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Originally Posted by jorko80
That's why the creatures should be stronger and bigger in numbers to compensate for your spells and spirits. And the player must think hard what ability or spell to use,not just throwing armies at each other.
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I got some ideas here...
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Originally Posted by jorko80
The immobile guards are a very important part of the game. You should fight your way to the goodies , not just get everything for free, it feels more rewarding. And also make you think : Can I kill those guys now,what will I lose, does it worth it ,what will I gain and so on...
While on the subject - the guards for the book of the Dead in elven lands are also easy to bypass and that opens the way to dragons ,runes and quests too easily. In GM there are 2 guards of each book - 1 in elven lands and 1 in death lands,both immobile, it is way more challenging.
About Gerda - you have no problem with accessing her earlier ,because she is in lower haddar and the immobile guard should be in a narrow area when you enter Taron Mines. So enjoy  |
Sounds like immobilizing the guards is the way to go - looks like I need to find out how to do this - is Grandmaster available for download somewhere? I can do a little comparison of the files to see how they did it...
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Originally Posted by jorko80
Ofcourse I try to play always with zero losses ,but thats not an ultimate goal, I like to make calculations : what if I kill that army now, I will lose something, but probably gain more, do I have enough money to buy my army again, is there enough army in the shops and so on...
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You know, I wonder how much the original King's Bounty factored into no loss for the new King's Bounty. I've read posts here where people complain if they can't do no loss.
But if you play HOMM, then you're losing troops all the time.
So it is kind of interesting how between KB / HOMM there are these two different paradigms...
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Originally Posted by jorko80
About the life change : it's a bit annoying when I changed my wife in elven lands and then 40 battles waiting for new kids. The first time it's ok, but now it make my hero much weaker,the battles are harder ,but still it is boring to wait so long. And not knowing what bonuses I'll have makes me reluctant to change the wife. I did it just to see what happens ,but if I play 2nd time I probably will not do it. Feanora did gave me good bonuses. A proposal : make a list of the possible babies that the wife offers, so the player can make at least some estimation,if it's worth it to make the change. And reduce the fights needed from 2nd wife onwards to 5 combats per kid.
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This was part of the game mechanics, but I'm not sure if you've noticed - you get higher level wives / children during the later game to compensate. For example, the wife levels are:
- Rina / Zombie Rina - 1
- Feanora / Frog Feanora - 2
- Mirabella - 3
- Gerda - 3
- Orcelyn - 4
- Diana - 4
- Neoka - 5
- Xeona - 5
And the children are the same level as their wife so you get better and better babies with the later wives.
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Originally Posted by jorko80
Maybe adding +1 intelligence will help, that goes also to Scouting, it just stays to lvl1 and currently I will not spend more runes on it.
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I like this idea and will consider +1 at level 2, and probably +2 or 3 at level 3...
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Originally Posted by jorko80
hat doesn't sound good. If it is too hard to change the arts don't do it, but if it's not, then it's a must, because you leave a part of the game useless. After all balance is the most important part of the game. At least 50% increase to the mana arts is needed.
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You know, I've been considering for AP / CW to change artifacts with -stats to either get rid of the -stat part or make them better so to your point, I probably should look at the original items and see if they can use a boost.
I think what I'll do here is if I make any changes to the AP / CW items I'll eventually roll those back into the TL items.
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Originally Posted by jorko80
I noticed that right away,no worries and I like it. Still it's too powerful. It was cast on me and that's not much of a problem, the problem is ,that the enemy can't react always to it and the neutrals can't at all, so my opinion is that it is way unbalanced in the moment. Base duration for Sheep should be at least -1. |
Well, unfortunately, Sheep duration is 1, 2, 3 - so it is already minimum with a minimum increase in duration for each level. Plus you're spending 22, 38, and 55 mana for affecting level 1-2, 1-3, and 1-4 troops. So a Warrior will spend 55 mana and if they are lucky, may get it up to 4 duration if they have 15 Intellect @Sheep Level 3. The Warrior's Mana pool is roughly half the Mage's (just like the Mage's Rage pool is roughly half the Warrior's) so expect them to have about 100 or so mana. At Level 3 Sheep, this would be 50% of the Warrior's mana pool for one Sheep cast. For mage, you can probably get it up to 6 turns if you get yourself to 45 Intellect and it would be roughly 25% of your mana pool. Don't forget that it is also adjusted by enemy magic resistance so it could get reduced if you cast it on an Elf troop (they usually have magic resistance), for example.
So I think you'll find that the cost / duration are appropriate...
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Originally Posted by jorko80
You are not picturing this in your head clearly , there is no way in real fight that some swordsman army will sit in a row in front of the cannon and wait . All be involved in melee and it will be impossible for the canonners to operate the cannon ,henceforth the melee penalty. |
Evidently not! Maybe I got hit in the head with the cannon!
Okay, all kidding aside, I didn't change this, but it sounds like you think that Cannoneers should have a melee penalty. So I will consider...
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Originally Posted by jorko80
No rush needed . But WotN needs far more then just the things you've done to TL. The only part thats interesting and balanced are the 4 initial Islands and then when you kill the spider it gets messy,boring,ultimately easy. I hope you will have the patience to change it,I have many ideas. The russian top modders are so disappointed in it ,that don't want to do it and for now it's frozen  .
Thanks for your time
P. S. Really like the idea of Fatt Shade about the spell with poison damage boost |
Yah, that's the daunting task ahead of us for WotN - it needs a lot of work! I haven't even played it much, but I heard about Marshan Swamp and Demonis.
Okay, let me spill the beans on what is either under consideration or going to be implemented in AP / CW with respect to difficulty level changes.
- Difficulty Level Parameters:
- rndrecharge - round at which enemy units automatically have their charged attacks recharged. I might make it round at which they gain +1 charge, we'll see... The roundehero/tower/boss will be additive to this. So if you're fighting normal stacks, their charged attacks will be recharged every 5 rounds, if they have a hero, every 10.
- espelldur - number of rounds to add to enemy bonus spell / ability duration and subtract from enemy penalty spell / ability duration. For example, I think Hard will be +1 and Impossible +2. So if enemy mage casts Shield, then it will last 1 additional round on Hard and 2 on impossible. Conversely, if you cast Slow on enemy units, they will have that spell for -1 round on Hard and -2 on impossible. This will require some good playtesting to see if it ±2 is too much on impossible, but at least it is easily changed.
- eunit:
- Will be additive to enemy unit's Critical Hit. Right now with it being a multiplier, it doesn't have much affect on a unit with 5% Critical Hit. So instead it would be +25% (on Impossible) + the map location difficulty modifier for a total of +50% at game end. When I was thinking of this, I thought that units on the harder difficulty levels should have a greater percent chance of critical strike, but the multiplicative modifier just wasn't doing enough...
- I'm also considering making eunit be additive for resistances (right now it is multiplicative and so if you have 0% resistance then it is unaffected), but I think it probably will be way too potent. Can you imagine all enemies with +50% Resistance All at the end of the game! Yikes!
- This modifier will apply to enemy hero spell power. So they will get base +25% power to spells on Impossible + the map location modifier. So it will be like they have a Destroyer-like Skill, but applying to all spells.
- With espelldur above, I wouldn't need to modify duration, but if I don't implement espelldur, I could use eunit to modify spell / ability duration instead.
- This will also apply to Boss damage / duration. So once again you'll get +25% Boss damage + map location modifier on Impossible and +2 effect duration.
- For normal stacks:
- The most powerful stack will be the group leader (sort of like a mini hero) and will receive additional bonuses, possibly bonus spells, and I might see if I can make its representation 10% bigger so that you know they are the leader. This might make normal stacks more interesting. I may make it use eunit as a percent chance at getting certain bonuses. These won't be dispel-able most likely - we'll see...
- I may use eunit + map location modifier as a percent chance that starting units receive a bonus and possibly your troops receive a penalty.
- Totem-like bonuses to enemy stacks where a random negative spell is removed from them / a random positive spell is removed from your troops. Or I could have a certain percent to drop Shaman Totems on the battlefield to help enemy troops and hurt yours.
So these are some of the ideas under consideration. Hopefully this gets the juices flowing about what to consider for future implementation.
The idea is to expand eunit + map location multiplier to other aspects of the game (like the enemy hero spells and boss abilities) and make it more potent if it is having minimal impact on a certain aspect of the game. The trick is that right now enemy hero stacks are pretty much perfect, but normal stacks are too easy for the most part. You can't expect the normal stacks to be as hard as the enemy hero stacks, but some of the above might go a long way to making the normal stacks more challenging.
Okay, thanks again for the great comments!
Matt