The spell of Sunder only affects elementals. And elementals gain about 5HP per level. I'm not seeing the problem with it. A 15th level champion should be able to instakill a 1st level elemental.
Yeah, the Sunder spell only affects elementals. The world bosses are elementals. The world bosses and their associated areas exist to provide expansion and XP harvesting opportunities for players who don't want to pursue a Conquest victory. The Sunder spell, as mentioned, acually does a whole hell of a lot more than 5hp/lvl damage, because a lvl15 champion has gained 5-10 multiplier traits related directly to cost and damage output of that (and every other) spell. So in reality any champion of sufficient level to fight a world boss, and whose time isn't better spent fighting pretty much anything imaginable that isn't a world boss, will do 250-300hp dmg per Sunder to a world boss
You know why you don't nuke every world boss on a map? Because the movement cost in turns isn't worth the resources defeating them unlocks. The actual bosses are only a consideration in terms of how many turns it takes to get in position to nuke them, and how many turns it takes to get the nuke-stack back to somewhere it can fight the AI. The bosses themselves are a fucking joke. Because the spell is utterly broken - not because they won't rape the shit out of any basic troops, which they certainly will.
..which is how FE works. One player's accuracy is measured against the other player's dodge to hit. All units have accuracy and dodge.
My apologies, you're right. Funny how you tend to overlook the one thing that works in the ocean of things that don't.
Then again, I suppose I should test just how well it works before I open my mouth. I've never run any assassin builds - because the AI did and it failed miserably because of it. But... The AI fucking sucks, so I'm not about to believe the game can't be wrecked 10 ways by optimising dodge before checking for myself.
How do you get that? If you can think of a specific scenario where you can easily get that I am sure Kael would want to know.
How? Partly through gear and mostly through level unlocks. I know you've watched a YouTube Let's Player called Das#. You might instead want to watch someone can actually play your game. If you'll pay me I'll happily break your game for you on video. Alternatively you can have a look at the Mad Djinn's LPs of your game. Yes he's still very much learning how to play your game. But he's been wrecking the systems design pretty much from the get-go.
And no, I don't consider myself a particularly good player, but I'm sure as shit better than MD is - I ought to be too, I've been playing since the first WoM beta.
Which spell does that? I am not aware of any that can do that.
Flame strike? The magic missile-like in of fire magic. It's a +2dmg/lvl spell, but as mentioned several times already, the multipliers utterly fucks over any semblance of balance. Really, when you have a lvl 10 hero nuking the Lord of Fire or whatever in turn 1 with a 0 casting time spell, for less than 10 mana.... Something is just a teensy bit broken. Don't you think?
I'm not sure why this is a bad thing. Mastery is weighed against Resistence to determine if the unit resists the spell.
Trust me, it's not a bad thing. It's a terrible thing. I'm not sure if mastery-resistance works like a D&D save or if it's straight up M>R full dmg, R>M half dmg. The reason I'm not sure is because mastery is very easy to increase, while resistance is basically between 10 and 50 for the entire world and everything in it. Either way, when you can have 100+ mastery at lvl 10 - which tends to be before you've even unlocked any semi-decent basic troops - it means everything is fucked if it meets a magic user controlled by a human player.
Of course, this only goes for human players. The AI has no concept of the importance of mastery.
Certainly if you have a spell doing 130 damage that's a game breaker. But I'd argue that it's a problem with the spell. Not some underlying game design issue. I could write some XML to have the Sword of Frogs that does 10,000 damage and make it common and voila, broken game play. But that doesn't mean there's some underlying game design issue.
I have that problem with every spell that does direct damage. Flame strike insta-nukes 1 guy. Fireball insta-nukes lots. Blizzard insta-nukes pretty much everything.
Sundering scales way, waaaaay too hard on the additive side. But everything else scales just as much out of control because of the multipliers.
How do you generate 50 mana per turn? You get ~1 per shard. You can get a couple more from a city if it has essence. If you've found a way to get lots of mana per turn that is due to a game mechanic flaw (as opposed to say having 50 cities or something where yea, you should get 50 mana per turn) then that would be a good thing to address.
Assume 5 essence focused cities when the expansion phase ends on a medium sized map, 3-4 of those with shards. That's not unreasonable, it is typical. Extrapolate into the midgame and you have 40-50 essence. In the late game - though chances are you won't hit the late game, because you can grab any victory you want by the midgame - you're going to be generating around 100 essence per turn.
That's the kind of essence income that allows you to blizzard a genuine army stack to death every turn, and still win the spell of making victory in 10 turns.
Basically, you're generating essence faster than you can reasonably spend it.
Now, with regards to allowing multiple champions per army, that's a worthy subject. I don't remember but could you have multiple heroes in MOM in a single group?
As the AI guy, I've lobbied for eliminating more than 1 champion per army. But players like that game play because it is fun for most people to level up units and then bring them together for a final battle. It's the pay off for them. *I* don't like it. But I do know others do.
I don't actually remember. You could in AoW, and just like in FE it was the source of a lot of fail. I'm absolutely behind rethinking Heroes as stack leaders only. It would do wonders for game balance. Really, make it so. Even a 100% XP penalty would still make hero doomstacks worthwhile.
I don't think listing a spell that does too much damage is an indication of a "natural state" of brokenness. Being able to put multiple champions in an army is somewhat more legtiimate a claim but even then, it really comes down to balance.
I trust you'll concede that FE is a very big and complicated system, yes? When I mention "an example" or "just one example" or similar here, I'm talking about stuff that represents general problems. I'm not simply saying "this one single thing is borked, so by extension I vaguely fucking hypothesise that maybe something else might possibly be". I'm doing it to avpod writing a damn dissertation. Though if you really want that sort of thing: pay me. Really, the beta is over. And I honestly don't have any faith you're making the effort to check out what I say here. So... Not gonna spend hours and hours on this. Sowwies.
The few multipliers are handled "seriously".
Fine. Riddle me this: if I prove you wrong with screenies, will you actually take it seriously and do something about it in your next "not-FE" game? Because I'm sufficiently interested in that to show you with fucking screenies just how broken your multipliers are. But I reqire a promise to the KKKodex. Otherwise, see my comments above about magic and heroes.
I agree. That's why we don't do it. If you know of a specific exmaple, I'd like to know so I can pass it on to Kael.
The 6 best hero unlocks are Trainer and Potential. I humbly request you patch out all of them, just to start with. We can discuss the rest afterwards.
In theory, maybe. In practise I know you don't. Like I said, I've played every SD game there is. It's what broke the back of your economy in GalCiv2 (well, if you take it to include pop mods, and I do). And it's what's breaking FE to pieces right now. In many, many more ways.
Yes, and those are addidtive bonuses that are carefully controlled.
*Laff* Controlled?
But yeah, I know. Problem I was trying to point out to you, is that you never explain how the fuck they work. And hey, if you could be bothered to do that, maybe - just maybe - they wouldn't break the associated mechanics, because it'd be clear even to you guys that they were much, much too effective.
You say initiative is over powered. How? It determines how often a unit moves in battle. So I get a typical unit that starts at say 20 initiative. End of game my mega guy may have 30 initiative. That's not a huge change. By late game, I should get an extra move over low level units every few turns.
Forgetting that you have army-wide initiv mods and not just the possibility, but commonly occurring armies with similar initiv. Which in practise means players can quite often init-nuke an army, init-boost their own, and then resolve a battle in perfect savety by taking a hit, backing off, taking a hit, backing off, repeat... Against a full fucking stack. It takes a total of 2 high initiv heroes.
More, at lower lvls stacks are typically harder solitary units, which means just about any stack with 2 heroes can do it right off, from level fucking 1, at the cost of 20 mana or so. Or about every 3 turns, at a point when the XP grind fights happen maybe every 6 turns.
Yeah man, it totally works as intended. I'm believing you sooooo hard :p
****
I'll respond to the rest at some later point. Friends at the door.
:patriot:
