Witch has always been such suffering for me. Killed by my own spells, killed by my own units. Would very much appreciate full poison res on the lv. 2 witch... maybe then I'd make it past turn 30.

Witches in this mod still follow the same progression of poison res as they promote, 0 -> 50 -> 100. However, there's a new level 1 ritual, "Witch Brew" that creates a misc item that provides poison immunity + fast heal for only 50 fungus. This adds a nice fast track to poison immunity with the added utility of being able to pass it to other units once fully leveled or to cure a troublesome battle affliction on a valuable unit. Double edged sword being that if you're defeated it falls into the hands of an enemy.

Thanks for the feedback though, I'll consider bumping up the base poison resist if I find that it's still too troublesome.

Had a near win with witch, so I'm willing to call myself officially not trash.

Once I learned not to kill myself with poison (much), I came to a new frustration--everything fun costs fungus. Even your unique soldiery, your main gold sink, cost enough that spending your gold, if you have a lot, will necessarily cut into your ritual budget.

I'd propose expanding Adrophags to include some new ways to spend gold and iron to support their sticky masters. Androphag Lord is a good candidate for a ritual or two i think!

I think the ability to build a hillfort in swamps makes sense. You might think this steps on miasma's toes? But Miasma creates a no-man's land that only a very elite witch army can cross safely. So I think the use-cases for these options actually have little overlap.

I imagine something working more less like what the Barbarian does in tribal villages, or the Thief in Bandit holes. Costing a little Gold, and good chunk of Iron.

The Manflayer seems like a guy who knows his way around a corpse.
It would make sense if he had a ritual to turn humanoid corpses into resources.
Hard to imagine what resource type a "corpse leather" windfall would fall under. Leather armored soldiers usually cost pure gold, so gold it is I guess? This would be most useful if he also had an ability that SPENT that gold.
Turning corpses and gold into effigies?
Using corpses and gold to spawn/upgrade units?

My last idea: Something like an androphag war elephant. Big lizard, 25 iron cost. Swamp move. You get the idea. On a related note, is there some way I can easily browse the sprite pack you use, so I know what you have on hand?

I'll give some thought to possibilities for gold expenditure for the Witch, not sure which way I'd lean tbh. In my current work I have already implemented building effigies for the manflayer so I am on the same page with that.

I get the vast majority of my sprites from Dominions 6 extracts: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/app/2511500/discussions/0/4132682727131370992/

While a few others are from other modders that are more artistically inclined and generously let others use their sprites for a credit. Namely: Juz and Sturm (He does Dominions 6 mods, so different workshop)

New Selkie is very themey but I feel like they are missing something. Not once was I able to ambush anything... some thoughts:

Selkie is a consumate loner. If she isn't alone in her swamp she can't ambush and is pretty useless. While she can have a home as part of a witch's army, anyplace the witch is is one where you can just plop some mushrooms down, so at some point she wants to break off on her own.

If she had stealth in her walking form, it would be easier for her to sneak her way someplace meaningful.

I also wonder if it is really necessary for her drown attack to be an assassination strike, and not simply a pre-battle one. That way you could give her some mushrooms to pal around with, and she could part of a real defense instead of just a suicide assassin.

The selkie implementation was tricky and I can see where in it's current state it's kind of an "all or nothing" unit with the ambush gimmick. The pre-battle route I think would be problematic because then there's no "foil" other than avoiding it, and I don't believe there's a way to make the AI view it as a "trap" unit to be avoided, so they'll constantly crash into them and take unnecessary losses for nothing. Adding stealth to the mobile form is not a bad suggestion though.

I'm inclined to add an additional bonus to the "submerged" form so there's an incentive to have them camp on swamps and if someone happens across it the units killed in the ambush is a bonus rather than the entire package.

On the subject of the lizards! I squeed when I saw them in my recruit menu. I have thought lizardmen needed a home somewhere in CoE5 and witch fits perfectly.

They reward the witch for having iron, which was a major weak point of the class before. But I think that's not even the best part of the change. It was such a mindblowing moment to recruit something on a citadel as witch that had POISON RES. There is a critical mass of summoning you do as witch where at that point, anything that isn't poison immune in your stack will die to friendly fire. Meaning your strong stacks are limited to summons only. The lizards let me actually support my main stack with recruitment. Makes the class feel a little less... oppressive to play as.

All this to say lizards are great and I love them. I would like to see more even. Here's the pitch:

Add unarmored lizard warriors to the mercenary lineup--50 G and 25 F.
Add fungus cost to the Swordslizards and Fen Guard. Fungus cost is thematic since you surely find them in the swamp, and they are pretty strong for their price currently, given their desirability.

New Commander, Lizard Priest. Has bile magic 1 and enables recruitment. Has a single ritual allowing them to settle in an Iron Bog, becoming a stationary "Lizard Armorer." In this form it has an iron bonus and a stronger enables recruitment, making it an opt-in to lizardfolk.

Nice! Glad to hear this hits the mark, I also think they fit thematically and help to shore up a very weak spot of the witch that can help them deal with units that really hard counter their summons in a way that can be rather frustrating. I was already thinking of expanding this a bit beyond their current implementation. I think the current setup is fine, but it can be more interesting with a cheaper non-armored lizardman, while the existing + new armored units can be gated behind a lizard man caster/leader as well. The armorer concept is interesting, but I think I'll have to test a bit how frequent iron bogs actually appear.

It's true that iron bogs are quite rare...
Since they yield less of the crucial fungus, the ability terraform a swamp into an Iron bog seems like it would not be broken. But i couldn't come up with an idea for it I liked.

Anyway... Cauldron Witches float now. I don't hate the change but I think it demands further tweaking. Before, being slow gave them a clear role--hanging out in swamps summoning nasties for your hags to lead. Now, they are even better than hags at guiding giant things around the map. They are also a cheaper upgrade, AND their summon ritual is a much more practical way to turn fungus into momentum than swamp soul.

I recommend nerfing the Cauldron Witch down to Maladies 1, securing the Hag's niche as the primo combat caster. I would also consider tweaking the costs of the promotion rituals and T3 rituals they unlock, as currently the T3 summon is such a mashable win button that messing around with hags seems less than optimal.

Thanks for the feedback! I think the prior version of the Cauldron Crone was a bit unappealing since level 3 casting, a normal movement rate, and pretty easily obtainable immortality was traded for access to T3 summons. But I can see where the reduced mastery cost + enhanced mobility may have tipped things too far in the other direction.

Single unit laser-tight suggestion:

Swamp Ghosts are friendly-fire experts. They have a degree in it. They are probably the ghosts of people who friendly fired someone in the swamp. It may "add texture" i dunno. But they wouldn't be out of place in the ritual's roster if they were buffed to be Front+

Good observation, although I generally lean to AOE attacks having friendly fire potential is good for balance reasons, for cases like this where it's on a lesser summon it usually just pushes the unit to being too niche to use. I could see either a rank adjustment as you suggested, reduction to the AOE but removing friendly fire, or making inanimate units immune to the attack so this can be a good pick to throw in an army of undead summoned by a manflayer.

The witch feels very content-sparse in comparison to a lot of the other factions, and while this is also true in vanilla, it is an even more stark difference when most other classes have gotten substantially more new content than the witch, and they already had more content.

A couple ideas -
1. Selkies should be able to submerge in shallow water in addition to swamps, ambushing shipgoers
2. Give the Erinyes a ritual that can only be done in inferno, costing either gold or a lot of ap (depending on which you think would be better balanced), which presses a dozen or so sinners and a couple lesser fiends into service. This gives a small but useful incentive to use your witches swamp teleport to invade inferno.

You are not wrong. My current stance on my witch additions is, "inoffensive but not fully fleshed out". Good news is in the upcoming update I've already given them a lot of attention. I'll be making a "what's next" post soon for feedback, but to summarize.

1. Building on the current split promotion path at level 2, I'll be expanding this to have 3 promotions at each level. Some of this is a new specialized "slot" for existing content and the Selkie is one of them. Currently they're kind of a gimmick, so they'll be reworked as a potential promotion at level 1 that grants mixed spell casting, an amphibious commander, and exclusive access to Marshlands ritual.

2. Lizardmen are being expanded from occasional merc recruits to more of a staple in the roster, with a mechanic where lizardmen warlord commanders can take over citadels to expand the types of troops that can be recruited.


Generally I steer away from mechanics focused too heavily on the outer planes, but what you suggested isn't too intrusive and could potentially be a little thematic flair for that unit.