Are Ghosts / Spectres TOO strong now?

[Arqane]

I'm still very skeptical about changing initiatives. It really doesn't fully solve the problem, and I like the feel they give the characters (certain types being REALLY fast, and zombies just trudging around).

For one thing, both Initiative and Speed come into play. Sprites can use the same tactic against Squires, and they aren't double their Initiative. If you end up with 1 stack of Squires, 1 Sprite can still kill infinite Squires. 50% higher Initiative is still plenty to mess up the AI. I don't think we really want everything to be between 8 and 12 init.

One of the ways a space game handled this type of problem was limiting the total rounds in a battle. If it took longer than that, you would have to continue the fight the next turn. That way, 1 little Scout ship with a pea shooter couldn't wipe out an entire planet, but it had some time to do some damage.

So I think the best way to fix this would be to add a 50 round timer. It still allows for a good amount of time to harass the AI, but that's only enough to kill 50 zombies with a L1 hero (not counting in the units doing damage). That's not an insane amount of xp. If any fight lasts too long, the hero loses the rest of it's movement for the day, and the neutral stack loses the creatures just as if the hero had fled. XP for the battle would be debatable.

[DaemianLucifer]

Sure that would work.But like I said,changing heroes not to be immortal,or your proposal for limiting the battles,would require a change in the game mechanics.Thats why initiative change is the best solution,imo,because it requires only changing a few values.Mind you that even if you limited heroes shoots,no retal creatures such as pixies or blood furries would still be able to kill anyone they want.But if they had just double initiative and not trible,they could be cornered,and just one bad moral would prove fatal(not like that now).

[Arqane]

I don't mean just 50 shots by the hero. I mean after 50 rounds (round based on 10 initiative), the battle ends completely, screen comes up with the results. Not counting morale/magic, that's 80 moves for Blood Furies. Since 1/3 of those are usually running away, that's about another 50 attacks from the Blood Furies.

Anyway, the number of rounds could be tweaked. I just said 50 because a ballista has 50 shots. It gives enough time for most long battles (even crazy castle sieges I haven't lasted that long), but it takes away the infinite rounds that you could be killing infinite zombies.

And strictly speaking, at double initiative, it still takes 2 morale failures to surely be caught. If you always wait on the second move you have to fail twice not to run away (case of Furies vs. Squires).

Unfortunately, it would be about impossible to mod that in. Nival, however, could do it fairly easily. They have the code for ending battles before one side is dead (fleeing/surrenduring). They have the code for dropping movement to 0 (boarding a ship, as if it wasn't easy enough). They have counters in battles already for Multiplayer. Basically they'd have to put those 3 things together and they're done. A little tweak to have a text show up in a lower corner saying "10 rounds left : You don't have enought movement points." and you're golden.

[DaemianLucifer]

No,you missunderstood me.I said that your proposal has to change the gameplay,and that purely changing the number of shots(that was proposed somewhere else),still isnt enough(t).

[Cyrox]

You guys seem to have gone off topic for some time already...