Please STOP nerfing magic!!

[MagisterCultuum]

I still think that Water Walking should be a OO High Priest Spell, an give all (melee, disciple) units in its stack a temporary version of the water walking promotion.

Tsunami would make a very good Water III spell if its damage were increased a little and if it would make the effected tiles turn to coast temporarily. (Cities' and world improvements' tiles would not ever turn to coast though, lest they be destroyed.)


I don't think Floating Eye fits the Metamagic sphere at all. I really think the old Ring of Warding building should be brought back as a <bRequiresCaster> building made by the Metamagic I spell.

 

[Volapyk]

I would really like to see some more counter magic effects, either a passive ability to defend a stack, or even nearby tiles, or an active ability you use, sort of like fighters intercept in Civ, but perhaps instead of damaging the caster the spell just gets interrupted.

With more defensive possibilities more direct attacks could be put in, to make the whole magic part less about summons.

Another thing I thought would fit really well were increasing power on spells dependent on the amount of mana nodes you have. Giving people a choice between focusing in a few spheres which would then be powerful or go more broad. Having the resistance promotions, or some other sort of specific sphere counter, would give people both the opportunity to invest in magic that would prove useful, and defend against enemy magic users more efficiently.

 

[Gelvan]

water 2 too good? it's never used because it's that great...

 

[Zechnophobe]

Esus has its uses: the earliest archmage in the game (earlier than mages, particularly useful with puppets), mask, guaranteed access to shadows. RoK can be useful for any civ, not just the khazad or clan. Who can say no to early iron weapons? Order gets Sphener, social order, basilicas, and bless, and unyielding order, all of which can be useful as well. Sure any one feature of order isn't amazing, but taken as a whole, it is quite viable.

Gibbon is Okay, but he's still just an archmage. It's not like getting Chalid. Mask is also only based on unit religion not national religion. (And also not particularly useful). Guarenteed access to shadows is also not true. You still need the CoE religion in a city to build a shadow, and a non religion based civ can still use their starting nightwatch to spread CoE.

RoK is pretty mediocre, but at least it has some good early game appeal (Gold is more useful than culture in almost all cases). Order is... I dunno about order. It doesn't do anything particularly noteworthy. That is, it doesn't achieve any kind of victory better than another religion.

My general opinion is that FoL is the strongest overall religion, and that Empyrean gets to be mentioned just because it has the strongest unit (per cost, both hammer and research) in the game attached to it.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I think that if you have CoE as your state religion, ALL recon units built in a city with CoE should start with mask. easy access to HN units would fit very well with the lore and be efficient and fun ( seeing as the issue about not being able to group together HN units is being squashed right now )

 

[DioBrando]

If you would remove Chalid and the Luridus ability to cast crown of brilliance/pillar of fire, empyrean would be a useless religion. The troops are pretty much the only things that the religion has going for it, while Order har basilicas and Social Order and two awesome heroes.

 

[PotatoOverdose]

My general opinion is that FoL is the strongest overall religion, and that Empyrean gets to be mentioned just because it has the strongest unit (per cost, both hammer and research) in the game attached to it.

From my experience, FoL (on non-elven civs) raises the average population of your cities to somewhere around 18. While this is a great passive ability since you can essentially forget about happiness problems, 18 pop cities can be achieved fairly easily with combinations of other religions, civics, buildings, and resources fairly easily. It may take a little longer, and may require some active planning (as opposed to the passive universal appeal of guardian of nature), the same effect can be achieved. But the above is just anecdotal, and your experiences may differ. On the whole though, I don't think any one religion is more powerful than any other per se. Some have powerful magic(which shouldn't be nerfed), some have powerful units, some have powerful civics. All a matter of play style really.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

I think that if you have CoE as your state religion, ALL recon units built in a city with CoE should start with mask. easy access to HN units would fit very well with the lore and be efficient and fun ( seeing as the issue about not being able to group together HN units is being squashed right now )

The religion granting mechanic is apparently quite simply, just a flat 20% chance. A bonus of double or so for having the state religion would probably be a good help Esus and a bit flavorful; Kael has discussed doing that iirc, though I don't know if he plans to or not.

 

[Chip56]

Wasn't there always a 35% for your state relegion and 20 for others?

 

[xienwolf]

Nope, it is a flat 20% for each religion, starting with Esus and working back through the XML from there (so actually slightly less than 20% for religions other than the first one checked if you have multiple in the city).

I've changed it up myself to be a flat out 40% chance for a unit to gain your state religion, then another flat 40% chance for ANY religion, and a random one selected from the city to assign to them (so you have actually 2 chances at getting your state religion if you have spread it to the city, and if you ONLY have the state religion in the city, your net chances of gaining a religion are about 64%). Wasn't too tricky to be honest.

 

[Humakty]

About order, having played calabim/order changed my mind about that religion (feast : no unhappy face problem, just more prod)(Mmh, might be cool with FoL too, must test that.). I think any religion has it's use, you just have to find the right civ.
Even esus can be nice : with hippus it doubles the number of national mounted units, nothing to scoff at. (untested)

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I think that there should be some units that can evangelize their religion to other units (causing units that were already built to gain a religion), and that the Luonnatar should similarly be able to make religious units (including units that got random religions and priests who need their religion in order to cast spells) to loose their faith.

 

[Volapyk]

Nope, it is a flat 20% for each religion, starting with Esus and working back through the XML from there (so actually slightly less than 20% for religions other than the first one checked if you have multiple in the city).

Perhaps have it increase with Theology, or/and the religion ones as well.

 

[Wyrmhero]

The Evangelist promotion would be good to bring back, but that's going off topic.

I think that we shouldn't judge magic yet, as there are still some unimplimented spheres. I think that the Force I spell should be a Magic Missile spell, which would add some value to adepts: Force I and Combat or Metamagic could be quite useful as a combination...

As for current spells, however, I agree with Water II being near useless currently. It's useful, but a one-time promotion. Like Trust, why would I waste a spell slot for something I'll use once (difference being Water Walking is cast once on each mage, Trust cast once in total)?

I'd like Magic promotions to add something to the mage without casting anything. Spirit promotions could add some healing benefits to the mage, perhaps? Earth could increase defensive strength, wind could give a bonus vs. Archery units, etc.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I think that there should be some units that can evangelize their religion to other units (causing units that were already built to gain a religion), and that the Luonnatar should similarly be able to make religious units (including units that got random religions and priests who need their religion in order to cast spells) to loose their faith.

that sounds great, but what uses would it have? out of the top of my mind I can think of :

1) forcing esus on a recon unit to gain HN ( kewl )

2) getting rid of/giving a good/evil religion to give/avoid giving units to Basium/Hyborem ( also great )

something else?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Well, in the case of the Luonnatar, to would let you make rival priests incapable of casting spells.


It could be used to make more units join Basium/Hyborem.


I'm thinking I'll probably make a lot more religious spells for other types of units. For instance, FoL recon units will probably be able to cure poisoned units. There will probably be an Order specific Law spell, an FoL specific Nature spell, etc.

 

[Asthix]

Found it. Its time to talk about this again.

The next logical step is to remove collateral damage from fireballs and make it so that demons spread flowers everywhere!

What gives? I thought you guys were past changes like this?

Where is the rationale? Are there threads where the team explains this constant dumbing down?

 

[Earthling]

What changes are you complaining about, and was it worth necroing this thread and being vague? (I actually don't have anything past like patch 's' or maybe 't' - but I haven't seen any bad/major changes to magic since 0.40 as a whole went out, other than the change to summoner)

 

[Iceciro]

I'd guess he means this

6. Cities reduce spell damage by a quarter of their city defense to units in them (so pyre zomebies, tsunamis, ring of flames, pillar or flames, etc isnt as effective against units in well fortified cities).
7. Tsunami's average damage reduced from 50% to 30%.

The nerf to Tsunami is actually pretty brutal. The first one is bad if you can't find Fire Mana anywhere since it's the only fortification buster. I think all the damage spells should do some damage to fortification if this change is going to remain in effect. If the fortifications are defending the people inside they must be taking the spells to the face, or wall, or whatever.

 

[Asthix]

Yes. You're not up to date on the patches so you don't know that they just nerfed tsunami finally, necessitating the resurrection (I like that term better) of this thread. It seems to me, though I wasn't here for the whole thing, that the only reason most magic is nerfed now is because a few initially were back in the day.