horror marks, curses and insanity / Shattered Soul

[Hades]

Are there still no cure / fix / counter , spell , method item for commanders or troops that have horror marks, curses and insanity / Shattered Soul ?

[Mormacil]

They're designed to not have cures, why would that change? Though horror marks can fade in severity. But they're meant to be permanent counters to valuable units.

[Hades]

Originally posted by Mormacil:

They're designed to not have cures, why would that change? Though horror marks can fade in severity. But they're meant to be permanent counters to valuable units.

Considering on can be reborn or use wish those to be incurable seems weird especially insanity / Shattered Soul . Does inanity follow from life to unlike to life ?
Also counters (using spells , items , mechanics ) will give more strategic depth
And those counters may be expensive to forge , cast (gems , levels ) , research .
So is it better to exist a few ways ?
thought for spells
how about bless for curses , Astral/void/glamour protection for horror marks and maybe "Gift of reason restore" or "divine name restore" for insanity / Shattered Soul ???

Thanks for the reply and thoughts i appreciate it

[DasaKamov]

Wish can remove most permanent effects, I believe. (For example, an insane caster can wish for "Sanity".)

Like Mormacil hinted at, Horror Marks may fade IF the commander is dead and returns later (through Ritual of Rebirth, some form of Immortality, being a Pretender that's being called by their priests, etc.).

It takes time for Horror Marks to fade, so in theory, Pretenders will have the best chance of the Horror Mark fading (as it takes many turns to call a god from the dead) and commanders that have an instant return-from-death mechanic (e.g., Twice-Born) will still have their Horror Marks remain at full strength.

[Flashman]

So whats bad about horror marks or curses? Don't curses just make afflictions more likely? In that case, any item which boosts affliction resistance would kind of counter it flat out. How about the horror mark? Does it not just attract void beasts and the like horrors to assassinate the commander from time to time? If so, I would assign strong, size 6 guards to block the tiles next to the commander. Ether Warriors for example. And Wish was mentioned as an option too, so if it can remove both Curse and Insanity then that is quite plenty already...?

[Mormacil]

Originally posted by Hades:

Originally posted by Mormacil:

They're designed to not have cures, why would that change? Though horror marks can fade in severity. But they're meant to be permanent counters to valuable units.

Considering on can be reborn or use wish those to be incurable seems weird especially insanity / Shattered Soul . Does inanity follow from life to unlike to life ?
Also counters (using spells , items , mechanics ) will give more strategic depth
And those counters may be expensive to forge , cast (gems , levels ) , research .
So is it better to exist a few ways ?
thought for spells
how about bless for curses , Astral/void/glamour protection for horror marks and maybe "Gift of reason restore" or "divine name restore" for insanity / Shattered Soul ???

Thanks for the reply and thoughts i appreciate it

It's the opposite, counters will remove depth because it will reduce cost. Weighing cost and benefits is what gives depth.

As for insanity, sanity is derived from the soul in Dominions. As the soul remains the same, so do the levels of sanity.

[anaris]

Curse can be removed with a Wish, and is countered exactly by Wound Fend 1 (sometimes referred to as affliction resistance).

Insanity can be removed using a Wish.

Horror Marks cannot be removed, only weakened. Once the Horrors have seen you, they never forget you.

Shattered Soul is only found on beings who have been far, far too far down for you to heal them. As far as I know, it cannot be removed.

[anaris]

Originally posted by Flashman:

So whats bad about horror marks or curses? Don't curses just make afflictions more likely? In that case, any item which boosts affliction resistance would kind of counter it flat out. How about the horror mark? Does it not just attract void beasts and the like horrors to assassinate the commander from time to time? If so, I would assign strong, size 6 guards to block the tiles next to the commander. Ether Warriors for example. And Wish was mentioned as an option too, so if it can remove both Curse and Insanity then that is quite plenty already...?

Horror Marks have two functions; the first is to attract Horrors from the Void to try and kill you, and the second is to cause any Horror already nearby to focus primarily on you.

Horror attacks cause horror marks to get worse. Eventually, your commander will attract constant assaults from things that eat Ether Warriors without even trying. Further, a horror marked commander is in extra danger from any Summon Horror spells, even ones they cast themselves.

[Dezzmont]

Originally posted by Flashman:

So whats bad about horror marks or curses? Don't curses just make afflictions more likely? In that case, any item which boosts affliction resistance would kind of counter it flat out. How about the horror mark? Does it not just attract void beasts and the like horrors to assassinate the commander from time to time? If so, I would assign strong, size 6 guards to block the tiles next to the commander. Ether Warriors for example. And Wish was mentioned as an option too, so if it can remove both Curse and Insanity then that is quite plenty already...?

For a curse, its generally not a huge deal to get it on a normal troop or a unit you never intend to subject to direct combat like a mage, but it can matter for some thugging strategies such as regen based thugging. You can make an item to help, but that requires getting the thug to a lab, making the item with a mage turn and gems, and attaching it to the unit. As efficiency is one of the most important factors to thugging, it can make sense to not bother.

It really matters on super combatants/thug+ style fighters that may take damage though, like monster pretenders, who often have very few slots and who are often very central to your strategy. It essentially puts a lifespan on how long these army slayers can work for you.

Horror marks start out fairly inconsequential, but as stacks grow they become more and more pressing, in a sort of self accelerating way. A low level horror mark simply makes horrors more likely to target you, but you don't generally run into them anyway. As the mark grows from being applied more than once, they start to spawn in events too, and horrors are strong enough to generally kill human and even unprepared giant mages by themselves, and more critically... apply more horror marks. The stronger the mark, the stronger the horror that comes for you, so by the time your seeing horror events you know your unit is pretty doomed. Strong bodyguards can extend their life, but eventually that builds up. Not to mention that using ether warriors as bodyguards is almost certainly far more expensive than just replacing the marked unit.

Curses are generally a pretty mild problem, because they only sorta kinda make units worse at what they do and depend on you being able to land hits on a unit worth degrading but being unable to actually kill them. Horror marks are generally more useful/dangerous, as a series of horror marks can so rapidly spiral out of control, they can be a decent 'budget' way to deal with things you can't normally handle before research really comes online. It is unlikely to immediately win your war, but it can be a half decent deterrent if your a nation with cheap astral mages bordering an offensive awake pretender.

[Flashman]

Horror marking opposing Pretenders sounds delicious. Thanks for the explanations! I guess I should next look into how to apply it myself, now that I know what it does... It is primarly applied just from the Thaumaturgy(1) combat spell Horror Mark, at S2 to cast? Hmm. It says, it won't affect mindless units. I guess there may be a way to make your horror marked unit Mindless later on by purpose, then, to save it in case it starts to spiral out of control...

[Dezzmont]

Its generally not a 'plan A' situation, just a thing you can do in case someone is tossing around something, usually an individual or very large unit, you can't perfectly handle yet. Just send in a bunch of astral mages with blocker chaff to spam it on them so they rapidly get a huge horror mark.

There is, as far as I know, no way to make a unit mindless, as mindlessness is more a state of the nature of a soul than anything else. So that isn't really an option for horror marks. I would imagine the spells to inflict feebleminded sometimes are invented by a poor mage trying to figure out how to become mindless, but that isn't the same at all, as feebleminded is what occurs when a minded unit loses their ability to use it, while mindless units are things that through some quirk of their soul are able to act on their own but not truly think for themselves. Think robots.

Horror marks really are a 'sucks to be you' situation and not a thing you can realistically work around, and are part of a general trend towards entropy that occurs in a dominions game: Even with magic to create immortals, nothing will truly last forever. Your goal is not to keep any given unit alive at any cost, but to use them to gain more value than they costed or to propel you further towards victory. So the inevitability of the death of super combatants and thugs is more a working constraint of them (and thus factors into how you design and create them, its easy to make a thug with 100 gems, much harder with say... 20) than something to be beaten or defied.

[anaris]

Communion is also Thau 1 S1, so you can toss those horror marks around with indie astral or 100 gold research monkeys, so it's a thing you can deploy much more easily than the enemy can replace a supercombatant.

Also of note: it is impossible to tell how bad a horror mark is, so the psychological effect is also very strong.

[Draken]

I think curse and horror mark also kind of stack with each other?
Apparently cursed units also get targeted for horror attacks a lot more often than non cursed ones.
At least I remember hearing something like that for Dom 5.

[Level10Cybermancer]

Horror marks can never be removed, but there is now a dome spell called Void Pattern Labyrinth that can block horrors from attacking (at least sometimes)

[DasaKamov]

Originally posted by Draken:

I think curse and horror mark also kind of stack with each other?

I don't think so.

It could be a form of perception bias floating (float-cat?) around the internet, where Cursed units suffer afflictions from wounds caused by Horrors more easily, so it *feels* as if the two complement each other.

[Draken]

Originally posted by DasaKamov:

Originally posted by Draken:

I think curse and horror mark also kind of stack with each other?

I don't think so.

It could be a form of perception bias floating (float-cat?) around the internet, where Cursed units suffer afflictions from wounds caused by Horrors more easily, so it *feels* as if the two complement each other.

Loggy, who has done some data gathering into the actual game said the following about dominions 5:

Loggy:
if only holding cursed items didn't have two side effects
ÆtherNomad:
which ones do you mean?
Loggy:
horror mark attack rate is roughly doubled, and the odds of getting afflictions every turn when diseased is 3-4x as likely