Thoughts on the schools after playing them all

[rgp151]

I've played through all of the pure schools and here are some observations.

Sorcery:
I'd say that Sorcery is stronger now than ever. The early game of Sorcery seems much stronger than in classic relative to the others now. There are so many weak neutral towns that it makes grabbing them with Magic Spirits and Phantom Warriors extremely easy and powerful. Also Nagas are better than they were.

On top of that, Spell Lock and Invisibility are pretty vital since all the AI wants to do is dispel.

But the real kicker is that the capital towers shoot powerful magic bolts, so Magic Immunity is hugely important. This makes flying Paladins a very effective army or heroes with Magic Immunity or just anything with Magic Immunity.

So Sorcery is by far the best school IMO. It was probably the best in Classic as well, but it seems to be even relatively stronger now.

Life:
Life is good. Prayer is way OP with its combined buff and de-buff. Endurance is very helpful as always. The Incarnation seems relatively better since getting heroes seems relatively less common. Righteousness seems better than it was in Classic, but also more like what I expected it to be in Classic. It blocks a lot now it seems in terms of magical attacks. So its almost as good as Magic Immunity. OTOH, maintaining buffs is quite difficult with all of the de-buffing so that goes against Life, but if you take Archamage its ok. Raise Dead is relatively better with the almost guaranteed deaths when attacking capitals.

Nature:
Nature seems better than it was. It seems to have gotten a few minor buffs that just make many of its spells a little better. Like Nature's Eye for example, which is well worth using now. Crack's Call was toned down a little, but doesn't seem to really hurt the human player. In the late game Regeneration is relatively better due to the need for it for attacks on capitals. In spite of the higher movement, the Earth Gates are relatively better and mobility seems to be more of an issue in this game. Pathfinding was nerfed, but rightly so and I like how it works now, it makes sense. Change Terrain seems more useful because I often end up with towns that have no woods somehow.

In spite of all this, Nature is still weak, but I'd say that the Life + Nature combo is stronger due to the buffs and increased relativity utility to some of Nature's spells.

Chaos:
Chaos seems to have been nerfed the most. Flame Strike is now pathetic and IMO Flame Strike was really an essential part of making Chaos viable. Without it its too hard to defend in the mid-late game. Hell Hounds are still good, but just don't seen as relatively good as they were. The Uncommon summons are all pretty strong, in fact Fire Giants and Gargoyles seems stronger. Even the Rare summons are a little better.

But it seems like the AI does a better job at countering Death and Chaos now, using appropriate buffs liberally. It just seems Chaos units run into a lot more in this version of the game. And it also seems like unit protections are more important then ever, if for no other reason than wizard towers. But overall it also seems that rocks are generally stronger, so you run into a lot more ranged attacks like from Fire Giants, Catapults, Stone Giants, and Air Ships, which do a good job of weaking Chaos units while Chaos has little way to defend, esp. w/o an effective Flame Strike.

Death:
Death seems stronger overall, which I didn't expect after playing Chaos. But the main reason is Regeneration and Illusions Immunity. Regeneration is so important now IMO. This makes Shadow Demons and Werewolves a very powerful combo, or just Shadow Demons. Wraiths, actually seem hugely nerfed. They don't seem to be worth using anymore. They hardly ever create undead, Life Steal seems rarely to work, even on low resistance units. They seem to just keep getting weaker and then dying without hardly ever healing themselves. But, Shadow Demons and Werewolves make up for it, though they are a bit slow. Death's town curses are less useful in the hands of the player generally, because the AI makes so many towns that cursing a few is useless.

Ghouls are also pretty good in the start since they can move faster and there are many weak neutral towns, so they seem to make getting started a little easier than in Classic when not using 11 books.

Summary:
Mobility is still hugely important. Sorcery, Life and Nature still provide the essential buffs to mobility. The abundance of towns in the early game, both neutral and wizard spawned, makes combat summons very powerful, which favors Sorcery and to a lesser degree Chaos.

The wizard towers are quite devastating, but their effects can be largely negated by Magic Immunity and Regeneration, significantly increasing the value of those attributes. The enemy's use of ranged attacks seems improved, which favors schools with the ability to negate or heal those attacks, again Sorcery and Life, and to a lesser extent Nature.

I'd say overall the balance has shifted even more strongly in favor of Sorcery. Life+Nature is also good, but suffers too much from de-buffing. Chaos is considerably weaker. Death manages on the back of its Regeneration units - Shadow Demons and Werewolves.

[ChaosSpawn]

Thank you for taking the time to put this all together.

So far I have only played with death/chaos split and life nature split, but I agree with most everything you've written about these spheres.

I'd like to add that if you are not playing with Sorcery, the life and nature buffs against ranged magic attacks from death/chaos and nature/chaos help quite a bit here.

Also, as for a few improved summons that weren't mentioned: Hydra and Death Knights get my vote. The hydras are devastating and have a very nice animation I might add. As hard as it is to believe, the death knights are even stronger than in the original title imho. I still have not had a chance to play with or against a Great Drake or a Great Wyrm. Despite finding nearly every other Chaos spell, I did not come across that one in my first playthrough. I also was Wyrmless despite starting with 7 Nature books on my current random map.

I had a sorcery start lined up in the bullpen for my next one anyway, so looking forward to it. Thanks again.

[rgp151]

#1 I don't like the towers. I really enjoy the strategy of how capital attacks worked in Classic better. I like trying to take out a couple of wizards very early and then the challenging battles of the later game when wizards fill their capitals with high level fantastic units.

I find actually defeating wizards to be too difficult in this game, but not in a good way, just a tedious way. It's not difficult because of anything really challenging, its difficult because the towers shut down early raids and the AI spawns too many towns and it seems Lizardmen are everywhere so the AI constantly gets Lizardmen and spreads crappy towns all over the map.

#2 I've suggested that the bolts from the towers should pierce Magic Immunity to make things more fair if they are going to exist. As it is right now, IMO, it makes Paladins and the Magic Immunity spell just vastly too superior to everything else in the game. The towers are no joke and have to be taken into serious consideration when raiding a capital, unless you have Magic Immunity, in which case you can just ignore them. It makes so many units and combos useless. Which is a bit of a shame because aside from the towers I would say that this game has made more variety in stacks viable, largely due to the movement changes.

In classic I tend focus on Heroes, Flying Paladins, Doom Drakes, Airships, Flying War Trolls, Barbarian Cavalry, Griffins, Stag Beetles, and Fantastic units for offense. In this game I've found that you can incorporate ranged units like Bowmen, Priests, etc. more effectively, BUT such units are useless for capital attacks. Indeed multi-figure units in general, unless they have Regen or MI, are very bad for capital attacks.

So, the game ends up forcing you back to just Flying Paladins, War Trolls, Stag Beetles, and Heroes with Magic Immunity. And while I would say that Heroes have been nerfed a little in this game, they haven't really been nerfed enough IMO. I'd like to see them have more Leadership type bonuses and the ability to make them OP toned down ever more. But given that heroes are really the only units that can have powerful ranged attacks and also be economically made to have Magic Immunity, heroes are ultimately still the way to go. Maybe a new attribute for caster heroes that grants a type of Leadership bonus that improves magic ranged attacks. Also a defensive type of Leadership bonuses, so there could be more overlapping and stacking Leadership type bonuses, which you give reason to have heroes play together with normal units.

I feel like a lot of the game made progress in diminishing the importance of heroes as combat units, which I think is needed, BUT the capital towers reverse all that and ultimately make Artificer+Runemage Heroes by far the best strategy, just because of the towers. Artificer+Runemage has two even bigger advantages now. Previously, it seemed that getting heroes was more common in Classic. In this game I rarely get hero offers, don't get them as early and rarely find heroes in lairs. BUT, we still have Summon Hero and of course with Runemage casting Summon Hero and Champion is discounted. The need to summon up heroes is increased and the ability to do it cheaper with Runemage is even more important. And of course on top of it all, Magic Immunity is more important than ever, which you can give to all of your heroes with Artificer. And on top of that the AI tries even harder to de-buff now, and Artifacts are the only way to give units buffs that cannot be dispelled. So even though heroes are less common to get than in Classic an the found items aren't generally as powerful as in Classic, heroes themselves are even more vital than in Classic because you can give them un-removable buffs and they can all have the ultra important Magic Immunity.

Yeah, I feel like the capital towers really hurts multi-figure units that don't have Magic Immunity. It certainly weakens the effectiveness of Barbarians, which were one of the best races in Classic and are now low tier IMO, purely due to the towers. OTOH, Klackons are much better now because their unrest seems to be less of an issue generally and the single-figure Stag Beetle is relatively better for capital attacks.

[ChaosSpawn]

I second your stance on towers. Though their damage range is greatly impacted by the number of spell books a wizard has in each sphere. Therefore, Opponent Mages that go deep in a single sphere have towers that can easily one shot a unit or hero without good buffs. I find that it is less of an issue with Wizards that go wide in 2 or more realms, as the multiple bolts do far less damage with less books behind them.

I would greatly appreciate an option in the setting screen or startup to toggle the tower defense on or off.

I also find parts of this game a tedious annoyance, especially concerning the early A.I. It is equally if not more so obnoxious and again completely omniscient. I had to restart 4 games to get a good map and starting location on small land masses. Before I was 60 turns in I had enemy units scouting near my cities and gobbling up the terrain bonuses, and coming through the planar gate. The A.I. (multiple Opponents) were sending troops onto the node squares after I would capture them; sometimes one turn before my spirit was at the hex to meld. Before I had my slingers up and running, I was already at war with 2 Wizards - one on Myrror, and one that somehow started on the same continent despite me choosing small land masses when setting up the game. Keep in mind, I'm playing on the lowest difficulty setting, just trying to check everything out. I scrambled to fight the good fight up to about turn 100, but by then one of the A.I. wizard was already at my southern front with a punishing stack while my best stack was far to the east trying to clear out the nodes/lairs, etc.

One of my gripes about the original was that by the time you had your feet under you to crawl the map, you had already defeated 3 of the rival Wizards and subdued the 4th by fighting a campaign on 4 fronts with early game units/heroes. So the A.I. was essentially allied against you almost every game. It more or less made exploration and the loot hunt moot and pointless, as all of your opponents were for all intents and purposes defeated before you could explore a meaningful amount of goodie huts. It is tiresome, and not fun. As you mentioned, it would be nice to have a chance to develop your armies/heroes, explore some of the map and find or cast some nice items before all guns are blazing. Perhaps the developers could throw us a bone and we could have Opponent starting location choices (near, far, etc) available at map creation ala Age of Wonders 3.

That pretty much sums up the issue I had with CoM as well. The difficulty settings were pretty pointless as the A.I. was in your face immediately even on the lowest settings. If I want to struggle from the get go, I will select higher difficulty before generating the map, and expect the game to be painful. I'm getting too old for the aggravation, I just like to explore the map and develop my empire early on without having to constantly stop what I'm doing to address the interference from my opponents. FFS.

In the end I cut my losses and I restarted a 5th and 6th time to get a good map against only 1 Opponent Wizard. I'm rolling now with Kali on Myrran minding her own business.

[bonfol]

I also find parts of this game a tedious annoyance, especially concerning the early A.I. It is equally if not more so obnoxious and again completely omniscient. I had to restart 4 games to get a good map and starting location on small land masses. Before I was 60 turns in I had enemy units scouting near my cities and gobbling up the terrain bonuses, and coming through the planar gate. The A.I. (multiple Opponents) were sending troops onto the node squares after I would capture them; sometimes one turn before my spirit was at the hex to meld. Before I had my slingers up and running, I was already at war with 2 Wizards - one on Myrror, and one that somehow started on the same continent despite me choosing small land masses when setting up the game.

I noticed the same.
Rival wizard would send stacks through my territory to capture far away cities that they know of.
They would also send a stack to a node i cleared.
But.
They wouldn't keep it, leaving the node a short while later. As i tend to play Life my melded guadian spirits were unchallenged like 95% of the time.
I'm guessing this is made to be perceived by the player as provocations to get a war started. Try ignoring it, and see how it goes. (if the ai wants so bad that city on the tundra hexs with no ressource around it, so be it).

[rgp151]

Someone posted that they had treaties with the rival wizards. I've never seen that. I'm playing on Max difficulty, except I'm using 11 picks instead of 10, because I consider 11 books the standard from Classic and many strategies rely on having 1 1 picks to work with.

For me, with everything on max difficulty, every wizard declares war on turn 1 100% of the time. I definitely don't like that.

Also, maintaining control of nodes is virtually impossible, in part because every wizard is at war with you. In Classic, when a wizard is not at war with you they won't go after your nodes if you have a unit guarding the node. But in this game, since all wizards are at war all the time, you can't simply place a single unit on a node to guard it, as they will attack it mercilessly.

As for exploration and such, I haven't had too much problem with that, and I like early conflict. I'm pretty aggressive when it comes to my playstyle. But yeah, the AI shouldn't be omniscient. Something needs to be figured out with nodes, because right now its really difficult to take advantage of them. I mean I can sometimes, but usually its only by having devastated the enemy.

Another difference I see is that in Classic I would typically just go straight for wizard capitals and take those out before bothering to take any of that wizard's other cities. For the most part I would do almost all of my conquering when the wizard was banished. I find that much more difficult in this game, which isn't necessarily as bad thing. It seems that enemy wizards return from being banished much faster and its more difficult to reach their capitals, and more need to fight them in more places before you can get to their capital. I'm ok with that, but the city sprawl is pretty tedious to deal with, also because the AI does such a poor job at developing their cities, so its often a matter of conquering poorly developed towns that take a while to really get going.

But again, all of this favors Sorcery, because with Sorcery you can just Summoning Circle > Word of Recall. So I find that it is by far the easiest to play Sorcery or Artificier+Runemage, have a strong capital and just keep pumping units there that you teleport out to all of your newly acquired cities.

So I think generally I like High Men, develop for Paladins ASAP while relying on Nagas and Phantom Warriors in the beginning, and/or Heroes, then start Word of Recalling Paladins, Priests, and Catapults to all the places you conquer. Plus with Sorcery you can take so many neutral towns with Phantom Warriors/Nagas.

And yeah, the way Myrror works is not good. Since when you start on Myrror there are no rivals wizards on that plane, it just makes it too easy. I played a game of Life Draconians and was simply able to cast Planar Seal after I got two stacks onto Arcanus and then take all of the resources on Myrror and eventually won with Spell of Mastery and was never even challenged on Myrror.