Iram, Sweet Iram

[ExasperatedCultist]

Hello! I'm ExasperatedCultist, and welcome to the second installment of Dominions is Busted, and So Can You. Today, I'd like for us to have a talk about one of the most uniquely flawed nations in the game: Ubar.

In general, among those experienced players who aren't anti-ban in general, there are broadly speaking four recognized categories of ban-worthy nations: Plain overpowered nations, underwater nations, pop-kill nations, and Ubar. Overpowered nations are banned for self-explanatory reasons, underwater nations I touched upon in my post August 15th, 2015, and popkill nations are in some ways analogous to underwater nations, except sorta-kinda less so.

That leaves Ubar.

It's never a good thing when a nation is singled out in this way, and for that reason, I'd like totalk a bit today about what, in my view and understanding, is wrong with the nation of Ubar, and propose one step that would go some way towards addressing it.

Ubar was added on June 2nd, 2020, in patch 5.46. It's the early-age counterpart to MA Na'ba, a solid and interesting nation of anyfort giants and foreignrec camel-riders with excellent elemental and glamour mages, and they do share some traits. Like Na'ba, Ubar has foreignrec camels and desert warriors, both of which are very useful tools to have, and like Na'ba, Ubar has elemental mages with a touch of glamour. But that's where the similarities end. Instead of having giants, Ubar has jinn. These are only recruitable from Ubar itself, and the better ones cannot be recruited until Ubar's god awakens and brings with it the fabled city of brass.

Why Ubar is some nonsense

These jinnun are a large part of the problem.

Looking at a basic jinn warrior, you'd be excused for being overwhelmed. The jinn warrior - unit ID 3463 - is an ethereal glamoured flying storm-immune magic being with spirit sight; wasteland survival; fire and shock resistance; cold, salt and iron vulnerability; stealth; magic power; and unseen. That's a lot. Its bigger Ifrit cousin adds heat aura, fire shield and fire power to the mix, and most of the jinn commanders resemble one or the other of these. In addition, Jinn and Ifrit Warriors both have decent stats, as does the deluxe Jinn Warrior known as the Guardian of the Forbidden Chamber, and both this one and the Ifrit have magic weapons, though they unfortunately seem to have left their hats at home, a common EA malady.

The problem is the way all of these elements interact. On the surface level, a Jinn Warrior doesn't look like that much of a problem to fight. Sure, it's a flier with an 18 damage attack, 12/12 att/def, 19 hp and 12 body prot, but that's not that much for 50 gold. Then you remember it's ethereal, and unless you brought magic weapons, 75% of your hits are going to be outright ignored. Then you remember it has magic power, so in its own Magic 3 dominion it's actually sitting at 21 damage, 15 attack and 15 defense, making it quite hard for most things to hit, making it very likely that it will hit, and making it hurt quite a bit when it does.

And then you remember that it has unseen, so until it gets hit, it's giving you a -9 to attack, meaning you're definitely not hitting it at all without truesight (if you had an attack skill of 14, which is very good, you'd presently be at a 3.4% chance to hit, which is abysmal), and, oh right, it also has mirror image.

This is the point at which you take your ball and go home.

The other side of the equation

So if jinnun are so obnoxiously awkward for most things to deal with, how come the nation isn't outright overpowered? The problem is that some of these things are extremely hard-counterable. EA Xibalba's sacred, the sun guide, is a blind bat man who swings in with a 19 damage, 15 attack magic weapon before even factoring in a bless. He completely ignores invisibility and ethereal alike, and costs only a third of what a jinn does. Tuatha Warriors are also cheaper than Jinn, have 15-attack magic weapons, and much better all-around stats besides, and TNN can trivially buff truesight. Fomoria has a slightly harder time buffing the truesight, but their Nemedian Warriors are even better, and cheaper, and don't even require shelling out for a bless. And god forbid you start next to a Vanheim with magic weapons on their bless, because vanheres will blend you, much the same as they do anything else. Heck, even without magic weapons, they hit hard enough and often enough and with enough skill that even just a few casts of truesight will render them quite capable of dealing with you.

So there are nations that can take good advantage of your reliance on special abilities, and most nations can tailor a bless specifically to dealing with you. The problem is that such a bless involves going significantly out of your way, and there are nations where the matchup is just horrendously one-sided. The combination of abilities on Ubar's jinnun makes the nation have an exceedingly warping effect on other people's build priorities, and it makes any early conflict very, very feast or famine. Either you fight someone who doesn't stand a chance, or you get rolled.

This problem is hard to solve while not adversely affecting the themeing of the nation. It has been suggested that jinnun should get mostly lesser forms invisibility - displacement, maybe even blur for the very weakest ones - but that would harm their flavour. I'll be honest, I don't know how to best solve that problem.

As such, I'll focus on a solution for the other half the problem with the nation:

Ubar after the early game

In some ways, you'd expect Ubar to get fairer as people get more research and therefore nominally more counters. However, it is generally not so. Nations without the glamour path don't really get meaningful access to true sight, and troops with magic weapons remain scarce and expensive for most nations, so even though Ubar can only produce jinnun in their capital, that is more than enough to cause problems. They especially match up well into province defence, which combined with Ubar's great (flying) mobility and omnipresent stealth means that the nation can be a real headache to defend against. Finally, they get one of the most loathed mechanics in the game: Corruption.

Once EA Ubar's god wakes up, they get the rest of their capital sites, and they get to recruit, amongst other things, Shaytanim. Shaytanim are flying glamoured unseen stealth 70 corruptors with 22 map move which cost 2 commander points. Ubar can make one and a half of these per turn, and each of them has a very good chance of stealing any commander they put their mind to, as the corruption mechanic works like seduction, but with morale being rolled against 13, and with no concern for gender. A fight against an Ubar which has been left alive can very quickly result in you having no mages, no land, and, even if you do catch them in a fight, no chance to actually hit the buggers. It sucks. People warp their entire build around them, rush them if they can, and if not, the whole lobby suffers.

So what can we do about that?

Well, since the jinnun of Ubar were bound to the City of Brass and the three deserts, why not give them homesickness? Different jinnun could have different levels thereof, with the lowest going to the Jinn Warriors who roam the desert even during the sealing-away of the City, and the highest going to the Shaytanim who were the original instigators of the past rebellion. The point would be to limit Ubar's ability to sneak things into place ahead of an attack, to pursue a sustained offensive raiding war, and to freely shadow enemy armies with Shaytanim. The nation would not be made especially weaker against early aggression from the nations that ignore most of their abilities, but their later strength being reduced would mean that nations with a bad matchup against them would feel less forced to warp their build around it.

I understand that some might be reticent to add the tag, as it has historically been seen as extremely debilitating on many units, but I believe that at the right levels, it shouldn't overly punish Ubar (who does, after all, have solid flying map move and stealth), and it would encourage them to make greater use of their perfectly reasonable humans.

In order to ensure that the nation still have some ability to wage offensive wars in bigger games, it might be desirable to give them a national item to remove homesickness, in the style of the Crown of Ohya (a lamp would seem like the obvious candidate), or ritual a spell to change their home province, or both. Perhaps even a (national?) artifact to remove homesickness from troops could be desirable, though I have no ideas what that might be.

I think that this change would not only make Ubar less of a problem in the later game but also serve to make them potentially more interesting. You'd be forced to think about terrain in a different way when you're only able to move so far from your capital before the penalties start racking up, and your wars would be encouraged to ebb and flow as you aggress heavily with your jinnun before beginning to cycle them home while the humans hold the line.

I'm curious to hear y'all's thoughts on this matter. How do you think the nation can be fixed? Do you think homesickness would be a good and interesting addition? Let me know!

EDIT: I forgot to mention (thanks to Tlaloc_ for reminding me!) that in order for Homesickness to be workable, you would of course need UI support for selecting sufficiently homesick units. If a certain keybind selected units who had lost, say, 30% or more max HP to homesickness, that would make it manageable to actually play the nation with such a mechanic.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Yeah you sum up the problem adroitly. Ubar's problem has never been that it's overpowered, it's that Ubar is either overpowered or underpowered, with no healthy middle ground. So much of the power you pay for with them is tied up in binary traits which are hugely impactful if they work, but worthless if they don't, so if you get the benefit of them you're horrendously powerful, but if you don't you crumple like wet paper. An Ubar fighting an unprepared enemy is nigh-unstoppable and able to win wars extremely quickly. An Ubar against an enemy who does have true sight, mweps, and some capacity to make salt is... Not helpless, but remarkably close to it. There's no middle ground where you can have an actual back-and-forth fight.

And it's an absolute pisser because I love the flavour, have done even before I devoured S. A. Chakraborty's City of Brass series, but I feel like if I ever took them out for a spin I'd feel like either a bully or a schmuck, and neither appeals.

The homesickness idea is interesting, I don't really know how I feel about it, but to my mind the obvious solution is to make both their advantages and weaknesses less bloody binary. Magic power is fine; the game has plenty of ways to interact with good stats. Unseen is a problem, but also very flavourful, so tuning it would need to be careful. The main idea I have is simple: replace Ethereal with Mistform.

The Jinnun are creatures of smokeless flame, yes? That sounds a lot like the rationalisation for how Mistform works, that it's difficult to cause meaningful damage to a creature for whom bodily integrity is kind of optional. Mechanically, Mistform is much less binary than ethereal; it has some limited utility against magical weapons, but can be cancelled with either limited magic damage, or the simpler expedient of Bonk Harder. Assuming these strengths can be brought into line, it might also be possible to take a hard look at the stun effect of enchanted salt, and ask if a retuned Ubar really needs to contend with a "forge here to trivialise Jinn forever" button.

[ExasperatedCultist]

Mistform would be a lot worse than ethereal. For things that didn't have a way of popping mistform reliably, it would take even longer to kill them.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by ExasperatedCultist:

Mistform would be a lot worse than ethereal. For things that didn't have a way of popping mistform reliably, it would take even longer to kill them.

I mean if you don't have a way of reliably popping mistform, what are you going to do about ethereal?

[ExasperatedCultist]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

Originally posted by ExasperatedCultist:

Mistform would be a lot worse than ethereal. For things that didn't have a way of popping mistform reliably, it would take even longer to kill them.

I mean if you don't have a way of reliably popping mistform, what are you going to do about ethereal?

Kill things faster.

If you deal, say, 12 damage after prot, on average, it will take you something like 8 swings to kill an ethereal jinn warrior, but about twice that to kill a mistformed one.

[Tlaloc_]

Homesickness sounds like it would be micromanagement hell as you can't easily check which units need to go back to the capital.

[ExasperatedCultist]

Originally posted by Tlaloc_:

Homesickness sounds like it would be micromanagement hell as you can't easily check which units need to go back to the capital.

Oh, right, that's a good point. I meant to add to the main post that such a change would necessitate the addition of a button to select homesick units. I'll edit that in, thank you.

[Sombre]

Perhaps instead of ethereality they could have some level of invulnerability, since that is less swingy. I imagine KO would want them to remain ethereal though.

[voronin_mike]

Ubar? Flawed?? Please share the contacts of your weed supplier! %)

[Selgeron]

I like the idea of homesickness, though it would be a micro nightmare- even if you could select the injured ones you'd have to be constantly moving troops forward and back, and you would almost never be able to use them on an offensive war, which seems like it would be really hard.

I think they just need a few less abilities, like they probably dont need the mirror image thing with all the other stuff- plenty of other units and nations have 'mirror image units' as their gimmick, their thing should be the unseen gimmick, and rely on that.

[Ara Ara ufufu~]

Homesickness seems a thematic and good solution without watering down the magical nature of jinn.

Ubar is great thematically, but the mechanics let it down in terms of making a nation you want in your lobby. A new thematic weakness seems like the best approach, and homesickness makes sense.

[GodHead]

Homesickness would make them so annoying to play you would never see them again.

It would just bookkeeping the nation to death.

[freek_o_nature]

Semi-permanent HP reduction is possible with afflictions like Never Healing Wound; might it be possible for Homesickness to be represented by an affliction? Never Healing Wound is already -20% HP, so an affliction like Homesick could be -10% instead, would be healed automatically in the unit's home province, and probably couldn't be healed any other way to keep the flavour. That would make it possible to select units with Homesick penalties just by selecting all units with afflictions in a squad. It might take a little bit of mechanical rearranging, but it doesn't seem (to a non-modder such as myself) like an odious task, and it could open up the Homesickness trait to be manageable or even useful for situations like this.

[Demonsthenes]

I think the Jinn Warriors are strong but certainly possible to fight. They raid well, but given the 700 gold cost for 8 Jinn Warriors plus a flying Jinn commander, you can fight them economically... It's possible to overwhelm them with missiles, or with high attack density melee attacks, or snipe the commander with random troops who attack rear. A raiding party of 30 camels is pretty dangerous for the same price, and those are Ubar's scales troops.

To me, the Shaytan are the crux of the problem, and in particular the fact that the check to resist corruption (vs 13) is so darn difficult.

Even forgetting amplifying factors like dark skies, a lot of mages have 10 morale and thus a 70%+ good chance to be stolen, and 30%+ chance even with some morale gear. Many more have a high chance to die in the assassination if not stolen, such that you need a lot of gear and strong bodyguards to protect a single commander. Given that the nature of Dominions is that many armies have single points of failure (like the Sleeper transporting the troops or the Army of Mist caster), this capability is very disruptive to the normal game mechanics.

As it stands, an 8 base morale Enarie in Ubar Dominion with dragon helmet still has a more than 50% chance to fail the corruption check. Under 10 candles of Dark Skies, it's basically impossible for many nations to field armies in Ubar territory without bringing dozens of chaff commanders, who can often be cleared by battlefield wipes.

Some bodyguards can be pretty effective, like Winter Wolves, but those (1) can freeze your mage in an actual battle if you don't have cold resistance, (2) only have a 50% chance to appear, which means even with 5 you often don't have enough to beat a Shaytan making a fire elemental or something without good luck, and (3) don't help the commander resist corruption at all. And there's no way to try to get the Shaytan or other assassin to try against the handful of geared/protected mages that you can realistically field.

The one time I played Ubar in multiplayer, I literally spent time delaying taking the C'tis capital so I could farm more 10 morale Sauromancers to add to my mage corps. And I wondered if the best move for my opponent was to suicide them so I couldn't steal them.

Ultimately I think the best change is just to adjust the check for how hard corruption is. Seduction has a check vs 9; I don't see a strong reason why Corruption should have a 4 points harder check vs 13... Which translates to basically negating the impact of a dedicated item like the Dragon Helmet that one might use to try to protect a key commander from them. I could imagine offering gear that offers a +2 bonus as with the Beauty items at the cost of 5-10 gems and a slot ... But the reason their late game is so cancerous is that the base check is super hard, and even if you invest gems into stopping corruption, it's not an unlikely roll for Ubar to just steal you gear along with the guy holding it. And if you make a super army full of geared mages and walk onto an Ubar throne, they might just cast Dark Skies that turn and steak everyone and their gear anyway. (I've argued in other threads that Dark Skies should be reworked to remove this exploit).

But I've got a few other ideas that could be interesting directions alongside changing that one number, which BTW is not moddable:

- Bodyguards could reduce the chance of corruption/seduction by 1 each by being loyal to the Pretender and making it hard to meet in secret.

- Allow more than 5 bodyguards... So with the 50% chance to appear you can more often have more than a couple units helping product you.

- The new Ring of Warning is cool, but what I usually want as a player is a way to actually kill the assassin who is messing with my army... It doesn't really help to take my 20 mage army and spend 25 gems to make 5 of them less likely to die if targeted... Because 75% of the time my investment has no effect at all (actually it's more like 85%, because the ring is only 60% effective). So something like a 5-10 gem item that increases the chance that the commander is picked out of an army and hit by an assassin by 5-10x would mean that you can meaningfully gear a few anti Shaytan commanders and expect them to provide decent coverage for an army of a dozen other mages.

- Overall the casting AI for mages defending against assassination attempts is very poor, often spending all one's fatigue on useless actions, like buffing commoners in the Inn with Body Ethereal. So even a mage geared with Moon Blades and salt and elemental armor might be hard to script to actually defend themselves from a Shaytan with a couple gems and no gear at all. Improving the casting AI would help a lot.

I think homesickness could be a thematic idea at the 5-10% level, but worry it might feel pretty unfun even at that level because of how that tag causes permanent afflictions; though it would be good to change that mechanic overall as it's super annoying for the lost Giants and other units with it too. I'd maybe want Ubar to get a cheaper 1cp Jinn commander to make troop logistics not frustrating; if you need to lead your Jinn Warriors with Kahin to expand, you don't want just waking 3 provinces and back to the capital to kill or seriously afflict them all.

[powerfinder]

A few thoughts:
- It would be nice if ethereality had different degrees. There are two degrees of true ethereality in the game (50 and 75), but only one degree of normal ethereality.
- A blessing or item that would grant immunity to seduction/corruption. The game has the blessing of sleeplessness, so why not make a niche effect aimed specifically at the seduction/corruption mechanic.
- The difficulty of morale checks for corruption can be reduced. 9 would be reasonable, I guess.
- Shaytan is too strong for 2 points. I'm surprised it doesn't cost 4 points.

[Demonsthenes]

Just a small note that Na'Ba gets Shaytan for quite cheap if they manage to build a blood economy, and that may need consideration if changing commander point costs is part of the answer.