MiamiBigAL

What level difficulty was that harpo? At harder difficulties the creatures have many multiples more hp, etc.

May want to be careful with boosting cities too much. It will power up the Master scout trait, enabling you to randomly settle cities with strong auto-defences.

Trading away influence, prestige, etc, is not realistic at all anyway, so what it comes down to is whether changing the influence game mechanics adds to game play and strategy. I'm all for finding more uses for influence if it adds to game play, though i would think that would take a lot of re-balancing, probably too much at this stage. There is nothing "broken" about the way influence works now (except trading abuse).

Wizard's idea is good, except I think +1 production/city level could be a bit op.

And you get better deals in trades. You can abuse it to steal all the computer's resources at no cost.

You're right about inspiration. It should probably only be +1 research, period. Just like enchanted hammers is +1 hammer, period. If you start with a 2-3 essence city, your research sky rockets out of control.

There would be certain situations where throwing knives with extra range would encourage kiting. Given that it is already a big issue it would be better to opt for bigger damage I think.

It would require massive rebalancing. e.g. would flame dart kill one unit or more? Is it limited to only melee? High damage low initiative weapons would be less effective (and vice versa would be true). It just seems a pain in the ass to change. I'm currently playing a game on insane, and right now it's about 4 hits 1 kill on a group of mites. fun fun.

I didn't like sins that much. It was too slow. I prefer proper RTS in the ilk of starcraft or turn-based civ-type games. That said, I did appreciate the game design of sins even if it wasn't for me.

I think the main problem is with champion-scaling. It is relatively easy to get high level unstoppable champions. I think that regardless of scaling the last boss should be a lot tougher anyway. Maybe make him magic immune like the obsidian golems. Slow/Haste alone makes him a piece of piss to beat.

Took my own solution right out of my mouth Derek. I was actually thinking of making the floor 10, which still allows 3 attacks for every 1 for a hero with 30 initiative (extremely easy to get with haste). At a floor of 5 initiative, it's 6 attacks for every 1 at 30:5 initiative ratio, which still feels quite high. Imagine 6 champions with 6:1 ratio; that means 36 attacks for every 1 Torax attack. I'm not sure his strength makes up for this, but it's up to y

It also made CPU Gilden put the smackdown on CPU Resoln in my last game b/c Resoln's magic was useless in auto-resolve.

Um, that is not true Rogdan. If you have two heroes in the same army, they get 1/2 experience they would otherwise have.

I like the tax change, although it makes me lean towards the idea of doubling all gold sources. I don't think I've ever run a tax rate of more than 50%, so even doubling would result in less money than before.

Okay, how about this logic: A very old game has managed to implement focus-fire AI, from a non-professional amateur modder with a day job. Therefore, it is safe to assume that it does not take a leap of faith to believe a professional game designer, 15 years later, can do at least the SAME thing. Note that the tactical battle systems of both games are virtually identical.

ddd888, As I said in my original post, just because the AI does not have the capability of taking advantage of weaknesses in counter attack does not mean counter attack is OP. All it means is counter attack is OP against incompetent AI. Fix the AI and you will help fix the counter attack. It does not seem difficult to change the code t

There needs to be a way form getting from level 1 to 2. That used to be beating up on creatures such as mites. That is no longer the case, so I ask....how the F**k do I level my crappy tarth sovereign with -8 initiative and a pee shooter when the worst creatures in the game are now dark sorcerer clones?

Taxes really confused me as well until I *think* I worked out how they work. You can only get gold income from tax % of total output. In other words, if my city produces 4 gold and i have 0% tax rate, then I get 0 gold from that city. But if my tax rate is on 50% ,then I get 2 gold from that city. It was pretty annoying in my last game because I cast prosperity on a city that gives 1 gold/essence and I had 2 essence. Intuitively you would think I would then g

Try playing on higher difficulties with the blindness spell. Mites are supposed to be the easiest mob to defeat, the best way to get from level 1 to 2 or 3. I payed with a sov and a champion with buffs during early stages of the game and got my ass handed to me cause I missed every single attack except 1 b/c I got blinded by mites....and then died to...MITES!!!

Ahem...my Tarth hero and fellow champion got owned by a few mites that decided to blind both of them. Mind you it was on expert level, but we're talking about mites here! Anyway, i'm not arguing one way or another.

The examples and analyses people gave before all involved big armies. I was just using their examples. Anyway, as long as you have an army of at least 3, you can minimize the counter-attack damage to 33%. I would not call an army of 3 large by any means.

There are some very good mathematical analyses of some of the weapons in this thread, but everyone seems to have made one fundamental flaw in the analysis of counter-attack. The OP's assumption is "counter attack is basically just one extra attack per turn", and later calculations based on counter-attack involve doubling the dps because of the counter-attack trait. In reality, counter-attack only activates if your unit is attacked. If it is not attacked, counter-atta

It isn't just a problem with Torax. Slow can be extremely powerful when shard-boosted on a number of monsters. Given how difficult it is now to acquire shard power, some may argue that if you can acquire a -8 initiative slow spell, maybe you deserve to beat Torax. Haste has the same "problem", but is arguably more overpowered because you can always successfully cast it. I think a good way to "fix" overpowered low-cost boosted spells would be to have varying casti

I've found that Monsters never attacked my cities when I was Pariden. I think the Monster aggressiveness is probably lower in this patch.

Try to understand this AI behaviour from a dev's point of view. Human players will often retreat injured troops so they live to fight another day. I am guessing Frogboy is just trying to replicate this behaviour, successfully or not.