Crazed Promotion...

[Fafnir13]

I am here to petition the complete losification of the % chance to turn barbarian per turn from the crazed promotion. I don't care how small a % chance it is as it will someday come back to bight you. Any unit with it become unreliable and a potentially dangerous. While the odds are low, I have had on two separate occasions lost Lunatics on the first turn I built them. Really hosed me over in one situation as the town I built it at had weak defense. Something that reminded me to post about this was noticing an ex Luchuirp lunatic. It was 3 star, carrying a hammer, and Orthus' Axe. This would have been the Luchuirp's strongest unit. Instead, they lost one of their cities to it. Not awesome.
For clarification, there are times when a % chance to turn barbarian are great. The Avatar of Wrath makes for chaotic fun (although that seems absent from this patch). Also works great for ravenous werewolves, especially as there are easily accessible mechanisms to catch them back. With most other units, you're only option is command 3 or Mind 3, command 3 being a rather small chance that also depends on the success of the attack and Mind 3 being rather late game.
So...who's with me? Shall we end this random scourge?

 

[pvt chaos]

No, I dont think its a good idea. You can counter the chance to become barbarian easily by casting the 1st law spell -> loyalty. This way your unit will never go barbarian and you will still keep the bonus.

 

[Sarisin]

I agree with you in that I hate it when I get a unit with the Enraged promotion. As you said, it is not a matter of if, but when. Every unit with the promotion seems to go barbarian eventually. In the case of the Lunatic, I stopped building them when I have OO as they are notorious for going barbarian in short order.

One related thing I have noticed is that sometimes you don't even get a chance to do anything about a unit going barbarian. For example, I have had werewolves kill a unit defending and the resulting ravenous werewolf is 'born' as a barb unit. I once built a Lunatic and it came out of the shoot as a barb.

Having said all that, as mentioned, if you know you are going to have Enraged units, it is an absolute must that you have a unit that can cast Loyalty. Otherwise, you are just asking for trouble. The AI, of course, cannot do this and you often see the result of their units going barb. Strangely, I often see barb Ecclesiastics wandering around the map.

Yeah, keep it in the game and use Loyalty as your countermeasure.

 

[Mergle]

No, I dont think its a good idea. You can counter the chance to become barbarian easily by casting the 1st law spell -> loyalty. This way your unit will never go barbarian and you will still keep the bonus.

Micro hell though. Perhaps if would be better that if you have law mana, enraged promotions won't trigger defection (w/o need to cast spell on each one).

 

[Pyr0mancer]

Personally, I welcome defection. It means xp for my non-crazed units, or perhaps a chance to remove enraged from another unit.

Ravenous werewolves are even better, since they're basically infinite XP for anything with Subdue Animal. Delete werewolf -> goes barb -> capture barb werewolf -> repeat

 

[SwordofStriker]

Personally, I welcome defection. It means xp for my non-crazed units, or perhaps a chance to remove enraged from another unit.

Ravenous werewolves are even better, since they're basically infinite XP for anything with Subdue Animal. Delete werewolf -> goes barb -> capture barb werewolf -> repeat

Ummm exploit?

 

[Sarisin]

Personally, I welcome defection. It means xp for my non-crazed units, or perhaps a chance to remove enraged from another unit.

Ravenous werewolves are even better, since they're basically infinite XP for anything with Subdue Animal. Delete werewolf -> goes barb -> capture barb werewolf -> repeat

Yeah, I've seen this exploit with Enraged Bears too! I have no idea how they got the Enraged promotion, but when I captured them, I deleted them, they turned barb and attacked. I captured again, and so the process repeated itself over and over and over again. It is a very easy way to get your Ranger or Beastmaster XP up to 100 (and beyond, if you have the required conditions).

Never tried it with a Ravenous Werewolf, though - I usually just kill 'em rather than capture again.

 

[hbar]

I like the added risk on units you know will get the promotion - Lunatics, Ravenous werewolves, etc. What I don't like is when having a source of Chaos mana mutates your early game warriors into enraged. That is too random, and is something you can't plan for/defend against. Losing a city to a crazed unit in the early game is simply not fun.

 

[Fafnir13]

Excerpt from the Civilopedia:

"A loyal unit will die instead of being converted to an opponent's cause."

If I'm reading this right, the unit will die instead of converting to barbarian. Better than having one of your high powered units go barbarian on you, but still not good.
Or is this another case where the Civilopedia is lagging behind updates to the game? If loyalty worked as advertised in this thread, then crazed doesn't seem so bad anymore.

 

[loki1232]

Maybe there should be a spirit or force spell -- "soothe," that removes the crazed and enraged promos from a unit.

 

[Niveras]

Yeah, I've seen this exploit with Enraged Bears too! I have no idea how they got the Enraged promotion, but when I captured them, I deleted them, they turned barb and attacked. I captured again, and so the process repeated itself over and over and over again. It is a very easy way to get your Ranger or Beastmaster XP up to 100 (and beyond, if you have the required conditions).

Never tried it with a Ravenous Werewolf, though - I usually just kill 'em rather than capture again.

Since about .33, or maybe .32, animals can purchase a promotion that is basically 'crazed' (+some strength, +1 movement, chance to turn barb). I think it's called feral.

 

[Caradoc]

I told this story before, but I think it's worth repeating. Playing Lanun, who have Chaos from their palace, you occasionally get a unit that is born Enraged. Once I had a Hawk that was born Enraged and did not think that would be a problem, but ...

When the Hawk eventually went Barbarian, it so happens I had left a city temporarily unguarded. So the Hawk had to leave my Hunter and needed to rebase, so it flew to that city and captured it! I believe this is the only known occurrence of a city having been captured by a Hawk.

 

[Goodgimp]

I told this story before, but I think it's worth repeating. Playing Lanun, who have Chaos from their palace, you occasionally get a unit that is born Enraged. Once I had a Hawk that was born Enraged and did not think that would be a problem, but ...

When the Hawk eventually went Barbarian, it so happens I had left a city temporarily unguarded. So the Hawk had to leave my Hunter and needed to rebase, so it flew to that city and captured it! I believe this is the only known occurrence of a city having been captured by a Hawk.

Haha, that is pretty funny!

I don't mind certain units being Enraged, but I think there needs to be a tradeoff. I don't see much use in building Lunatics, for example. Why go through the bother?

Still, the #1 thing that absolutely drives me nuts and really needs to change is the Chaos mana randomly enraging your units. I hate, hate hate this feature. I lost an archmage once, as I didn't realize he had the enrage promotion.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

Jeez, so Chaos mana will randomly make a unit enraged? Or does it just randomly make new units you create enraged? Because if its the former, thats pretty damn ridiculous in a game that encourages fewer high level units instead of mindless hordes.

 

[Blackmantle]

Sidar love enraged Units. More fights = more xp= more shades. So i really like this feature (even for nonsidar it means more xp which i still like.)
Nothing more reliable / errorproof on the side of the player for getting Xp than buying slaves in a city with an asylum and upgrading them to lunatics + boot them. (With animals one bad click can ruin it for you.)

Also Loyalty already prevents units with enraged / crazed to go barb 100% if you need it. The pedia is misleading on that sadly. And the AI cant use it. Yet!
No need to criticize features not implemented yet if the game is not ready yet though. Just wait and see.


And Mutation (the way roaming bears do get enraged / crazed as well.) is a godsend. The chance for Chaos Mana to mutate is so low it really shouldn't be an issue (with one node at least. Its 3% with an even smaller chance within those of again 8% each for enraged and crazed.).
Sure you can get an extremely! unlucky draw with 2 in a row. But so can you with starting position and many other things. And it should be far more seldom than that.
If you utterly hate random effects its not for you though. There law comes in handy...

Also crazed unit + loyalty = very powerful if unreliable boost or especially burning blood + loyalty = very powerful boost.

@ fuzzy_bunnies: in short: only newly built ones i belive. And the chance of it is just 3% to mutate. For those mutated ones there is an 8% chance each to get enraged / crazed. Only crazed beeing a serious problem since enraged goes away after the unit in question wins one fight (which enraged also helps to win quite alot.)
Only ways to prevent a unit with crazed to turn barb whould be a) to have it lose a fight or b) to cast loyalty (law 1 spell) on it.

 

[kumquatelvis]

What made me unhappy was losing my hero to the enraged promotion. Guess old Threepwood just couldn't take it anymore. It's also a problem during extended periods of peace. You will essentially lose all of your enraged units before the next war.

 

[Pyr0mancer]

The solution was staring you in the face, you know. How do you remove enraged? Win a fight. What do enraged units do? Turn Barbarian. What do you do with Barbarians? Fight them.

Seriously, if some important unit gets enraged or even crazed, just keep a stack of cheap, enraged/crazed units nearby. If you manually delete an enraged unit it turns barbarian instantly, allowing you to kill it with your important unit and remove enraged.

 

[Fafnir13]

And hopefully your important unit doesn't turn barb on its first turn of enragement.

Also Loyalty already prevents units with enraged / crazed to go barb 100% if you need it. The pedia is misleading on that sadly. And the AI cant use it. Yet!

Okay, this makes it much more manageable. Still a bit of a micromanagement headache, but there are a good number of those in the game. I suppose the simplest way to do it is have an adept parked in each city ready to cast loyalty as soon as things get built. Could also load them up with mind 1 and get some extra research for your trouble.
Well, thanks for the help there. Now I can finally build asylums and lunatics again.

 

[Caradoc]

When building Freaks, I get a fairly high incidence of them being born Enraged and immediately going Barbarian. Fortunately, they do not attack the city on that same turn, so you have a chance to deal with them. But this is a case where Loyalty does you no good, since you don't have an opportunity to cast it.

The other day I was fooling around with the Dark Mirror and found that the illusionary counterpart of a Mutated unit will get Mutated again. In this case, it become Enraged and then went Barbarian. No harm, though, since it was gone before it could attack.

 

[cyther]

I told this story before, but I think it's worth repeating. Playing Lanun, who have Chaos from their palace, you occasionally get a unit that is born Enraged. Once I had a Hawk that was born Enraged and did not think that would be a problem, but ...

When the Hawk eventually went Barbarian, it so happens I had left a city temporarily unguarded. So the Hawk had to leave my Hunter and needed to rebase, so it flew to that city and captured it! I believe this is the only known occurrence of a city having been captured by a Hawk.

Reminds me of when I was Lanun and ended up with a large number of enraged settlers. It seems every time they were out of my reach they would go barb on me.