Frozen: Bugs, Balances, and Feedback

As you may know, I created the Frozen civilization included with Rise of Erebus. So I'm starting this thread for stuff related to them.

Instead of posting bugs, balance issues, or suggestions you have for the Frozen in their respective threads, please post such issues here. That way, I can easily find your posts, rather then have to dig through the Fall Further Plus bug thread and ideas thread to find them. Any problems you find probably are global in all three Frozen versions, and I would like to fix those bugs in all three versions, not just the version included in Fall Further Plus.

With the release of v1.0 of the Frozen civ, I've removed all bugfixes and changes from this post. Before reporting an issue, read the changelog in this thread.

Balance Issues:

If you've played them as they are in RIFE at the moment, you'll quickly realize they are extremely unbalanced.

Therefore, I recommending disabling them (use the "No Liberation" gameoption). And they're my civ.

The next, unreleased version of RIFE features the latest version of the Frozen (v1.0; available as a standalone mod for FFH 2 or FF), and is more balanced. So please consider that when complaining about how unbalanced they are.

Wintered is quite damn powerful aye. Had their WS used while I was in an all out war as the Bannor, and it made my L8 Champion with many many command promotions die against a relatively weak unit because he was only 3/5th as strong as the turn before. 20% while dispellable sounds about right. Though, I wouldn't make it a disease - maybe make the Frost Resistance promotion dispell/prevent it? It's less boring than a disease and both and more interesting harder to cure, which seems like a good thing to me.

Edit: Oh, and, when they spawn, they show on the Power graph as if they've got an immense army, whereas the only units they seemed to have were 2 8str(+ some ice damage) champions and a worker or 2. Bug, or did they send off their other units far away? Mind you, they didn't have any cities I wasn't aware of - I took down 2 cities and that was the end of him.

Perhaps the name "Winter Corrupted" or "Ice Corrupted" or even the name "Frozen Soul" suggesting that the unit is a living unit with a frozen soul doomed to become a servant of Taranis upon death, unless healed. I believe that the promotion is too over-powered as of now and should be both weakened a bit and also have a difficult but possible means to be healed.

Ideally this is my suggestion:

Rename "Wintered" -> "Frozen Soul"
- Units with Winterborn are immune
- gives units -10% strength
- gives units a 5% chance to suffer 0-25% cold damage each turn
- gives units -30% to cold damage
- can be removed with "Dispel Magic"

Finally, when FF+ eventually includes The White Hand as a religion:
- Units with White Hand religion should be immune to "Frozen Soul"
- The Frozen should gain frozen soul untits from any non-Frozen unit which dies with either
* the white hand religion
* the frozen soul promotion (no more winterborn)

Rename "Wintered" -> "Frozen Soul"
- Units with Winterborn are immune
- gives units -10% strength
- gives units a 5% chance to suffer 0-25% cold damage each turn
- gives units -30% to cold damage
- can be removed with "Dispel Magic"

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"Frozen Soul" is probably a better name, given that the unit spawned is called Frozen Souls. I'll change that in the next version.

Dispel Magic is probably the best method to cure it. That will be changed in the next version as well.

The best I can do to make Winterborn immune, I think, is to make units with Winterborn loose Wintered Frozen Soul at the beginning of each turn. So the magic will still affect the unit, but it will quickly fade away. This will be added in the next version.

The cold damage is a cool idea. But I'd rather have it -20% and drop the cold damage... any other thoughts?

Did you mean change to:

Frozen Soul
- gives -10% strength
- gives -20% defense to future cold damage attacks
- can be removed with dispel magic

If so, I can live with that. What do you think about the future changes regarding The White Hand religion?

Swinkscalibur said:

Did you mean change to:

Frozen Soul
- gives -10% strength
- gives -20% defense to future cold damage attacks
- can be removed with dispel magic

If so, I can live with that. What do you think about the future changes regarding The White Hand religion?

Click to expand...

The White Hand changes are good, I think.

But I actually meant:

-gives -20% strength
-gives -30% defense to cold damage
-can be removed with dispel magic

But if 10 and 20 would be better then 20 and 30, I'll go with that. Maybe 15, 25?

maybe 10 (15 at most) and 30 (25 if regular is 15) would be best. That way the effect is strongest with regard to the civs it's related to, but isn't overpowering overall.

To block wintered, use <PromotionExcludes/>. Available in FF/FFPlus, will prevent wintered from being gained so long as the unit has Winterborn.

In FfH, the python might be the best bet, but there are less intensive methods in FF.

Valkrionn said:

To block wintered, use <PromotionExcludes/>. Available in FF/FFPlus, will prevent wintered from being gained so long as the unit has Winterborn.

In FfH, the python might be the best bet, but there are less intensive methods in FF.

Click to expand...

Alright, I'll use that method.

A request: could you rework <PrereqCivilization> in the event info file to be an array, not a string? This means that a single event can either be available to one civilization, or all civilizations (unless you use python, and then it doesn't automatically say "Requires the _____ Civilization"). And I'm sure other events would benefit from such a change- maybe one applicable only to elven civilizations, or one applicable to only lizardmen civilizations, or dwarven civilizations...

I actually thought of doing that after reading this...

TC01 said:

-The monument-inscripting event should have an option for both Frozen and Illians (doable, but to do it right it requires letting an event have more than one prereq civ)

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I'll be working on that for the next patch. Good practice anyway, and there's a bit of DLL work planned for the Animals already, as well as merging in the new FfH patch.... Shouldn't delay me too much, and I agree that it could be VERY useful for other events as well.

Do Frozen units start with winterborn? if so the <promotionexcludes> fixes a lot of problems.

Should the announcement for frozen getting a unit from your fight pop before the fight is over? Kind of defeats the purpose of having the battle animations when you know who wins at the start.

Also, it seems at times that the announcement for frozen getting a unit will go multiple times for one battle, not sure if they are correspondingly getting that many units, but it still seems disproportionate announcement wise.

On a balance note, when they start getting 61+ pop cities, they just keep getting more and more great people.

Looking at the blizzard change-log at the linked post, I'm not entirely sure I like the idea of blizzards permanently icing water/sea tiles. That would be a pain for anyone who likes to use nautical units -I suppose that discounts the AI for the time being, but overall the feature seems to just be a nuisance-.

Could cure disease remove wintered? Or might that be to easy?

Nice Civ though overall. A team-member and I -in MP- battled a mid/late game frozen civ and played whack-a-unit by losing a unit and having a frozen soul pop up in the city the other teammate was attacking; other than that brief amusement, our trek into the ice/snow lands was interesting; with all those clouds around, it was like an ascent into some crazy battle in the sky. Did make it a bit hard to see other borders though.

TC01 said:

General Changes for Next Release:

-Frozen Palace by Deon. (Thanks!)
-See here (most of it is just adding the blizzards stuff, which should already be in FF+ anyway). Needs updating from this thread
-Rename Wintered promotion to Frozen Soul
-Allow Dispel Magic spell to remove Wintered from affected units.
-Wintered/Frozen Soul now applies -15% strength, -25% against cold damage

Bugs Fixed for Next Release:

-Your own units turn into Frozen Souls
-Wintering does not cause Frozen or Winterborn units to gain Wintered/Frozen Soul
-Blocked Winterborn units from gaining the Wintered/Frozen Soul promotion:

• In Fall from Heaven 2: Removed Wintered/Frozen Soul promotion from Winterborn units every turn
• In Fall Further/FF+: Block Winterborn units from gaining the Wintered/Frozen Soul promotion

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I think that takes care of every issue I had with them, and increasing the utility of Dispel magic. win win

Frozen Soul sounds good.

Also I think that there should be a limit on summoned frostlings. For now, they are cheap endless swarmers. I even managed to kill Acheron with them.

What I see as a Problem is that Winterborn Animals like Mammoth also spread Wintered. (At last I think it hapened to me) I also agree with the point that Winterborn sould 100% protect against wintered.

Really? I thought that only demons spread cold souls. It's a bit imbalanced (adds more power to ice than to any other damage sphere), because other fire/death/... attack types do not cause -15% str.

Just read the Winterborn description in the Civopledia of FF+ there it clearly says in Winterborn "Passes the Wintered Promotion to enemys in combat". I think thats a bad Idea becaus Winterborn is used in many difernt places.

I also think that having the frost resistance promotion should make a unit immune to "Frozen Soul." Not hard to do if the <promotionexcludes> tag works as advertised. Frost resistance should be made available to all units as a promotion given the completion of a ritual (as in complete "x" ritual and all your current units receive the promotion). That would help balance the strength of cold damage. This ritual should be fairly hammer extensive and carry at least the elementalism tech (if not a higher one) as a prereq.

oops double post.

2Hydroclopse said:

Looking at the blizzard change-log at the linked post, I'm not entirely sure I like the idea of blizzards permanently icing water/sea tiles. That would be a pain for anyone who likes to use nautical units -I suppose that discounts the AI for the time being, but overall the feature seems to just be a nuisance-.

Click to expand...

Actually, that part is already in FFPlus... And it's usually temporary ice.

This is the version merged into FFPlus... FF has more Temp functions, rather than just Temp Terrain.

Schwarzbart said:

Just read the Winterborn description in the Civopledia of FF+ there it clearly says in Winterborn "Passes the Wintered Promotion to enemys in combat". I think thats a bad Idea becaus Winterborn is used in many difernt places.

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Winterborn is used for the Doviello and Illians (Although it's two separate promotions, as the Doviello version includes the capability of stealing weapons from slaughtered enemies), Polar Bears, Mammoths, and so on. Might be a good idea to give them their own racial, so the Illians don't pass the Frozen free units.