Is Enchanter Too Weak? Thread - Conquest of Elysium 3

1) Nothing good in regular recruits. Just regular human troops and a rare wizard at times.

2) Enchanter depends on iron HEAVILY. All summons require huge amounts of iron (and an equal amount of gold). It's not easy at all to get all that iron unless you're very lucky. No other special to resource to rely on either so if you don't have tons of iron around, you're basically screwed.

3) Almost all summons and upgrades consume the resource structure you cast it on. This is the killer penalty in my opinion. Not only you have to acquire huge amount of iron/gold resources since you're consuming them when you summon something you have to acquire new resources constantly or your income basically erodes to nothing. I have not played all 17 classes but most other classes don't have this consume penalty. They just happily keep summoning strong troops relying on some secondary resource and without consuming the said source. It looks like the Enchanter is at a serious disadvantage here.

4) Not only you have to consume your resource structure when you summon something that's any good, the things you summon are constructs that never heal. While other classes' strong summons heal themselves battle after battle, you don't even get to keep those constructs that you spent precious income structures long term. I almost forgot: your good summons also take a very long time to summon like 7-8 AP which is another penalty compared to other classes.

While Enchanter has some pretty powerful summons (what class hasn't?) and some nice spells on the upgraded Enchanter (again what class hasn't?), the penalties of the class far outweighs the benefits in my opinion. I think they should be buffed by removing/lightening some of the penalties they get or they should be given some other strengths maybe -- especially on the resource side.

If Enchanter was meant to be weak as in a "Hard mode" class, I would like to say that I don't like that idea at all. I know you can't (shouldn't?) perfectly balance all classes but they should be roughly equally strong / playable. Enchanter doesn't feel like either at the moment.

What do you all think?

Edited by: Tarrax

It is a hard start. It seems the one really viable path that people have explored is to heavily use the Necrotods (don't require Iron) heavily to build up a charmed army, and then you can get on a roll. Also, the clay golems regenerate (not just heal), so they are a good base for a standing army.

Yes never pass up a chance to make a necrotod.
Guardians are good to leave on important resources
Use only lakes and swamps for awhile. When you reach an enemy nation, then start converting HIS resources into your best troops.

The Enchanter is one of the strongest classes in the game, probably top three in my opinion.

You may have missed the power of the necrotoad? Start summoning them whenever there are bodies around, and keep summoning until you run out of bodies. Once you have a big stack of these nasties, you are virtually unbeatable by most other classes.

Just start vacuum cleaning up any groups of roaming animals/ancient trees you can find. They have almost no magical resistance, so you'll enslave them almost instantly and add them to your army. Your favorite enemy AI is the Troll and the Druid. You'll literally take all their troops, and they can't do anything to you. With enough necrotoads and a healthy animal meatshield, you will enslave anything that isn't mindless. In fact you'll kick all archers and damage mages out of your army, because you are more concerned with keeping the enemies alive long enough to enslave them than to actually kill them.

As for the questions "what class hasn't" got powerful summons, or nice spells on upgraded enchanters, Baron of course, and more or less, Dwarves (they have some improved spellcasters but I haven't seen them having spells like some of the other classes have).

Enchanter seems one of the weakest classes to me, too. The army is ok the way it is, but you're unable to recover from losses, while other "machines" are strong when established and stay so the enchanters machine somewhat dies, when the army dies.
What do you do after loosing your necrotods? Nothing, really!
What do you do after loosing your enchanter? Sacrifice an important coal mine!
What does another class do? Spend some gold.

I also disagree with the "unstoppable". This is may be true for the AI, but a human is able to counter mass necrotods. Easiest way: Just avoid them and force them to split up by raiding or threatening the enemy citadel.
The late game armies of some classes also are a lot stronger (Warlock, Witch, Necromancer, Demonologist, High Cultist,....). There are some classes that have regular troops with high MR (Especially dwarves and hoburgs I think). Necrotods are rather useless against them.

Next you're unable to fend off rushers.
Soulless / Longdead + some ranged units rush of a Necro? -> certain death.
Early push of a Warlock -> rather certain death.
A senator raiding your income with 5 small stacks -> pray for some lucky army kills otherwise: death.

The design of the Enchanter forces to play a one army power play style that is strong against the AI, but extremely weak against a human player, who knows what's coming. Just imagine some lucky mage, killing most of your necrotods in mid-game due to some bad luck. Minor investment for a Senator, devastating damage to an Enchanter. And imagine playing versus a Baron who has 4-6 strong stacks running around in no time and most of the map conquered while you still struggle to get your machine going. Not to mention assassins. Beware the assassins!

And a human Baron won't suicide his stacks against you. You would be able to kill each of his stacks, but you would have to split up to do so, while he's destroying your income. After splitting up you're an easy target for him.

The army still is good the way it is, I think. You have some awesome and rather cheap blockers, necrotods and mass archers. The enchanters army is probably the strongest mid game, IF you get to there. You're forced to push out as soon as you can, try to conquer enemy mines, finally convert them and kill some armies before you're overrun in the late game. It's the one real roguelike class: If you loose a battle it's basically game over. The enchanter is an abysmal map-controller so try to keep the game short and don't let your enemy build up.

One more thing:
You're very dependent on archers/crossbows. The constructs are awesome damage sinks, but only mediocre damage dealers. This can make enchanter rushes rather weak, because you are forced to find another recruitment site very soon and have to visit it regularly.

The enchanter is for me a weak version of the warlock, who is just better in most ways, but the enchanter is one of the coolest classes. And he's a strong counter to Troll King and Druid. If you manage to surprise your enemy and hit his main army early you might actually win. And Necrotods are the coolest thing in the world .

In testing the AIs the Enchanter does pretty well.
In 650 games the Enchanter came up 4th for dying first (50 of the games) and even then it was average 11th turn.
Pretty good altho of course being in the top 5 early deathers makes suggestions welcome.
Winners stats are harder to come by but the Enchanter has come up fairly medium there.

And of course MP stats would be up to the community to record.

Edited by: gp1628

OK it's been a few days and I found the time to play some games so I thought I'd respond now. The general response / suggestion I read above: spam Necrotods.

I had bought some Necros before but I now tried a few games where I tried to buy Necrotods every chance I get (basically ignoring everything else) and IF (a big if) you can get to a certain threshold (maybe like at least 5-6 Necros) with some meat shield in front, they are indeed very powerful.

However, all this brought up some other questions to my mind. The whole thing just felt wrong. I re-read the description of the Enchanter class and it talks all about constructs -- not a word about Necrotods or undead. There are like 10-15 different types of constructs summon all with cool abilities yet your only viable early-mid game option is Necrotods. All the criticism I wrote about constructs not being viable in my original post still stands.

Wouldn't you say Enchanter class was designed badly if constructs are not viable and you have to spam Necrotods to stay alive? What's the point of putting the thought into designing 10-15 different constructs if they are not viable in the game?

If constructs are Enchanter's "thing", they must be made more viable so a player can use all these wonderful different types of constructs throughout the game -- not just after already having won the game. My suggestion would be not making them stronger (they are strong enough) but the summoning of them should be economically more viable: maybe lessen the iron costs somewhat and/or more importantly remove the resource building consumption on some/all summons -- that's a killer penalty. Sure you can try to get close to the enemy and consume his buildings instead but that usually means you already won or if you're weak the enemy will come kick your ass.

Certainly a class in the average - bit below average range.

Most of it's constructs are fluff, their arsenal is really: Necrotod, clay golem, ice golem, wood/oak golem and guardian. For the other golems, think of them as resource denial to enemy when the time is right for it.

Golems are basically non-healing meatshield (contradictory?) that hits 1 unit at a time (seriously lacking in offensive power), to my knowledge only ice golem hits twice and iron golem hits AoE 3 poison. A Hoburg treant pretty much beat most golems at their role, and that's just using Hoburg's tertiary resource weed.

You're right their class name is a misnomer, I've always thought "enslaver" is more on point, even though it only works on low - very low MR things.

This is a common comment. That the Necros dont quite fit enchanter.
The game says that Enchanters create "mago-mechanical" creations. Partly magic, partly mechanical.
As I see it, Necrotods are basically a bone golem. Its a construct made from the bones of the dead.
Altho to be more fitting to the class, it might make sense to remove the undead tag from them.

There are Flesh Golems in the game code but not yet finished or in use.

If the Necrotods were removed. then some other form of rear unit might have to be made. A construct archer? Animated siege weapon?

To make many changes might be best to be tried in a mod first in order to see if it plays better or worse.

Gandalf, I like the direction you are thinking for the Enchanter. I love the idea of the enchanter, but I always feel like I can't role play him because Necros are so vital to his survival, and I don't feel like they fit.

Coming from D&D, where "Enchanting" is Dominate Person in addition to enchanting swords, I really don't have a problem with Necrotods. It is weird that all the rest of the Enchanter's stuff is so crap though. Clay men and stuff need to come out way faster if they are supposed to be the focus of the class.

The golems and stuff aren't bad units, they are just too expensive and time consuming for what you get. If spending a month raising soldiers in a swamp gave you enough Terra Cotta Soldiers to care about, then Necrotods could go away. As-is, the ablative golem soldiers you get are so few in number that they only make sense as a stopgap measure while your Necrotods form an army out of whatever is around.

-Frank

I'm just trying out Enchanters now and they seem very fun to me, but the cost of early summons and the small starting army seem to make them very vulnerable at the start, and the costs of things are high and mostly in conflict with each other. Necrotods do seem kind of odd that they can capture lots of animals, and does make them invaluable as a source of units that doesn't require piles of gold and iron. The enchanter himself seems to often come with good battle spells. I think maybe if the animated swords and armor were much cheaper, they would be a spam alternative. Like 1 or 2 iron for an animated sword rather than 5, and 4-10 gold&iron for animated armor and gargoyles, instead of 20. I haven't turned an entire swamp into clay soldiers yet, but I would hope that would yield a few dozen of them, at least.

Edited by: PvK

The Enchanter makes Terracotta Soldiers at the rate of one per turn, and every turn there is a smallish chance of making the swamp dry up. The issue for me is that a Tribal King gets an average of about 3 slaves a turn while sitting in a settlement (which is a resource worth defending, meaning that the fact that the troops are sitting there while you muster isn't a bad thing) and never exhausts it. Tribal Kings cost like 50 gold. Terracotta Soldiers are better than slaves, but not so much better that they justify all the numerous ways they are worse from a recruiting standpoint.

-Frank

They're one of the most AP intensive class, I'd dare say they are most constrained by AP at that. They have to be at the right place that is often out of the way before they can spend that AP too.

Terracotta is a dead end trap most of the time as you're using up finite clay golem, and that's your only regenerating golem available, plus every terracotta you're spending AP on takes up expansion time which translate into making more necrotod.

To my knowledge they're the only class that can use up over 1 turn worth of AP summoning a unit, say ice golem which use 6 AP (2 turns), and has to pay out of its primary resource pool for summon (gold + iron). Most other class pay out of bonus secondary resource like gems or sacrifice, and is generally either less AP constrained or more less restricting in summoning on the road. For what they go through to summon the higher end golem you'd think they would rock, but besides tanking most of them attack 1 unit at a time with fist (beside the 2 exception, iron golem that does a single witch's fungus worth of poison, or ice golem for a wooping 2 attack), I was seriously disappointed when I first summoned a high end golem expecting kickbutt but got a non-regenerating meatwall instead which describes all of them (except clay, which regens).

Not to say the class doesn't have good points, but I find that it's downs to outweigh it's ups in general, resulting in a somewhat below average class.

Edited by: finalgenesis

Really? You dont have fun playing it? I think its a blast. One of my favorites.

As far as terracottas I consider that to be the perfect thing for an apprentice to be doing. Find him a swamp or two near home and put him to it. Keeps him busy doing something until you can afford to upgrade him and have him plant the home portal.

Looks Terracottas actually don't cost anything except the time of an apprentice, and a swamp isn't useful to an Enchanter for anything else, but would be useful to several opponent classes, so it actually seems like a very good thing to do, as Gandalf just wrote.

Oh, I guess that's not quite right - a swamp could also be used (with 50 gold & iron) to make a clay golem. 50 iron, wow.

What is the "statues" resource for Animate Statues?

I find terracotta raising to be low level play myself most of the time, but hey gotta stick with what you think best

LOL, I just built my first terracotta soldier, and the whole swamp was removed the first time!

Animate Statues eats a temple.
If you want to be mean it also works on the high Priestess Cathedral. maybe others also

Edited by: gp1628

I completely agree everything finalgenesis said in his AP / cost analysis above. Gandalf, it's not that we don't have fun playing it. Golems are cool. There are many interesting ideas in the class design. It's just that it feels unbalanced, weak, and some things just feel wrong.

Golems can be so much more interesting, the class really suffers a bit of "opportunity squandered", which hopefully will be modded to realize it's full potential later. I think part of what disappoints people in general is that enchanters looks COOL on the surface, and they go into it expecting awesome golemness... only to find that all those golems are bland side dish, and the main dish is a bowl of squiggly alien worms made from humanoid corpse that enslaves mostly animals (wut?).

An average player looks at the list of summons: animated armor, gargoyles, half a dozen bad @$$ sounding golems...etc just a sweet list in general, but at the end of a play through realize that behind the shiny veneer most of those things range from not cost-viable to mediocre value, lacklustre, boring, and the focus of the class is on a single un-assuming item on that list: necrotod, a squiggly worm that comes right out of an old sci-fi movie.

To exaggerate a bit more, I want golems that shoot eye beams, giant golems that tramples over men like ants, majestic golem that awes mortals, hell something that does more then fist people to death one at a time. They need to be more then generic non-healing HP blob covered in different colored skins.

Even just taking from Dom3 you can get something far more interesting and varied: banefire golem, spell casting runed golem, trampling golem, sieging golem.

You can argue on endless semantics and groundless optimism (not saying anyone is doing this yet), but all these criticism doesn't come from nowhere. We're not bashing on the game, we'll trying to improve the game by pointing out areas that could use improvement and because we like the game (otherwise why bother spending time here?), which will make a good game even more awesome.

There are a dozen different things you could do. I'll list an a half @$$ example:
1) Rework lower end summons: animated sword, armor, gargoyle ...etc, I don't know what, but something needs to be done here.
2) Add secondary resource, I'd say gems. One version would be using gems to upgrade golems, give it new attacks, elemental afinity or just general improvement of some aspect. An iron golem can be upgraded via ruby path and new abilities like fire breathe, fire shield, fire immunity ...etc, another version is to allow some golems to be made from just gems, or add gem to the gold/iron cost. Anyway, it can most likely be a combination of the two.
3) Add more variety of function and nuance to golems, something more then fisting.
4) Look at their resource consuming cost model again, doesn't mean remove the resouce consuming aspect, but some cost revaluation is probably needed.
5) I'd say that for the higher end golem, focus on the idea of making each one a big deal, add some customizable option to them (via gems for example).
6) One of the new mod goal is probably to turn necrotod into Enchanter's arsenal of many viable weapons, and not their only viable life line.

Add me to the chorus of folks that consider the Necrotod not befitting the Enchanter.
I think he's a very good and fun to play class, but if I made a new class with nothing but Necrotods, it'd almost be as fun to play (Clay Golems would be sorely missed) and, heck, most of the game would play out almost identical. And that's also how it should be - there ought to be a different class for which the Necrotod makes more sense using it, and the Enchanter should (be able to) focus on Golems.

Simple changes that'd come to mind:
- Making Terracotta Golems has no chance to consume the Swamp.
- Swap out the Necrotods for the Flesh Golems gp1628 has mentioned.
- If maintaining the resource consumption, make it so most Golem crafting creates 1-x Golems instead of a single one. The same is viable for the lesser creations.
- Remove or drastically reduce gold and hammer costs for advanced golem crafting. You're already paying a HIGH price by sacrificing the resource forever.

More elaborate changes that might be hard or impossible to implement:
- Make the loss of resources (mines mainly) temporary (like a year).
- Allow Enchanters to spend their turn repairing their golems which cannot otherwise heal.
- Allow Enchanters to spend gold and hammers enchanting their Golems with special abilities and attacks.
- Variation of the above, allow Enchanters to craft items they can let their Golems wield.

I definately hope SOMETHING (mustn't be ANYTHING from my list) is done about the Enchanter. Maybe people can mod him, but a lot of sensible stuff seems outside the scope of things that CAN be modded, at least for now.

Cheers
Marco

Im new to this game i have only played a dozen games or so but the enchanters feel like one of the weakest and unthematic clases in the game. I dont know if this would make them too powerful or if its even possible but what if the enchanters had to use around 18 ap and pay what they do now or perhaps more in gold and iron to make a golem factory (it wouldnt be called that but i cant think of a good name now) and as long as the enchanter stayed on it he would produce a golem depending on the type every X amount of turns and if he leaves the factory its destroyed.These factorys would destroy the resources they were built on but the enchanter could spend the same ap he used to build the factory to bring the resource type back and destroy the factory if he hasnt left it.I feel i should mention when i wrote this i had a Headache so im sure there are enough spelling and gramar errors to cause a spell checker to go into a corner and cry.

Ok, having played a couple of times as Enchanter now, I'm coming around to agree with the original and continued complaints, at least more than not.

That is, I think:

* Necrotods are one of the most powerful things, and something that seems out of place. A Necrotod Master class or something would be good to have those.
* The costs of most things on the list are so huge that you can hardly make any of them, and/or they are way too expensive for what they are.
- I would make the apprentice creations (Sword, Armor, Gargoyle) cost about 20% to 40% what they cost now.
- Terracotta golems shouldn't consume entire swamps, and should probably be built more quickly.
- The larger golems should cost less, especially less iron (20% current cost?). Even no cost might work for the ones that consume an entire map location.
* I also thought of the idea Marco just wrote: add a repair action for no cost but time.
* I think the summons are pretty cool (I don't think they need more lasers), just that you currently don't get to make nearly enough of them.