mobs can't hit me.
You do not have to build dodge troops to play resoln.
I still think Acc / (Acc + Dodge) would be the way to go. Base Acc around 80; base dodge around 20; therefore base 80% chance to hit.
This would eliminate capping chance to hit because it would be extremely hard to get anywhere near even 10% to hit.
This way 60 dodge reduces to hit to 50%, not ~10%.
Of course I'm simplifying the numbers way too much but you get the idea.
I don't think the solution is change the hit system, just because wraiths got today +20 dodge, and maybe tomorrow they will get +10 instead...
BTW I agree totally with Kalin. Giving dodge to wraiths, has made them to be more similar to Tarth in combat strategy, or well, to the game tactics of stacking dodge.
The idea of balancing them that way was good, but I think the results are far from expected
I was thinking the same sort of thing although the formula for accuracy needs to be Acc x Acc / (Acc + Dodge) so that we get 80% x 80% / (80% + 20%) for your example = a net 64% chance of hitting (instead of 60% in the current system). I'm worried that this reduces the effect of dodge by too much at normal levels of accuracy and dodge we have in the game and very severely reduces dodge in extreme cases. Using high values of dodge needs to be a valid strategy without being OP.
Given the low numbers we have for dodge effects in the current game and the ease with which a Fortress can boost accuracy the formula should probably be Acc x Acc / (Acc + 2 x Dodge) to make it a noticeable and worthwhile effect. Otherwise all the dodge figures would have to be increased for shields and the dodge traits for user designed troops. Using my formula if would still be very hard to get ultra low chances of hitting even with the effects of Blindness and very high dodge (say 60% with a Wraith unit on wargs with kite shields and dodge traits).
So Blindness reduces basic accuracy from 80% to 40% and then we have 60% dodge. Using my formula we get 40% x 40% / (40% + 2 x 60%) = 10% chance of hitting compared with the current 3% from the hard cap. Using mqpiffle's formula (modified) we get 16%
Without Blindness the same battle would be 80% x 80% / (80% + 2 x 60%) = 32% compared to 20% in the current system (80% - 60%). Using mqpiffle's formula (modified) we get 45%, which is much too high a nerf in my opinion. High dodge should be an effective strategy against normal troops.
jj
Perhaps not, but why would you expect people to do anything else when there's an "I WIN" button in their back pocket? That's the point. None of their other aspects is even remotely mentioned anymore after this change. Spiders? Summons? Who needs them if your enemies can't hit your BASIC troops. Hell, people are probably dumping all the other Resoln traits and picking things like Lucky and Enchanter just to cheese roll the race even more. The only thing that synergizes well is death magic, so if you don't need to blind, you can dirge, or just use contagion (cheaper).
Dodge troops are not the only "I WIN" button here, and when you choose one such button you are stalling progress on another.
Um... choosing? You can do this with very minimal effort. Hell, the majority of the dodge is right in the blood, you essentially start with it. Just what exactly are you stalling on?
Blood + Lithe + Balance = 35 dodge, right at the beginning of the game. If you toss on Lucky, you have a 40+ dodge tank.
1 - 55/75 = 26.67% That's how much your average opponents' damage output decreases with the base wraith trait. They will miss 26.67% more often.
You are absolutely right about the increasing effects of stacking dodge. Nobody ever questioned that. But, like Dihir said, it's just another way to win.
Please don't tell someone he 'doesn't understand' simply because he does not agree with you. Thanks
75% to hit equals 75 hits out of 100 attacks. 40% to hit equals 40 hits out of 100 attacks. That is a 47% reduction in hits/damage. It's not really a fair comparison though since 15 of that dodge came from sources other than the Wraith dodge. 35 Wraith dodge would be equivalent to 15 non-Wraith dodge - 40% hit rate vs 60% hit rate is 33% reduction in damage sustained.
Is 33% damage reduction excessive compared to other racial bonuses? I don't know, but I like it more than any other race bonus other than henchman+heroic+wanderlust which isn't really a fair comparison either since it includes 3 faction trait points.
So, yes, using blindness, one spell from your sovereign and you can pretty much defeat a single opponent. And the dodge you are describing indeed gives some survivability in stand up combat.
But magic is powerful, and blindness is not your most powerful spell if you play the game to emphasize your magical strengths.
In my current game, dirge of ceresa is my "I win" button (except when facing something with poison resistance, or when my sovereign is not present, but even there I almost never waste any mana on blindness).
... and how does using blindness stalls dirge? (death magic?) Hell, I specifically mentioned that you'd be using either Dirge or Contagion when you don't need to blind (Contagion is my prefered spell due to its much lower mana cost). Still, Dirge and Contagion only really shines against mass of troops or if you have amass tons of death shards... and they aren't so great against particularly strong mobs. Dodge troops allows you to tank everything while you let those spells do their work... AND it also allows you to tank those strong mobs (with the help of blindness). I don't see how one is exclusive of the other?
I'm sorry, but I think you need to reread his, and my statement again. He said they will miss ~25% of the time (NOT MORE)... which isn't true. They will miss over 55% of the time. There's a pretty clear disconnect here. The only way you'd have a 25% chance to miss is if you thought accuracy didn't matter, or that it always start at 100.
As for your math... with 0 dodge, assuming a person does 1 damage per hit, that's 75 damage (75 base accuracy). With the 35 dodge you can get right in the beginning of the game (actually, you can get more with acrobat or lucky, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm leaving it out), they'd do 40 damage instead. 40/75 = 53.3%... That's a reduction of 47%. You COULD use the dodge traits without the blood bonus, but then you'd only have 15 dodge, and that isn't enough to do anything major (again, dodge is only particularly powerful when stacked), so it's a fairly pointless argument.
To take your math a bit further, on a purely wraith race balance argument, if you combine it with acrobat, and lucky, you can get troops with 50 dodge at level 5 with NONE of the fancy equips (not exactly hard to get to, considering nothing will be hitting you anyway)... 25/75 = 33.3%, that's a damage reduction of 66.6%. In exchange, you'd be losing 5 HP, out of 16. So you have 11/16 of the normal HP (68.7%)... a 31% HP reduction, but you have a damage reduction of 66.6%. Again, I ask... How is this considered balanced?
No seriously, all you guys are saying is that you can win in other ways, which is true, but I can also cheat to win, that doesn't mean that the cheat is balanced. Hell, I'm not sure why are you even arguing for this blood trait, if you think dirge is so OP in the first place? "Oh, they are so strong already, so let's buff them some more..." WHAT???
And on that same line on thought, dodge stacking and blindness was powerful BEFORE (you needed to put in some work, but it was very viable), but let's go ahead and give them a race that can REALLY abuse it? Come on.
Ok, yes, I'll pay the extra mana cost for dirge for the extra round to react. I'm currently running my sovereign solo because of all the strategic movement I lose when I bring an army with me, and if someone is going to resist dirge I want to have time to deal with that situation. Also, with enough death shards, dirge works just fine on anything that's not resistant to poison. (I think I'm up to 107 damage with it, in my current game -- huge map -- but of course it was extremely effective when it was half of that, or even a quarter of that. It's not so much that I need that much damage, but I want to still be effective if I start losing my shards -- though it's also nice to be able to end combat before the opposing army can take any actions.)
Anyways, there just have not been any tactical situations for a long time, where blindness has been useful.
Also I imagine his 25% miss chance that you are speaking of was an approximations of the change in outcomes -- times that would be missed which otherwise would have been a hit. (But that was not my post so I do not know for sure.)
And resoln has no armor which is better than leather -- and armor also gives you damage reduction, of course. Meanwhile, statistically speaking, you would have troops which have the equivalent of 33 health when facing untrained opponents. If you compare this with Ironeer troops -- those level 5 ironeer troops will have 21 HP and no restriction on armor and some innate spell resistance without any dodge, and if you give them +30 dodge they have the equivalent of 35 health (21 health * 75%/45%) when facing those untrained opponents. Meanwhile, the advantage of dodge starts vanishing when you are facing seasoned opponents. Against troops with +10 accuracy those resoln troops will be statistically equivalent to troops without any dodge bonuses and with 26 (11 health * 85%/35%) health, and they still have the armor limitation.
If anything needs balanced here, it's probably that the AI should be aggressive about obtaining accuracy. Still, you can get +15 in the early game for level 5 troops, and you can get +30 for them in the late game, using fortress bonuses (and that gets better when you research refined accuracy). And when facing troops with +30 accuracy, the resoln troops are inferior to the ironeer troops, even if the ironeers were just wearing leather armor and had no dodge bonuses. (This assumes no spells, of course.)
That said... when I go in to design resoln troops, I do not see any option for "lucky". Have you actually tried any of this? If so, how did you make your troops be lucky?
Um... Lucky is a faction trait. Wraith is a race. You can make a custom wraith faction with lucky, without taking binding or cult of hundred eyes (both are pretty pointless now that the basic troops are so much better), and without the no armor penalty even.
Gilden's blood trait is also very strong (hence why the AI is often very good with Gilden), but if you honestly think Ironeer troops are better than Wraith troops right now, then you obviously haven't tried the dodge builds I've mention before. You can't kill, what you can't hit, it doesn't matter how many HP you have if you have 3% chance to hit. With Lucky, my Shadowblades are pushing 90+ dodge (acrobat and some levels). My sovereign, going with path of assassin and picking up their dodge traits is just as untouchable. +30 accuracy doesn't help nearly as much as you think, just try it, you have a late game resoln going right? The only way to counter this level of dodge is to use spells or skills that guarantees a hit. Neither of which are available to troops.
Also, are you SERIOUSLY saying that dirge is a broken "I WIN" button when you have THAT many death shards? (Of course you're not going to care about mana when you have that much). That game was over ages ago. I'm not sure why you're even going on with that let alone use it as an example. The Blindness strategy is particularly powerful right at the beginning of the game, when you can dominate the strongest mobs with almost no effort.
Not pointless at all, since production costs for your basic troops will be significant, and available defenses are already quite good without the dodge, and with binding and cult of hundred eyes you get cheap boosts to damage, which can be quite useful for defending cities and cleaning up things you do not have time to deal with. And unless you invested some serious effort into them (efforts that could have been used to achieve something else), you'll be doing maybe 1 damage against gilden's troops (which will have some stacked accuracy, if I recall correctly.)
And there's no counter for them to use against my path, either -- between wither and blood sigil, the defenses on my grave elementals (which is to say: no armor and no dodge) have been adequate against most non-magical opponents for quite a long time. Juggernauts, for example, get a damage multiplier, and I reduce their base damage before that multiplier takes effect when I am fighting them using grave elementals - but in this game, I have only kingdom sovereigns so the only juggernauts I have faced have been the escaped kind.
That said, it might very well be that there needs to be another +accuracy trait available for troops, or perhaps some piece of +accuracy gear.
Still, you can also research +10 accuracy for your troops, and if I had researched warfare and had two passes of refined training instead of researching magic and having done two passes of refined arcana, I'd be able to build +50 accuracy troops at level 5 (with +15 from fort bonuses, along with precision and disciplined). And of course, I'd be able to wear armor for damage reduction if I was playing a faction like gilden.
How many death shards do you think I had? I did try to mention that it was an I win button when it did a quarter of its current damage.
Anyways, I have almost 3x spell damage from spell damage multipliers, and I've not been playing long enough to be offered the evoker iii level up trait. A few turns later my dirge damage is 121 because I've picked up another five shards. (But it is true that I am no longer rushing altars.)
Anyways, I am still playing in part because I am also studying the game. (And, I wanted to kill a river slag with solo pioneers and with 107 damage on dirge, I did not have enough shards to do that.) And it was not that many turns ago where the outcome was in doubt: I'm playing on ridiculous, and this was my first resoln game since 1.1 came out -- my next play through I'll change things to increase the difficulty. And even with 121 damage from dirge, I just now was in a battle against poison immune opponents where they managed something like 80 magical damage on my sovereign -- it's true that that was an optional battle, but it's not like the map has no challenges.
As for strong monsters in the early game, keep in mind that graveseal can be used on an opponent that is suffering from dirge. And, also, it costs production and/or gildar just to get those shards in the first place. And there are various things you can research to improve dirge's usefulness (almost none of which are in the warfare tree -- in this game I did not even need warfare to get a horse, and I have quests turned off -- my research has been only in civilization and magic).
*sigh* ... 1 damage against gilden? My god, what do you equip your troops with, daggers? (You realize you can upgrade weapons, right?) I'm just going to go out on a limb and say please try it before you talk, because it's quite frankly a bit embarrassing to be arguing over this. The production costs of basic troops is quite low. Hell, if you take wealthy on your sovereign you could rush an army of them out by turn 20. Spiders also cost production along with a hefty amount of mana (the only affordable one, the widow isn't very good). If you honestly need extra units from binding, then by all means, take it, but keep in mind, none of the other factions need it, and their troops aren't even near wraith troops now.
You can still wither and graveseal with dodge troops. That has nothing to do with it. As I've said it before, if you think resoln is so OP RIGHT NOW, WHY ARE YOU SUPPORTING EVEN MORE BUFFS? You talk about jugs... they are crying in a corner against my shadowblades.
Also... if you can afford casting dirge or any of those spells in the beginning of the game as a strategy, I'd really like to know how. Dirge = 64 mana, Wither = 24 mana, Blood Sigil = 30 mana, Graveseal = 40 mana... How the heck would you be able to use MULTIPLE of them in the same battle?
Meanwhile... Blindness? 12 mana.
You're obviously arguing at an extreme late game... which most games never get to. Keep in mind, the base game doesn't even have huge maps. If you're going to mod it in, you have to mod the balance as well. Hell, Pariden/Amarian is OP as hell if you get that many shards, but I'm not worried about a situation where the game is practically over.
Ok. I'm a BIG FAN of NOT nerfing everything to be unfun. With that said.
SOV can easily stack dodge and become a superman. I'm ok with that though, since you can do that so many other ways.
I went wraith, with lucky, with binding, with master scout, with enchanter. Cheese. Tough.
Early spearmen are MUCH more effective, more so than any other early troop I've had that is maybe a few hits before they get nailed by anything higher than a darkling. Wraith spearmen still get hit, but there is a much higher chance they'll survive the battle. And yes I usually coddle my troops, but spearmen die pretty frequently usually. I'm marginally ok with this. A very nice boost. I took binding but not 1000 eyes. A couple dodgy spearmen and some young elementals were good. Probably overpowered, but still ok.
Later game troops:
Mounted spearmen - Take the above and give them high mobility. Much nicer.
Mounted sindarin staff wielders - counterattack and an extra 6.25 dodge... might have been perception, but these guys barely got hit. Might have had some defenders by that point too with +dodge.
Then I got light plate... Had to change the traits around and add 2 +capacity and charge but...
Mounted broadsword + shield (dodge) and light plate. So I now had a reasonably dodgy, high attack, high defense, middling hp mobile troop. I didn't even need any ranged units. I walked up and could trade blows with anyone. They were coming out of a jacked warrior temple fortress, but still.
Is it overpowered, yes.
SOV - Yes, but I'm ok with that. Its fun and reasonably equivalent with most.
Early Game - extra efficient, which is nice. Overpowered... yes. I'm mostly ok with it.
Mid and late game - due to the early game efficiency/benefit the mid to late game is definitely overpowered. This isn't to say that other factions can create strong troops, but not ALSO have 30 dodge with no effort (20 + shield + lucky) on a heavy armor knight.
a) Bonus should be 10 dodge + 1 per level - still stackable, but you have to sacrifice most of your traits. Sov will get some benefit and can still be a powerhouse.
Armor should reduce dodge
c) Horses should reduce dodge
d) Probably make lot of the stackable bonuses not have a linear benefit
Oh poo, diminishing returns are never fun.
Agree with this
Keep in mind that this 33% damage reduction comes coupled with somewhere between a 5% to 40% reduction in hp (gap gets larger as units level up, also larger for trained units than for champions). Also the dodge only works against regular attacks, i.e. not special abilities or spells, the hp reduction hurts you against all sources of damage. Still the dodge bonus does seem to outweigh the hp penalty, but keep in mind other races get no penalty to go with their arguably weaker bonuses, so you have to take it all into consideration when comparing. It's not just +20 dodge vs. whatever another race gets, it's +20 dodge -1hp/level.
The problem is that the dodge bonus can be much better or worse than 33% damage reduction, depending on enemy accuracy, and gets far more powerful when combined with blind. This is not anything new, it's just emphasizing a weakness in the accuracy vs. dodge system that has been there all along. A champion or even trained units stacking dodge were always ridiculously powerful vs. the AI - just look at some of Tuidjy's old playthroughs - this bonus just gives you another way to get to that minimum 3% hit chance faster. Krax blood gets you there even faster, however.. it baffles me that this bonus gets cries of "OP" while Krax is conveniently ignored.
Anyway the suggested formula of "hit chance = accuracy/(accuracy + dodge)" mentioned earlier is much better, it'd solve this whole problem.
Krax's blood gets you there the same time (both are 20 dodge), but you have to spend a turn fortifying and have to stay immobile in that tile to recieve the bonus. If you get knocked out of that tile (titan's breath or the like), or if you move out yourself, you lose the bonus (you tend to notice this when fighting archers). To be honest I was never a fan of Krax's blood either, but at the least you have to plan its uses tactically. With Wraith, you have the bonus all the time, so you can just charge in. Yes, you do have an HP reduction, but it's not that bad at all when you don't get hit. IMO, it's quite a big buff to dodge stacking, and I really don't feel like dodge stacking needed it.
I'm tired of arguing over this, I can mod it out in 20 seconds, I was just saying that it's not balanced. So here, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'll submit this one for your consideration:
My late game Nightblade (Shadowblade decked out in accessories and trained in an upgraded/enchanted Fortress), this is right after I mowed over Morian, I believe. Notice the HP? Even if they do get hit (which they don't), they can take it just fine. Probably doesn't even need evade anymore at that level... but I didn't bother removing it.
I thought I had mentioned I never built any wraith troops? Still, the 5 demon units which were doing 50-60 consistent damage in most contexts were doing 1-ish on gilden. (I did mention that I am playing on a huge map on ridiculous, no?). And, the widow was fine, for my purposes though I have not made many of them. If it's a sacrificial battle to slow an oncoming army, web is all that matters. And under blood sigil, the poison makes a significant difference.
Note also that way of the mage reduces mana costs, and you do not need that much time to get to level 4. And building for mana and pacing battles for mana was my top priority. Also, using staff of souls, I get some mana back from killing blows And note also that blindness is a per-target spell so multiply your mana cost for blindness by the number of targets that need it. And, yes, I did use blindness occasionally, in the early part of the game. I would also have my sovereign go stand near a high damage, high health target because once the spells were cast the sov was expendable.
But when I am using magic to end the battles, the cost of blindness is usually a cost that I have to pay on top of everything else, so it's not an "instead of" cost, it's an "in addition to" cost.
Anyways, this is my first game in 1.1 (epic pacing and not having much time to play will do that). And, yes, it's late game now, and it's been some time since I got through the early parts of this game. But yes I was playing pariden on insane difficulty under 1.02 on huge maps and sometimes winning, but I've played them enough, and was hoping resoln would feel different. And they do have higher mana costs and lower survivability and battles end sooner, and so on, but the pacing of the game seems similar.
Meanwhile, level 23 on a trained unit built in an advanced fortress? You are playing later game than I am...
Not at all, I'm about 200 turns in on that screen shot (about 7 cities - just look at my shard count, that's with the 4 towers built), the reason I can level so fast is because I can take on ANYTHING. Mowing over a couple of the wildlands will do that easily (hence why I'm saying it's OP). Right after that, I just allied everyone and won because there was no reason to bother cleaning up.
Ok...
Actually, this is really hard to compare, because I am on a different pacing and other such things from you. I have not yet had time to build those towers (I got one, from capturing an opponent's city, but that opponent had a big advantage over me on construction because of the difficulty settings).
I would probably have to play on default settings to achieve something comparable.
That said, while there are some constraints on my approach in the early game -- I have to pick my battles and be careful to use appropriate tactics -- they also work with stock resoln. Going with a custom faction seems to me to be comparable with choosing a custom map. And, while, yes, I have been playing on a huge map (because I find that fun), I think that the game would be rather similar if I had chosen a large map. But, of course, a large map is still a customized map.
When I customize my game, I am not just picking things to make things easy for myself -- I am also making choices so that I have a challenge which I like.
Anyways, if you feel like you cannot lose, you should probably change things to increase the difficulties you face. (If you said what settings you play on, I missed them, but there's a lot you can do change difficulty.)
Alternatively, if you like, you can document the settings you play on, and I can try a magic/civ game using wraiths and report on my progress. I am not sure if that would mean anything, but it would be an option.
The game in that ss was on expert, normal pacing, medium map. After I mowed over my neighbor early (magnar with a ton of useless slave troops - couldn't hit me if they had 1000x my army) and absorbed his cities the game was effectively won. So I just went around and cleared the wildlands and allied everyone afterwards. It was just a quick test game anyway.
Having said that, the dodge strategy has been known to work on even the highest difficulties (it's one of the ways you can beat insane), that's why I said there was no need to buff it. I'm not sure what would be the point of testing it on all the pacings, but you can if you want. I don't see how it would lose effectiveness though *shrugs*.
For dodge to be balanced, the AI needs work. That does not mean dodge is unbalanced (though it might be). And if it is unbalanced, I'm not convinced that it needs to be reduced in magnitude. For example, if the AI would ever pick path of the warrior, it could have champions with leadership. And that just never happens. Also, there's no standard sovereign with mancer blood -- were any in your game? Especially, were you facing any lucky, disciplined mancers? (We already know that if you were that they did not have leadership.)
The AI has a similar problem with magic -- the AI has not been designed to counter it. It's true that magic is mana-constrained, but it's also true that magic is one of the potential counters to dodge that the AI does not make proper use of.
But I was not offering about repeating your work with dodge. I was offering to replicate your work using magic/civ instead of dodge. And pacing can matter for magic, because pace can be used to help build a sufficient mana reserve.
(But it is somewhat ironic that "path of the assassin" claims to offer increased accuracy, but does not actually solve the problem of not enough accuracy for facing dodge troops, where path of the warrior does provide some help...)
And... maybe lucky needs to be modified, like maybe it should be altering limit thresholds. If taking lucky changed the hit chance floor from 3% to 10% and the hit chance ceiling from 97% to 90%, it might better fit its name. A sure thing does not seem like luck, and luck can be either bad or good, depending on the situation.
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