New Demon Skill

[KGB]

Piranha,

You mentioned in the development thread the Demon is going to be unaffected by city walls defending or attacking. So I have a few quick scenarios regarding the new skill the Demon unit has and I want to confirm if my understanding is correct.

1) Demon is defending in a city with L0 walls. The Demon will be at 7 strength.
2) Demon is defending in a city with L3 walls. The Demon will be at 7 strength.
3) Demon is defending in a city with L3 walls, a Hero with a +3 command bonus and a Dragon. The Demon will be at 12 strength.
4) Demon is attacking a city with L0 walls containing a Light Infantry. The Demon will be at 7 strength and the Light Infantry will be at 2 strength. If the Light Infantry survives it stays at 2 strength.
5) Demon is attacking a city with L3 walls containing a Light Infantry. The Demon will be at 7 strength and the Light Infantry will be at 2 strength. If the Light Infantry survives it will go back to 5 strength.
6) Demon is attacking a city with L3 walls containing a Light Infantry, A Hero with +3 command bonus and a Dragon. The Demon will be at 7 strength and the Light Infantry will be at 7 strength. If the Light Infantry survives it stays at 7 strength.
7) Demon + Catapult is attacking a city with L2 walls containing a Light Infantry and a Dragon. The Demon will be at 7 strength and the Light Infantry will be at 4 strength. If the Light Infantry survives it stays at 4 strength.
8) Demon + Battering Ram is attacking a city with L2 walls containing a Light Infantry and a Dragon. The Demon will be at 7 strength and the Light Infantry will be at 4 strength. If the Light Infantry survives it will go back to 5 strength.

Is this how it will work?

KGB

[piranha]

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. Yes
5. Yes
6. No. All bonuses from other units can only be 5. So in this case the light infantry will get the bonuses added, 3+2+3 = 8 then lowered to 5, then the city bonus (3) is removed so the light infantry will fight with STR 4 vs the demon and if it wins it will go back to 7.
7. Yes
8. Yes

This mean that the demon will be dangerous to cities with strong walls and a lot of command and stack bonuses. Kind of reversing the effect from a city wall.

[KGB]

Piranha,

6. No. All bonuses from other units can only be 5. So in this case the light infantry will get the bonuses added, 3+2+3 = 8 then lowered to 5, then the city bonus (3) is removed so the light infantry will fight with STR 4 vs the demon and if it wins it will go back to 7.

But this means you are saying that +3 of the final +5 bonus is from the city walls. I maintain that the +5 is entirely from the hero + dragon and the +3 city wall bonus was what was dropped as excess. Therefore the Demon shouldn't reduce the Light Infantry strength at all.

In other words what should happen is that your calculation should be (Hero bonus - Cancel Hero bonus) + (Stack Bonus - Cancel Stack Bonus) + (City Walls Bonus - Siege + Demon Skill) - (Negative Stack Modifier Bonus). Then this number rounded down to 5.

So it would be (3-0)+(2-0)+(3-3)-0=5.

Otherwise what will happen is strange things will creep in such as:

Hero with +5 Command + Dragon + Light Infantry in a city L3 city walls vs a Demon. By your calculation the light infantry would only be 4 strength instead of 7 because you are rounding down the positive bonus at +5 before you apply the Demon skill. In that case the Hero is better off being outside the city instead of inside because there the Light Infantry will get his full +5 bonus against a Demon. That makes no sense.

Or

Hero with +3 Command + Dragon + Light Infantry in a city L3 city walls vs a Demon + Catapult. Now does the fact the Catapult lowers the City walls bonus by 2 mean that the Light Infantry is now a 6 strength (getting +4 because there is only 1 level of Walls for the Demon to overcome)? That doesn't make sense either.

What happens with a Medusa?

Hero with +3 Command + Dragon + Light Infantry in a city L3 city walls vs a Medusa. I'd expect the overall bonus to be +5 because you get +8 and lose 1 to be +7 rounded down to +5.

It may not seem like much to calculate it by the formula I showed above right now but in the future I can imagine that instead of fully canceling a hero bonus or a stack bonus as the Archon/Devil do now there may be some unit created that only cancels +1 or +2 of it in the same manner that the Battering Ram/Catapult only lower some of the city walls. For example a 3 turn unit could be added that cancels just +1 stack bonus instead of all stack bonus or +2 command bonus from a hero instead of all +5.

KGB

[piranha]

I know it may sound a bit strange.

The calculation model is based of warlords 2 dlx as you know and according to bob heeters site the calculation is a bit different than you think. The negative bonus from medusa is applied after the max 5 bonus limit so when there is a medusa present the other force can only have +4.

Thats why the negative stack is so good.

For the demon bonus. It seems that later in the game its very hard to do anything vs a protected city.
There should be counters to everything.

Being the guy defending until the other one is throwing away his units on uneven odds out of boredom is not how we want late game to be.

This is still beta so its our chance to test things that might turn out to not work and we can change it during the next beta.
The way the bonus works is quite strange and might need to be redefined to make sense to most players.
Perhaps the demon bonus should be stated as a bonus that will use the defenders wall against them.

We will test it a bit while working on beta 3 and might tweak it a bit. But the bonus will be something that is good when attacking and not when defending. Thats what we want to test.

[KGB]

Piranha,

I didn't realize the negative stack bonus (Medusa) was applied after the rounding of the other bonus to +5 was applied. Though I can see why it makes some sense to do it that way as otherwise it would be often lost completely due to so many positive bonus's and most of those positive bonus's being large (+2 - +4 range)

As far as the Demon skill goes, it still seems wrong to me to me to apply the skill in cases where the walls aren't part of the +5 calculation in the example I mentioned. In those cases the skill is going beyond what it was meant to do and is in fact lowering bonus's from command/stack in some cases.

With the fix to the Devil, you already now have a unit that is MUCH better designed to attack cities. That unit is the Elemental which gets +3 when attacking. That unit *always* gets +3 regardless of the enemy city walls so in effect you are much better off using Elementals instead of Demons.

After you announced the new combat system (with large numbers of hits for units) and before you mentioned this new Demon skill I was going to say you should borrow another of the DLR skills. That skill is 'trample' (called 'Crushing Blow' in Warlords IV). The skill allows a unit to do more than 1 damage when it hits against ground units (it was not possible to trample flying units). In DLR it was given to Golems (Iron/Stone) and Elephants. It could be given to the Demon so that the Demon does 2 damage per hit instead of the normal 1 (and yes, this would still apply in the 2 hit max combat as well).

KGB