New year, New Master of Magic! v1.5 fan patch

[Elestan]

* AI wizards have a 10% lower chance to raze a city if was owned by another AI wizard. (W $9F968)

The patch reduces the chance by 10%. I assume it's because the game gets too easy if the AI burns down the cities and fails to expand. Since kyrub never talked about his reasons for AI changes and preferred to keep them a secret, I don't actually know why he did it.

* AI will never cast Dispel Magic and Dispel Magic True if Holy Arms is in effect for the human player. (W $BA125)

They did and now they don't. A very crude solution to prevent the AI to waste their skill on dispelling holy weapons. One of those things I don't agree with, I don't remember if my own dispel changes made it into 1.5 or not, if yes they replaced this, but they probably did not. This makes Holy Arms and Life magic a lot stronger against the AI because dispel is essential against Life and buffs. And it's even worse if the player ever notices it and starts taking advantage of it.

* AI is able to buy items from merchants. AI pays 50% of the normal price for items. (W $BE009)

Ask kyrub, I have no idea. Did I mention he kept all of his AI changes a secret?

Yeah, though I'm very grateful for the many good fixes in Insecticide, I would not call the above changes improvements, and would suggest that perhaps they be made optional for 1.51.

* * Why not slow down the enemy ships?

kyrub belived that breaks the AI's ability to use ships. Don't know why he would think that, ask him. It might even be true.

Hmm...I suppose this one's okay if it really does completely break AI ship use, but it would be much better to fix the actual issue with the AI than to nerf Wind Mastery.

* * Speaking as someone currently playing a Myrran game, I don't think I like these two changes. All of the towers are bunched up in the middle of my territory, and I'm having to fight a lot harder to keep enemies out than I used to. I don't think that the way Towers were often found in remote places was a bug, so this seems more like a design change than a bugfix.

There was a thread about this. To put it simply, this was a bug for the AI not you. They have pretty much no way to use those island towers at all - no ships on the other side to pick them up-, leaving them with no access to the other plane and a bunch of stuck units.

If the AI can't be taught to use flying units for the island towers, then I would just take those towers out completely, as long as there were still at least a minimum number of towers. Ideally, I think the number of towers should depend on the world size, so that the average density of the towers is roughly constant between games.

* * This seems like an oddly specific rule. Isn't there a more general rule that says to prefer units with lots of active Figures for Area Damage spells?

No. I don't think there are other area damage single target combat spells in the unmodded game.

It would also be good to prioritize multi-figure units for Doom Bat attacks, or any unit with Immolation on it.

* * Why not? Per the animation, the attacker has raided the target's Fortress, where the mana crystals were presumably stored.

Very bad for gameplay. The AI usually had 30k mana crystals even while the player is still in the hundreds. It's like unlimited free mana for banishing any AI wizard. Besides the AI got that mana from bugs, sometimes they spent negative mana into spells and gained it for that. (hopefully those are fixed now though)

Well, as you indicate, the real bug here is that the AI is building up all that mana. If the negative mana bugs are fixed, and they stopped putting any Power into Mana once they reached a few thousand, then maybe this change wouldn't be needed any more.

* * All of these seem like straight-up improvements with no down side...or is there a drawback to them?

No, there isn't.

Well then, by all means put them in, IMHO.

* Leftover production is not lost but used for the next project (211)
* * Oh, please put this in. I hate having to micromanage production overruns. Or at a minimum, at least make the excess convert to trade goods ( = half value in Gold).

* Raise Volcano allowed on Hills, Mountains (277)
* * Why not? I see no logical reason that it shouldn't be allowed on those tiles. For that matter, I would allow it to be cast on Volcanoes too (taking ownership of the Volcano in the process).

These change game rules where no bug actually requires it, which is why they were optional.

I suppose, though I really don't see a downside to these ones. Fiddly micromanagement is a sometimes necessary evil in 4X games, not a design goal.

Finally, I have one last request for 1.51: Can you make excess research carry over between turns?

There would be no place to store that research because the new spell isn't chosen where the previous is done, and the game keeps track of "research left for this spelll" and not "research made" unlike with production in cities.

Hmm...then I guess my request (at least in an optional patch) would be to roll the previously wasted excess into Casting Skill, so at least it isn't wasted.