Raise Volcano

[zitro1987]

I just thought of a slightly different suggestion to raise volcano:

*Our early analysis appear to indicate raise volcano has a fair casting cost for human.

Can we treat raise volcano for AI as one of those spells that cost more skill to cast? (like their globals, death wish, etc). The reason I say it is because AI just can't mess up this spell, unlike most others.
*I'd be almost inclined to treat all city enchantments & curses in the 'higher skill for AI' category. You made AI nearly perfect-intelligence on these as well.


*Fire Giants, even with fire ball, have lesser ranged damage output. However they cost 40 less. Thus balance!

[Seravy]

That is a modifier to enable Spell Blasting, not to make the AI cast fewer of those spells. The AI ignores the costs when deciding to pick a spell to cast. So raising the cost of ANYTHING means the AI casts fewer of ALL spells overall, as they still pick them at the same ratio.
I opened the thread with "The AI will not use this spell less often even if it costs more". So there you have it.
Leave the AI out of this.

[zitro1987]

Right, I apologize for veering off topic then.

My raise volcano suggestion is 50 to 60 cost.

I don't suggest any changes to Fire Giant. For chimeras, I support 4 move, a cost reduction, or some other boost.

[teelaurila]

About generating ores, raise dead on my old math:

It's 20%(?) chance to generate an ore. So 250 mana for an ore, which produces equivalent of, say 5 to be somewhat conservative, or 7.5 with miners. With dwarves that doubles to 15. Plus 3 from the volcano itself. Results in RoI time of 14 turns.

... wait, can you not spam volcanos on top of each other until you get ore? I think I've seen AI destroy volcano-generated ore with another volcano.

[Seravy]

You can but then you aren't getting the 3 power from the replaced volcanoes.

[teelaurila]

Right, so 14 turns RoI. If you got the power from all the 5 volcanoes, it would be 8 turns (!?)

[Nelphine]

That's only 8 turns if you're a dwarf. If you're not (much more common), RoI is 11 turns.

However, that's only if you put it on tundra. Any other terrain and you're losing the terrain value. For swamp and desert, this is actually worth it - call it a RoI of around 13 turns. For anything else, you might be getting 15 or 16 or worse - and your RoI withput any ores (but not wrecking your own cities) is 16.6666 anyway. That's where my reference that it's not guaranteed to get an idea every casts becomes important.

[Nelphine]

As for ai. It is still a relevant metric. It won't change how many volcanoes are cast relatively (thought it could change it in absolute terms but not by much). 

However, you can still say 'how many volcanoes can the AI cast to be equivalent to summoning one fire giant' (or chimera or whatever).

This has nothing to do with trying to change the priority, or show that the site gets it more. It's simply that saying '2 volcanoes is far more valuable to me than summoning 1 fire giant' does NOT mean that '2 volcanoes is far more important than summoning 1 fire a giant' for the AI.

Specifically my own reason for rating volcanoes so highly compared to fire giants is that fire giants are better in defense.

Well, in my games, the AI is normally on defense. So that fire giant is more important. So purely on that reasoning, a fire giant IS worth 2 volcanoes when the AI casts it.

However, part of my own problem with volcanoes as a human is that destroying an AI ore doesn't really matter, except adamantium or mithril or orihilacron. The ai already cheats for resources because it can't understand maintenance. Therefore destroying a resource ore of the ai does almost nothing. The ONLY thing it does, is permit the AI to waste more mana in combat - because it's already designed to have enough resources to do everything else, and ores are specifically bonuses. So all economy ores do for an AI is give me more gold when I take a city, and slow me from doing one spearmen attacks to drain mana.

So for the human, raise volcano is primarily an economic spell.

However, humans will design their strategy to take advantage of ores. If you have ores, you may delay building banks (whereas the AI won't change when it builds banks due to the lack of presence of ores). So if the human heavily depends on idea, AI destroying ores can be a big problem. 


So I would say that giants are worth less than 2 volcanoes again.


However, if we look at chimera, while a chimera is worth around 3 volcanoes for me, for the ai (since it's easy to kill chimera without them fighting back for the human) a chimera is definitely worth less than 3 volcanoes if at war with the human. Maybe even only 2. But Chimera have great strategic strength so they're worth more than 3, maybe even 4 volcanoes if the AI is at war with another ai.

[Seravy]

However, you can still say 'how many volcanoes can the AI cast to be equivalent to summoning one fire giant' (or chimera or whatever).

Is it the wizard I'm trying to conquer? Any amount of volcanoes is better than a Fire Giant.
Is it a wizard I'm not expecting to fight in the forseeable future? Any amount of Fire Giants is better than a Volcano - it's eating their mana instead of producing more, and will be obsolete by the time I fight them.
If neither applies, meaning the wizard is hostile, it entirely depends on my own spells and armies. If I can deal with Fire giants (black sleep, good ranged armies, whatever) then I prefer those, otherwise volcanoes.

Hard to compere in numbers - I either want one, or the other, regardless of the "conversion rate" as long as the rate is not unreasonable (10 for 1 would be).

Note that I'm intentionally ignoring ores - it doesn't take a large amount of volcanoes to destroy them all so  they are gone either way. 4 or 12 each year makes no real difference.

One thing someone should probably test is how viable it is to play a "volcanoes only" game where you don't conquer cities and thus don't need to garrison anything, but fuel your entire economy on volcano power. I expect it to be not viable at all, but worth a try.

[Nelphine]

Already done similar. Literally used raise volcano on every tile on Arcanus, while I controlled allod Myrror, as well as holding all 6 towers so the ai couldn't break through.

The ai still had hundreds of units running around. You'd need to be able to stop entire cities before they could produce units in order to make it viable and you simply cant get it that fast.

And no, if an AI you are not at war with summons giants, they still do something with those giants and grow stronger (like conquer nodes or other ai). Similarly, an ai at war with you can use volcanoes to decorate your cities. Maybe it doesn't stop you from beating that ai, but it can stop you from beating the next ai. And if it's a close enough, long enough war, it could stop you from bearing that ai.


However the point that it isn't super helpful is valid. It still comes down to '50-75'.