FfH2 0.34 Balance Thread

[CockyWizard]

Ok, so I finally got to test out the latest version with the lairs. I remember playing on FF and really liking the lair effects. This time however, something has gone horribly wrong.

I am playing a multiplayer game with my dad. Five games in a row, one of us are completely destroyed by a monster that pops out of the lair. This never happened in Fall Further. The monsters that are being spawned are ridiculously over powered. In one, I popped a 8 Str, 2 Move Ogre who was accompanied by 3 Axemen, all before I've even researched my first tech. I mean, a bad result should result in loosing the unit who explored, not losing the game. When every single lair/ruin has the possibility of making you loose the game, what are you suppose to do?

 

[orangelex44]

Are you using the latest patch? Kael admitted somewhere that the lair events are currently a bit unbalanced in the early game, and I think he changed the availability of some of them to stop that kind of thing from happening.

 

[xienwolf]

agreed that Illians should keep the +1 commerce from riversides

btw, severed souls only last 1 turn? I am used to FF divided souls with permanent severed souls, was that overpowered or something?

I think the main reason behind having them be temporary is that the method Kael uses to track summoned units to their masters doesn't allow you to easily figure out which soul belongs with which Unit. Thus it would be quite difficult to know if you are calling in your 200 XP super-leveled Divided Soul, or your lair exploring Poisoned-Weak-Withered Divided Soul.





For giving the Barbarian Trait players something "more" to do with dungeons, why not allow Dungeons to play in reverse to how the Forts play for them?

Any unit which is at peace with the barbarians gets a spell called "Go Native" which they can cast while on a Dungeon. Once cast, the unit is lost to the player and will spawn as a more powerful Barbarian unit.


This way, you can "pump out" boss monsters from the lairs and have them rampage across the map for your. Of course you would have to have some cost involved in this beyond just the cost of the unit itself (gold, delay time on casting, chance of nothing happening at all - aka, unit dies), and preferably a method of making the spawned barbarian unit be based on the strength of the unit who went native (possibly spawn the exact same unit for the barbarians with either a partner of the same unit, or some promotions to enhance him. Could even include a decent chance he carries a minor item to reward the other civilization who finally beats it).

 

[PotatoOverdose]

Was is an epic (named) dungeon? Because otherwise I don't think it is supposed to be able to spawn that so early.

The dungeon I cited was a standard run of the mill dungeon. Absolutely nothing special in the way of terrain features.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

a damage limit on pyre zombies' collateral damage would be good. (i.e. not letting them actually KILL units with collateral damage) .

also, Aeron's Chosen is really really REALLY strong, kinda unkillable.

 

[CockyWizard]

It was patch "c", the latest that was available yesterday.

 

[Sarisin]

I think I probably need a refresher course or maybe new instruction on how Blight works in .34.

It just with the AC at 30.

For example, one of my cities has a population of 11. The Blight effect is 48 unhealthy!

All of my cities are going down to pop. 1. I'm not sure if they will go below that.

How can you get more unhealthy than the population? In this case it is more than 4 times the pop.

Thanks for bearing with my ignorance.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

the formula for blight is (rnd(15) + population - building health bonuses) as of 0.33 ( and 0.34 didn't change that AFAIK. I'm guessing that "rnd(15)" reads "a random number as low as 1 and as high as 15"

 

[Sarisin]

Well, I am still a little bewildered on Blight.

Five out of six of my cities went down to population 1. At the time I was in second place a little less than 100 points behind Cassiel. By the time I got my cities back on line again (about another 100 turns), Cassiel had more than 500 points than me.

I opened the World Builder once and found many of his cities (he had about 25) were still double digit population and had not been affected by Blight.

My cities were producing nothing, no Great People (Cassiel still getting those), and my research time almost doubled.

However, it didn't seem to affect the Grigori much at all.

What am I missing here?

 

[Ahriman]

Blight penalises large cities. Large cities get a much higher unhealth penalty, and it takes longer for the penalty to subside (I think it drops arithemetically not multiplicatively).

This overly penalises large cities IMO; a size 7 city might survive the blight unscathed, but a size 15 city will be getting (on average) an extra 8 unhealthiness, which is 8 less food per turn, which starves the city to death in quick succession.

Linear penalties for something with nonlinear costs is really really annoying.

I also wish that the blight cared about total health, not just health from buildings. Its lame to have to specifically build health buildings rather than accounting for the granary/smokehouse/harbor/keeping forest tiles that are actually keeping your city healthy.

 

[MiKa523]

Anyone else find it annoying that you need a sea habor instead of a training yard as Lanun in order to upgrade to or build Boarding Party??
I still don't understand, why you shouldn't be able to build them with a training yard or a sea habor.
Basicly you can't get Champions as Lanun, if you don't have coastal cities,
and when you don't have many coastal cities, it becomes very annoying MM in order to upgrade all your warriors/swordsmen.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I prefer to remove the boarding party UU, and instead make the Lanun Harbor UB grant the Boarding promotion to all melee units built in the city.


I also like making the promotions purchasable at Military Strategy with prereq promotions like Amphibious and Combat V.

 

[BillSeurer]

I agree blight seems to have gone overboard in .34. I was in the middle of a big struggle when blight hit and my 20-ish population cities all plunged down into the lower single digits and basically stalled the whole game for me as it was taking forever to produce anything useful from them. How did it change from .33? I remember getting hit with blight there but the effect wasn't nearly so severe IIRC.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

good call by Mika about the boarding party, I agree.

 

[BeefontheBone]

Reducing the blight unhealth when the city pop decreased (so that once-large cities didn't end up being more heavily affected) would make sense, but I'm not sure how to do it in a non-intensive way off the top of my head. Is there a trigger like onStarvation you could use to avoid an every-turn check?

 

[Demus]

[QUOTE='[to_xp]I love how the lairs are spawning ALLIES for barbtrait civs instead of enemies, and I love how it's actually better for them to keep lairs around so that they can spawn monsters to harass enemies. but still I think that the option to explore should be there. by the endgame for example, skeletons and lizardmen are going to be useless anyway, so you might as well take the chance and see if maybe you can get something useful out of there.
[/QUOTE]

Instead, i'd like to see the spawns from lairs upgrade along with the random barbarian spawns. For example: when the barbarian spawns start including axemen, make barrows spawn lizardmen rangers instead of normal lizardmen. Same for skeleton spawns.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Considering that Spiritual trait civs can upgrade Savants into mages what have Potency just like Arcane trait mages would, and that this promotion is all that Arcane currently gives, I'm thinking that Arcane needs some other boost. I think that a research boost (like the Barb trait research penalty in reverse) would be appropriate.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

nice idea Demus, I totally agree.

 

[Psycho_Ivan]

Instead, i'd like to see the spawns from lairs upgrade along with the random barbarian spawns. For example: when the barbarian spawns start including axemen, make barrows spawn lizardmen rangers instead of normal lizardmen. Same for skeleton spawns.

Only one problem with this... Rangers are pretty strong. Although that's easily mitigated so long as you make them come around at a later time, and not with the arrival of Axeman.

 

[Blackmantle]

@ MagisterCultuum: I believe Arcane grants 2 free promotions each level / upgrade as well. (Which is lost to Savants to start with. So 4 additional free promotions at archmage-level.)

Now that this bug has been fixed (all other civs got 2 free as well...) for non-arcane civs it should be OK. (Arcane is a rather weak trait for most leaders who have it. Teamed up with a stronger one usually. Spiritual is different in that regard.)

Not that i would think a slight research bonus (like 5% or some such) or something similar to make it a tad bit better would be a bad idea.