Alignment: Good/Evil

"Bonuses":

• -15% gold production
• +5% population
• Can store up to 200% Spy Strength
• Double spy strength regeneration
• Free magical rezone costs
• Non-rezone spell costs are doubled
• Free raze costs

Troops

• Gold Golems train direction from peasants.
• Tinkers reduce offensive casualties by 10 * (Tinkers sent on attack)/Land to max 100%
• Tinkers increase realm improvements with 12 * Tinkers/Land.

Buildings

Frost Temples on Forest
Homes on Highlands
Obelisk (Tower) Acts as 10 mages. Does not produce MD income

Racial "Spell"

Either no spell or new spell

Change History

• Replaced: Half cost spy operations (rounded up)
  With: Can store up to 200% spy strength, double spy strength regeneration
• Replaced: Gremlins cannot cast spells (other than rezone ones) nor be the target of spells.
  With: Non-rezone spell costs are doubled and Obelisk (Tower) Acts as 10 mages. Does not produce MD income
• Tinkers now only reduce offensive cas reduction when sent on attacks. Changed wording to hopefully make it easier to understand.
• Removed: "Race spell"

Heres one for them

Race Spell/ Ability

Machine Overdrive - SELF, INSTANT costs land size in workers
Your Automaton (workers) use themselves to give extra power to their machines, they have succeded to further your incoming troops, buildings and land one hour. But not resource gains and peasant growth. This ability can only be casted once every three hours

this way they get to keep an awesome and versatile spell
and it scales with landsize




if you feel like its overpowered you could do 1.5*landsize in workerss

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What has nobody else done? Lets do that but different :)

Spells can only cost magic dust. I'm sure zip could code the spell to have a negative of killing 1 worker per acre of land, but this would also mean the spell would also have no negative if there were no workers to kill.

know nothing of zips code sorry

most of languages i use i would do it as an and statement
in the way of
cost= 0 dust + (landsize*1worker kiiled) =


or make HC cost dust again but at slightly less and work out a decent price to buy the dust from the bazaar for the spell knowing that 10g = 1 dust

just thoughts

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What has nobody else done? Lets do that but different :)

Actually it would have a negative if there are no workers to kill. You would have say -570 workers producing negative income

If Zip are willing to make the spell cost zero dust and subtract X number of workers then it would be easy to add an if clause.



And Zip could reuse the code from the hour change spell to add the condition of 3 hours to the if-statement.

My point is just that it is quite easy to make. Annoying maybe to do the reduction of every single build and train times... there are a lot of those!

Would the benefits of adding this spell for gremlins, be worth the time of zip coding it into the game?

(This would also make it rather easy to get 4 hr train times with Mechanical Wisps)

umm... just a pricing thing i guess, but shouldn't the wisps train directly from peasants too?

and why would they need the obelisk?

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The empty handed painter on your street..
is drawing crazy patterns in your sheets...
The sky, too, is falling over you...
and it's all over now, Baby Blue.

Barren's original design had them immune to spells and made it so they couldn't cast spells.

In my suggested update, I removed that penalty/bonus. They now need a way to train mages, a building makes sense to me (I think Observatory might be a more thematic name). 10 Mages per building would make the building the cheapest way to get mages in the game, but also the most inefficient.

I'm not sure they need a double penalty to spells (no towers might be harsh enough, but stealing MD might also be too effective). Free rezone might be unnecessary as well (we should put an additional home on mountains)).


It comes from the original Goblin concept. Training from workers allows for much more massive spec pushes, and makes them useful all round long.

36 hrs * 150k g/hr = 5.4M g

5.4M / 180 = 30k Wisps
5.4M / 290 = 18.6k Wisps

Training from workers allows stockpiling more than 36 hrs worth of effective training gold (other gold is stockpiled as workers).

Adding in 6 hr trains and Wisps/conscripts are incredibly scary. They could shadow retal anyone in the game.

I do like the ability to train from workers, but I think we should change the train time of wisps to 9 hrs (and lower the train time of Gold Golems to 6 hrs).

edit: Training from workers does have a downside. You get less gold upon sacrifice, so once you mass train Wisps, you are committed.

If we do not want them to be trained in less than 6 hours we can just have the spell do nothing to the mechanical wisps.

Coding this spell put together with the rest of the race seems hardly any worse than any other new race. It is up to Zip experience weather it will cause him issues. If you really want to know ask him, but I see no reason he could not do this.

On the obelisk:
They have no way to cast spells so this is only to resists spells? Is the building not close to useless?

I would allow them to cast spells, but not allow them to construct buildings that make MD. If a gremlin wanted to cast spells, they would have to raid/steal/buy MD to do so.

Even with resisting offensive spells, their is a break even point where Obelisk > Spire.

An obelisk would also be very cheap for mages. It essentially houses 10 Free mages at the cost of 20 raw pop.

20*1.25 = 25 pop
25 - 10 = 15
15*2.6*1.33= 52g per hr

10*1k = 10k
10k/52g/hr = 192hrs (96 hrs if using full GQ)

Even though the long-term efficiency is low, the short bonus is huge compared to paid for mages.

Note to self:
Tinkers are OP and need to be nerfed (smaller bonus and smaller cost)

raid/steal/buy MD

Can they really steal enough dust to get anything out of their mages: How much per stealing operation of dust do they take? Max 5%?
If so, someone with 30,000 dust will take 10 steal operations to cast a 12h magic shield. Assuming you steal 5% every time and never fail.

Remember that ALL Gremlins need to steal dust. (Magic shield is just THAT powerful when you attack)

Assuming the race is playable if we got just 5 players playing this race then everyone will have a hard time finding the targets they need.

Also when you fail your stealing operations you lose spies. <- Maybe making spies immortal will go a long way but I really do not like this having to steal resources from others to do well.

That mage building and stealing dust concept feel like an unappealing concept so why would you add something new to the game that are weaker than what other races have? Extra work for no gain..

1) Tundrahe made an excellent point in the race nomination thread, on why making them immune to magic is a bad idea. My thoughts were similar to his.

2) Farsight is very useful for attacking and calculating Max Pushes. It's necessary that a pack has the capability to cast FS. Either someone will need to be a mage whore, or have a Multi to do well. I think it will be easier to allow Gremlins to do it themselves, but make it a PITA.

1 & 2 necessitate gremlins have mage ability, but this goes against the theme. A mage building concept fills this roll without going too much against barons theme. (the strength of the building might need to be changed).

After re-adding the ability of Gremlins to have a pseudo-intel mage ability (though stealing/bazaar), I figured it might be easy to let them have every spell with the same pseudo-mage ability.

You made a good point on why Gremlins should not be forced to steal MD to cast MS.
In my next version of Gremlins, they will not have the ability to cast MS.

Tinkers look way to strong to me too. The either need to be nerfed or limited in some way.

Possible Ideas:
- Add rune cost
- Limit to 1 per acre/building/something else
- Every 10 Tinkers act as 1 Alchemy. Much lower dm cost. . . (this might have to be 20 Tinkers = 1 Alchemy)

If lowering the price, we should also remove the pseudo-hospital ability.

out of all the race choices why gremlins? they still need work. Arent there any others that you like?

I think a good number of reasonably finished races lie on these forums, maybe they need tweaked but most of the balancing has been done on the forums to make them playable already.

not to rain on The baron's parade but it seems that there is a good number of finished races here already.

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What has nobody else done? Lets do that but different :)

zxektok why would we have to discuss balance if a race like say Pong's Dragon race is well balanced? Some seem interested in Gremlins so we look a bit on the general kinks of the race.

The concept of immune to farsight came from the inability to have magic shield from the original concept Baron gave.

My big problem was how Baron based the gold economy on getting higher spy rate with the race "spell", but with that removed the race have to run less spies if it want a good competitive economy (assuming the military get balanced to this effect).
The double spies per spy unit could be turned into 1 to counter their ability to reach a very strong spy rate.

It is not like people are complaining about the spy rate on the trolls a troll with 30k spies got equivalent to 11,250 tinkers and it is not like Grimlins can reach those number of tinkers early round, they also have to get their improvements up and running for a number of tinkers to give them that much.

If the concept of immune to farsight is so broken then why do we have a bazaar hero that can do it? Why has the last race elveron presented with the immune to magic not dominated completely? I know for a fact that Earthborne with immune to magic has dealt some serious damage to top players at the late part of the round although their military was not completely as good, which they were punish for a few days later.

We can like or dislike the immune to magic but my point is just that it is NOT anymore broken than many other concepts we already got in the game.

People can go with the good old races they know how to play but that is not what race suggestions are about.

We do not have to make the race magic immune but I just feel like that punishment to magic the races has suffered now is much higher than the bonus the race have been given in the tinker unit, while it also makes the race much less unique and therefor less interesting.

Alignment: Good/Evil

"Bonuses":

• -15% gold production
• +5% population
• Can store up to 200% Spy Strength
• Double spy strength regeneration
• Very Limited spell selection
• Free raze costs

Troops

• Gold Golems train direction from peasants.
• Every 10 Tinkers act as an Alchemy.

Buildings

Frost Temples on Forest
Homes on Highlands
Observatory (Tower) Acts as 20 mages. Does not produce MD income

Race Spells

(Slow) 0 MD per acre
(Volcano) 0 MD per acre
(Erosion) 0 MD per acre
(Ice Age) 0 MD per acre
(Global Warming) 0 MD per acre
(Lesser Farsight) .75 MD per acre
(Farsight) 1.875 MD per acre
(Revelation) 2.5 MD per acre
(Dispel)

Change History

• Very Limited spell selection (Intel, Rezone, Slow)
• Mechanical Wisps +3 hr train (now 9 hrs)
• Gold Golem -3 hr train (now 6 hrs)
• Tinker bonus changed to "Every 10 Tinkers act as an Alchemy"
• Tinker -200 dm (to 100dm)
• Changed name of Obelisk to Observatory.
• Observatory +10 mages (now acts like 20 Mages)

To Do List

• Give Ornitopers a High secondary resource cost (maybe lumber). This is to make them fade out near-endgame.
• New names for "race spells", that do not seem magical.
• Balance cost of spells
• Balance difficulty of spells