Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General Easy Solution for Wizard Tower Problem

Like many people have pointed out, Wizard Towers are easily the least effective buildings on the strategy map. This is because Dragon Skill cards are only useful when the player is commanding a fight personally and, even then, only if they haven't researched the skill already. The net result of this is that players just don't build Wizard Towers because the gold would be better spent on Hunters or saved up for building another Tavern or Factory. A lot of suggestions have been thrown around about changing the nature of the cards, but I feel that solution is too complicated.

My easy solution is to make Wizard Towers contribute to your research score, just like Academies do. Canonically, Maxos the Wizard does provides as many research opportunities for you as the Imp Mechanic does. Then, even if the cards are useless, there's still an advantage to making the occasional tower as you get a research bonus. It would be simple enough to implement without having to rework the entire card distribution model.

That's a simple idea, but it's not really the best fix for Wizard towers, in my opinion. The problem with making them contribute to research is that Academies contribute to research and als o give cards - and most of the cards they give are useful all game long (except Unit Acquisition and Unit Skill cards, but those appear really rarely from Academies anyway). Besides, Research points are easy enough to acquire as it is.


For the record, my two suggested solutions to this were

A) Turn Wizard Towers into shops for Dragon Skills.
They could remove the "random card every 3 turns" functionality and have the Wizard Towers serve as some kind of shop, with a random selection of 8 Dragon Dragon skills, so you could buy skills you wanted. Maybe the price should be lower, though, since some skills are not worth up to 15 gold a turn. Maybe 2 Gold per Tier level (up to 8 gold per Tier 4 card). This will let players decide whether to spend research points on mastering a skill, or buy it with gold and save their research points for units.


B) Add an additional Function to the Wizard Tower
Keep the existing functionality of the Wizard Tower as is, but add a "Transmute Cards" function to it, that lets you transmute 3-5 cards for a single other random card, which could be anything, even stuff from the Emporium. That would solve the useless card situation, and the useless building situation, and add an element of gambling to the Wizard Tower, which can be addicting. Maybe a fee of 3 gold per transmutation... or maybe a fee is too much if the result is a random card. I'm not sure.

I prefer B, because it would help in other ways. Yes, it would require more work, but it would give Wizard Towers a distinct role that couldn't be replaced by an Academy.

While B neatly solves 2 problems (there being no way to sell unwanted cards and the Wizard Tower being a but worthless) it does have the problem that there's only ever a need for one Wizard Tower. Ideally I think the Wizard Tower needs a buff so it actually performs its intended purpose. If the cards offered genuine buffs you couldn't just research in the same way the Academy does that would be ideal. Of course it opens a can of worms but cards that offered improved versions of the existing upgrades, temporary luck bonuses, generic buffs to the dragon, faster spawning and a "2 places at once" card that let you deploy the dragon twice could make the Wizards tower genuinely appealing.

It's a balance can of worms of course so I'm not sure such changes could actually be made.

See, the problem with option B is that they'd have to create all new code in order to turn 3 cards into 1 random super card that won't be meaningful by the end of Act II anyways. Adding research points achieves two key goals:

1) It is a very simple solution and, therefore, easy for Larian Studios to implement. You can't expect them to make dramatic changes to a relatively minor problem.
2) It gives the Wizard's Tower a use even after all Dragon skills are purchased. Given that all buildings scale up in price as you acquire more, the lower marginal cost of getting an extra research point from a tower instead of an academy should outweigh the benefit of the academy's slightly more useful cards.

I'd also think it'd be good if Wizard Towers contributed to the Dragon's HP, but I'm not sure how easy that would be to code and I feel that simplicity is critical here.

I didn't say 3 cards to make a super card, I said 3 cards to make a random card - from any category (except permanent of course). The card could be a mercenary, unit advantage, unit subversion, unit acquisition, unit skill, diplomacy, etc... even cards only generated from the emporium). In fact, they could probably just reuse the same code that they use to generate the Emporium cards.


I don't build Wizard Towers now, I build Parliaments, Academies and Taverns. I don't build extra Academies because I desperately want the single extra point of research they provide, I build extra Academies because I want the cards they provide.

Having Wizard Towers also produce research points still won't make me build Wizard Towers instead of an Academy. While you're right that just adding research points to Wizard towers is the simplest way to change Wizard Towers, for me, that is not a change impressive enough to make me want to build a wizard tower.

You're right Rack, I don't really have a good answer to making it desirable to build more than one Wizard Tower, other than the shop idea. ... Factories have a limit of X units you can build. What if you could only gamble for a new card once per Wizard Tower per turn? But I don't know how hard that would be to code either.

Ooh, I have a good idea! Each Wizard tower could have a small selection of randomly determined cards you could trade for at a 4 for 1 ratio (weighted towards card rank), say 2 or 3 that changed every turn. More Wizard Towers means more of a selection.

This also stops the frustration of trading 4 worthless cards for 1 worthless card. It would take a bit of coding but would be easier to balance (heck the cards should ALREADY be balanced according to rank, even 1 for 1 trades wouldn't be gamebreaking). As far as the AI goes you'd just have to feed it a list of optimal and sub-optimal cards and it would trade in whenever it had a couple of redundant ones (unit acquisition and anything from the Wizard Tower itself).

I'd still prefer the Wizard Tower to generate actually useful cards but this would fix some other issues with what could be a lot less work.

Solid idea about the selection of cards. Maybe there could be more cards along the line of "Dragon does 33% more damage" or "Dragon has 50% more health" or "Dragon does not require recruits to spawn" and make the Dragon cards more like the unit buff cards you get from academies.

Yeah, Dragon buff cards (and possibly debuff in muliplayer? No, too annoying or unbalanced) instead of Dragon Skill cards would definitely make Wizard Towers useful. They could occupy a slot on the skill bar as well, to force you between passive skills, active skills, and buffs.

I do still hope for some mechanism to trade/sell unwanted cards at some point.

Of course Dragon buffs that occupy slots on the skill bar are already produced by the Wizard Tower in the form of research upgrades, so these would have to be better or we'd end up with the same situation.

And yes, I'd like a way to get rid of useless cards as well, though part of me thinks the solution here is not to have useless cards. I'd never trade in a Mercenary or good Strategy card no matter what the board situation, if the Wizard Tower and Academy cards were better I'd not trade them in either.

Maybe there could be a use for Wizard tower that also benefits a dragonless AI? Either that, or dragonless AI's should immediately deconstruct any wizard tower they come across.

Perhaps you can buy spells from them:

Word-of-recall: Pay X/2 gold to respawn casualties up to a total value of X to this wizard tower from battles the coming turn. Naval units require coastlines. Excess gold is returned at the beginning of the next turn. (If you pay 2 it is enough to return a 3 or 4 gold unit; if no unit is returned you get 2 gold back. If you pay 10 it is enough to return up to 20 gold's worth of units. If you return only 10 gold's worth, you get 5 gold back.)

Recovered units behave like newly constructed units (cannot move before next turn).

Teleport: Pay 6 + 2X gold to spawn a transport unit that has X cargo capacity, can move on this turn, lands in any friendly territory where you have units already (without entering other territories on the way) and unloads automatically before ceasing to exist. (Spell cancels before payment if wizard's tower is invaded before the owner's turn.)

Waterwalk: Pay 7 gold. All ground units in the territory gain the ability to step onto ocean tiles. They ability is lost if they travel by other means (enter a transport), if they encounter enemies and if they end their turn on dry land. Waterwalking units cannot engage enemies, and if they are engaged by naval or air units they are destroyed without battle. (Hostile waterwalkers can go past eachother without incident, and naval units can take out enemy waterwalkers without forcing their own waterwalkers into battle.)

Haste: Pay 10 gold. All units in area with 1 or more movement points left gain an extra movement point.

Cloak: Pay 20 gold. All units in area are cloaked until they reach their destination. (Will not intercept or be intercepted before final tile. Will not claim territories before final tile.)

Quest for the philosopher's stone: Once per wizard tower, convert X research points to an equal amount of gold. (This should not reset if a new player conquers the wizard tower; to reuse the ability, a new tower must be built - you can sell the old one and build a new one, of course.)

Pricing may affect what phase/situation wizard towers are most useful in. Expensive wizard towers can be interesting for long campaigns. Teleport, waterwalk and haste makes for less predictable troop movements, which could be a bit harder for the AI, but it also gives the AI more reason to spread its forces the way it already does. (Whereas I leave most of my empire wide open because I control all his attack vectors.)