This is all-or-nothing fallacy is well not constructive or helpfull to the debate.
Er, what? Please explain where I did this, because I honestly did not mean to do one of those.
In addition, I've never heard of your spell's tendency to kill it's own casters. Say much about things right, that even a spell that is supposedly useless works perfectly well to kill Artotzkan troops. They've been annoying our armored troops for ages, and they're doing fine to kill our artillery.
Right, you're confusing spells here. We have two 'lightning' spells. One is basically 'Make This Storm A Lightning Storm', which says 'make this storm cast a lot of lightning, but we can't control where or how'. It does the nasty to your cannons because they are big metal things out in a storm that is throwing lightning. (The actual 'make a storm' spell is separate from that, and the 'make a calm zone so we do not have a storm over our heads zapping us' is a third spell. All of which were separately designed.) The other one is 'call lightning' which, if it worked, would have let us directly call lightning down on what we wanted to hit, letting us snipe your snipable stuff. It does work like that, actually, but whenever it's cast it has a 50% chance of hitting the caster instead, so after five actions of working on it our wizards still refuse to use it.
I didn't say they were enchanted. I said they were immune to arrows, which well, they are. The wizard on top did it.
Anyway, in any case the designs impact is disproportionate.
It's somehow useful at sea, where there are no places to land and recharge.
It flies effortlessly and without trouble through your constant storms.
Despite using a massive gust of air for propulsion, it is near silent and undetectable at night.
A wizard is said to be able to do several spells in combat, but you Carpet requires the constant use of recharging + Wind Gust + Cyclone Shield. You'd never get anywhere without running out of spells.
It's a flying unit. Were you expecting it not to have a major effect? If this was a tech game and we got an early biplane out with a light bomb, would you still be complaining about it's major effect? It's bloody flight when you don't have any. Of course it is shiny, just like artillery when the other side doesn't have any is pretty damn good.
Anyway, in order, if they were immune to arrows, we wouldn't have had wizards dead from being shot with arrows. Which we did.
For the sea... We do have boats out there, you know. Our carpets can launch from them. If you think that 'having to choose between a carpet rider wizard or a wizard that runs the ballista' is unfair for the boats, I'm going to have to disagree with you some more.
For storms, that might be a fair point if we were still summoning them. We aren't. Our 'summon desert winds to keep us from freezing to death' spell interfered with them, and or vice versa, and we've not been summoning storms in most areas. Checking the last battle report, the only place we actually summoned a storm was in the desert itself, where we weren't using the 'summon desert winds spell'
Though even if we still did have storms, considering we're the ones summoning them and the ones with wind magic I still don't see that interfering too much, or at least not more then 'tonight the wind is blowing towards the enemy camp, let us catch a helpful breeze' ends up helping out.
Despite using a massive gust of air for propulsion, it is near silent and undetectable at night.
...Well, yes? Wind isn't that loud, specially when the people who should be listening for it don't know they need to be listening and the riders are hiding behind trees. I don't know exactly what your battle report said, but we took a lot more casualties outside of the jungle where sharp eyes enemies could see them coming. If you really want to order your men to go on full alert whenever they hear strong wind in an area where winds and rains are common because we have hot desert wind clashing with cold tower air, that's fully your right to do so.
A wizard is said to be able to do several spells in combat, but you Carpet requires the constant use of recharging + Wind Gust + Cyclone Shield. You'd never get anywhere without running out of spells.
A wizard doesn't recharge the carpet in flight. You might remember real world examples of flying machines that refuel on the land and then can move around in the air for a bit. I fail to see how 'the carpets can't hang in the air for hours and have to land to recharge sooner then later' is unfair. I mean, if they could recharge in flight that'd let them stay up for basically as long as they wanted, so if you want to argue they should be able to do that I'm not going to argue against changing things so that's how they work.
Neither do they use Cyclone Shield constantly, because they are in fact casting wind gust near constantly to move around. You might, in fact, notice that their method of attack is 100% non-magical, allowing them to use magic to move around and then not use magic to drop things on your head before running away? The only spell they need to use 'constantly' is their propulsion spell. And given that these are in fact being piloted by wizards 'cast one spell at a time basically consistently' is no great demand on them.
That was during Iituem's run.
Was it? Fair enough then.
Artotzkan anti magic has had a similar amount of rolls thrown at it, and it does far, far less than your spell. Our thing used to blow up the people using it. Then it used to inflict third degree burns.
In a way, that showcases the issue. Even your example of "Stuff goes wrong for us" , really shows that you got the far better deal that what Artotska got.
Because the anti magic we developed, stops only your mind reading spell, nothing else. Yours stops 80% of all our magical equipment.
Anyway, you seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the issue. The issue is not that you never roll ones. The issue is that when we roll X and you X, you guys appear to get much better results than we do.
Yes, we both did anti-magic. We also both did anti-magic in very different ways, so of course they have different effects. Ours is a spell we cast. Yours is an item. Ours lasts as long as we're casting the spell. Yours lasts as long as someone wears the anti magic. Ours suppresses magic within it's field of effect. Yours seems to suppress magic that effects the person wearing the anti-magic token. Your anti-magic was usable from the start, even if it did explode. Ours basically wasn't usable until we got it into a finished form.
As for the 'stops the mind reading spell and not others'... That's less on the anti-magic spell and more on how both sides use magic. Your side has a lot of magic that directly effects our side, and we have more magic that effects our own side (Lucky Strike), or that causes battlefield wide effects instead of targeting anyone in specific. Given that, of course the anti-magic devices that stop spells that are targeted on the people wearing them aren't going to do much when we have all of one (working) spell that directly targets enemies. If we'd gotten the 'Call Directed Lightning Bolt' spell done I'd bet you'd be singing a different song on that anti-magic, because going by how it seems to work it should neatly keep us from being able to snipe all your officers with lightning. Or if we'd ever gotten that 'Unlucky Strike' spell researched, or so on.
Anyway, you guys seem to have done your anti-magic on 'keep them from reading our minds' and it worked, and we did our anti-magic on 'keep them from fireballing us all to death' and it worked.
Anyway, I'm sure people have more specific complaints besides the carpet, but a quick scan of the thread isn't finding any more specific examples. If people want to bring up said more specific examples, I will happily debate them on said examples. Because I've had loads of fun in this game, and seeing it end is going to make me sads.
Here are several main ones.
We spend several turns carefully revising, optimizing, adjusting the fireball spell.
You guys did one turn and made a mundane equivalent that was cheaper, can be used as grenade, bomb and by artillery, longer ranged, burned perpetually and have of toxic smoke.
Even with the Nerf, it's still equivalent to our minimized version of the design, and there was only a minor revision in difference there.
It's basically a clay pot full of alchemical napalm. I'm not going to argue about cheapness because I don't know how cheap your fireballs spells are, but by memory we spent an expense credit on the Firestorm Shells. Making things cheap is what Expense Credits are for. Beyond that...
can be used as grenade, bomb and by artillery
Well, yes. It's a payload. If you guys invented a 'summon acid' spell and then started making acid filled cannonballs and acid filled pots to throw at us, that'd be just as fair. As is, the original firestorm shells had a tendency to randomly break and murder their own siege weapons+crew, and we spent another revision purely on keeping them from doing that. The Grenades was an order of 'have our cavalry carry some and throw them into the enemy camps in raids'. We've all used orders before for good effect, ala your mage hunters. And then once we had grenades, the 'use the grenades as bombs' was literally part of the carpets design order.
longer ranged,
We're firing it out of artillery. So yes. This also has nothing to do with the actual Firestorm Shells and their rolls, and everything to do with the Ballista we've spent something like three or four turns on designing and upgrading.
burned perpetually
Again, it's magic napalm. It burns until the fuel runs out. It doesn't burn for ten years and ten days or something like that, you just can't put it out easily. I'm honestly not seeing why this is a big issue, people are just as combat ineffective from burning half way to death as they are all to death.
have of toxic smoke.
I'm gonna need a quote on this before I can debate it, because I just searched the last five Moskurg battle reports for 'smoke' and the only mention of it I found was back in 930, when your side used smoke to disguise moving your cannons up to attack us, and the equipment collection doesn't mention it at all.
Their cannons manage to get the drop on our ballistas from behind smoke screens, and within minutes they're mostly all destroyed
(Also, speaking of carpets, I forget if anyone has mentioned the original design tended to randomly flip over and dump everything on it out into the open sky and we had to fix that before it could be used.)
We designed a steam engine. We spend 6 actions (IIRC) on it. One of those actions (the second design actions) had rolls better than your magic flying carpet. What we got :
The slow moving paddles will certainly propel the ship, but a stiff breeze will stall the boats progress. The captain points out that it'd be more efficient to replace the device with the same amount of rowers by weight, or even by swimmers pulling the boat along by tow line.
I'm gonna ask for more information on this before I respond. Was this at the end of the six actions, in the middle, or was it the first thing you did and then you spend six actions making it better?
Anyway, speaking more in general then in this specific steam engine circumstance because I don't have the info to speak in specific for this specific steam engine, I'm not surprised that Steam Engines are going to be really hard in general. Besides the whole issues with pressure and so on, they just need a really high overall quality, with everything fitting 'just so' or else they leak steam and the fuel concerns and so on. But basically I'd want a copy of the design request so I knew what you guys were trying to design as well as what you got to debate on this.
I'm also going to point out that Steam Engines was basically a 100% new field for you, as far as I'm aware, while literally the only new effect for our Flying Carpet was the actual flying bit. (Being as that's literally the only thing that actual carpet does. If we didn't have Gust of Wind as a separate spell we'd be unable to manuver it, and again, the way of attacking is also an entirely separate product.)
While they could be compared in potential effect on the battle field, comparing them on the field of design difficulty doesn't look equivalent to me at all.
We designed a steam cannon. Our rolls, after negative modifiers, were [4 5 4].
What we got :
We got a cannon with shorter range than your ballista, a tendency to explode if fired repeatedly, a tendency to crack if fired at all, a requirement for water supply, the need for a dedicated mage, the ability to almost miss further than it could fire (range 180 meters. Shots hit within a circle with radius 70 meters), the need for several months of training, the need for specially crafted stone ammunition, and the need to be cleaned every dozen shots.
Right, again, these are several items so I'm going to tackle them separately.
We got a cannon with shorter range than your ballista
I'm going to need a quote on this, as per Moskurg Battle Report 928, when your cannons showed up, they were equal range and fired faster then the ballista of which we'd been working on for two turns at that point.
a tendency to explode if fired repeatedly, a tendency to crack if fired at all
Um... Yes? Our first Ballista Design basically had the exact same sort of issue. Actually, have a copy of the original Ballista Design results before we spent a few turns upgrading it.
Even despite fully trained crews and careful manufacturing, the ballista can be...temperamental. The crank used to wrench the bowstring back doesn't have a safety, so if the user slips before it's fully set then it'll misfire and violently spin in the opposite direction. This has been known to break arms. The wood must also be made of as high-quality timber as we can get and inspected for cracks before each firing event, otherwise the device can - and will - shatter when fully torqued. This will completely destroy the ballista, and likely kill the crew. Even when the operators are being careful and taking their time, sometimes the device will simply misfire and destroy itself.
It's a powerful, but dangerous weapon. Very Expensive.
So, basically, both of our first designs were equally self destructive.
a requirement for water supply
Well, no, we didn't need that, because we didn't do a design that needs water to fire. This basically falls under 'we made something that needs a specific kind of fuel to work, and so if we do not have the fuel it does not work'.
the need for a dedicated mage
You made something that worked on magic. We didn't. Once we started enchanting our own Ballista, we too found ourselves in need of a dedicated mage to make it work. (And actually we needed one anyway to cast Lucky Strike. So basically we arguably use up more wizards per siege engine then you do.)
the ability to almost miss further than it could fire (range 180 meters. Shots hit within a circle with radius 70 meters),
We didn't get numbers quoted at us for our first design, but our own base accuracy was also said to be on the super meh side. This falls under 'we have a spell designed to give stuff magic super accuracy' instead of anything to do with our actual siege engine and its rolls.
the need for several months of training
...So, what? You expect people to just be able to hop on and be able to use a siege weapon at speed with good effectiveness after... idduno, a week or something? I'd also like a quote on how this actually hurt you instead of just being fluff talk or a disguised suggestion on how to make your cannons cheaper, like how the part I quoted above about our first generation ballista mentioned 'even with fully trained crews'.
the need for specially crafted stone ammunition,
This is another 'please provide a quote on this' because at first read of course siege weapons need specially fitted for them ammo? I mean, it's not like we took people spears and just dropped them into our ballista or anything.
and the need to be cleaned every dozen shots
And yet, in the battle where you first deployed your siege cannons, you still had a higher rate of fire then our ballista put together even though we'd manage to bring them down an expense category by that point. Let me give you another quote.
Their volleys rain down with much greater frequency than what we can return, even with our merely "expensive" artillery. Our only saving grace is our Lucky Strike, which gives us a way to remain comparable with the enemy. If we didn't have that ability, we would surely have lost every battle this year.
We had decent rolls (3, 6 5) on a spell to summon plants.
We got the ability to make a flower bloom, over a period of 24 hours, if we send one of our mages to work at it for several minutes.
And then we figured, that's a fluke, let's do a revision, maybe the hard part is over. We rolled 4
We got the ability to grow a single stalk of wheat through a spell that took 5-20 minutes. Ok, to be fair, we could also grow knee height shrubberies. And small trees, but for the latter we'd need our rare skilled mages.
The same mages who could otherwise create massive walls of fire, or power a tower that can send an entire region in freezing temperatures. And on a good roll, they get the ability to do something that can be destroyed by the average goat.
I'm gonna want actual quotes on the spells before I debate this so I actually know what they can do.
When we tried to use an expense credit upon our horses, to make them cheaper, EvictedSaint suddenly changed the rules to prevent that. I didn't realize why at the time, but I know now. It was because you guys spent a design actions on making them cheaper, and he didn't want you to have "Wasted" that action. Thus the rules literally got changed to benefit you.
Again, please provide a quote. If that is true though, isn't 'we can now use an action to make our horses cheaper' better then having to spend a rare expense credit on it?
Oh, and a new one, I learned from the Moskurgian thread.
EvictedSaint secretely nerfed our Frost Towers
Under the original game, and for a while under EvictedSaint's system, the game used a 3 point temperature System. Hot > Normal > Cold
Under that system, the final, upgraded version of the Frost Tower was an awesome thing, capable of turning Jungle into Taiga.
But when we made the upgrade, EvictedSaint has changed the system to :
Desert > Jungle > Normal > Mountain > Taiga
This effectively halves the power of our Frost Towers. So our design actions improving their strength was completely negated.
It did remove the "Hot" bonus from the jungle, which was a Moskurg advantage. From what I read from Iituem's description of the tower, it simply lowers a regions temperature one degree from Hot>Temperate>Cold.
It wasn't cold enough to turn the rainstorm into a blizzard, but it did remove their temperature advantage.
NOTE: Temperature levels are as follows -
Tagia>Mountain>Plains>Jungle>Desert
Wasn't that back when he stopped using the computer program to run combat and started doing it in his head instead? Looks like one of the things that got changed when he stopped using said computer program. If he wants to switch that back I totally won't mind, It'll just give me more reason to argue with the others to create that Hellish Heat spell and cook all you eskimos alive.
Overall it looks to me like the biggest source of the complaining (on both sides, not just from one side or one person) is the inability to see what the enemy actually has and their equipment descriptions like we could in the tech version of things. Personally, I think it's a cool feature, but it does seem to be a major source of aggravation.
look, the GM retracted his actions and literally gave us what we asked for and then some.
Presumably, his admission of the unfair nature of it (salty as that admission may be) means he will do his best to keep the game fair in the future, if only to prevent another situation like this. Give the guy a chance.
This issue has been resolved, so everybody just shut the fuck up and let's get on with the game.
Like, Plus Infinity to this now that I see it.
10Ebbor10, I'm willing to keep debating you on this if you want, but if you want to keep this up can we move to PMs as to not clutter this thread up?
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Topic: Wands Race: Magic in Forenia [Core Thread] [EvictedSaint's Run] (Read 44741 times)