Afterlife Rated 1.18 Statistics

[momom2]

Saurians are already useful against undead because skirmishers can score early adept kills, and upgraded skirms can kill even dark sorcerers.
Skirmishers are incredibly useful even with low dps and survivability because they can increase the amount of hexes a unit gets attacked from, which forces the opponents to contort into less comfortable defensive formations.

Ud vs drakes is a very volatile mu: you need to kill as many units with as few as possible, because initiative brings a lot of damage and units are so glass-cannoney. Even if a saurian dies in two or three adept blasts instead of one or two, it's one wasted blast that won't kill a burner. With cold resist, hp which is a good investment in saurians already will become much better.

[WarolKojtyla]

but it's impossible because of the square-cube law; dragons would be much more resistant to cold irl

[WarolKojtyla]

Will u add dunefolk to afterlife?

@dwarftough: Please tell me!

[momom2]

Dunefolks would be pretty neat, I quite like them in general, although it'll probably be a lot of work to balance.
Btw, here's a replay showing how ud vs drakes is imba: Vytas is a better player than me (I have no chance in e.g. loy vs orcs), and still loses to no fault of their own. Just the RNG swings a lot one way or another, then it snowballs extremely fast. I didn't even check at all what was going on on their side until I realized I was winning, I just spammed adepts and focused on maximising survivability and the rest happened by itself.

[WarolKojtyla]

Dunefolks would be pretty neat, I quite like them in general, although it'll probably be a lot of work to balance.

Afterlife is so severely unbalanced it doesn't really matter.
I mean look at dwarves - 40dmg unit that u can buy extra strikes for for the same price as for normal units... Berserker (instakill unit)... If they are against drakes, it's a guaranteed win!

Poison, slow, charge, berserk... Completely unbalanced in afterlife format...

Drain is nerfed but it can be bypassed by buying upgrades before levelling up...

[WarolKojtyla]

Dwarftough I also think you should fix rating... From my experience it seems the elo gain/loss is very similar regardless if your opponent has ~50 points, or 500 points more/less than you... Which is stupid...

[momom2]

I think drain is fine, but ghosts need special consideration since unlike most units whose effective hp is (1+res)*def*max_hp, ghosts use (1+(2*res))*def*max_hp with half the usual amount of max_hp, effectively doubling the effect of drain (with an effective -80% vulnerability to fire and -120% vulnerability to arcane).
This means that ghosts benefit twice as much as almost any other unit from hp upgrades. On the other hand, draining units benefit more from attack upgrades but not from movement or hp upgrades.

This is why I think it would make more sense to have the drain penalty apply only to strikes and damage, but give ghosts and their variants only a 2x penalty for hp.
(Although in practice it's a lot of complications for something that matters very little - it would make bats slightly better and shadows significantly worse, but for balance considerations the xp mod is already priced in as is.)

[cupcakes]

Drain depends on the damage dealt by the attacker. If you never upgrade damage the drain ability won't add all that much hp, and it does nothing when defending against range. Ghost will struggle against paladin, elf sourcerer, or thunderer with strike upgrades.

[WarolKojtyla]

I think random maps are ass

You get a lot of trees - GG elves won
You get bad terrain - GG drakes won
You get no oases and hard terrain preventing you from moving between villages in 1 turn - GG the faction with healers won