Legend of the Invincibles

[RainerT]

Hi,

I have to agree with others, that redeem in the current way isn't a good solution. It ends up the way, that you're constanly redeeming to get spells you don't use, because you're constantly redeeming. It takes some fun out of the game, since you have to do it to often. Why are there two cold and four fire based spells? This is more confusing than helpful. Somtimes less is more. I still prefer a way without an offensive spell.

Another point are the resistances of the ordinary units. Some like the chaos rider get really good resistances, while others get stuck at there standard level like the elves. Apart from the mages the elves are stuck at -10 arcane and 0 for the rest. That makes them pretty useless in chapter 7. The resistances should be more balanced between the diffrent unit types.

[Dugi]

The main problem imo is not so much the offensive power of the demigods, but their insane sturdiness.

It appears that they advance too frequently, fully healing them all the time and getting their maximum hitpoints too high. How about making their advancements increase the amount of experience they need to advance by 20 percent instead of just 20 (like with normal units)?

So perhaps you could redeem 15 souls, then choose an ability. But to improve it, you do not need just more experience, you need more souls.

A total separation of redeem from experience would result in a total loss of need to gain experience and redeem all the time, I think.

Well, it is rather easy to do so, especially with the improved entropy attack. And if the enemies get even tougher, the normal units would get completely useless...

Well, the leaders were not supposed to be so strong. I might limit entropy to offensive attacking.

many... like almost every unit

You mean that almost all units show multiple advancements possible to advance into the same unit? I have never encountered a problem of that kind, so I would like to know with which units I might replicate it.

1 exp/turn is really not very much , i make like 5000exp in a level with killing

But not with a shaman low level unit, for whom it would be a perfect item.

the leaders should be nerfed

Seeking solutions that would not require to redo it completely.

Why are there two cold and four fire based spells?

Because the lightning fire spells deal much more damage and have much more attacks, so their properties are quite different (maybe something went wrong here as well, though).

Another point are the resistances of the ordinary units. Some like the chaos rider get really good resistances, while others get stuck at there standard level like the elves. Apart from the mages the elves are stuck at -10 arcane and 0 for the rest. That makes them pretty useless in chapter 7. The resistances should be more balanced between the diffrent unit types.

Not sure what you mean, elves can take armours to increase their resistances.

[brot]

i just found out theres a siege troll

is it possible to get it? and how
i dont think so

dont want to cheat me one

[jokuouto]

First: Thanks for a great gaming experience!

I think redeem is fine now... The problem is that Efram and Lethalia are too powerful. They should be amazing, but not immortal. Ability absorb and high resistances are just too much. Maybe you should remove absorb (and improved regeneration) from Efram and Lethalia. This way they take damage--> they may die --> less killings --> less expeience --> less powerful demigods --> you need to use other units to support --> other units are useful, their developemt and gearing is necessery

[GaiusCaesar]

The main problem imo is not so much the offensive power of the demigods, but their insane sturdiness.

It appears that they advance too frequently, fully healing them all the time and getting their maximum hitpoints too high. How about making their advancements increase the amount of experience they need to advance by 20 percent instead of just 20 (like with normal units)?

Well, if you do that, the redeem abilities like thunder or particle storm would require thousands of xp to upgrade...

So perhaps you could redeem 15 souls, then choose an ability. But to improve it, you do not need just more experience, you need more souls.

A total separation of redeem from experience would result in a total loss of need to gain experience and redeem all the time, I think.

Well, I thought like the following: Efraim starts out with 125 hp, having just his mundane attacks and the basic fireball spell. Thats a strong unit, but far from invincible. He will get real trouble if he is swarmed by yetis, demons or somthing similar. But redeem gives no xp, and it doesn't kill whole packs of enemies.And the fireball attack is unlikely to kill in retaliation, so you simply couldn't wait for these suicide attacks of the ai to give you experience. So you need to KILL units to get xp and increase your hp, defence...

On the other hand, redeem is necessary to get your liches out of danger and to acquire spells capable of killing those hordes of demons. So ther's also the necessity to redeem. It would be some kind of balancing problem for the player: strong demigods with lots of hp und rather weak attacks (and little chances to redeem anything) or a powerful, but rather fragile magician.

That's just the idea.

I think redeem is fine now... The problem is that Efram and Lethalia are too powerful. They should be amazing, but not immortal. Ability absorb and high resistances are just too much. Maybe you should remove absorb (and improved regeneration) from Efram and Lethalia. This way they take damage--> they may die --> less killings --> less expeience --> less powerful demigods --> you need to use other units to support --> other units are useful, their developemt and gearing is necessery

This would probably work for some time, but efraim gets araound 300 hp by the end of chapter 8. The demons simply won't take him down.

many... like almost every unit

You mean that almost all units show multiple advancements possible to advance into the same unit? I have never encountered a problem of that kind, so I would like to know with which units I might replicate it.

Royal Guard would be one unit to try.

[arobinson]

For the issue of the overpowered leaders, I think the actual problem is not the regeneration, but rather the item resistances plus combined with leeching/draining skills, the murderlust benefit (really powerful for the leaders) and the fact that they have no weaknesses.

Normally in Wesnoth, benefits are balances with cons. For example, a troll warrior has higher hitpoints and damage, but has no ranged attack. The rock lobber gains a ranged attack, but the melee damage is decreased, as are his hitpoints.

The demigod units are too powerful because of several reasons, but the big one I think is that they have no weaknesses. When taking on a pack of enemies, the AI will not only try to pick the attack that does the most damage, but also one that results in lower damage to the attacking unit. With Efraim and Lethalia having both a powerful melee and ranged attack, they can kill regardless of the attacker and attack type.

Now, for argument sake, say Efraim and Lethalia were not balanced the same as they are now. Say Efraim had a really weak ranged attack and Lethalia had a really week melee attack. Now AI would choose to use ranged vs. Efraim and melee vs. Lethalia. With ranged vs. Efraim, he would not heal since his ranged does not drain.

If you really cared to nerf the leaders, I would suggest limiting Efraim's ranged abilities and Lethalia's melee abilities. For example, let Efraim have only the iceball or fireball with a max # of attacks at 3 or 4, never more. With Lethialia, keep her melee number of attacks at or below 4 as well. Remove all +% attack items and replace them with +1 attack items (like the Quick Gauntlets). This way Lethalia cannot get ~10 staff attacks.

It was not that my demigods' were invincible, it was that they had too many paths of healing. If a unit attacked my Lethalia via melee, her staff would drain enough to end up netting HP instead of being hurt. Now if her staff had only a few attacks, then should would not heal so much, and therefore would be much more fragile. The drain and then the murderlust really packed a healing punch. As much as I like using murderlust, I think it should be nerfed so that the amount is +2 HP per kill instead of 8.

So perhaps consider removing Lethalia's axe attack and give her only a staff attack. Nerf or remove her "weapons" redeem advancement line and remove all but say one of her +1 attacks to melee AMLA.

For Efraim, nerf or remove his "magic" redeem advancement line and remove all but one of his +1 attacks to ranged spells AMLA.

Another thing I have found is that the number of attacks gets out of control for Lethalia's faerie fire attack and Efraim's knife attack. If I can get ~12 attacks, it is way too many. I think maxing out the AMLA at ~5 attacks is plenty and focus on adding adding damage and accuracy instead. You may also want to consider making the "focused" attacks only accurate on attack and not defense (like the built in marksman trait).

With Efraim and Lethalia each only being great at melee or ranged, but not both, then the AI would be able to avoid their strengths and actually wound them.

For resistances, the items are already very powerful in the game. Adding +3 magic and +2 melee advancements for resistances on the demigod's is probably not needed. Removing them would make them more mortal.

Also, I think it would be nice to have different redeem advancements between Efraim and Lethalia. Let Efraim's be melee based and Lethalia's be ranged. My recommendation would be to combine the damage redeem spells (only firestorm or fireblast, not both). Perhaps Efraim should get a shockwave attack to do area damage with melee and nerf his ability to get the ranged magic spells?

Overall I don't think the area spells are bad since they can only be used on attack and not defense. That is why I think that limiting the number of attacks for basic skills like melee and the ranged attacks that can be used for defense would really make it more balanced. If the demigods are only truly powerful on attack and weak on defense, then they won't mow through an entire screen of enemies in one turn.

To fix the redeem issue, perhaps just greatly reduce the number of redeem advancements that are available. That would make it so that you don't have to redeem so many times and it would also limit the ability to become virtually immortal.

Hope that helps with some ideas to consider.

FYI, another, unrelated, idea to throw around:
Maybe make the enemies equip the items they drop and only have items that they can use. So for example, an orc warrior would only ever drop armor or a sword and they would actually have that object equipped. That would make the enemies a bit more difficult in the game and more realistic. Why would a unit with a nice sword not be using it?

[TheZ]

a few more inputs my my experiences.

in chapter 7 and 8 i didnt use murderlust items at all, and had very little asborb and drain abilitys

On the 2ed to last map of chapter 8 (the jungle one) i had efraim running around alone taking on entire platoons of deamons and human-deamon hybrids by himself with very and i meen VERY little use of partical storm. most of the enemy platoon threw themselfs upon efraim and died, horably. i had leth and the kids runnign around taking on the same number of opponents trying to get leth her 15th redeem level. Only had to save load once or twice when one of the deamon messangers holy beamed the female daughter to death. had to use very little partical storm with leth but more so than with efraim. by the end i think the male kid had 12 sword attacks for 50 damage each hit with the collosal sword. this let him litteraly run over the abbadgon dude in the last level in chapter 8 as i had a cesetal messanger with max legacy of the kings, bard song, leadership, roalty helm and melee damage aura letting the son do somthing like 300 damage a hit.

for ballancing effect i would make it so the deamons have some abitily like "life force channal" were per attack any demi god (or unit) loses 1 hit point for 20 turns or something this due to the sheer number of deamons would force the player to realy upon other units for support or fodder. the reasoning behind having could be somthing like "since we are so close to the portal, the deamons can our very life essence is being drained into the inferno"

[Arrogancy]

Redeem is the un-fun. It's not pleasant to go out of my way to kill a specific opponent only to get spells I can't use because I'm using redeem instead.

Mitigating Efraim and Lethalia's power is very simple: don't let them access the leeches/drains ability. This will necessitate re-balancing quite a few levels, but it will solve the problem.

I'd also recommend lowering the total number of attack options presented to them.

J

[Dugi]

Well, if you do that, the redeem abilities like thunder or particle storm would require thousands of xp to upgrade...

It would actually make everyone focus on one particular thing, if you focus on defence, you will get defence and bad attack, if you focus on attack, you will suck defensively. It might increase too much, so it might be 10 percent instead of 20 percent (with 20 percent increase, the maximum experience would increase five times, that is probably to 1000, after 9 advancements, and with 10 percent increase, it would increase so after 17 advancements, so there should be an optimal number).

The conception of increasing it by 20 percent for normal units and by 20 for leaders worked in the first part because the enemy levels were not getting too high and there was a lack of powerful items there, letting me to get the first part finally balanced.
But it didn't work in the second part, because the enemy levels were increasing as well, and much more than in the final dungeon of chapter 5. According to some of you, it was the cause of the redeem all the time balance issue.

Well, I thought like the following: Efraim starts out with 125 hp, having just his mundane attacks and the basic fireball spell. Thats a strong unit, but far from invincible. He will get real trouble if he is swarmed by yetis, demons or somthing similar. But redeem gives no xp, and it doesn't kill whole packs of enemies.And the fireball attack is unlikely to kill in retaliation, so you simply couldn't wait for these suicide attacks of the ai to give you experience. So you need to KILL units to get xp and increase your hp, defence...

On the other hand, redeem is necessary to get your liches out of danger and to acquire spells capable of killing those hordes of demons. So ther's also the necessity to redeem. It would be some kind of balancing problem for the player: strong demigods with lots of hp und rather weak attacks (and little chances to redeem anything) or a powerful, but rather fragile magician.

That's just the idea.

It was meant to be exactly like you said, but the numbers did not go as I expected and the balance totally failed in chapter 8.

Royal Guard would be one unit to try.

Okay. I was able to replicate it, but no idea what it is.
EDIT: Got it. Won't be very easy to fix, though.

For the issue of the overpowered leaders, I think the actual problem is not the regeneration, but rather the item resistances plus combined with leeching/draining skills, the murderlust benefit (really powerful for the leaders) and the fact that they have no weaknesses.
...

I am not quite sure if it would work. Can you please try it? Just don't develop the ranged skills much with Efraim and don't develop the melee skills with Lethalia, and the other things you said, and see how would it work (I think you know to edit save files, but it has to be done without it).

FYI, another, unrelated, idea to throw around:
Maybe make the enemies equip the items they drop and only have items that they can use. So for example, an orc warrior would only ever drop armor or a sword and they would actually have that object equipped. That would make the enemies a bit more difficult in the game and more realistic. Why would a unit with a nice sword not be using it?

I was thinking about this possibility, but just a single item improves units only a little bit, and items have to drop in a way to provide you with gear you need (before, they just dropped anything, but this was changed in 2.0.x versions because too much stuff you didn't need was dropping, so according to my experience, the drops should contain things you need and not something else). It would also slow the game down, but not very significantly.

a few more inputs my my experiences.
...

So you think that the children should be nerfed as well?
And doing tons of damage with units that are improved by leadershipers, but not so brutally; on the other hand, you had a convenient unit for leadership stuff, improved by two books and a convenient legacy, that is a nicely rare combination (and a good idea).

for ballancing effect i would make it so the deamons have some abitily like "life force channal" were per attack any demi god (or unit) loses 1 hit point for 20 turns or something this due to the sheer number of deamons would force the player to realy upon other units for support or fodder. the reasoning behind having could be somthing like "since we are so close to the portal, the deamons can our very life essence is being drained into the inferno"

This is an interesting idea for a weapon special. I would prefer to make this ability a common demon trait (appearing randomly in more than one trait). Something lasting for 20 turns is quite a problem because the countdown for all units would slow the game down, so I believe it should last until the unit advances instead.

Mitigating Efraim and Lethalia's power is very simple: don't let them access the leeches/drains ability. This will necessitate re-balancing quite a few levels, but it will solve the problem.

Leech was badly nerfed recently. So I think I shall just replace some drain with leech...

[arobinson]

Okay, I nerfed Efraim's fireball and Lethalia's staff attacks to remove all of my +1 attacks AMLA and re-equipped an item to force it to apply the changes.

The AI did, most of the time, stop attacking Efraim via melee and Lethalia via ranged. I was no longer able to mow through enemies while defending. So, yes this strategy works for preventing them from killing too many units while defending. So Lethalia had 5 staff attacks (with equip, 3 without) and Efraim had 5 fireballs (with equip, 4 without).

Now even with those changes, they are still too powerful. The big reason is there are too many ways for them to heal (and very high resistances). Lethalia is healing 11HP per staff hit for me, which even with 5 attacks is up to 55HP healed. With a level 2 attacking unit and her resistances, it is very unlikely that they will actually damage her more than she heals.

My resistances: (arcane, blade, cold, fire, impact, pierce)
Lethalia: 55, 52, 90, 90, 37, 52
Efraim: 64, 35, 74, 64, 24, 42

So with "leeches", "murderlust" and "regeneration", they simply heal way too much.

Possible ideas:

• Remove "leeches" altogether
• Make "leeches" +1 or +2 HP per hit, not percentage based
• Make "leeches" an AMLA (possibly as part of a redeem upgrade) and also lower its effectiveness
• Make initial regeneration of the demigods lower (+2 or 4 HP per turn)
• Nerf the murderlust from +8HP to +2HP or +4HP per kill
• Remove the non-redeem +resistance AMLA for the demigods
• Reduce the number and amount of the redeem AMLA for healing (regeneration and draining)
• Have Efraim have all 0% base resistances instead of starting with 30% to cold and fire and 5% to impact and pierce
• Have Lethalia have all 0% base resistances instead of starting with 20% for blade, impact and pierce and 30% for cold and fire

So with healing nerfed, reducing or removing Lethalia's + to melee attack AMLA and Efraims + to ranged AMLA, removing the base resistances you will stop them from being so invincible.

Also, Lethalia gets way too many Faerie fire + attacks AMLA. Even not fully upgraded, my Lethalia's Faerie fire has 12 attacks. I think 5 or 6 at most is more than enough to max out at.

[Ugmpag]

A possible fix to the power issue might be for demigods to have a disdain for armour and mortal equipment. If they decide to go into battle geared like a cowardly"mortal", they don't get access to any of their advanced powers / spells.
As a work-around in my game, I just dump the equipment off on weaker units when a unit gets over-powered to the point no enemies will attack them.

[TheZ]

The kids were fine, i was just providing a point that with similar work any unit can become truly "over powered"
the leadership unit had 3 books the leadership lv 5 was from a book. i will admit i got somewhat lucky in the number of kills i was able to get with it

as far as the life leach effect, however you want to implement it, i was trying to help provide a solution. however regaining the lost hit points upon advancement might not be such a good thing as I was leveling up efraim at least every other mass melee in the jungle travel map and leth & the kids every 5 or 6 times. though an increase in exp needed to level would fix this. For the increase in experience to advance for the demi-gods why do linear progressing in needed exp? why not start off with 1% additional exp needed per level up and add 0.5% per level after?

[Dugi]

Okay, I nerfed Efraim's fireball and Lethalia's staff attacks to remove all of my +1 attacks AMLA and re-equipped an item to force it to apply the changes.
...

I told you not to edit the save files, and try to do it the hard way, editing the files and not taking the advancements you want to remove. The way you have done it has proven something, but you cannot estimate the number of advancements they'll take without killing countless units with overpowered retaliation. With much less advances taken, they might not be able to have so many defensive and offensive upgrades.

For the staff, try to replace drain with leech, it heals 5 times less (in the last version). Limit Lethalia's staff and axe and Efraim's fireball and iceball, making entropy attack-only. I think the resistances they have are okay (looking at the resistances you wrote down). Or just try whatever you want...

A possible fix to the power issue might be for demigods to have a disdain for armour and mortal equipment. If they decide to go into battle geared like a cowardly"mortal", they don't get access to any of their advanced powers / spells.

Hm, interesting idea. Kinda too radical, so I'll have to think about it.

As a work-around in my game, I just dump the equipment off on weaker units when a unit gets over-powered to the point no enemies will attack them.

Pretty good way to work around balance issues.

...
For the increase in experience to advance for the demi-gods why do linear progressing in needed exp? why not start off with 1% additional exp needed per level up and add 0.5% per level after?

Spoiler:

Linear progressing for leaders has proven itself as good in the first part of the game, but it wasn't very good in the second part, where the levels of enemies are increasing all the time, providing more and more exp. I would like to replace it with an exponential function for the second part (and possibly also in the first part), but the % added per level is quite a question. 0.5 or 1 percent is far from enough. I calculated how many times will the unit advance for particular percentages and to get its maximum exp multiplied by 5 (from starting 200 to 1000; the formula was ADVANCEMENTS_NEEDED=log(5)/log(1+PERCENTAGE/100) ).

Code: Select all

%	Times till 1000
1	162
2	81
3	54
4	41
5	33
6	28
7	24
8	21
9	19
10	17
12	14
15	11
20	9
25	7
30	6

I think that the % should be somewhere between 5 and 12. Can you please try it out? To find the files, read where the userdata is here, then find a file named amla.cfg in (the userdata path you've read about)/add-ons/Legend_of_the_Invincibles/utils/ . Find this (it is near the beginning):

Code: Select all

#define GREATER_AMLA_DEFAULT_BONUSES
        [effect]
            apply_to=hitpoints
            increase_total=3
            heal_full=yes
        [/effect]
        [effect]
            apply_to=max_experience
            increase=20		#This differs heroes from regular soldiers
        [/effect]
#enddef

And replace it with this:

Code: Select all

#define GREATER_AMLA_DEFAULT_BONUSES
        [effect]
            apply_to=hitpoints
            increase_total=3
            heal_full=yes
        [/effect]
        [effect]
            apply_to=max_experience
            increase=10%		#Replace 10% by another number % if you want some other.
        [/effect]
#enddef

This is the solution I would prefer, because arobinson's solution is somewhat too much against the original conception and Ugmpag's is even more. But who knows what will work.

[RainerT]

Why are there two cold and four fire based spells?

Because the lightning fire spells deal much more damage and have much more attacks, so their properties are quite different (maybe something went wrong here as well, though).

If they didn't work different, they wouldn't make sense. But why are there four different types, if I count it right? The most important point is to have different damage types. I would never take more than one of each, but make it really powerful. This is more effective than spreading the advancement about loads of different spells. If you halve the number of fire and cold attacks, you have to do a lot less redeeming and it is still sufficiant. It is also less confusing for the player which one to choose and you have to do less maintaining.

Even if a reduced amount of redeeming would make things better, I prefer an approach without an extra attack option. Redeem might be interessting for other campaigns, but for this one I don't see a necessity. I noticed that the other units are more fun to play than Efraim an Lethalia, because you don't worry about redeemed enemies.

By the way, what type of damage(s) does Particle Storm do?

Another point are the resistances of the ordinary units. Some like the chaos rider get really good resistances, while others get stuck at there standard level like the elves. Apart from the mages the elves are stuck at -10 arcane and 0 for the rest. That makes them pretty useless in chapter 7. The resistances should be more balanced between the different unit types.

Not sure what you mean, elves can take armours to increase their resistances.

My point is a different one. Some units get with their final advancement resistance improvement, while others don't. E.g. the Cavalier has really good ones and gets a huge bonus in fire with upgrading to Chaos Rider. The only weakness he has is pearce and this is easy to improve. The Celestial Messanger gets a +10 to his great arcane resistance and +10 to all physical resistances. He has better physical resistance than any elvish fighter. Another one is the Pilum Master compared to Swordmaster and Scythemaster. It looks like there isn't a real logic behind and it should be better balanced. I'm concerned about it, because I noticed in Chapter 7 that resistances are more important than damage. They make the difference, if a unit survives an attack or not and high level units are not easy to replace.

With Efraim and Lethalia having both a powerful melee and ranged attack, they can kill regardless of the attacker and attack type.

This point is not that simple. Somtimes I wished both had counter attacks with less damage, because killing a unit makes place for another one. To say things with a film title, it easily ends up as "drowning by numbers". I could have done some improvements with equipment, but not that much.

As much as I like using murderlust, I think it should be nerfed so that the amount is +2 HP per kill instead of 8.

The problem here is, that everybody uses the same equipment. While for Efraim and Lethalia +8 HP is quite a lot because they kill several units in a row, for ordinary units it is absolutly fine and less wouldn't make a lot of sense.

[arobinson]

Okay, I nerfed Efraim's fireball and Lethalia's staff attacks to remove all of my +1 attacks AMLA and re-equipped an item to force it to apply the changes.
...

I told you not to edit the save files, and try to do it the hard way, editing the files and not taking the advancements you want to remove. The way you have done it has proven something, but you cannot estimate the number of advancements they'll take without killing countless units with overpowered retaliation. With much less advances taken, they might not be able to have so many defensive and offensive upgrades.

The reason I hacked a save game is that I simply do not have the time or the desire anymore to play this add-on again for now. I really got frustrated by redeem and the thought of having to cast it again is a very large deterrent to ever play again. The reason I hacked the save game is that I could verify that a fully upgraded Efraim and Lethalia minus the extra attacks could not destroy fully healed units on defense, which held true for the > level 2 demons (the level 2 demons still got killed most of the time, but that makes sense with a lvl2 taking on a lvl10 unit) without having to play it again.

Even with no advancements, I can make them pretty much invincible with armor alone. I never used entropy or ever used the redeem skills that improved resistances or healing, I used 100% of my redeem advancements and most of my AMLA advancements (only took a few of the resistance to magic AMLA for Lethalia) on upgrading damage. Since I was never in danger of dying and could kill units on defense ~90% of the time, I had no reason to take any of the other skills, including the area damage spells. Since I was redeeming almost 100% of the time, I never did use the redeem area spells anyways.

I'm afraid that I can't backup my thoughts with a trial run at this point. Hopefully someone that is less burned out is willing to assist and do some testing for you. Perhaps in a few months or more I'll have the desire to play again as long as I don't have to cast redeem much again. Thanks for the hard work, sorry to not come through with what you are requesting.

Note that I don't think that nerfing the ability to advance is going to fix the issue, their resistances with armor is just so high that I takes very few advancements to make them godly. As long as they can kill fully healed units while defending, they will have no shortage of experience. If your nerfed the resistances without nerfing the attacks, the game would probably get almost impossible. This is because the demigods would be killing every unit without healing and would die before the end of the turn because in the new scenarios the enemies attack the leaders about 95% of the time and no other units. I think the best approach is to ensure that they don't kill higher level units on defense. Which would either mean nerfing all of their abilities severely and nerfing the equipment to stop getting such ridiculous numbers or just nerfing the melee for one and ranged for the other and leaving the rest of the game alone.

One last thought on redeem. Since you don't want to use the soul-eater due to the "hack up the enemy" philosophy, perhaps just give them a 1% chance to redeem on any attack hit. That way they have the same chance to redeem a fully healed unit as they do a damaged unit, so they are not trying to hack the enemy, but in fact "save them from dying" during the battle.