Why do standard sovereigns suck so bad?!

I agree with everything you've said!

It rings especially true for pariden. They have spellbooks to give four of the five available schools of magic. So you'd have to be an idiot to design a sovereign with anything but life magic. You take just that one spell school and learn the rest later. spend the extra points on Brilliant and Attunement and Impulsive

Seconded.  I think the sovereigns suck because their design was formulated before the game really coalesced.  Stardock should revisit the vanilla sovs and ensure that they are at least a viable alternative to a custom sov.

Good for a laugh.  Thanks!

All true.

Yep, I rerolled a new sov after starting as Pariden and realizing I couldn't pick up Life Magic. The crown costs one point, and you can unselect it, I haven't thought to see if it was tradeable or not.

Well, if they optimized every sov we wouldn't need customizable ones right? So pick the race and the traits, I made Porcupine into the most powerful channeler in the world (as advertised) instead of mediocre. Haven't played any other race yet because I like to learn one before moving on.

Bah.  Magnar rules.  He will eat you all for lunch.  And your little dog, too.

Just speaking about the faction I play most, Ceresa's design is pretty bizarre. Your faction is setup (adepts+death worship+binding) to quickly quickly spam death altars->shrines, giving you a nice supply of demons and mana. What are you going to do with attunement (+2 mana/turn) on your sovereign, or the shadow warg (summoner)? Your faction traits make both of these redundant. What you do need is all the spell mastery and damage you can get, since death and water magic are heavily debuff/direct damage based, particularly with the death worship trait.. so of course Ceresa isn't brilliant (+2 spell mastery/level +10% xp) or a warlock (+50% spell damage), she's an attuned summoner. Among both her magic paths + the extra spells from death worship, there's exactly one summon, and it's not one of the good ones. Perhaps if the summoner trait affected the binding demons, this would make sense?

Magnar is much better designed - he has a well put together set of traits and spell schools for a damage caster, and his faction's flesh bound tome spells plus cheap slaves are decent support for that. For that matter Ceresa's faction abilities are even better support for a damage caster, it's just that her personal traits are exactly the wrong ones.

The sovereign traits feel totally unbalanced to me too - things like veteran are lame and things like wealthy are awesome - I hope Derek has another look at the traits and does some rebalancing here

Magnar is good, but not great: he needs another school of magic to be truly fearsome. 3 schools is minimum for a dedicated caster with no access to Decalon. imho.

Yup. You can do a lot better as a leader for the Quendar.  Death and Fire at level one, warlock/brilliant/hardy/wealthy/clumsy will wipe the floor with Magnar. 

I was thinking exactly this sort of thing earlier about not just sovereigns but also default units: they are both hugely weaker than custom made ones. Now, I do think it's great that you can make your own sovs and units, that's an awesome feature. I also think it's nice that doing so can mean the player is rewarded with stronger sovs and units.

But, here's the problem for me: default sovs and default units are so way inferior to custom designed ones, to the point where the default sovs and default units are grossly underpowered or the custom ones are grossly overpowered (depending on how you prefer to see it, amounts to the same thing). The gap between them seems too large.

I'd rather custom sovs and custom units be more about flavour and alternative strategy, with some increase in de facto power to reward the effort of time and thoughtful design than something that renders default sovs and units kind of obsolete, there to add spice and variety but not so much a big power difference. In some ways it's not as big a deal as it might sound, because there are so many options relating to setting the challenge that players can quite effectively self-govern how they are challenged: an OP sov here combined with an increase to difficulty level there etc. But the defaults shouldn't be quite so.... unappealing in relation to customised designs. New players who are less familiar with the game are likely to stick with default sovs and units for the first bunch of games. When they start customizing, it shouldn't feel like they've been playing nerfed sovs and units and now are playing OP ones, it should just feel different and with a bit of an edge. Obviously that's just opinion though, and I'm no game designer.

Maybe it is something that will get fiddled around with as the updates keep rolling out; they're certainly rolling out fast and I'm liking the attention the game is still getting after customers have paid. That's a real credit to the team.

Also, two of her three magic paths do not have summons. And, of course, Summoner is perhaps the worst profession for any type of mage, since you get more disposable meatshields even using Bandit Lord than you get from the Shadow Warg, and even with an extra two levels (or even with all the Summon traits adding levels) the summons Procipine has will still drop like flies when attacked by real troops.

I personally think that taking three schools of magic at the start costs too much to be reasonable for most builds, and it's not like I need Magnar to have many more spells to cast - Flame Dart works every other turn, and I can cast anything else from Death or Fire in the off turn. If Warlock and Summoner reduced the cost of taking magic paths, then I'd be more inclined to agree with you, but I'm more inclined to have Brilliant, Death Magic, and Fire Magic II or Brilliant, Death Magic II, and Fire Magic than to have Magic A, Magic B, and Magic C or Magic A, Magic B, Magic C, Brilliant, and a weakness. With a Warlock, I could also favor Fire I, any other magic that has at least one damage spell or a useful blessing/curse, Brilliant, and a useful trait (say, Tactician).

It's also not like you're really gaining anything by taking more than Fire Magic for a Warlock, since most of the damage spells (and especially most of the early damage spells) come from Fire Magic. Granted, there isn't all that much available in the normal traits that is really appealing for a caster, so you might as well spend points on a second school of magic. Plus, where are you going to get the turns in a tactical battle to make use of these extra spells? The only problem that taking Fire and Death as your magics has is that you don't really have a good alternative damage spell that doesn't deal fire damage, but there also aren't a lot of good damage spells outside of Fire Magic, anyways (Water + Death has Vetrar's Howl, Earth has Shatter, Air has ?Thunderstrike, Water has Blizzard, and that's about it for good damage spells outside of Fire and quests), and having a secondary champion for casting blessings or curses will work better anyways, since I'd rather my Warlock be dealing damage as much as possible.

Air has Cloudwalk. It's addictive.

Joeball, I agree with you - 2 schools is fine as you want to have points to spend on other stuff when creating a sov. Also, it gives more focus when you level up - no pot luck on which spellbook to upgrade

Only if you get to Magnar quickly enough.  On a large map, if he first encounters another AI, he'll wipe the floor with them, all the while expanding on his own.  As a human player, you can beat any of the AI ones in a straight battle, but if Magnar gets to streamrolling, which he usually does, your chances of winning are drastically reduced.

You know, I usually win my games on ridiculous, even when I play races cooked without cheese, and just won a game on insane (admittedly, with a very cheesy race). I am quite used to beating Magnar, early or late, and I always play on large maps.

The Quendar are a great race, but the AI isn't as good at focusing all its might in a single point as players are.

But you know the game very well, and by your admission, used a cheesy race.  I think most players without your experience or knowledge would have a hard time facing off against Magnar--after all, the name of the thread refers to sovereigns being really bad, not being really bad when faced by veteran players like us.

Complete agreement.  And this is very true in so many TBS titles, where the sheer variety of gameplay elements leaves the AI metaphorically cross-eyed.  We can't hold as much info at one time, but we can combine it very well.  Humans are sneaky that way.

That's pretty much Magnar already though, just with the addition of the (imo) overpowered hardy/wealthy/clumsy and removal of the less-helpful Fire II. Heck, every default sovereign would be improved by removing a level II magic school and adding hardy/wealthy/clumsy, that doesn't mean they should all have that It means those traits should be better balanced.

Not tomentio

Let's not forget she has Decathlon... She doesn't need to waste 6 points on 3 Magic schools.

What's wrong with the Gilden Guy? That guy seems to be all gravy. Spends too much time teasing that fabulous hair do to complete quests?

Unless A.I Porcupine can't reseaching book and buy, learned it... but in hand of player, yes, she don't need waste 6 points on it, but however in hand of a.i, I am not sure she could buy and learned it, sure they can do that armors, but learned from book, not so sure about that...

Personal, I think those magic cost 2 point is way too much, it's should cost one point, not 2...

Well they should be able to use books they find (exp, stat bonuses), and hopefully buy and use potions. She could definitely drop a school if the AI is updated to be able to make intelligent decisions with Decathlon. Hoping they don't end up with every champion a Penta-Mage and wasting level perks on spell school ranks. Perhaps have a Decathlon AI choose schools based on the path a Hero has taken. Schools which utilise their Path as much as possible. Warriors and Defenders take earth, Warriors (Assassins?) and Mages take fire, Defenders and Governors take Life, etc.

Why not? Penta-Mages rock. Some of the best spells are the cross-school ones.

The great thing about 3 schools of magic is you can get more of the mixed school spells.  Honestly the best is Mantle of Oceans.  Between Mantle, Path of the Mage, Mages Robe, + Affinity you can get your tactical spells to cost 95% less.  Which is insane.  I mod modded in a waaspon that also gave 10% and had to get rid of it because it was making all my spells free - which was fun for a about 5 turns before it ended up getting stupid.

Also, Sunder is essentially a "Clear target wildland" spell.  It does ridiculous damage with damage multipliers.  When you can 2 shot delin with 310 point Sunders - I dunno the spell seemed a bit too out of whack.

Thank you for taking this up Tuidjy, I have tried to say this before but to no avail, so I'll just bump this thread

Sincerely
~ Kongdej