Well, having weakened spirits when Oak is pounding away on the cit with his axe is kind of unfair.

Maybe the damage reduction can be tied to range?

eg: 0-20 = 100%
21-30 = 50%
31+ = 10%

Just an idea

What if spirits just can hurt "living" things and no building? It would be more rpg style that ghost can only harm living creatures.

But it may be nerfing spirits to much? Just an idea... Don´t blame me too hard for that.

I think you are missing it a bit, orion.  And if you don't think spirits are viable against dgs, you probably haven't played against a good minion oak player (eg the idiots that generally just spam the cit probably have no idea how to play a good minion oak (focus on dgs).  

Anyway, this thread isn't really about looking for discussion as to whether or not a nerf is needed... I'm just asking if its possible to change spirits so that their dmg stays as it is for dg/creep dmg, and that it could be changed for either the citadel or structures to a reduced rate... and how much work would be involved in doing that. 

Thanks for the response, exx.  I like 1 and 2.  3 - not so much.  I think the best fix would be option 2.  But I'm cool with a simple fix if you can find the time for a simple mod.  At this point, I'd wager about 70% of the remaining user base are downloading my dg mod package on a regular basis.  Adding a mod like this to that package would likely result in at least a 10% adoption rate on the quick (which would grow, of course). 

I'd love if the mod have a silly name... I can only think of horrible things like "quit raping my citadel, noob."  I think it should be silly but explain what the mod does. 

And if you felt like spending any time developing the 2nd one, that would be my #1 preference, but really - anything is an improvement.  And side note - this really isn't a huge issue - just one that has existed for some time. 

If you have time for either, I'd appreciate it.  If you don't have time and wouldn't mind pointing me in the right direction, I'd be willing to code this.  Thanks. 

Thanks, miri.  I'll compile this and give it a go sometime in the near future. 

Hey, I see you have a mod in mind.... What if crawlers,spirits,shamblers had a damage respective to their DG's distance. When in close range damage is full. When ranged as far as a tower range from their DG, damage reduced  by 1/2, when completely out of range of controlling DG, damage is 1/4.  So the DG who controls them has like an aura that affects the damage their summoned crawlers inflict.

This way for a citadel kill with spirits, OAK would need to be right there attacking citadel too...

I'm all for discussing this and that for changes, but I'm only looking to create a simple mod atm.  Once that's done, we can expand upon it.  The only goal just nerfing citadel spam by spirits.  That's about all I'm shooting for.  And to be completely reasonable, its not really a big deal.  Having the mod enabled would simply ensure that if you do get one of those fellows that wants to spam the cit won't be able to.  They can still make a nuisance of themselves by tearing up buildings, etc, but they wouldn't be able to destroy the cit single handed for their team even if their team is down by 20 kills.    The only goal I have to is remove the cheese option and enable folks to use it if they want to. 

Once I finish testing, I'll just add it to my combined installer and folks will have access to it if they want it easily. 

I don´t think that generals or minions in common need to be nerfed (Yetis and Shamblers are boosted in Crazytown for a reason). But to nerf oaks spirit against the citadel seems to be a reasonable thing (even I´ve never encountered an oak player like that. But have very little gaming experience yet).

Another problem is, that all online games I´ve seen don´t use any mods (once I spotted AI and another time Uberfix 1.03).

One great hope is, that they will be implemented somehow (as an automatic download for example that everybody has them).

But if not (which is maybe more realistic), what to do? Okay not the question for this thread, sorry.

Out of curiosity, can Nightwalkers be used like this as well?  I realize that they don't have the same mobility, nor the persistent, non-present creation via totem that spirits have, but they're still really plentiful as long as Erebus is anywhere near a lane, and they have more hitpoints.  I suppose the towers snipe them before they can get to the citadel?

Also, what's this about only Nightwalkers being able to attack wards?  That's not intended, and is definitely UberFix material.

Edit: I see, their TargetRestrictDisallow is set to 'UNTARGETABLE + AIR', and that's not a valid syntax for non-extended category parsing (it should be 'UNTARGETABLE, AIR', although just 'UNTARGETABLE' is functionally the same given that they cannot attack the Air layer as it is).  This is definitely a bug, and probably affects more than just wards, because many units (e.g. walls) rely on the UNTARGETABLE category to prevent being attacked.

Anyway, you think its a bug and the actual intent is to make it so spirit wards can't be targeted.  That would mean that they must have made an earlier design decision where they wanted them to be targetable so they could be destroyed (hence the HP - otherwise having HP on the wards is silly).  Then, perhaps they changed their minds on that, tried to remove the ability to dmg them, but screwed up their code so that erb's rollies could still do the dmg.  That doesn't sound all that implausible and would logically be a fit for uberfix.  But then, I'd suggest fixing the code if possible so that the wards no longer have hp (and no reference would exist in the tooltip (if it does exist) indicating the HP of the ward).  I'm sure that's pie in the sky, but that would remove the redundancy (hp on items on things that can't be dmg'd).

With regards to the bug related to untargetable - I think I've seen this play out a few diff ways.  The occasional targeting of flags or mines when they aren't under your control (minons mostly if I remember right).  And then there's the extra strange thing I've seen with swap on the demon assassin ai.  I've seen him try to swap a tower on cataract many times.  Pretty sure that's with the vanilla ai.  It is not possible to do this as a player using da though... so something strange there.

Mines do have hitpoints.  All units have hitpoints, including many invincible units such as walls, trebuchets, portals, gold mines, etc.  Some of these cannot be hovered over at all because they have the BENIGN category (e.g. walls), but most of them can be hovered over for information purposes (e.g. to see what level a ward is at, or who owns a captureable structure).

However, as in all GPG games, units with UNTARGETABLE and NOSPLASHDAMAGE categories are intended to be absolutely 100% invincible, and anything that causes something to be able to hit them is a bug.  In this case, the extremely obvious bug is that the Nightwalker weapon isn't getting the UNTARGETABLE category parsed for its weapon restrictions, even though it's specified right in the string - there's just a syntax error keeping it from taking effect.

And yes, AI can issue all sorts of illegal orders that players can't, such as teleporting to untargetable walls.  This is because that object is technically a valid target for the ability itself (determined by category, or in most cases, lack of category exceptions) and the AI is getting a handle to the object via overly-broad category filters (in the case of wall teleportation, STRUCTURE instead of STRUCTURE and DEFENSE), but the UI's targeting mask prevents e.g. structures from being targeted by Swap for human players.  If you look at the blueprints of these abilities, they'll list both a TargetingMethod (the UI mask) and TargetCategory (what the sim-side ability code allows it to be used on).  The UI does not take categories into account, and allows you to actually click a mask-valid target before halting the cast based on category filters.

It's possible there's a bug in the AI somewhere that doesn't check categories before attempting to issue some ability casts, and the AI DA will attempt to start a Swap cast on an invalid target only to be stopped by the ability system itself (Swap has a TargetCategory of HERO, allowing only use on demigods regardless of what the AI tells it to cast on).

The latest version of the AI mod fixes most if not all of these illegal cast attempts, including wall teleportation.  As evidenced by the behavior of an AI DA trying to swap a tower, it's not good enough just to prevent the ability from being cast on invalid targets (e.g. adding DEFENSE to the TargetCategory of the teleport item abilities), as that just makes the AI get stuck in that cast loop until it's interrupted by something.

Man - soo lazy this week.  I have the nerf mod coded - just need to get around to testing it, coming up with a silly arse name for it, and bundling it up.  Hopefully I'll knock that out this weekend.