I've been playing FE religiously since its release. Here's my thoughts on some needed adjustments to balance and mechanics. I've settled into a VERY powerful strategy: Death Worship + a very magically powerful sovereign + corrupting every shard on the map to a death shard and harvesting it, then using Ceresa's Durge and wiping out all enemies just by looking at them funny with a solo sovereign, even ultra-powerful Gilden armies of barons and sons-of-the-forge. So maybe this strategy will get toned down in the future, but for now, it just dominates, and that combined with betrayers allows me to simply flip cities, (or just conquer them with Ceresa's Durge) sacrifice their people, and continue racking up mana. Anyway, here goes:
Curgen's Volcano: This spell absolutely needs looking into. It can be researched (so everyone can easily get it), costs a mere 500 mana (not a big deal by the time you can research it) and it can simply end the game by wiping out an enemy sovereign in one fell swoop. My suggestions:
1) It should not be researchable. It should require something along the lines of Fire+Earth Archmage levels of magic mastery.
2) It should cost something more like 1000 mana and have a multi-season cooldown. Or, it should only be castable by each sovereign once before it disappears forever.
3) It shouldn't be able to instantly murder enemy sovereigns (and thus their entire faction.)
And... other spells that can instantly destroy cities: FE takes civilizations "nuke" mechanic and dials it up to 11. It is a bit excessive. You don't really feel this until you play on a higher difficulty level and find an advanced enemy earthquaking all your cities into oblivion, which is simply not fun. Especially when you COULD HAVE simply done so with Volcano, but you didn't because that's dumb and way too easy. Oh, cool, my capital with several wonders is instantly gone. My suggestions:
1) There should be an essence enchantment on cities that protects them from enemy natural disaster spells. It would be researchable, but late game, and rather expensive.
2) If not an essence, then a unit ability that, when stationed in a city, offers some protection from those spells.
3) Or similar to 2, a city improvement.
Destiny's Gift: This spell can be used to buff a champion or sovereign to ungodly levels.
1) Its mana cost should be raised or...
2) It should have a cooldown of multiple seasons.
Paragon: The ultimate broken spell of brokenness. So, you're telling me, I can buff a champion to level 100+ basically just be repeatedly casting spells on it, and all it takes is a little mana? Plus, it's broken now. If you place your sovereign in a city, it doesn't lose HP. Hell, even if it did lose HP, you could buff it up with Destiny's Gift.
1) It should actually work and remove 5 HP from your sovereign.
2) And if your sovereign has 30 HP or less, it shouldn't be usable.
3) It probably shouldn't stack with xp% boosting items and abilities, since the tooltip says only one level.
Diminishing Returns versus linear formulas: Just about every number-based system in this game functions linearly. Rushing production in cities, boosting stats like dodge, spell resist, etc. It is very easy to have GODLY sovereigns and champions. You should absolutely still have them, but they should be godly because of the careful balance of equipment and abilities you put in them, not simply stacking stats easily to insane levels.
1) Permanent boosts to stats that function on a % scale should have diminishing returns, or a "soft cap." For instance, you get past 50% dodge, suddenly 1 point increase only results in 0.5 points increase, and so on as it continues to rise. Temporary boosts can stay linear, like a tactical spell you use to enhance these stats.
2) Rushing production in cities should take a look at how Civilization 4 does it. Huge cost for instant from zero, and an immediate drop on turn 2, with diminishing returns as time goes on.
By that same token, weak end-game enhancements that are weak because they're linear: Eventually, these essence enchantments and other bonuses that increase things by 1 are almost meaningless. Because everything is linear, nothing scales.
1) Review a wide range of bonuses and change arithmetic increases into % or exponential increases.
There's a lot more, but that's enough for now. Please share your thoughts.
I always thought the answer to balancing the strategic nukes was giving them a max range and cast time. So you actually have to go up to city and give the opponent a chance to counter.
Keeping in mind that this is a single player game and it is sometimes fun to be godly...
I agree with pretty much everything you said. A lot of it can be boiled down to % enhancements, even stacking, rather than straight #'s.
I haven't used destinies gift/paragon yet... I may need to play with it before it gets nerfed.
I agree 100% with everything the OP has pointed out.
Great strat with the Resolin!
Definitely strats like these should be toned down a bit. (there are a few for some of the other factions I've seen)
Either give the game ending spells like quake and volcano the requirements as OP suggested or give some way to counter them! End game shouldn't just be a spell that ends all spells! (unless you are going for spell of mastery victory of course)
I've never "exploited" the game with the enhancement spells mentioned but I can see how after more time playing I would eventually come to the same conclusions.
I hope devs read this and make some adjustments, just leaving this to modding IMO is a mistake.
It's a great game and (I hope) will only get better!
The volcano definitely should not instantly kill sovereigns (and thus entire factions) without the ability to recover at the nearest city, it's the only thing in the game that has this effect, it seems like an oversight.
The rest is more debatable - in general I'm okay with the idea of city destruction, spamming paragon/destiny's gift, etc.. the mana costs are not trivial, I feel like there should be some dramatic way to end a game once you've stockpiled enough mana, by the time you can burn 500 on a volcano or several stat-boosting spells it should be about time to conclude things anyway. I'd agree with higher mana costs (say double) on all those spells though, just to delay that dramatic endgame a little more, it can come too quickly. A range limit and/or cast time on the volcano would also be good, and the hp removal on paragon needs to work, that's definitely a bug.
I think most of the scaling works out well; linear isn't inherently bad, not every effect needs to be great both early game and later on. Obviously inspiration's +1 research sucks late game, but it's great early game, it has a certain niche that it fills well. Of course if the spell was say a flat +1 research and +5% per essence to the city's total, it could fill both niches, early and late game - that kind of universal usefulness is a good ideal to aim for, but I wouldn't call it essential. That being said there are a few stats where the linear scaling is just broken, dodge leaps to mind; diminishing returns would work well there.
Yeah, in my game design experience, I've often used both linear and exponential bonuses on the same power up. Like a healing potion that heals 10+25%, or like you said, inspiration giving you +1 AND +5%. +5% would be almost meaningless early game, but later, huge. And that makes sense, because the amount of essences available is extremely linear and limited.
Personally, I've never felt that this was worth ruining the magical power of the majority of my spell casters, since I find spells like Flame Dart and Fireball to be much more useful than low to moderate amounts of poison damage over ten turns and I don't like Cyndrum Demons. Plus, there isn't that much in Death Magic that shards are useful for, since its most useful spells (at least, the ones I find most useful) are curses whose effects are unaffected by shards, and I can get equivalent or better damage spells elsewhere. Certainly Wither is a nice army curse if I have a lot of shards, but Blind and Infection together are about as good, and Infection will spread any other curses I throw on the unit around to the rest of the enemy army, and both Blind and Infection have no dependency on Death Shards.
Granted, if I have enough high level conclaves Fire and Water magic can be largely unaffected by shard corruption, but that takes a while to come into play.
I'm fairly certain that a 5% bonus will remain fairly meaningless even in the endgame because of just how low the numbers for research are on any given city. If it were a bonus to gildar production, then it might be worthwhile on a town (though that is affected by the tax rate), but I suspect that research would be largely unaffected since research values are generally low even in conclaves. You might get an extra handful of research points out of it from your whole empire, at most. With the current research numbers, I think you gain more from switching to the +research per essence spell in the magic tree than you would gain from a +5% research bonus, assuming you're casting the spell on a site with at least two essence.
Regarding Paragon - I don't want the game to tell me how much health my sovereign must have before I can use this spell. If I want to make the trade-off that my Sovereign must sit at home because he's only got 1 permanent health because I had him cast Paragon multiple times on my heroes, then I should be able to do that. That my sovereign must have at least six permanent health to cast Paragon would be a reasonable restriction, but that the sovereign must have some arbitrary amount of permanent health that has no clear relation to preventing you from killing yourself? No thanks.
As far as the 'protection from strategic spells' enchantment/building/unit - maybe, but it'd need to have some kind of downside. The enchantment already does (sort of), since you'd be giving up one of a relatively limited number of essence slots for the protection, but the building doesn't have any clear downsides at the moment, since it's likely that the building would have no upkeep since none of the other buildings (that I know of) do. A unit that did this would seem somewhat strange to me - this seems more like something you'd have a dedicated group of people stationed permanently in the city to do, rather than having some traveling group that protects one city at a time, though I could see this for an army or as a temporary measure in a city.
With regards to rushing - it would be nice if rushed units had some kind of weakness or negative trait applied to them for being rushed, with the degree to which the trait is negative dependent on how far along in training the unit was when it was rushed to completion. I think it's rather ridiculous that I can rush a group of soldiers through training and have them come out with the same initial quality as it would have if it spent five or six turns training. Unless we're supposed to view rushed soldier groups as mercenaries - but then, shouldn't they have some sort of wage penalty (as in, I have to pay them more per turn than I would for troops I trained the normal way), and the mercenary rationale doesn't make much sense as an explanation for rush completion of partially trained units.
The best balance method I've always used is NEVER USE THE SAME STRATEGY again that I won with before. I always find the perfect balance playing the AI this way.
The Volcano has one other broken use, you can use it to seal off enemy sovs entirely. Then just win the game.
IIRC, master of magic handled powerful overland spells by the way of giving them a several-turns cast time, informing other players the spell is being cast(through the means of a detect magic spell, i think) and give them an opportunity to try and counteract the spell.
Great feedback, thanks.
I'm looking at Curgen's Volcano (I think it needs a higher mana cost and a casting time) and Paragon's Gift (we need to fix the bug where it doesnt take hp if th sov is in a city) today. I've already rebalanced Destiny's Insight. Keep it coming if you discover other exploits.
You are welcome and thanks for a painfully addicting and awesome game!
First congrats on a great and addictive game.
Another area that needs looking at from a balance perspective is the stacking of different abilities and spells. I haven't checked this thoroughly but I believe that most abilities/spells stack, rather than just applying once. So for example if you have five heroes in a group and each has Tireless March, the entire group gets +5 to movement. I believe it's the same with abilities that add to experience, defense, dodge etc.
As you can imagine, things can get easily 'broken' when stacked to extreme levels, i.e. a group of 9 heroeson horseback all with tireless march has a move of 13!
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