I don't think I would nix the VM, I would just make it a later summon.

Anyway, no Vigilant Minion is going to cast more than two Arcane Dooms in a single battle, and having 7 before offspring (who take a looong time to mature) takes an awful luck and serious resource investment (gold, mostly).

Vigilant Minions are much stronger in epic games though, due to the longer window before regular units became dominant.

Well if it wouldn't be a problem against humans all I can say is: let's try it out & the AI is REALLY bad if you're right about that one. Seriously, 4 vigilant minions dominate everything so hard you can just run to everyone's capital and totally destroy whatever they have.

And about stacks of 12 peasants: it will take a lot of research and a lot of turns till you have your first one, by that time I'm sure I have overrun you. Maybe if you throw everything on warresearch? But still, it's the only ability coming anywhere near that level of power. And also: people are talking about stacks being overpowered as well, and the first strike needing nerfing or such.

All I can say is that if you are right and stacks of 300 hp units are common quite early then:

a) AI is utter utter crap,

magic damage dealing spells utterly suck then. When you're wizard with 4 fire shards, high int and infernal commonly misses half the units it attaks, and dealing below 15 hp on the rest while max is 260 and units have 300 hp, then something is indeed wrong!

Wrong. Leveled to 5, they have 10/10 mana. Unless you're doing the same thing, (which you're not, since this is the AI we're talking about) they'll get to cast three in one battle. Two the first round, one the second. On round 3, your foot troops will finally get to attack.

As for making 7 champions, as soon as you have a child with substantial essence (read as: 40+), you can imbue champions til the cows come home. And they'll all start almost ready, if not ready, to summon a VM, and costs a base of between 80 and 150 Gildar. Cheap.

So...

Get hero. Spend gold.

Spend essence.

Have them fight one battle.

Tada, new minion.

What do champions have to do with this? It's pretty common knowledge the only thing they're truly good for is being made into spellcasters. A lvl 2 imbued champion has enough mana to summon a VM.

Lol, no, it doesn't. It takes time, that's all. If you pour all your leveling points into this strategy, it takes about as long as it takes for one child to be born. The only luck-contingent part there is finding a female who doesn't have a Prestige requirement, which ain't hard.

Buying 4 champions is about as costly as a unit in the 100 attack, 100 defense, 360 hp, range and I figured I should point that out.

Anyway, in the game I am playing Vigilant Minions aren't gaining essence as they level (I have a level 4 right here that still has 5 essence) so I really don't know why yours have so much more essence. Do you have elemental shards or research increasing their pools?

Yeah, just build 1 25% essence building and you have 6 mana, enough to cast it twice.

And those people talking about how it's not a problem and how you can have 7 minions by the time you have your first child born... no, I usually have won by turn 50 (I play medium maps, maybe that helps me), just around getting my first child. You don't need more then 2 minions for a long time anyway.

If this was a MP thread, or if MP was even relevant at this point, I'd agree.

But it's not, and it isn't. "Butchering the AI" is exactly what the problem is, because of underlying balance issues with the unit itself. Since they're the only opponent we have, a sure fire way to butcher them is a problem. Elemental is a SP game until the MP is active, as far as I'm concerned.

As for rush vs. long term strategy, again, you ignore resources completely while making the warfare argument. Or do you have all the metal, material and crystals, research and economy by turn 100 to create 9x9 units of decked out Shock Troopers? THAT's luck. VM's are an imbued champion and 5 mana.

But let me offer some suggestions instead of just disagreeing with you.

-A cap on the total # of a summoned unit allowed.

-Arcane Doom costing all the VM's action points per round.

-Moving the VM to a higher spell level.

-Increasing the cost of their summon.

-Increasing the mana point cost of Arcane Doom.

-Removing true damage from the attack.

-Reducing the damage of the attack while keeping true damage.

It's all a balance issue right now, numbers vs. when they're introduced, and some unbalanced thinking in the way summons work. But it IS out of whack, and it IS by far one of the most useful units in the game, at perhaps the cheapest cost and easiest access.

That has a lot to do with it.

Then you're playing a short game. Of course you don't need more than 2 minions, the AI never built up to the point where you'd need more than that.

Well, ok, let's ignore MP for now since it doesn't exist. But butchering the AI is piss easy even on ridiculous difficulty, it's not even a question of whether or not you'll win, just how long it will take you to roll over all your opponents one after one (or win using one of the other victory methods). Your reasoning is basically that the AI is bad at countering VMs -> VMs are overpowered. But there are so many ways to mop the floor with the AI that it can't counter that I don't think you can reasonably make the claim that anything that kicks the AIs ass is overpowered; it's more a general problem that the AI doesn't receive enough help on the highest difficulties and it's unable to use its advantages effectively.

The problem is that Vigilant Minions can come into play at a stage where they are dis-proportionally powerful, even in small numbers. The other side of the coin is that their utility drops rapidly as the game progresses. Eventually, there's units that Vigilant Minions can't deal with; being to build those is contingent on having key technologies. Those key technologies can also be reached very quickly if you focus on them. When you have those technologies it's still a good idea to use Vigilant Minions, they are powerful. It's absurd to call Vigilant Minions invincible or even the best way to go just because the AI can't deal with them.

Anyway, to deal with the balance issue I would either increase the units cost or the research level where it's available. I would probably do both, actually. Level 6 seems to be a good spot, it's one level higher than the rock giant which has a similar special ability (aoe, but weaker) but is a stronger fighter. The mana cost ought to be around 10, as 5 allows the minion to pretty much be instantly recast if it dies (or is disbanded, as an out of essence vigilant minion is worthless while a newly summoned one has full essence). Ten is also the same as the Ice Lord's cost (I think) which is a better summon to deal with indigenous monsters but worse against enemy nations.

I'm not disagreing the AI is bad and that's a huge problem with respect to the kinds of things players and their units can do.

Thing is, I'm not just assuming the AI is going to magically get better in a short period of time, and know that VMs just need to die immediately.

I'm assuming the AI getting better is going to be a slow, iterative process.

So rather than just rationalizing that the AI will be fixed at some point, they should make some very simple changes to get the unit where it should be.

And I guess my biggest problem with them right now is...yeah, the AI is easy and you don't necessarily need VMs to cheat and/or stomp it. But they're by far the easiest way to do it, and require less out of you as a player. I could just not use VM, just like I choose not to stack 100 Rings of Defense. But unlike an obvious bug in the equipment system, the VM is an actual unit with a place and a purpose that is just out of whack, and will continue to be until it's changed. Why bother waiting on an AI update when there's obvious balance that the unit itself needs?

Also: holy crap I edit my posts often.

This I can agree with, and I do think VMs are in need of a nerf too, just that there are other things that need so to a greater extent (acessories stacking and the Yithril in general are the most pressing). The entire summoning section may be better off if summons are limited to 1 unit per faction for any given spell imo.

Some accessories don't really need a need, their marginal cost is way too high (why buy 3 rings of defence when I can just build another unit of doom?).

I would love to see a more cost effective way of improving champions added, and a fix that enforces limits on the actually useful accessories like movement and sight.

I think it's more the behavior of aggressive factions in general he's talking about. Ythiril and Kraxis in particular just seem to rampage in every game they play, while Kingdom factions are much more reserved and don't expand nearly as fast.

Really. That extra HP right at the start of the game would make your soldiers at least 1/3rd as powerful, at least according to combat rating.

It's very simple to get 4 heroes imbued and to at least level 2 by turn 20.  At which point you begin to be literally unstoppable if you attack.  40 damage to every unit on the field will win you battles on the first turn against neutrals right to the end.  Scratch that, the hermit has 59 hitpoints, so between turn 20 and completing master quest (if you can avoid conquering the world for that long), you will need 6 VMs--6 L2 imbued heroes, to defeat the hardest monsters in the game.

Against the AI it is a little trickier.  You need to get those VMs to level 8 so they can hold 6 essence each.  This doubles their damage.  80 points first round.  Anything that doesn't clear you can plink once or twice with a spell to finish off, or use a hero with dominate, wait for it to approach your lines, then beat it senseless with no repercussion.  No dominate?  Just keep one troop of dudes strong enough to reliably deal 10-20 damage in one hit.  This is very easy to do.

Rinse lather repeat, hire every hero you see, imbue, summon, be unstoppable.  End every combat in turn 1.  If you pick up demons, then oh boy, you just added 40 damage on turn 1 per demon in army on top of what your VMs were doing.

Solution?  Single target 10 true damage, that fits with the level, or battlefield wide 10 normal damage.  Stacking these little dudes is kind of ludicrous.

It does work... your sov gets +10 hp.  I hope no one thought that it was supposed to give every one of your troops an extra 10...

1 per faction per summon spell would be boring... I thought we wanted a more magical world...

The stackable equipment thing is annoying but honestly, if you can't use those thousands of gp it costs for ringstacks to actually become effective more productively, then you really shouldn't be playing strategy games.

The VM problem is significant simply because it is so damn cost effective.

No changes on the Vigilant minion front as of version 1.07; still overpowered as ever

It takes 100 turns for your baby to grow up. Plus you have to marry (Janusk, which still takes ~5 turns to get your reputation high enough), and you have to roll "lucky" to have a baby. So it takes a good 125 turns at least to critical mass, which is more than enough time to prepare for a swarm of VMs.

By that time, Squads and Groups should be the normal unit tiers... so not really an issue.

Just because the Vigilant minion is not unbeatable, does not mean it is not overpowered.

I still contend that it is really a trivial matter to come up with 5-10 VMs, capable of dishing out 100-200 damage in a single round.  You don't even need your offspring to imbue enough champions if you just increase your essence every level.  At spell level 3 means you can access them easily within 50 turns.  There simply isn't a monster in the game that can stand up to 100-200 damage in the first round.  For instance, the "Master Quest" final encounter dies to three level three summons in the first round.

Researching warfare really doesn't help against VMs because the damage ignores armor.  The only stat that slows them down is raw hitpoints.  The only way to increase a units HP is by increasing squad size, adding magical rings and amulets, and adding expensive medical kits.  Crystal is a difficult resource to find, and not a practical solution.  Med kits are closer, but still very expensive for mass production.  And the ultimate ceiling is (5 + 1 + 3 + 5 + 2) a unit with 16 hitpoints per figure--if I missed a modifier, let me know.  With Grim Defiance (a level 6 spell), that's 26.

16 x 12 = 192 hitpoints.

26 x 12 = 312 hitpoints.

Bear in mind that these uberunits  require significantly more research to produce, and are outrageously expensive.  It is doubtful that one could produce 12 figure units anywhere near the right time frame.

The other method would be to produce huge stacks of the monster units available from diplomacy.  This will counter VMs very well, until you consider how much those monster units cost.

Errr... How is this balanced?  Simply making arcane doom a single target true damage spell would be more reasonable, and still bloody powerful.  Perhaps demons should receive a new ability that gives them a 3x3 square of doom.