[Balance] Beastlord class and Wealthy Are Still OP

I find them different flavors of fun.  It's a single player game, you could mod them and post it as an alternative version.  I would rather improve the mediocre professions than nerf the fun ones.

 I would love to see a nomad sov/ faction that can't settle a city and must roam until they conquer someone else's.  I thought that would be a good way to counterbalance the old Adventurer sov profession (heroes for free.)

I wish Bandit Lord let you steal caravans from other players, or tech points, or whole techs.  And let you recruit high level assassin heroes.

Besides, Beastlord depends on beasts... if you are surrounded by darklings, ignys and other non beast critters you are out of luck!

Boo!

And Slavelords lets you take those bandits and ruffians, etc and convert them to pioneers.

etc

There are some 'poor' choices, but these aren't really that OP.  Wealthy runs out.

What is likely more unbalancing is getting the free archer group and the sand golem (wolf also, but it's a glass cannon).

get those free units and you don't need an army.

I agree.

I havent really tried beastmaster before but my last game I realised how incredibly strong that class is, you can easily get an incredibly strong army with it really early. 

Wealthy needs a nerf also or complete redesign like +1 gildar per turn instead maybe but right now its too strong, especially if you start with rush tech.

The deal with OP powers in a single player game is I would rather them be there than not be there.

Since it is single player and I'm not competing with people online I can always choose to not min/max and use the best combination of skills.

Agree!  Keep the nerf stick and .   Just make the other stuff better rather than nerfing the fun items.  Its fun to be OP occasionally.

Balance is more fun, it makes choices interesting rather than obvious...

Beastlord isn't just fun at the beginning. I am in the late stages of my current game and have a Beastlord running around with two Hoarder Spiders, two Ravenous Harridens, one Silt Skath, one Plague Stalker and one Naja. She harself is a life archmage. So you can imagine that this merry band is practically unstoppable. Sacking well defended cities is a piece o' cake for them. *grin*

I think Beastlord is as powerful as Warlock (+ 50 % spell damage > should be + 25 %), Warlord (- 50 % unit wages), General (+ 25 % xp) and Armorer (+ 25 % defense). The other professions are weak and should be made stronger to give the player more options and to make AI opponents with them dangerous.

Several times I managed to snatch an Umbroth (spelling?). Well yeah. The game was practically over by that moment.

NO NO NO NO NO.

First wealthy gave 1,000 gildar, then 800 now 500.

stop it.  leave it as is and consider it a feature. This is like saying the Tarth traits are OP with Wealthy because you can rush-buy 3 easy pioneers and spam cities without having to worry too much about monsters.

Leave wealthy alone.

Wealthy is pretty reasonable.  You get a couple of free rushes early, which is, no doubt, really great; but it runs out rapidly.  Scholar is better over the long-term.  That said, yeah, I can't win on ridiculous or insane without it.

Beastlord really is very strong.  There aren't nearly as many "lone monster" groups, which is what really made it crazy before; but it's still strong enough that I don't use it in order to make the game more interesting.

Hehe, yes I guess having a tamed Umberdroth would be the ultimate dath sentence for anything that comes your way. *grin*

i only played one game as a beastmaster hero and found it very fun. can be really powerful if you are lucky and get some early cavebears for damage and some spiders for crowd control. the limitiang factor is the mana cost of the tame spell and the chance of getting a resist. maybe the tamed beasts should work like summoned creatures (require mana maintenance), so by having an army of tamed critters, you also drain the resource that is required for the taming.

i don't think wealthy is too powerful. it's 500 gildar, so you can realistically rush 2-3 units or buy your hero a nice suit of leather armor and a horse, but once the cash is spent, it's gone. if you use it wisely, it can obviously give you an edge by starting the snowball effect a few turns earlier (and early turns are usually the most important turns in 4X games). but you have to spend the cash early to actually benefit from the compound effects and if you make a bad decision, you can lose the potential advantage. it's certainly a powerful boost in the hands of an experienced player, but a newbie is probably more likely to waste the cash on the wrong items and render the trait pretty useless in the process.

likewise, its fun to use, even if you use it wrong (as i have in the past).

Gold isn't permanent, you lose it when you get something else from it. the "fun" comes from the wide array of options you can use the gold on.

There is an easy solution to this problem. Just don't pick them. It's a singelplayer game....let people decide themselves how they want to play.

Yeah it's pretty strong, I remember being level 5 or 6? Using Air Elemental spell for the first time and summoning 9 Air Elementals, Now those can pretty much take on any army except deadly ones, and not to mention you don't have to worry at all about unit upkeep.

Isn't the beast lord and wealthy thing a trade off between early game power, and late-game stat advantages?

They have heightened resistance levels against Beast Master somewhere a long the way, so it isn't as easy to use as it once was. Wealth runs out fairly quickly. Leave them alone please.

The other thing to consider about beastlord is its utility depends heavily on the "world" settings.  So if you're playing with extra monsters and extra wildlands and have the world difficulty set as high as possible and are using epic research speed, then yeah beastlord is pretty overpowering (though as far as I know the AI doesn't use it effectively).  But if research is faster, and the world has fewer monsters, the advantage is less overwhelming.  Honestly, if the issue is "Feature X is overpowered in situation Y and underpowered in situation Z", that sounds to me like another way of saying it's balanced already; the point of balance is not to make all things equal (at that point, there's no need to make a choice), but to make sure that every option has situations in which it's the best choice.

I wonder how many of those who claim beastlord to be overpower at times re-load in case of unsuccessful early attempt ....  

Yep, that is the only way that it might be OP. Resistance is bumped significantly, so it is much much tougher than it used to be.

If you have the Brilliant trait and take a spell mastery talent ASAP (both of which you should do as a beastlord), the chance to convert is almost 100%

As a bit of an amusing story, in my most recent game I found my favorite map ever.  Lots of cool stuff, quests, etc all over the place.  I was playing an Adventurer sov witih Ridiculous opponents, and not doing very well - I landgrabbed way too much, had no army to defend anything, and if an AI had declared war, would surely have lost.

Eventually, the Spider Queen event popped, that spawned a bunch of special, extremely high level spider armies (corpse spider packs of 600+ hp) all over the place.  I was a bit annoyed, since it seemed like that event was basically just a game over screen in disguise, since of course, all the spiders beelined my cities, and I had nothing to fight them with (still relatively early game.)  Luckily I had the Freeze spell so I could at least delay them a bit, though I did lose a couple cities pretty quickly.

Then I finished a quest I was working on at the time.  My empire was bloated, and my army terribly weak - just a couple spearmen, a sand golem, and a couple heroes.  But, thanks to Adventurer, my fame was really high, so it popped a high level hero... who happened to have the Beastmaster trait.

After I finished fistpumping, a few turns and casts of Tornado by Bragni later, and I'm rocking armies of corpse spider packs, giant ravenous harridans, hoarder spiders, and even the spider queen herself.  I'm not sure how I feel about it - it was fun collecting the spiders, but the game is over just as surely as it was before, only in a different sense - I went from the very bottom of the pack to double the next highest once I was done.  Not sure if I'm even going to bother finishing the game now.

So, yeah.  That event is a bit silly from either angle, and imo, the resistance to taming of a mob should scale with level or something.  And that hero is a mite on the strong side