[Balance]Large map+ Paragon+ Blood curse.. Broken.

So today I made an immortal hero. Paragon stacks with all the xp bonus thingies, so I got 2 levels all the time with each Paragon. 90 mana isn't that much either, and with the Blood Curse spell from Imperium you have infinite health. 

Acrobat+Discipline+The dodgy stuff (and the relevant buffs) and spell resist stuff gave me:

125 dodge, 270 spell resist. (hero was level 70 btw, I got bored since it was only crap skills to pick)

Pretty much immortal unless you stack a shitload of accuracy, which the AI isn't clever enough to do. I could beat them naked with that hero :D .

When they launch the new huge map some of this scaling should be nerfed I think, because this ended up kinda silly ;)

 

 

 

7,134 views 7 replies
Reply #1 Top

125 dodge, 270 spell resist. (hero was level 70 btw, I got bored since it was only crap skills to pick)


So why did you continue to play all that time if all you were doing was exploiting a hole in the game?  Nothing better to do?

 

Post it under bugs.  That's where this belongs.

 

 

Reply #2 Top

note that you can do this without blood curse.

also i am not even sure if this is a bug, the game seems to be designed so that if you can survive long enough it's just waiting for you to end the game.

By the time you have the resources to pull this stunt, you are powerful enough to complete either the master quest or the magic victory conditions, and even if you have them turned off, you have essentially already won the game by then.

Reply #3 Top

True.  The whole thing was obviously gamed from the start, a preplanned selection of moves that has the sovereign going out alone or in the company of beasts, elementals, etc.  It becomes less a game at that point than an orchestrated ode to oneself.  Not really a bug, in that sense.   More like exploiting cheese.

Reply #4 Top

I played for conquest victory, and I had a pretty tough fight against a 800+ points AI steamrolling the rest. 

I kinda ended up with this by chance, it wasn't preplanned by any means. (I started paragoning when heroes were around lvl 14, AI's had lvl 18 heroes) This is more a problem for big maps, and we should get even bigger ones next DLC. It's bad scaling more than cheese, and is easily fixed. (why dodge and spell resist is linear is strange to say the least, it just gets more valuable the more you have, and you get more by default as well)

 

Reply #5 Top

While this trick works, and is indeed extremely effective, I think that it is significantly less powerful than the quest loop.

At some point, I'll make a play-through to demonstrate the overwhelming effectiveness of the quest loop.  The strategy is described here.

Reply #6 Top

There are a lot of different tactics that really "break" the "balance of the current game"... well, if there is one anyways ^_^

Nothing new really, the paragon thing have been here forever.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #7 Top

I think the real issue here is the AI.  The AI is mostly a cookbook approach and cannot adapt to much of anything.

Here are some other ways to break it using magic+civilization:

build for population and spam huge sacrificial armies with low attack wearing thorns plus faction specific mechanisms for dealing with archers. I have not tried this yet so I am foggy on the details

build for mana generation and spam destiny's gift on your sovereign (pariden works best here, I think) needs cloudwalk and/or a bunch of champions and call of the titans (I once got Procipinee to 1000+ health and 200+ initiative, though this was long after she got a +4 initiative weapon and a similarly nice mount from the epic arena quest). And note that even if you never research destiny's gift you can still get the "battle is over before it starts" aspect using celerity. The mana requirements for this seem high, but once you're earning 300+/season that should probably count for something.

build for death shards using resolyn - blood sigil (and wither) means city militia. (and cyndrum demons, and your custom troops), etc. have high defenses, and again you can use your sovereign to capture all the cities with essences and wear down your opponent trying to take them back (I currently learning the ins and outs of this approach).

Each of these strategies has an achilles heel, I imagine, just like the classic shield wall + archer spam has an accuracy problem. But it is not clear to me that being able to walk all over the AI using massive power build up means that these approaches are buggy. By default you can win the game by killing a few dragons and such, or using a bit of research and construction and I think all of the above (along with others, like the scrolls plus shards approach) require significant additional work beyond what you need for those victory conditions.

That said, I can imagine stardock making some cheap changes on behalf of the AI if they cannot design for any of the paths that they feel they have made too easy or on behalf of the player if the AI using one of these approaches makes things too difficult.