Touch of Entropy OP? » Forum Post by Alstein

Nah it's fine. I'd like to see this become a mandatory spell for the AI player that way nobody can walk about saying "Can't Touch Dis".

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Werewindlefr

Join Date 03/2007

+28

Make it 25+1/2*Int, at a huge cost. Or make it 40 give it a draining effect: if you cast it, your sovereign is drained for 3 rounds and can't act.

Also, it's spammable...

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No matter the requirements or costs or drawbacks, anything that can kill an important unit (such as a sovereign) on the first round of combat is a bad idea. It reduces combat to a game of "let's see who gets to go first." There's no chance of back-and-forth, move and countermove, if your enemy can be dead before he even gets to his first turn. At that point you may as well ditch tactical combat and flip a coin to determine winner.

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Quoting Austinvn,

reply 3

No matter the requirements or costs or drawbacks, anything that can kill an important unit (such as a sovereign) on the first round of combat is a bad idea. It reduces combat to a game of "let's see who gets to go first." There's no chance of back-and-forth, move and countermove, if your enemy can be dead before he even gets to his first turn. At that point you may as well ditch tactical combat and flip a coin to determine winner.

Yep the same could be said for spells like Curgens Inferno. Touch of Entropy should cause INT * 1.5 damage and Curgens Inferno should reduce the population of the city by 50 %.

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If you think about how powerful wizards battle it out in movies and cartoons, there are alot of defensive spells in action. One guy flings a fireball, and his opponent surrounds himself in ice or something. Perhaps all DD spells need to take a full round to cast, so that in every case you can counter it if you have the right magic.

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A better solution would be to make sovereigns invulnerable to all spell damage. Forcing victory through strength of arms is fine by me.

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DsRaider

Join Date 11/2008

+70

How about it does 50dmg - targets intelligence. That would balance out i think. Would make it less a kill all and more a warrior killing spell.

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Werewindlefr

Join Date 03/2007

+28

Quoting Dsraider,

reply 7

How about it does 50dmg - targets intelligence. That would balance out i think. Would make it less a kill all and more a warrior killing spell.

Too good against warrior-type sovereigns, who already have to split between 3 stats.

A better solution would be to make sovereigns invulnerable to all spell damage. Forcing victory through strength of arms is fine by me.

It can still one-round kill major champions and legendary units. I think that's a bad idea.

1-round kills (from a single unit, not from ganging up) should only work against weak opponents.

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Reducing damage, better resistances,, better defenses, and more opportunity cost to use it would all help. Otherwise, it's the basic Save-Or-Die problem from D&D. Doesn't matter what the other guy does or how powerful he is, he flubs a single roll and goes splat. Or gets no save at all (more an issue with high level epic spells).

After all, if you can wipe out a good chunk of health on turn one, that automatically puts the other guy at a disadvantage since now they have to play very defensively (or extremely aggressive).

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it's not that bad, just that there are no other spells capable of dealing that magnitude of damage. though i will agree it does need some way for the target to mitigate the damage. if only we had a saving throw system. the new magic resistance is a good start, but it only works as an all or nothing mechanic, instead of reducing damage.

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Quoting Sethai,

reply 10

it's not that bad, just that there are no other spells capable of dealing that magnitude of damage. though i will agree it does need some way for the target to mitigate the damage. if only we had a saving throw system. the new magic resistance is a good start, but it only works as an all or nothing mechanic, instead of reducing damage.

The irony here is that a "saving throw" generally means an all-or-nothing system, whereas "resistance" tends to be a proportional reduction to damage. A saving throw system is actually what we do have, whereas an actual magic resistance is what you're asking for.

This pedantry brought to you entirely free of charge.

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Quoting Cruxador,

reply 11

The irony here is that a "saving throw" generally means an all-or-nothing system, whereas "resistance" tends to be a proportional reduction to damage. A saving throw system is actually what we do have, whereas an actual magic resistance is what you're asking for.

i guess i was thinking more of the D&D system where a successful reflex save means you take half damage or so forth. and also, everyone has some reflex save worth mentioning, whereas (correct me if i'm wrong) only characters with good INT currently have spell resistance?

when you figure in monster abilities and morale effects, there are actually quite a lot of opportunites for saving throws in this game. i think they'd do better axing magic resistance and going for classic D&D will, reflex and fortitude saves based on wisdom, dexterity and con respectively.

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What school/book is it in? Is it empire or humans? Both? I've never seen it, or the entropy book.

The ones I've seen: Air, Fire, Earth, Water, Enchantment (Base) and then Summoning, Life and Combat later

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I think the solution here is to buff sov hp and not to nerf this spell. I mean really stacks of units have hundreds of hp. We need magic that can deal with them. The issue is currently that sovs die too easily when compared to normal unit stacks. Con points need to grant dramatically more hp.

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Werewindlefr

Join Date 03/2007

+28

Quoting Delmoroth,

reply 14

I think the solution here is to buff sov hp and not to nerf this spell. I mean really stacks of units have hundreds of hp. We need magic that can deal with them. The issue is currently that sovs die too easily when compared to normal unit stacks. Con points need to grant dramatically more hp.

Not really. We need spells that scale with unit group size (a sort of area spell that has an area of "1 tile"

). And we need real area spells to scale with unit size too.

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