The new crazed

Ack! Can we get it changed back?
The chance of losing a unit permanently was always bothersome with the old version, but at least you could have loyalty if you ever felt the need to mount a serious offensive with lunatics. Plus that was only a 3% chance. Now the negative effect of crazed occurs every single time enrage procs and, unless I'm missing something, there's nothing in game to keep you from losing control. It's cool from a conceptual perspective I suppose, but it trashes any sort of strategic game play.
So could we get it changed back? Please?

The thing is the AI won't understand that it needs to put loyalty on with the old version, so its a balance issue more than anything.

I haven't played with this new enraged yet, but it excites me. I always imagined some mechanic like this, but for Loki. He's the trickster of all tricksters and shouldn't be controllable by anybody, not a player, and not even Perpentach (or a player controlled by Perpentach). Just let him loose to entertain and cast spells in your cities, or entertain and disrupt in others'. I'm not too savvy on AI so I don't know what the enraged units will do (or if they can declare war), but I hope they don't do something predictable like go angrily fortify a city. That would be what the Sulking promotion is for.

Anyway, I really should try it and see how the new enraged works before saying anything, but sounds super to me. I always thought loyalty and enraged was exploitative because you're canceling the balancing effects, rather than it being designed to be overpowered.

What happens if you try to delete enraged unit? Would it still turn barbarian?

I always pictured Loyalty being 'there will be no free will, only my will' type of magic. Also civilopedia has to document many things better and be up to date if all these things are changed all the time.

Yeah, could we get the old crazed back? Mutating units now won't be any fun if you can't control them

Are you all even trying the game out before you complain and request a reversion? The Enraged promotion is still removed after combat, so you just need to keep the enraged units near some enemies and they return to your control in no time, generally with some spare XP to help you out.

Just be glad Kael isn't as mean as I would be and didn't make it turn them HN as well so that you wind up picking off your friends as well as your enemies.

I actually found that this change is quite fun. At first I was a bit skeptical, but after exploring a few dungeons I found it isn't bad at all. The enraged promotions gets removed after combat (and does crazed ramdomly remove it too? cause I seem to remeber getting control back over a few units that hadn't fought) and since it confers strength while it apply's, you usually win the combat that you get into. My scout turned into some pretty mean killing machine until it got enraged before it fully healed and suicided on a skelly. I find it a very fun mechanic, really adds some fun randomness to the game!

Each turn Crazed has a 50% chance to apply Enraged. if it does not apply enraged, it instead removes it. So regardless of what you do, each turn it is 50/50 for a Crazed unit to start enraged or not.

xienwolf said:

Each turn Crazed has a 50% chance to apply Enraged. if it does not apply enraged, it instead removes it. So regardless of what you do, each turn it is 50/50 for a Crazed unit to start enraged or not.

Click to expand...

ah, thanks. I knew there was something behind that. should of remembered though, went OO once and my lunatics would be enraged when I was slogging through forest and when I got to the city walls, all normal and nice again... that was when it had the barb chance though. just got thinking, it's gonna be hard using lunatics on cities now, they probably would just take off into the countryside... actually that sounds great! setting enraged lunatics off to terrorize the countryside... now if only they had hidden nationality

EDIT: I just realized the new crazed severely cripples the Avatar of Wrath. Not to say he isn't strong with his army of Ira, but now recieving enraged does nothing to hurt you unless you have the Avatar himself on you. Maybe it might be good to have the Avatar convert some units to barbarian, but to keep them where they are, unlike the old version, so the effect gets spread around again.

Then how about changing dominate to counter the ill effects of enraged? An archmage level spell should be sufficient to overcome mundane mental deficiencies.

xienwolf said:

Are you all even trying the game out before you complain and request a reversion? The Enraged promotion is still removed after combat, so you just need to keep the enraged units near some enemies and they return to your control in no time, generally with some spare XP to help you out.

Just be glad Kael isn't as mean as I would be and didn't make it turn them HN as well so that you wind up picking off your friends as well as your enemies.

Click to expand...

Problem is an enraged unit from random mutation is immediately useless. A Crazed unit is very unlikely to even get close to an enemy, or at least one it can kill. Half the time it just goes wandering off. Makes lunatics even more freaking worthless.

I think the best thing we can do, is to give another layer of crazy.
Crazed = 50% to be enraged. Enraged = 10% chance to permanently gain the 'hellbent' trait, which is implemented like we have it now. Hellbent units just go around trying to kill things. End of story. But you never start with it.

xienwolf said:

Are you all even trying the game out before you complain and request a reversion?

Click to expand...

Yes, I did try it out first. I read it in the change log and thought it would be cool. Got an enraged scout from a dungeon and immediately saw the horror of it.

xienwolf said:

The Enraged promotion is still removed after combat, so you just need to keep the enraged units near some enemies and they return to your control in no time, generally with some spare XP to help you out.

Click to expand...

If it survives. Odds are it won't unless it's either super beefy or if the units nearby are weak. If it's super beefy, I really don't want it to be attacking anything without my say-so. Anything I want to keep alive never attacks at anything below the high nineties and I still lose them occasionally.
As for spare xp helping out, don't forget that random fodder units helps the defender's xp too. Given that the enraged units will be doing their own thing, the defenders probably won't have to worry about a coordinated strike on their weakened defender either.

So why exactly did anyone think this was a good thing to add to the mod? It removes any sort of tactical use of any unit with enraged, making them an unreliable basket-case that will probably wander off in odd directions and die in a futile attack. If the goal was to make a really nasty promotion to avoid at all costs, great! Succeeded completely. I now live in fear of that promotion. The big problem with that is some units start with it so supposedly it's supposed to have some benefit. Or are lunatics supposed to be completely worthless from any tactical standpoint now?

An effect like the current enraged isn't a bad idea for the mod. Plenty of places to make it interesting, like make is specifically occur as the Avatar's version (adding the HN promotion with that one would really make things interesting, although it might want to limit its targets to non-heroes to keep things from being amazingly frustrating). Right now it's interacting badly with a bunch of pre-existing stuff that really didn't need such horrible penalties added to them.

i never found the old crazed/enraged mechanic very powerful, the loss of defense and the uncontrollable effect as well as the -1 happy of the prerequisite building kept me from trying to build my main force out of them. it was more of a nice addition.

the current implementation makes it kind of worthless. i hate it when my units do things i do not control. everybody who tried to change civs with gibbon knows that he founds only smoldering ruins of his own glory when he comes back.

in my opinion you can as well remove the promotion and the associated units from the game in whole, would be better then the current state, even for the AI.

...it'd be Lanun only, but what if Guybrush Threepwoods singing could "soothe" enraged units?

Though I guess that'd possibly be another player over AI benefit, but would certainly help the Lanun with their palace Chaos mana and natural affinity for OO

Ick...I'd forgotten that chaos mana has a chance to mutate your units.

Nifty little idea on the soothing. Unfortunately, any attempt to remedy enraged after the fact is you'd have to catch the unit to do so. They go first and get bonus movement, so good luck with your merry chase.

Rather get rid of enraged I never really liked it. It was awesome to get a bloodpet mutated with strong and heroic strength, too bad he ended up crazed as well. I eventually ended up giving him loyalty in world builder. Also, lack of loyalty for my high priests of winter ruined one of my Illian games when Avatar spawned.

The new system sounds more fun and useful to me. (And zup, how hard is it REALLY to get loyalty on your moroi as calabim? All you need is 1 adept)

I am not sure if it is an intentional side effect of Enraged, but I found that one wacko unit in a big stack, could drag his whole army along with him.

Came up in the Blood of Angels scenario, I was "softening" an enemy civ by killing all kinds of Blood of the Phoenix promoted Arquebuses who kept re-garrisoning a city enroute to my goal, but which I didn't really care to keep. Basically, just depleting defenders, gaining XP, waiting for the final sprint to the objective. Very methodical approach, buffing each turn, pillaging with various summons, slow march on only the highest defense tiles available, etc.

I think I had an Arquebus unit who went bonkers and dragged my whole stack into the city I didn't want... instant win of the city, since again, I'd been softening it up with things like Snowfall and Shadows chipping away at it. Still, it seemed to mean more than just my nutty Arquebus attacked, all his friends got dragged in as well.

Happened further along a few turns, trying to beeline to my objective, and the Arquebusier seemed to drag the whole army on a detour.

Am I alone in this experience? I don't mind the new Enraged, kind of a neat idea to have certain units go off foaming at the mouth (I shelved a few in out of the way cities, no enemies in their line of sight, it seemed to keep them chill), but if they can corrupt a whole "stack of doom", then they may become fodder / last resort type troop.

Sounds like a bug, the unit is probably not detaching itself from the group before it gets free will, and instead moves the group along with it.