Balance Modding: Agartha Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

Update: Testable Balance Mod for MA Agartha:
Dropbox.com

Today we are talking about balance modding to MA Agartha. Again, the principles are Documentation, Balance Point, Conservatism, and Division.

MA Agartha is different from Pelagia in that we could jump right in with two feet and start modding them. All of the commands relevant to MA Agartha currently exist. Further, the Golem Cult already has access to mid-game summons that are powerful enough to stay relevant well into the late game. MA Agartha, I submit, could be brought to virtually any balance point through adjustment of costs alone.

And yet, it's a fairly well established fact that Agartha is one of the weakest factions. The problems come down to army ineptitude, poor magic, and golem pricing. Let's go through those things one at a time.

It is tempting to write the Agarthan army off altogether. After all, in Dominions 3 you were literally better off spending your money on independent tribal forces than using their troops at all. But it's important to note that things have improved since the time of Dominions 3. First of all, since the days of Dominions 3, the armored Ancient Ones have learned how to use iron. It's not a lot, but it's surprisingly helpful. Secondly, the inclusion of Troglodyte Slaves gives them a potential for offense that can't be negated with 20 points of protection or 16 points of defense skill. The Agarthan Heavy Infantry is actually pretty good at holding a line, and while there are no archers in the nation to take advantage of that, they do have the aforementioned Troglodytes and decent enough battle casters, so line holding is a thing that has value.

The Pale One Soldier is not good as a soldier. He does no more damage than an Agarthan Infantryman, comes only 2 to a square, has considerably sub-human attack and defense skills, and their decidedly high hit point to effectiveness ratio means that they are overcounted in the tests for whether your army routes. In many ways, Pale One Soldiers are literally a liability on the field of battle. But they are not completely without value. If you compare them to other sappers, they aren't terrible, and they are certainly cheap for a unit that digs for a siege value of 3.4. And while they are terrible under water, they can at least go there. It may take a lot of Pale Ones to expand into water or tear down a fortress, but it takes less research than Gate Cleavers and Sea King Goblets, and when you compare the costs it's not bad.

Still, while the Troglodyte acts as an answer of sorts to heavy cavalry, they are themselves not that resistant to crossbow fire and the like. And the rest of the Agarthan troops consider an attack skill of 10 to be high and none of the other line troops do more than 15 damage. Heavy Cavalry are not exactly rare in the Middle Age, and they are extremely hard to handle for Agartha. It is virtually assumed that Agartha's armies will be out-shot due to their lack of ranged weapons, but even in melee it is very likely they will be out fought - it is not hard to do.

You'll note that I haven't mentioned their capital only sacred troops. That is because they are honestly not really very good. The Hurler does a lot of damage, but a range of 6 means that even heavy infantry can often charge into melee from outside of range. The Ancient One has an impressive Strength, but uses such crap weaponry and attack skill that it doesn't matter. He's more expensive than three Barbarians and his offensive output is less than one. There are certainly blesses you can get that will improve them, but not enough that you could make a strategy around it that would be good.

Now the mages. Agartha has lower than low magic diversity. Their capital only mage is worse as a mage than the Crones or Grand Masters of other nations that have low magic diversity coming from a StR, old, capital-only mage, and their build anywhere mages don't bring a lot to the table either. All their mages have holy paths, and the autocalc consistently overvalues mage priests. That's not a unique issue to MA Agartha, but the fall solidly on the wrong side of it. Their late game magic is extremely limited, and they can't count on anything better than F1W1E4D2. It's basically Ulm levels of mage shunning and they don't even have the excuse of having a good basic army or an anti-magical society. Indeed, their society revolves around the worship of magically animate statues, so you'd think they might have some magic up their sleeves - and you'd be wrong.

The silver lining is that the Golem Crafter has pretty decent battle magic paths, though not especially better than the Ulm Priest Smith who costs 35 gold less, has a forge bonus, is drain immune, and generates resources. Still, with some research under your belt, the Golem Crafter can Summon Earth Power and Magma Eruption. Even at the beginning of the game, the ability to throw Fire Flies and Flying Shards is better than many basic mages can do. And he searches well enough. I know that isn't a lot, but it means you aren't sad you get the Golem Crafter as your basic workhorse mage. You're sad that you don't get much else.

The biggest issue I think is the Golems. Specifically, their cost. The Attentive Statues are about as good as Living Statues, but instead of getting them at a discount for being a supposedly important part of your society, they cost more than twice as much each and come out only one fifth as fast. You can start summoning them at Enchantment 2, but at those prices you don't really want any at all. The rest of the Golems continue that line. They are somewhat lower in the research tree than equivalent summons available to everyone, but they cost considerably more and pretty much aren't worth it. The Golem Cult grants extra hit points to the living statues at home, and this might have been the justification for making them so expensive. But whatever the reasoning, it's a kick in the knees to MA Agartha, and as established they are not a powerful faction.

The gold standard of summoning in Dominions 4 is the Ogre, which incidentally also costs Earth gems and is available at level 2. They cost less than one gem a piece, and you have to ask how many Ogres any summons that costs more than one Earth gem is really worth. Now, one of the main advantages of the marble forces is their resistance to non-bludgeoning weapons and Ogres use bludgeoning weapons. So it would be acceptable if Attentive Statues got their butts handed to them by their cost in Ogres specifically. But it's simply very hard to imagine Attentive Statues being worth more than an Ogre or two in almost any circumstances.

What Can Be Done?

Quite a lot actually. While with Pelagia we're mostly at the stage of sitting on our hands waiting for the next set of mod commands to allow us to interact with core Pelagian issues, with Agartha all the relevant commands are finished. There's even #caverecruit if one wanted to go that way. An Agartha balance changing mod could be done tomorrow. Or this evening for that matter. The problem then is one of restraint. It would be easy to get carried away and make changes that were too sweeping or too potent. The question is how to make MA Agartha good enough to hit balance targets without making them too powerful and with the least invasive possible changes.

For the magic, as I see it there are really only a few things that might be done. Giving a 10% random to Golem Crafters and/or Earth Seers would help a lot with Agartha's anemic access to later game effects and yet have little effect on the research curve. Giving more paths and/or randoms to the Ancient Oracle would seem thematic and have limited impact on what you do with most of your economy - after all you're never going to buy more than one Ancient Oracle every two turns, and you won't even make that many for some time. Obviously, it would be possible to take advantage of the fact that no one cares about Earth Readers to alleviate their magic diversity problems by turning Earth Readers into something very different like E1S2H1 or something, but that seems like an example of something that would be "overboard."

For an example of how a more powerful Oracle might work, if the Ancient Oracle had a base Earth 4 and an extra FWD random, they would cost 490 gold. Obviously you wouldn't start building them super early in the game, but raw power of that sort would at least be helpful to have access to in the late game.

The Golem Costs can be approached from three different directions. The number of units can be increased per summoning, the gem costs of the spells can be reduced, or we could go with Drpraetor's idea and one or more of the Statue units can be made into recruitables. Zero gold recruitables was tried in Dominions 3 with Hoburg: Blood Works, but it never really gelled: however many resources the zero gold recruitable cost it mostly sidelined all the gold requiring recruitables (or at least those recruitables that cost gold and resources together). However, the advent of Limited Recruitment in Dominions 4 can remove that problem. If you can only build 2 Attentive Statues per fort per turn, you won't simply turn all your resources into statues and all your gold into Troglodytes because you'll have gold and resources left over at the very least. Unfortunately, it's currently bugged to have more than one limited recruitment troop, but there are workarounds and it will probably be fixed in any case.

A small amount of Attentive Statues shoring up the early game army would plug a lot of holes in the faction's armed forces. At 17 damage and 11 attack, Attentive Statues are noticeably better at both penetrating armor and hitting skilled targets than anything else in the regular, sad as that is. If the other Marble forces were reduced in price by about 60% (yes, really), that would probably be enough to call the faction done.

And importantly, I think it can be done with few enough changes to the faction's mechanics as to be listable on the fingers of one hand. And equally importantly: with no change at all to the faction's lore or flavor text.

-Frank

Edited by: FrankTrollman

This all sounds real good.

Would you consider it too "out there" to have something where the Golem Crafters are more directly linked with crafting golems? A summon ally ability letting them create a steady trickle of golems in place of doing anything else, or creating an E2, 0-research, 0-cost ritual that creates a golem, so that your crafters could re-cast the spell turn after turn if that was something you wanted to happen.

Regardless, I'm not alone in wanting to see MA Agartha competitive while also being thematically true because their theme is pretty dang cool. Having golems be available from the start of the game, and having the varieties of golems form a core part of the nation early, mid-game, and late is too appropriate to leave out.

Edited by: baumgarm

Hmmm. Limited-recruitable Attentive Statues is an interesting idea and both unique and thematic for Agartha. I like the idea--but I don't think they should be 0 gold. Even the non-sacred Attentive statues must require some maintenance, plus you have to pay the (presumably NPC) mage for creating them. That's just my initial reaction, I am open to further discussion.

I also approve of older, more powerful Oracles, but E4(200% FWD) feels like a bit too much of a stretch for a first step. I'd go with keeping their base Earth the same and upping their 10% random to a full 100%.

Attentive Statues might be better as a #caverecruit than a fort recruit, both to prevent fort-spamming strategies and because thematically, caves are where the NPC Golem-crafters probably live.

Frank.Trollman wrote:
And importantly, I think it can be done with few enough changes to the faction's mechanics as to be listable on the fingers of one hand. And equally importantly: with no change at all to the faction's lore or flavor text.

Yes, this is really nice.

Edited by: wilsonmax

(Note: My experience in multiplayer is limited to playing against friends who are just as bad as I am, so take this with a grain of salt)

I think what it comes down to is that the Golem Cult needs to actually be able to field a threatening amount of golems. Their horrible mage paths wouldn't be so crippling if their mages were all able to wander around with a sizeable force of constructs, but right now they're just too slow and expensive to create. Limited recruitment attentive statues in forts is a fantastic idea, and an extremely heavy reduction in gem cost would also do them many favours. The other main thing is deciding how many to get per spell. 2 attentive statues per spell is definitely not enough. 1 sentinel per spell is not enough, but not to such a bad extent. The granite guard, on the other hand, *might* be strong enough to justify it only coming as a single unit - Though even if the cost is halved, I'd probably still take 6 ogres over the granite guard, which is a problem.

As for their mages, I think the Oracles could be E3D1 (100% FWD, 100% FWE) without being overpowering. I also think a level in S would be appropriate for the Earth Reader, both thematically and from a balance standpoint. While this has limited application by itself, it opens up a few options for Agartha, and it is a nation which desperately needs options.

I'm somewhat concerned that the first impulse of balance is to give 30+% more magic paths to the nation at the same time as greatly improving a bunch of summons, even making some gemless in limited quantities. Do we have enough data to justify all these changes?

Edited by: kianduatha

kianduatha wrote: I'm somewhat concerned that the first impulse of balance is to give 30+% more magic paths to the nation at the same time as greatly improving a bunch of summons, even making some gemless in limited quantities. Do we have enough data to justify all these changes?

At this exact moment? Probably not, except in a test game. But these ideas will be useful things to keep in mind over the next few months while Dom4 nations are being evaluated in the context of a new game. It doesn't hurt to discuss thematic options now.

Maybe it will turn out to be the case that MA Agartha has absolutely no trouble expanding or facing down armies of skilled and/or high-protection troops. If so then there's no real need for recruitable Attentive Statues, although decreasing gem costs for national summons across the board may still be justified just to make them more attractive than generic summons.

(That could go in a separate mod actually, under the modularity principle which we're apparently calling "Division". Call it the "Gem standardization" mod or something, based on "thirty gold-per-gem" and a number of gold standard summons like Ogres. Drakes would be 3 earth gems apiece based on LA Agartha's gcost for cave knights, and the notion that all drakes are notionally equally powerful and should have similar gem costs. The Ogre becomes the standard for summoning thug-like creatures including O-bakemono. Etc.)

Edited by: wilsonmax

Hahahahaha, all drakes are equally powerful. Oh man. If only. But it's hard to make cave drakes even half as scary as the other ones as long as LA Agartha has 'em.

What's weird is that since they have EA Agartha's great summons, MA Agartha has even LESS reason to use statues.
If I were to balance them, I would make Attentive Statues identical to the Ogres spell in both cost and research level and also scaling with paths. Also, Sentinels would be summoned in batches of 3-5, and the Granite Guard being only 5 earth gems. Marble Oracles should only be about 10-15 gems, and have good magic paths and leadership as well.
One quirk that I think would be interesting is have the Pale One soldiers give a standard bonus due to the fact that the humans see them in awe, similar to how the Pale One commander has the inspirational perk.

Edited by: amuys

This...is very well reasoned and thought out. Color me impressed.

I do like the idea of a 'summon allies' style recruitment option for Golems. This gives players more of a choice in using their Golem Crafters, which is almost always a good thing for faction power.

I'm going to say that recruitable commanders who use summon allies command for worthwhile troops is a bad idea. I had that in a nation mod of mine a while back and it was pretty bad. People spammed castles and cranked the freespawn generation to 11.

Burnsaber wrote: I'm going to say that recruitable commanders who use summon allies command for worthwhile troops is a bad idea. I had that in a nation mod of mine a while back and it was pretty bad. People spammed castles and cranked the freespawn generation to 11.

Fair enough. Having them be limited recruitment at forts and available in larger numbers for gems ought to do it without unleashing Statuegeddon.

Burnsaber wrote: I'm going to say that recruitable commanders who use summon allies command for worthwhile troops is a bad idea. I had that in a nation mod of mine a while back and it was pretty bad. People spammed castles and cranked the freespawn generation to 11.

I agree here. Another note is that reanimation and free summons nations like Sceleria have a slow early research curve. In the long run it evens out because freespawn are free to maintain and they can invest the gold saved in new forts and labs, but in the early game a mage who is making spawn isn't researching, leading expansion armies, or site searching. While freespawn making mages can get out of hand in the late game, it really slows down the early game because your mage time turns are so limited. I don't think we want to do that to them either.

On Cave Recruit: I don't think that Caves should make units that cost a lot of resources and are limited recruit. Having Cave Recruit is an incentive to capture Cave Provinces, which I think everyone can agree is something Agartha of all eras should be doing. But it's also an incentive to not build a fort on those caves. If you end up using all the resources on your cave provinces making Attentive Statues and then you wouldn't be able to make any more Attentive Statues by building a fort because you've hit the turn recruit limit, then you won't build a for there - you'd build it anywhere else. Good candidates for Cave Recruit are Pale One Soldiers, Troglodytes, and even Earth Readers and Ancient Ones. But it's also important to note that a number of games are played on converted Dominions 3 maps that have no cave provinces. So whatever is Cave Recruit has to be something that is not necessary to the faction (though hopefully also nice enough to be a real incentive on those maps that include caves).

Amuys wrote: One quirk that I think would be interesting is have the Pale One soldiers give a standard bonus due to the fact that the humans see them in awe, similar to how the Pale One commander has the inspirational perk.

That's possibly too useful for the basic Pale One Soldiers, but that sounds like an incredibly thematic benefit for the Ancient One. The Ancient One trooper says that they inspire "humans as well as pale ones to deeds of greatness," which makes me think their lack of a standard effect is possibly even a bug.

-Frank

For current map setup cave recruit isn't a good idea since the amount of caves is non-existant. New maps can definitely be made and random maps can definitely be played, but making something important cave recruitable only will make the map choice define whether the nation should be played at all.

However, terrain recruitments except forest (and mountain, if border mountains trigger it) recruitment all suffer somewhat from this issue anyway, caves considerably more than the others though, since all maps tend to have at least some swamp/waste/mountain/forest. Using those for something important is really a statement to ignore the current stock non-random maps. Then again - even if it's largely offtopic - trying to make different kind of maps for Dominions 4 might be worth it anyway if the movement system stays as it is. The stock map setup is, however, what Illwinter supplies the game with.

Edited by: elmokki

So I've got a test version up in the OP. It does five things:

1. You can recruit up to 2 Attentive Statues for 50 Resources each turn.
2. The Oracle has access to all the paths of the EA Oracles whose knowledge he has "kept alive." This increases cost to 405 gold.
3. The Ancient Ones are standard bearers.
4. You can recruit Troglodytes in Cave provinces.
5. The costs of the golem summons have been reduced by 60%, rounded down.

Initial notes: currently the reclimit command is bugged, meaning that you are unable to recruit your Troglodytes and Statues to the full complement. Hopefully this will be fixed in an upcoming patch. The way it works is weird. If you hire 2 Statues, it will say you can recruit Troglodytes after but none of them will be recruited. If you recruit 3 Troglodytes and then 2 Statues, you'll get 3 Troglodytes and 1 Statue. I don't even know, but hopefully it will go away next patch. Early expansion seems to work very well, and the Statues might be too cheap at 50 Resources. Barbarians with hammers will still mess your statues up.

-Frank

Edited by: FrankTrollman

The reclimit bug is eliminated in the next version.

This is all quite interesting, although I'm more of an EA Agartha than MA Agartha fan, and was slightly let down by the thread title(perhaps it could be renamed 'modding MA Agartha?) - so, sorry for being slightly OT any plan of adapting some of these changes to the Early Age too?
Perhaps trogs could be a foreignrecruit in cave provinces in EA...

I assume you're not touching the non-golem summons, like umbrals and the rhuax/barathrus pacts, since they are not the 'point' of Middle Age Agartha?

Edit: also, on the issue of 'things that would be nice but require game changes and can't be modded' - I've been suggesting a 'cave survival'ability, to make the Agarthan armies slightly less slow in some niche cases. Closest that could be done currently is giving mountain survival....

Edited by: TheZonk

If I had to pick a reason why I started in the Middle Era other than "It's in the middle" it would be because it has clearer outliers than the Late Era and isn't as overall insane as the Early Era. But mostly i think it's just because it happened to be in the middle. We will get to the Late and Early Eras, just as we'll get to the countries that are less obviously out of whack in the Middle Era. But it will take more research and more experience with more games.

I didn't touch the Cavern Wights and Pact spells both because they are not core to the nation and also because they are already pretty good. Casting Barathus Pact doesn't make you feel stupid.

Early Agartha is a sad case. Their build-anywhere mage is worse than the Golem Crafter and the early Pale One army is simply awful. In MA Agartha, Pale One Soldiers are already better looked at as camp followers than melee combatants, and the EA version uses bronze armor and is strictly worse. They have better magic diversity on paper, but having it split between three different StR capital-only mages makes it terrible. Seal Guards and Troglodytes have their uses, but they are also literally the only troops in EA Agartha that have an attack skill better than 9. And none of your troops who cost less than 50 gold a piece have an attack higher than 8. It's really hard to see how the army of EA Agartha can do anything but re-enact the Kinslayer War.

Their issues are simpler in a way than MA Agartha, but at the same time more intractable. They need access to battle magic and they need some kind of core army that can do something at all when Equites or Jaguar Warriors or Mounted Hirdmen come to play.

-Frank

Illwinter did say they were considering of adding some Olm units and commanders for EA.
What was the Kinslayer war from again?

Edited by: amuys

amuys wrote: Illwinter did say they were considering of adding some Olm units for EA.
What was the Kinslayer war from again?

Sorry, it's "Kin Breaker War." In the lore, the Early Age comes to a horrible end for the Agarthans when their prince leads them into battle using tactics devised for caverns and is wiped out by the surface dwellers because their cavalry and archery are better suited for the open terrain. The prince's corpse is taken back beneath the earth in shame, and his name is never spoken again. He is given a monument statue as befits his rank, but it is black rather than white marble to sign the distaste the Agarthans feel for the Kin Breaker's failure.

Then things get weird. Human sorcerers and witch sympathizer from Ulm get a land grant from Pythium to invade the underworld and take over the Agarthan halls of jewels. Then, instead of attacking the place, the leader of the humans brought his sorcerers to the Oracles and asked them to accept human worshipers as a plan to take over Agartha without swinging a sword or firing a shot.

The story of the end of EA Agartha and the beginning of MA Agartha is in the hero backstories of Kin Breaker (1846), Golog (1847) and Klaus (1848). It's pretty cool. But of course, it sucks if you have to play it out from the standpoint of the Agarthans, because they get crushed.

-Frank

Frank.Trollman wrote: On Cave Recruit: I don't think that Caves should make units that cost a lot of resources and are limited recruit. Having Cave Recruit is an incentive to capture Cave Provinces, which I think everyone can agree is something Agartha of all eras should be doing. But it's also an incentive to not build a fort on those caves. If you end up using all the resources on your cave provinces making Attentive Statues and then you wouldn't be able to make any more Attentive Statues by building a fort because you've hit the turn recruit limit, then you won't build a for there - you'd build it anywhere else. Good candidates for Cave Recruit are Pale One Soldiers, Troglodytes, and even Earth Readers and Ancient Ones. But it's also important to note that a number of games are played on converted Dominions 3 maps that have no cave provinces. So whatever is Cave Recruit has to be something that is not necessary to the faction (though hopefully also nice enough to be a real incentive on those maps that include caves).

There's no disincentive if Attentive Statues are recruitable ONLY in cave provinces. I was suggesting an alternative to making them normal recruitables, because I worry a little about the effects of allowing worthwhile upkeep-free recruitables out of any fort. Upkeep is a hugely important limitation on national recruitment, it changes it from an exponential to a logistic curve.

I'll check out the mod, thanks.

Edited by: wilsonmax

I notice you also removed the holy levels from the Oracle. While mechanically this could be a justifiable change, it's pretty off the wall in terms of thematics.

I'm gonna guess that's a typo from the mod, and that when Frank rewrote the Oracle's magic paths he just forgot to add back the holy.

Point of clarification: I assume that the Testable Balance mod exists in order to get a sense of how much the individual changes impact MA Agarthan viability, both in isolation and in combination with each other. I.e. the idea is to assess how much each change moves Agartha away from the Pelagia end of the scale towards Hinnom, so that when a fixed balance point is chosen there is data on how much is needed to move Agartha toward that balance point.

If the testable mod were intended as a fait accompli I would have some concerns about conservatism, balance point, and maybe about documentation--but I think it's not supposed to be that.

One thing I want to avoid is adding new spells/recruitables in balance mods.
EA and MA Agartha played VERY differently in CBM from Vanilla because of those additions.

I don't see a compelling reason why the statues couldn't be kept as summon spell only, just with a worthwhile price. Turning the summons into recruits is just a cop and would make the faction either too gimicky (if they statue recruitment is weirdly done), or just the same as anything else (if it's just a plain old recruitable).

They need to at least compete with the Barathrus Pact Earth Elemental summon though, which is a pretty awesome thing already as is but then boosted by the Golem Cult dominion even further. That thing is so damn good it makes me want to head into Conj. first every time rather than Ench. and the statue summons, even if the statues were buffed a ton. And unless the statues come with significantly less caster time needed, for instance, I'd think I'd keep on churning out those elementals all game long rather than statues with my E gems, unless the statues got utterly ridiculous.