Dev Diary #17: Post-Launch

[Ferrus Animus]

I like what I am reading so far.

But I did a bit of an analysis of the Necroamncy tomes in another thread and in the hopes of being more seen I will repeat some of the soul economy stuff here.
I have heard the part of the stream, that there's some balance changes but a bigger rework is out of scope for this patch, so this here to maybe inform some of the future changes.

Souls​

While several of the Tomes will be visited in this Update, Necromancy Tomes will have rebalanced Soul Economy. The following changes should result in a higher general soul income and the possibility to gain even more souls when investing in it.

• All Necromancy Tomes: Change Soul Harvest income from 1/2/3/4/5 and 5 per hero level to 2/3/4/5/6 and 6 for each Hero.
• Tome of Souls: Replace Soulbind Army: Sustained World Spell: Soul Collection: +6 Soul Income and 30 Gold upkeep.

One element of current design is that base soul income comes via soul harvest, aka 1 soul per tier of unit killed. As such higher difficulties (world and AI) that out more enemies to kill on the map mean a higher soul income, making use of souls actually easier on harder settings.

Now for the list of soul incomes:
- Basic soul harvest: Functionally free if we ignore the opportunity cost of picking the tome.
- (T1) Soulbind Army: Was a 45 mana spell that functionally gave 2 to 12 extra souls for killing an enemy stack (by soulbinding them all). This put the cost per soul from this to 22.5 to 3.75 mana. It's new replacement Soul Collection changes this to a fixed 6 souls per turn for a cost of 5 gold per soul.
- (T1) Soulbinders: An enchantment that for 2 mana per unit per turn allows support and battle mage units to inflict soulbound with a 90% chance. This spells has a few issues early game. The first being that all support units are T2 or higher and usually busy supporting, while only the mystic culture arcanist and the dark culture warlock are battlemages below T3 that do not require another tome (Mana channelers has a chance to give you an astral wisp at game start, but that is one of a kind). And as it only affects base attacks, even getting the later battlemages restricts application of Soulbound via this enchantment to 1 unit per battle turn at most. I think often applying 1 soulbound per combat on average for each soulbinder-enchanted unit is the expectation. So 2 mana per turn for 2 souls per battle.
- (T2) Soulwell: Special Province Improvement for 3 souls each strategic turn once per city.
- (T3) Domain of Death: Costs 60 souls to cast and 5 mana per turn to maintain for some economic and military bonuses but also to apply soulbound to all enemies in the city domain. Which means just to regaint he casting cost, you need to fight 5 full stacks in the domain of your owned city. This is not a good ROI unless you are mostly on the defensive already.
- (T4) Harvest Population: Costs 45 mana and 1 population for 60 souls. Techncially a good trade, but that population at this stage is a couple hundred food and 5-10 turns of time, and the loss of future income that population would provide. So not as cheap as it looks. But if you are needing souls a good way to amass.
- (T4) Soul Siphons: 150 mana for 40 souls and getting 6 zombies. Comparing that to Unleash the Warhounds, that gives 6 war hounds, that is 100 mana for 40 souls. Good but circumstancial.

As we can see the basic soul harvest is probably the majority of your soul income as most others are still rather low until you reach the Tome of the Reaper.

I think that is an issue. We have literally 6 techs here about increasing souls harvested of which only the latest two promise a decent income relative to the gold and mana cost.
Considering that souls are usually used to replace gold or mana costs in what units you buy and spells you cast, the rather steep cost in gold or mana to acquire extra souls makes it a bit weak. Like I understand that there probably is a cost equivalence calculation applied, but there is that element fo transactional effort that gets overlooked.
The new Soul Collection spell would cost research for 1 tech, casting points/mana to cast it and then trade 60 gold over 2 turns to allow the player to recruit 1 skeleton...instead of recruting a mystic pikeman for 60 gold without all that effort...Why am I going through all this effort?

Now the second aspect here that mess up the soul economy are soul costs.
T1: Soul Overflow is a very powerful spell that gioves early access both to HP buffering, an AoE dispel and brings a strength buff. That is good this early, but 15 souls is also a steep price. This is 2.5 turns of soul collection, 7.5 tiers of units killed (2 fights on average world danger in the early turns), 4 times Soulbound applied. This is a very limited tool. Soul Fire gets changed.
T2: Raise Zombies also costs 15 souls, which is quite a lot for a temporary battle summons. Especially as Rotting Explosion demands a zombie to target. Restore udnead also costs 15 souls, compared to the 60 mana of the army heal. For coming later and only applying to undead this is expensive, even if it can be used quickly in an emergency. But already we are through 2 tomes and all we have a good soul use for is stuff that is to expensive to use regularly and units.
T3: Talked about Domain of Death above. Desecrate Structure is even worse. 50 souls to add a +5 mana income that can be lost. If Soul collection gives 5 souls for 30 gold, 50 souls are 300 gold. As the game usually goes gold value = mana value that means 60 turns to break even. I think Desecrate Structure needs a full rework. Maybe make it something interesting like mana cost only sacrifice an undead unit on the target4ed node to add +1 soul income to it or such. Would also help make that realm of death transistion the T3 tome is seemingly about.
T4: 35 souls for greater reanimation (dies at the end of battle), 35 souls for Marked for death (Kills one hero unit if you don't kill it normally beforehand) and 150 and 5 in upkeep per turn for a Reaper. Now these prices aren't too abd given the same tome gives us finally good sources of soul income, but they're still steep for arguable 2 battle spells and one mediocre T5 summon.
T5: 3 of the 4 spells in this tome require souls (and arguably 2 are bad at this stage of the game) and none give you any soul income....um, very unusable of you went the non-necromancy side up the dark tome tiers


Units: Skeleton = 10 souls, Bone Golem (produced or fused) = 30 souls, Necromancer = 50 souls (changed below), Reaper = 150 souls & 5/turn.
Banshee is a pure mana summon. Bone Wyverns can only be gotten as loot and Bone Dragons can be loot or a rtally of lieges unit form a gold landmark, both cost mana upkeep.

This unit line up shows also the cost is rather high and comparing that to normal recruitment gives us
T1= 60 gold in souls compared to normal 60 gold (varies)
T2= 180 gold in souls compared to 100 gold
T3= 300 gold in souls compared to 140 gold
T5= 600 gold in souls compared to 300 gold/mana (400 gold for the golden golem)
Now while the producable undead units with soul costs have reduced draft costs compared to normal producable units, given the difficulty of acquiring souls this comparison shows they are all very overpriced, with T1 having an about equal cost and the others practically costing about twice as comparable units.
It seems souls are calculated to be worth 2.5 gold/mana, but for some reason all ways to get them cost extra.

Now I think this all shows that income and expenses in the soul economy are rather skewed and the abse income from killing is supposed to do the heavy lifting most of the game. This is a bit unsatisfying as you have 5 books about having a soul economy and most soul economy tools in them do little.
By these calcualtion if you do not get most of your souls from killing enemies you are paying extra for your necromancy units.
The exceptions here are the soul well, because that with not bad placement is a better conduit that gives extra souls, maybe souldinders if you fight a lot.
There's the added issue of few undead units existing outside the wightborn transformation, making all the undead supporting tools dependent on that one transformation.

Showing all these numbers shows us that you need to do a major rebalance here, because the costs are way off. My personal assumption is the numbers were done before an economy adjustment and escaped recalculation. I would even go so fat that a lot of the techs in these tomes need a bigger rework, to make sense and especially to give more of a red thread to the tome line.

• Tome of Souls: Soul Fire changed from 10 Souls to 10 Mana.

I agree with the above suggestion to make it apply soulbound too.
Or if you want to keep the "trade souls as short term advantage instead of long-term gain" I would suggest making it a really cheap spell, like 5 mana and having it add a "Soulburned: Unit provides no/2 less souls upon death" debuff.

• Tome of Necromancy: Reduce Necromancer Soul cost from 50 Souls to 70 Gold and 25 Souls.

Given the Necromancer is a living unit I think that fits, though the cost issue from above applies.

• Tome of Great Transformation: Change the cost of Wightborn Transformation from 200 Souls to 300 Mana and 100 Souls.

I like this because it means it is easier to go undead spontaneously.

Praphrased: "We're going to add a new undead unit, the (existing) Corrupt Soul to the Tome of Necromancy."

This is from the Stream.
I don't think that fits. The Corrupt Soul is a unit that is not undead currently (only in the undead queen dungeon encounter it becomes wightborn) and it also has abilities about lowering enemy morale and exploiting that like the Banshee. It does not fit the Tome of Necromancy's theme and would actually fit more into the Tome of the Doom Herald where it does overlap with the banshee quite a bit.

How about we get the Bone Wyvern and an assemble Bone Wyvern spell? That would expand on "Asembling undead" half of the theme from the Tome of Souls.
Ideally I would like to see also adding a T3 Bone Horror and the T4 Bone Dragon as further undead fusion, similarly to the way fiends can be "combined" via the Fight for power spell.

 

[Arilou]

One of the obvious things is they could make the various "raise undead" work like some of the assembly healing abiliites from PF, where they are either raise a new corpse or heal an existing undead unit.

EDIT: Another point is that they're also nerfing combat summons (non-undead ones have a time limit, undead ones start with an uncleansable decay status effect so cannot be healed and progressively lose health)

Desecrate Structure has other problems (probably needs to be more clear when a structure is desecrated and the income to show up in the structure tooltip somehow)

 

[grandadmiralbob]

This game is awesome! So many ways of playing it and they are all enjoyable. Congratulations to the team on making this game actually exceed my expectations. I can't wait to see what this game grows in to!

 

[trojasmic]

• Added a Next and Previous button for the Hero Panel screen

Thank you!

 

[Dex8172]

• And much more!

I stopped playing the game on the second map of the campaign when I saw that faction units can't float/fly over water, even with Basic Seafaring. Neither mystic culture scouts, neither heroes with flying mounts. Then I loaded my last save from the first map of the campaign, and found out that demonkin flying also didn't work over water. Non-faction flying/floating units, on the other hand, work just fine.

Hopefully that's fixed too and I'll finally be able to continue the campaign.

 

[Vinicius_Zoio]

As an ardent fan of the series since the first game, it's always good to see you post, Lennart. Frankly, Age of Wonders 4 can truly become the "definitive AoW game", and the way the studio is integrating feedback and keeping an eye on the community is encouraging. Knowing you guys are working on the game's issues and plan to keep polishing gameplay is very good.

The Age of Wonders series has always been a labor of love for Triumph, and you guys deserve all the critical and commercial success for your long journey. Let us go boldly through the 4th Age of Wonders!

 

[Leyrann]

Will we be able to deleted sectors and City Ruins?

They confirmed in the livestream that you can now remove City Ruins.

In Caldera map as well as Grexoli, free cities often send raids. Those raids consist of an isolated heroes level 5 to 7. That's a lot of research already at 50 points per level. Planning to increase to 150 I suppose the skill will move from the bottom of the dark tree to somewhere higher.

Keep in mind that the change is from 50 per level to 150 flat.

 

[Kelben]

Oh okay, in that case I understand the change. It is for the better. Still, the free cities suicidal behaviour should be fixed.

 

[T_Rev]

Big fan of most of the changes. I like the idea of Corrupt Souls becoming an undead unit, but what unit's going to replace it in the ancient wonders?

Also I'm not a big fan of the necromancy rebalance, before I was able to ignore mana for the most part just having a token amount for unit upkeep and combat casting. I'd mainly focus on gold and souls. Now it's going to require developing 3 resources instead of 2. I understand that it would allow those who focused on other tomes to get the wightborn transformation more easily, but it's also the only T3 tome great transformation with the rest being T4. Other great transformations require at least two T3 tomes of any kind to get a T4 tome, so requiring at least a T1 tome of Souls or T2 tome of Necromancy seems fair to me.

 

[BulsaraNZ]

Cavalry & Mounted Units
We've heard you loud and clear. You wanted more mounted units, so we have put several units on top of Horses, Wolf, Boars and the likes. The Mystic Spellbreaker, Hound Master and Wild Speaker units are now permanently mounted, while units like the Dark Pursuer, High Dawn Defender and Glade Runner will get mounts when paired with a Exotic Mount Trait.
These units will also be more easily recognized thanks to the new “Optional Cavalry” tag in the unit panel encyclopedia.

WTF? Just because some people yell that they want something, anyone not wanting such things end up with it as well. You made more units mounted if you take a mount trait - why not apply that to all units instead of mounting currently unmounted units permanently.

 

[aadf97799c]

can player edit existing self made faction

have to make new faction for any small change is absurd

 

[aadf97799c]

hound master wild speaker already very powerful low tier unit

this buff would make player spam them even more

 

[Leyrann]

WTF? Just because some people yell that they want something, anyone not wanting such things end up with it as well. You made more units mounted if you take a mount trait - why not apply that to all units instead of mounting currently unmounted units permanently.

First of all, no need to be so rude and dismissive.

To answer the question you implied between your ranting: A lot of people were of the opinion that there were too few mounted units, period (side note: I'm not sure how anyone could look at the current roster of units and argue otherwise, though I'm willing to hear the argument). Triumph, apparently, agreed. They added a few more mounted units to balance it out a bit better, and then also buffed the mounted traits for those who want to take a step further with their mounted units.

But keeping the number of mounted units this low and requiring everyone who wants to have more mounted units to always take a mount trait is just weird - you'd essentially be forcing people into it if they want to have any significant number of mounted units.

 

[stigmund77]

Listened to the stream while working, very excited for what's to come hoping vassals can be expanded at some point with culture/society traits to turn them into more offensive points on the map.

Looking forward to the dragon dlc and item hoards!

 

[Lord Sheogorath]

Regarding mounted trait, why not remove mounts from body traits and make an optional mount trait. If mounts are chosen then the units that get mounts will have a cost increase (both gold and draft) depending on which mount is chosen. It is thematically correct since the empire will have to breed mounts and train those units for mounted combat. Maybe make a small increase in maintenance too since mounts need to be fed.

How much the cost increase will depend on the mount, since not all mounts are equal. To my knowledge most players rank spiders first and then unicorns. The wolf and especially the nightmare are the most situational since they only benefit melee units.

This will give the vast map spanning empires optional mobility, while empires that are compact, defensive and don't need much mobility will get some cheaper units.

 

[Xartharos]

First of all, no need to be so rude and dismissive.

To answer the question you implied between your ranting: A lot of people were of the opinion that there were too few mounted units, period (side note: I'm not sure how anyone could look at the current roster of units and argue otherwise, though I'm willing to hear the argument). Triumph, apparently, agreed. They added a few more mounted units to balance it out a bit better, and then also buffed the mounted traits for those who want to take a step further with their mounted units.

But keeping the number of mounted units this low and requiring everyone who wants to have more mounted units to always take a mount trait is just weird - you'd essentially be forcing people into it if they want to have any significant number of mounted unit

Although i do agree he came off a harsh i do understand where he is coming from as i disagree with your assumption more so because of fly, as far as i can remember mounted units cannot fly so any mounted unit is a waste for those who pursue the major transformations who are angel, demon and future draconian, this also is the most important reason i was choosing mystic since they were the only culture who was fully unmounted therefore could make full use of said transformations

Now after this update is implemented mystic has turned from an unique culture who does not use mount and a must use if you want all your units to fly, to never to be used by me because if i have to choose between wasting a t3 or a t1 unit that cannot fly with said transformation, i will choose a t1, making my options to choose between high or industrious as the ones i will use

as for the lack of mounted i would have preferred a new culture that was full on the mount like nomads and be permanent or as was currently done that picking the mount trait will make the culture mounted,

 

[Karion]

Loving the changes but my only disagree is with the permanent mounts on some units, they should be added to the pool for mount traits instead.

 

[Roronak]

For the mounts
My suggestion
Major race tranformation: Angelize Demonkin Gaia's Chosen, remove all the mounts.
- Angel and Demon can fly, riding a mount is odd, Gaia's chosen is too powerfull, they will be fine without mounts.
Mount traits add 2 mounted unit to high and barbarian( fury and sunderer ),the rest add one.
Some tome units mounted if mount traits activated.

I saw Defender riding spider on the stream, but didnt find it in this diary?

 

[Angel Horn]

I dare you to show us a complete working multiplayer game in stream.

 

[lunelune2413]

No mention of performance optimization or network stability for multiplayer either. Guessing it will remain Age of Reloads.

Also, did these guys really just show us the pictures of Dragon Dawn on the steam page. Come on bro. You guys are the source...

I would also agree that it's really sad they didn't mention the clear performance issues that happen mid to late game.
Tile improvements + Forests/Jungles really stutters the game. Wish there was a big optimization patch or simply a way to simply remove enviormental animations. Since it appears that most of the stutters comes from the engine loading 1-2 dozen animations all at once. Which it clearly struggles with...

Not to talk about Battles, where some battles are running fine, while other battle maps cause a massive FPS loss.
If by next major patch this hasn't been fixed, I will give the devs a clear and detailed bug report about this issue.