FfH2 0.15 Balance Recommendations

[Sureshot]

could make mana nodes in a cities radius grant XP bonuses to adepts trained there

 

[QES]

Has anyone ever made very good use of Barnaxus? By the time i make him I never really get to use him. (I'm at peace and the barbarians are gone). Also - since hes not a hero (he ought to be) and doesnt gain xp by himself, he always gets killed by the time i wanna use him. As the Luchurip seem very dependant on "good golems" for warfare, it strikes me as necessary to level up ol' Barnaxus to decent levels. The only time he ever gets involved he dies, and my late game suffers cause i have 0 decent golems.

Shouldnt Barnaxus gain exp as a hero? Maybe either VERY slowly, or give him a cap not as high as regular heros? The issue for me is that when he's useful as a str 5, Im typically not at war with barbarians dead. I shouldnt be FORCED to declare war on someone so that i've a viable late game strategy should i?

Maybe I'm just confused as to how he works.
-Qes

 

[Maniac]

could make mana nodes in a cities radius grant XP bonuses to adepts trained there

That would force you to build all your adepts in that single city to avoid inefficiency though. Not fun IMHO. Same with those wonders that only give promotions to the city it is in. :q:

 

[Sureshot]

to some extent maybe, but sometimes you just gotta ignore certain things and then enjoy them as bonuses when itactually proves useful

barnaxus getting 1xp per turn would definately be bad (remember, his promotion rate means the promotion rate of all those golems, so if he got 1xp per turn you're basically givign every golem the hero promotion). a slow rate might be interesting.

 

[Kael]

I don't know how balanced or unbalanced this is, but it kinda got me miffed: I usually don't even bother making any kind of effort for bowyers as the gains it gives for the amount of research requiered doesn't seem so great. I'm usually at or past iron working by the time I get research or trade for it. Well I was playing a game as Amurites and after getting bronze working I found no copper resoruces in any reasonably accessible areas, the nearest was deap within my neighbors territory. So I began making plans to warmonger and since I was Amurite I decided to go for bowyers to get the bowmen instead of head for iron working and hope for the best. Though I had built up a preaty good research base, this still tooks some time as I was cramed into 3 cities (one almost devoid of commerce). Well I finally get there and am ready to start making some bowmen to get my war on and I find out they requier a metal. One of the perks about bowmen in vanilla was that they did not requier metal, and therefor could provide some means of medium strength combat for those lacking metal.
I understand that a 6 str unit with no resource requierment might be a bit much, so maybe they could be 5 but not requier metal.

Recon are the section of untis that dont require any resources. Archers require resources at 1 level laters than melee units. So their t3 units require copper and their t4 units require iron.

I will take a look at the research cost of bowyers, and see if it should be adjusted.

 

[Kael]

The vampire Lord requiring lvl 12 is crazy. I dodnt think Ive ever had a unit hit lvl 12 in any game ive played. Lvl 6 is fine but 12 is insane.

Level 12 isnt very hard for a vampire.

 

[Kael]

Maybe I missed something, here, but aren't the mana nodes supposed to give a and boost? Now we're back to square one, trying to keep them out of your workable radius...

Yeah, the bonus's were removed when the new mana system was put in. I feel mana nodes are worthwile as is and dont need a production change too.

 

[Kael]

Has anyone ever made very good use of Barnaxus? By the time i make him I never really get to use him. (I'm at peace and the barbarians are gone). Also - since hes not a hero (he ought to be) and doesnt gain xp by himself, he always gets killed by the time i wanna use him. As the Luchurip seem very dependant on "good golems" for warfare, it strikes me as necessary to level up ol' Barnaxus to decent levels. The only time he ever gets involved he dies, and my late game suffers cause i have 0 decent golems.

Shouldnt Barnaxus gain exp as a hero? Maybe either VERY slowly, or give him a cap not as high as regular heros? The issue for me is that when he's useful as a str 5, Im typically not at war with barbarians dead. I shouldnt be FORCED to declare war on someone so that i've a viable late game strategy should i?

Maybe I'm just confused as to how he works.
-Qes

The Luchuirp are all about Barnaxus. He is probably the most powerful hero in the game, but you may need to adjust your strategy to be able to get good results.

 

[Maniac]

Yeah, the bonus's were removed when the new mana system was put in. I feel mana nodes are worthwile as is and dont need a production change too.

No one questions the worth of mana nodes. People question the use of having them in your city radius.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

No one questions the worth of mana nodes. People question the use of having them in your city radius.

Well, then they are easier to protect. Powercomes with a cost, in ths case a slight tile penalty.

Has anyone ever made very good use of Barnaxus? By the time i make him I never really get to use him.

Extrodinary use. Start a war if you need to. Rush towards knowledge of the ether after construction so you can keep him healthy. And with resurection, you aren't screwed late game if he dies.
It might be nice if he could get heroic strength, but then, after leveling up, just replace him and keep in tucked away safely in the capital.

 

[Maniac]

Well, then they are easier to protect. Powercomes with a cost, in ths case a slight tile penalty.

True of course. For the record, personally I don't really care where the nodes are.

 

[Sureshot]

Recon are the section of untis that dont require any resources. Archers require resources at 1 level laters than melee units. So their t3 units require copper and their t4 units require iron.

I will take a look at the research cost of bowyers, and see if it should be adjusted.

its placement on the tech tree seems good, but its cost is double that of the tech that gives Stygian guards O_o (Fanaticism gives Stygian guards and costs half the amount of Bowyers, and Fanaticism comes 1 step later than Bowyers on the tech tree).

 

[Chandrasekhar]

Well, then they are easier to protect. Powercomes with a cost, in ths case a slight tile penalty.

Couldn't the same thing be said about valuable resources like mirthril? And yet mithril gives you eight or something to that effect.

Having a tile that you can't improve in your city radius is really just a penalty of whatever you would normally put there. So if a mana node spawned right next to my capitol, it's sacrificing the 1, four extra that I would normally put there. Is there some reason for taking their yields away that I'm not aware of?

 

[Sureshot]

a new terrain could be created called unuseable terrain that only mana nodes spawn on so you wouldnt feel like you're not putting them to use (since otherwise theyd just be 0 yield tiles that cant be improved) lol

 

[Kael]

Couldn't the same thing be said about valuable resources like mirthril? And yet mithril gives you eight or something to that effect.

Having a tile that you can't improve in your city radius is really just a penalty of whatever you would normally put there. So if a mana node spawned right next to my capitol, it's sacrificing the 1, four extra that I would normally put there. Is there some reason for taking their yields away that I'm not aware of?

Its a trade off, it has pros and cons. The most efficient build may be to have the node in your empire but outside of your city radius. If so you may need to consider if you want to drop your city right beside to hook it up right away or go farther from it and have it take longer to access, and risk an opponents cultural borders will take it.

As for the mithril, we dont balance like that. I have no desire to have a mana node conform to the same laws as a mithril node. In fact my goal is the opposite (to have each object present its own issues and flavor).

But the heart of it is that having mithril close to a city would increase the cities production capability, but a death node... probably not.

Ideally I would like some node types to give bonuses (life boosts the health of the city that works it, death lowers the health, chaos increases the chance of revolts, law increasces productivity, etc etc). But their is a problem in that the AI would find the most rewarding of these and just build tons of that type. So if earth was the best all of the ai leaders would build nothing but earth nodes.

In time we may work around that and have the AI block those bonus's when considering which one it prefers. But for now they all have to be equal. And I cant picture a money or production boost that is applicable to all types.

 

[Halancar]

The vampire Lord requiring lvl 12 is crazy. I dodnt think Ive ever had a unit hit lvl 12 in any game ive played. Lvl 6 is fine but 12 is insane.

Vampires are really really good at gaining xp. They can attack as many time as they want a turn (using bloodpets to sustain themselves), and they can gorge themselves on xp. Personally, I use the feast ability a lot on captured cities, since they will probably loose a lot of population anyway due to high unhappiness...

Lvl 12 is what, 122 xp ? If you play aggressively the whole game and protect your best units, that's easy.

 

[Mavy]

Has anyone ever made very good use of Barnaxus? By the time i make him I never really get to use him. (I'm at peace and the barbarians are gone). Also - since hes not a hero (he ought to be) and doesnt gain xp by himself, he always gets killed by the time i wanna use him. As the Luchurip seem very dependant on "good golems" for warfare, it strikes me as necessary to level up ol' Barnaxus to decent levels. The only time he ever gets involved he dies, and my late game suffers cause i have 0 decent golems.

Shouldnt Barnaxus gain exp as a hero? Maybe either VERY slowly, or give him a cap not as high as regular heros? The issue for me is that when he's useful as a str 5, Im typically not at war with barbarians dead. I shouldnt be FORCED to declare war on someone so that i've a viable late game strategy should i?

Maybe I'm just confused as to how he works.
-Qes

had a game with the luchirup and got barnaxus while there where still some barbarians around, i used him to kill as many of the invading barbarians as possible and got him the combat 5 promotion quickly.
that made my golems extremely powerful, barnaxus wasn't of any use though, i mean actively, since he isn't strong enough and he's far to valuable to risk getting him killed.

Imho the Luchirup are too dependent on their hero Barnaxus, he makes a great difference.
Don't get me wrong, i like the idea of that hero very much, its just that if he's not around the golems are quite weak, with him they are extremely strong.

Maybe instead of giving the other golems the combat 1-5 promotions he could give them a percentage of his XP, maybe 10-20%.
and i would give Barnaxus some sort of Immortal promotion, he gets revived in the capital after dying but looses all XP.
It would still be devastating to the Luchirup, since their Golems will loose all their XP, but they have a chance to gain their strenght back.
Maybe the "reborn" Barnaxus could come back with a higher base strenght, if you have access to iron, copper or mithril.

just my thoughts about that particular hero, right now you have pretty much lost if you loose barnaxus, unless you're much stronger than everyone else, and someone might consider using barnaxus to attack with just a 99% chance, without relying on saving/loading, which kinda feels like cheating.

mfg
Mavy

 

[Grey Fox]

In time we may work around that and have the AI block those bonus's when considering which one it prefers. But for now they all have to be equal. And I cant picture a money or production boost that is applicable to all types.

Why not make each have an equal bonus and equal penalty (in the eyes of the AI).

And isnt there a function in the SDK that the ai uses to value bonuses? You could add all your mana bonuses there and tweak the ai value for each.

 

[Kael]

Why not make each have an equal bonus and equal penalty (in the eyes of the AI).

And isnt there a function in the SDK that the ai uses to value bonuses? You could add all your mana bonuses there and tweak the ai value for each.

Yeap, thats the AI change I was refering to.

 

[Frozen-Vomit]

How many mana nodes are created with rites of ogmah?

I countend fife new sources on a large map - seems pretty few for all the time spent to get it finished...