers, no randoms, no good mages, all your mages are old, and the only unit in your entire army that can bust even medium armor is a capitol-only sacred troop with a protection of 12.

Let's see... they get their asses handed to them by:

• Archers.
• Heavy Armor
• Battle Magic

And there's no real way around that for a really long time. When they finally do get their national spells, it pretty much boils down to making living statues and trundling slowly forward. In short, these guys are a poor substitute for Ulm. Gah.

So what do they need? They need the ability to do something in combat with an Earth Reader, because that's what they are supposed to use. That means that they need some decent combat effects for 1 Earth and 1 Holy.

How about a copyspell of Arrow Fend or Summon Storm for path requirements 1 Earth, 1 Holy? It would allow them to put Earth Gems on their peoples and reduce the impact of their nation's crippling archery shortage.

And how about a national version of Weapons of Sharpness that was much smaller in area and available with less research and Earth magic? That would let their damnably useless shortsword infantry fight enemies in chainmail and accomplish anything at the same time.

With those two spells under their belt, I could see the Agarthans doing something - rather than just bending over and bracing themselves every time Man showed up. That's the worst part about this. It's not that they are stuck against some weird troop type available to only one faction or another - no. They are a middle era nation with no good answer to Knights or Bowmen. That's lame.

-Frank

[HoneyBadger]

I'm slowly formulating a gnome-nation which has quite a few earth effects, so I've thought about this issue a bit. One thing I'd like to see for Agartha is some kind of cave-superiority like Atlantians get for being amphibious. Agartha, being amphibious, should be the nation to pick if you want to go everywhere: ocean, land, cave, and they should be getting some kind of plusses for that. I really lean towards some kind of combat penalty for a lot of nations who aren't suited to fighting underground, besides the lack of light, although that's a big step in the right direction-cave provinces should definitely be utterdark as a matter of course, but even then, caves are hideously uneven and can be remarkably treacherous. A spelunking ability akin to amphibian and poor amphibian would be a step in the right direction here I think, and then once that was in, I've got quite a few ideas about some of the friendly-to Agartha-creatures that might live in caves. I tend to think in terms of adding new and interesting units, rather than changing ones that are already in the game too much, although ofcourse that's always a possibility for some of the redundant and more or less useless units in the game (there are a number).

Don't tell Kristoffer, but I'd really like to see some kind of Agarthan beholder in the game, if only because the body-type-including levitation and multiple eyes-would be perfect for caves. For my mod, whenever I get around to it, I want to see Agartha having a few of the more complex cave-creatures while remaining more or less the same, while gnomes will have access to earth elemental kind, and a third, "N'kai", proposed by Nerfex, will feature slimes and molds and fungi. There may possibly be a fourth Myconid nation, but that's just barely visible to me right now.

[Endoperez]

FrankTrollman said:
I think mid-era Agartha blows. No archers, no randoms, no good mages, all your mages are old, and the only unit in your entire army that can bust even medium armor is a capitol-only sacred troop with a protection of 12.

Let's see... they get their asses handed to them by:

• Archers.
• Heavy Armor
• Battle Magic

SNIP

With those two spells under their belt, I could see the Agarthans doing something - rather than just bending over and bracing themselves every time Man showed up. That's the worst part about this. It's not that they are stuck against some weird troop type available to only one faction or another - no. They are a middle era nation with no good answer to Knights or Bowmen. That's lame.

Kite Shields are good against archers. Bucklers aren't. Kite Shield infantry do fine against bows. The problem is that Agartha doesn't have bows of their own, and are forced to use independents.

Agartha can also use Rust Mist to great effect against HI, and it's only Evo 2.
The normal warriors have str 10 and Shortsword, dam 5, so they deal about 15 damage. It goes through most armor (14% chance of dealing 1 point of damage through prot 20; bigger chance of dealing 1 or more), but of course, not through shields. Pale One Soldiers have worse attack, so even less chance of punching through shields, and they have just Buckler, and they deal about the same damage (str 12, 3 dam in spear). They do fine against HI without shields, such as Tien Chi's glaives or half of Ulm guys.

Battle magic, as in what? They Pale Ones have good magic resistance at normal gold/res costs, and lots of hp, so Astral spells will probably target ainly them and fail to have an effect. Even Pale Ones and medium infantry have decent protection. Lightning? Huge AoE spells that decimate all units everywhere, not just MA Agartha's? This isn't any worse than with most other nations, they just don't have any easy way to answer to that, besides perhaps Marble Oracle thugs, but that's just comparable to Golem thugs, perhaps worse.


IMO, they can manage against most targets, but really, their problem is that they don't live where their description would suggest. In caves, with darkness making bows and enemy units less useful, they'd do just fine. Unfortunately, there aren't any cave provinces in current MP maps.
Also, even MA Agartha can go underwater pretty easily. They don't get much from that, though, because the water nations beat them there, and they can't use the water provinces to beat the land nations except perhaps by giving them another way to advance to after land indies are taken, and that only works if there are NO underwater nations in the game.

I'd just make the existing (Enchantment) national spells easier to cast. Attentive Statue to Ench 2 and E1, so that Earth Readers can summon them, Sentinels to Ench 3, Granite Guards to Ench 4 and Marble Oracles to Ench 5. Alternatively, or perhaps in addition to, these could be moved to Construction. It works much better for their mages, and lets them easily use their Ancient One commanders and later Marble Oracles as thugs.

[Wauthan]

Propably a worthless idea but I made a 1n1d spell for Machaka that summons 0 mapmove sacred "spiderlings" with Webspit. Needed a way to bolster the fragile PD of that nation. Would have made it into a global enchantment like "Mechanical Militia" if I could figure out how.

[HoneyBadger]

I would think that MA Agartha-with the inclusion of humans and all our bright shiny ideas-would have some troops specifically tailored to fight water empires. True, they still might not hold up as well, might be costly in terms of gold/resources, but they ought to have some soldier types which are there incase the player wants to spend a lot of gold/resources and tackle water. A national summons would work here too. They shouldn't have the ability to go underwater unless they have some kind of strategy to back it up, and I think that once the humans showed up, they'd start exploiting that in some way.

[FrankTrollman]

Deleted.

[HoneyBadger]

Niefel province defense is awful, and I can't decide if it should be that way or not. Mythologically-speaking, Jotunheim was pretty well-guarded, unless you were Thor, but at the same time, I'm not sure how well organized the Jotun were until Utgard-Loki showed up. Still, Niefel is supposedly one of the strongest nations out there. I kind of disagree with that, they're a logistics nightmare, but I doubt too many people are going to jump on the "poor Niefelheim" bandwagon.

[HoneyBadger]

Atlantis Living Pillars are great troops, but one area in which they are weak is that if you have an Earth sacred bless, it only seems to raise their prot up to 22 from 20. Unless I'm viewing this wrong, this makes them weaker than they ought to be. Is this a bug? I hope so, because Living Pillars are extremely hard to mass and should have the full effect of a bless strategy, should someone choose to go that way with EA Atlantis, just because their are very few advantages to doing so already. At Prot 24, (20 + 4 earth bless) 1 Living Pillar would be worth buying over 3 coral guards. It's a small thing, but it's enough to tip the balance against using Living Pillars, which is a shame, because they're such a cool unit, otherwise (one of the few units who don't take explitive from Helheim's best-I've seen one berserk Living Pillar take out 3 blessed Helheim troops and keep coming), and already lack a lot of love.

[Endoperez]

Living Pillars have Basalt Armor (prot 18), natural protection (9), and they don't have a helmet. Because natural and armor protection don't stack straight, their final protection is Head (9) and Body (23). Legions of Steel and Earth 9 bless both only raise armor protection, and unfortunately, Living Pillars don't wear any head armor.

The protection value shown in the unit screen is only an approximation. You should always check the actual protection values.