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

[Seravy]

RC13 is available for download. Includes ~20-30 new patches.
There have been several bugs I managed to fix but could not move into 1.50 due to incompatibility this time, and I expect this number to grow over time the further CoM strays from the original.
I do believe most of the important bugs have been fixed, though.
If this version works, it should probably be the completed, released version of 1.50.

A few noteworthy changes :
-Historian will now show the graph of banished wizards, but not defeated ones correctly instead of omitting both
-Historian will not add casting skill and researched spells to the graph, so it will reflect actual military/resource power, and not casting abilities.
-Astrologer Magic Power and Spell Research categories are now replaced by Power Production (power income only) and Spell Power (research+skill)
-When requesting a war from an AI player, they will refuse if they have a peace treaty with the target the same way as they do if they would do it for another AI player's request
-AI uses settlers better, no longer checks for an invalid plane when analyzing terrain
-Combat movement on diagonals no longer cost +.5 extra in an inconsistent way instead there is no such cost increase at all
-Forming a Peace Treaty can no longer boost relation over 0 (neutral)
-Heroes cannot desert on low gold (but all other units will, if available)
-Dispelling curses no longer has a 100% chance of success
-Fixes the bug of AI stacks falling apart if having different movement speeds
many other bugs fixed and AI improvements.

an optional file I should mention which isn't in the default version :
-Ships cost no food maintenance. This, and changing their gold maintenance to 0 fixes the problem of the AI disbanding their entire land army when running low on cities, as they are inherently unable to disband units over sea.

One of the fixes that didn't make it in due to incompatibility (don't remember the rest, there were more) :
-Newly summoned units don't get combat effects applied to them (buffs, like High Prayer) until next turn.

[burchalka]

Thanks a lot Seravy! After watching you and Hadriex on Youtube had to get this myself, and though I don't have a spare time to play - I still started a game...
You're awesome!

[Seravy]

Thanks a lot Seravy! After watching you and Hadriex on Youtube had to get this myself, and though I don't have a spare time to play - I still started a game...
You're awesome!

I need to say that the Caster of Magic mod you saw on Youtube, and the 1.50 unofficial patch are two separate projects, so make sure you install the one you want to.

[burchalka]

I noticed that, but considering the nostalgia - I preferred to take the 1.50 version (also would love to see youtube players use it more).
Now I wonder - where can I learn best ways to handle the new diplomacy - what strategy best to use depending on what adversaries you've got.

[Tiltowait]

RC13.

I was an artificer, so I had enchant item and create artifact. I felt that the CPs asked me to trade spells just a bit too often.

Fought to a 50 round draw against rampaging monsters and got "you are triumphant, 1 thousand people killed" instead of "both sides retreat exhausted"

Same issue as before...there is this wonderful new diplomacy system that only gets used at the beginning of the game. Soon the CPs declare war on you and since you are on Hard level and they have food bonuses, they have a much larger army than you, and due to the new diplomacy routines they won't make peace with you. The first war declared against you lasts the rest of the game. Rjak got beaten down to one city and made peace, the other two expanded to cover their home continents and comfortably stayed at war with me, even though we weren't competing for any territory or even having battles. We never made peace and I didn't get to play the diplomacy part of the game with them for the entire game.

I think the game should go back to only allowing the CP to choose one of the 'power 5' races at Hard or better instead of randomly. That feature was cool for a while, it got super boring seeing the same races again and again from the computer, but the other races just aren't competitive. The CP lacks the finesse to play races like gnolls.

CP attacked my halfling city guarded by 2 halfling swordsmen with one of its magic spirits? Was it hoping to overcome me with spells? Cause the magic spirit just got slaughtered.

Do summoned demons count for XP? Summon Demon x1 would be a cool hero ability for CoM.

Sometimes mountaineer costs 3 in grassland, sometimes it doesn't. It seems leaving a forest may cause the problem.

If wind mastery doesn't slow oppposing ships any more, why does it incur a diplomacy penalty?

With the new movement style, when a unit is directed to go forward, it doesn't proceed directly forward. Instead, it goes diagonally to arrive at its spot.

Code:

Before       After   X=dest, P=path, U=unit
X            X
P             P
P              P
P             P
U            U

I felt I definitely got too much mana and gold from fighting monsters, I cleaned out three islands of them and got nothing but The Enlightener staff. Several 1000+ gold/mana awards and many lesser ones.

Warship vs. galley, computer cast confusion on my unit and succeeded. Controlled my unit for several turns without the battle ending. I ended up putting it on auto and at length won the battle because my unit was stronger.

Another time, it was 2 berzerkers vs. 1 lizardman shaman, the CP confused one of my berzerks and killed the other with ranged fire. I got "all units immobilized" and entered a strange state where it looked like the game had locked up. If I pressed and held the mouse button, the animation of the confusion spell would move until I released the mouse button. I couldn't do anything, clicking 'done' did not advance the turn. I clicked auto and got things to proceed.

Another time, while under confusion and auto, my unit changed its shirt color from mine to the enemy's! It changed back when it was my turn.

I was still able to attack when adjacent to an enemy unit but all units immobilized.

Rjak kept offering me a wizard's pact but I kept declining because I wanted to finish him off. I felt he offered it to me too often, it kind of got annoying.

I walked my high level Orc up next to an enemy Orc and attacked, doing more than 50% damage. The enemy Orc tried to run away! I was impressed. I was faster so I just ran him down, but still. Good move, get the hero away like that.

CP cast life drain on a unit that already had black sleep on it.

CP still built boats on a 2-square inland lake.

[Seravy]

RC13.

I was an artificer, so I had enchant item and create artifact. I felt that the CPs asked me to trade spells just a bit too often.

It was already reduced once, though. Maybe the problem was you had spells all 4 opponents needed, so you got more offers.
Seriously, you should be happy about this, free spells.

Fought to a 50 round draw against rampaging monsters and got "you are triumphant, 1 thousand people killed" instead of "both sides retreat exhausted"

It always worked like that for the defender, since the defender's armies don't retreat.
It never was "both sides", just "all units", which meant the attacker's side who saw this message.

Same issue as before...there is this wonderful new diplomacy system that only gets used at the beginning of the game. Soon the CPs declare war on you and since you are on Hard level and they have food bonuses, they have a much larger army than you, and due to the new diplomacy routines they won't make peace with you. The first war declared against you lasts the rest of the game. Rjak got beaten down to one city and made peace, the other two expanded to cover their home continents and comfortably stayed at war with me, even though we weren't competing for any territory or even having battles. We never made peace and I didn't get to play the diplomacy part of the game with them for the entire game.

It's unfortunately but I already explained the system is optimized for CoM's gameplay. I don't have the time and capacity to do two different systems. Maybe someone else might do an 1.6 patch which is more optimized for the vanilla game rules.

I think the game should go back to only allowing the CP to choose one of the 'power 5' races at Hard or better instead of randomly. That feature was cool for a while, it got super boring seeing the same races again and again from the computer, but the other races just aren't competitive. The CP lacks the finesse to play races like gnolls.

Again, this is the original game's design flaws. Unplayable races shouldn't have existed. My desired solution is buffing up races, which is obviously a CoM only solution. I also made CoM AI prefer to build some types of settlers over others, but since not the same races are preferable in CoM than in vanilla, this isn't going to be in 1.50 and of course is largely subjective even for CoM.

CP attacked my halfling city guarded by 2 halfling swordsmen with one of its magic spirits? Was it hoping to overcome me with spells? Cause the magic spirit just got slaughtered.

I suspect the stats of the halfling swordsmen unit is low enough for this to be possible. Either they are actually ranked weaker than the spirit (less total health and defense, not much more attack), or both end up ranked 0, although I think I already made the latter no happen.

Do summoned demons count for XP? Summon Demon x1 would be a cool hero ability for CoM.

Yes, summoned units that die or disappear at end of combat give exp to the enemy if they win.

Sometimes mountaineer costs 3 in grassland, sometimes it doesn't. It seems leaving a forest may cause the problem.

This actually is in an LBX file and not in the exe files as far as I remember, which is why it never made it into the patches.
Try using the TERRSTAT.LBX file from CoM, if it works, then we can include it.

If wind mastery doesn't slow oppposing ships any more, why does it incur a diplomacy penalty?

I don't get why that effect was removed to begin with, I don't think it has any problems (or does it make ships move 0 in some cases?). Ask Kryub. If there was no reason to remove the effect, it can be restored.

With the new movement style, when a unit is directed to go forward, it doesn't proceed directly forward. Instead, it goes diagonally to arrive at its spot.

Code:

Before       After   X=dest, P=path, U=unit
X            X
P             P
P              P
P             P
U            U

I believe this also happened in the original game. Maybe not in the same directions and cases, but it did. The diagonal path is equally long and costs the same amount so I see no reason why the horizontal would be any better. The diagonal actually explores more. If you don't like it, you can always move one square at a time.

I felt I definitely got too much mana and gold from fighting monsters, I cleaned out three islands of them and got nothing but The Enlightener staff. Several 1000+ gold/mana awards and many lesser ones.

There is a poll for this already open. At the moment it's 13:9 for the gold and mana not being too much.

Warship vs. galley, computer cast confusion on my unit and succeeded. Controlled my unit for several turns without the battle ending. I ended up putting it on auto and at length won the battle because my unit was stronger.

That's how confusion was supposed to work, but the spell was buggy and gave permanent control of the unit instead of temporal.
I'm 100% sure on this, as the game specifically checked if the units was temporarily controlled, and in that case, counter it into the original owner's army instead. Due to the control not reverting when the temporal effect was over, this failed to take effect.
See : http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=7915

Another time, it was 2 berzerkers vs. 1 lizardman shaman, the CP confused one of my berzerks and killed the other with ranged fire. I got "all units immobilized" and entered a strange state where it looked like the game had locked up. If I pressed and held the mouse button, the animation of the confusion spell would move until I released the mouse button. I couldn't do anything, clicking 'done' did not advance the turn. I clicked auto and got things to proceed.

I need to investigate that one, it also happens when the only unit(s) are webbed, but it's not always, just sometimes.
Edit : I suspect it might happen when your last non-immobile unit dies. The game probably fails to select the immobilized unit and keeps the dead one selected which...causes this.
Edit 2 : Successfully fixed this and several other immobilization related bugs, such as not getting the chance to cast a spell when needed, or losing it when unrelated buttons (INFO, FLEE) were pressed. If it proves stable, it'll be in the next version.

Another time, while under confusion and auto, my unit changed its shirt color from mine to the enemy's! It changed back when it was my turn.

Any unit controlled by anyone else does that, this isn't new.

I was still able to attack when adjacent to an enemy unit but all units immobilized.

This sounds like a bug. What caused your unit to be immobilized? Did it actually have movement points left somehow?

Rjak kept offering me a wizard's pact but I kept declining because I wanted to finish him off. I felt he offered it to me too often, it kind of got annoying.

You should be happy, as each time there is a chance he offers you free gold or spells after you refuse. Not a high chance, but it exists and grows the larger your military advantage is over him.

CP cast life drain on a unit that already had black sleep on it.

That's unfortunate but isn't a frequent enough situation to be worth teaching the AI. Any other direct damage spell would have actually been a good move.

CP still built boats on a 2-square inland lake.

Sadly those are still ocean tiles adjacent to the city so yes, they can. To fix this, I would need to do a recursive search to count the number of adjacent tiles, which is not easy to do and would require quite a lot of free memory space. I guess a simplified solution would be to just count the ocean tiles in, say a 7x7 area around the city and if it's fewer than 7 then avoid ships. Problem with that is, if there is a real ocean on the other side not directly adjacent, it would be a false positive...
Let's just say fixing this would take far too many days to even try. Besides even if I did do it somehow, if there was a lake AND an ocean on the two sides of the city, the ships would have an 50% chance to move into the lake still.

[Tiltowait]

Same issue as before...there is this wonderful new diplomacy system that only gets used at the beginning of the game. Soon the CPs declare war on you and since you are on Hard level and they have food bonuses, they have a much larger army than you, and due to the new diplomacy routines they won't make peace with you. The first war declared against you lasts the rest of the game. Rjak got beaten down to one city and made peace, the other two expanded to cover their home continents and comfortably stayed at war with me, even though we weren't competing for any territory or even having battles. We never made peace and I didn't get to play the diplomacy part of the game with them for the entire game.

It's unfortunately but I already explained the system is optimized for CoM's gameplay. I don't have the time and capacity to do two different systems. Maybe someone else might do an 1.6 patch which is more optimized for the vanilla game rules.

It's just really unfortunate. All that work, all that discovery of unused dialogs, all those fixes...and the CP stays at war due to the fact that it has more units than you and somehow that means it's winning the war and shouldn't stop. Wars should end when there is no further point to them. Declare war, grab a city or two, and end it. It's how MoM worked before, and MoO before it. Too much time goes by without any fighting and the war is over and peace declared.

I think the game should go back to only allowing the CP to choose one of the 'power 5' races at Hard or better instead of randomly. That feature was cool for a while, it got super boring seeing the same races again and again from the computer, but the other races just aren't competitive. The CP lacks the finesse to play races like gnolls.

Again, this is the original game's design flaws. Unplayable races shouldn't have existed. My desired solution is buffing up races, which is obviously a CoM only solution. I also made CoM AI prefer to build some types of settlers over others, but since not the same races are preferable in CoM than in vanilla, this isn't going to be in 1.50 and of course is largely subjective even for CoM.

The original game doesn't contain this 'flaw', it implemented it correctly. Hard level and above the CP only picks halflings, high men, barbarians, high elves, and nomads because those are straightforward races. Gnolls aren't 'unplayable', hardly. They do, however, require a different style, which is why they are in the game in the first place. It got boring seeing the same races all the time so kyrub removed this in v1.4. It was a breath of fresh air, even though it made the game less competitive. Now I think it's time to revert to the original behavior.

If wind mastery doesn't slow oppposing ships any more, why does it incur a diplomacy penalty?

I don't get why that effect was removed to begin with, I don't think it has any problems (or does it make ships move 0 in some cases?). Ask Kryub. If there was no reason to remove the effect, it can be restored.

I believe that it was 'removed' because it never worked anyway. The Plight help text documents the observed behavior.

With the new movement style, when a unit is directed to go forward, it doesn't proceed directly forward. Instead, it goes diagonally to arrive at its spot.

Code:

Before       After   X=dest, P=path, U=unit
X            X
P             P
P              P
P             P
U            U

I believe this also happened in the original game. Maybe not in the same directions and cases, but it did. The diagonal path is equally long and costs the same amount so I see no reason why the horizontal would be any better. The diagonal actually explores more. If you don't like it, you can always move one square at a time.

Sorry, I didn't make this clear that this was in combat. Used to be, units commanded to charge forward did just that.

Warship vs. galley, computer cast confusion on my unit and succeeded. Controlled my unit for several turns without the battle ending. I ended up putting it on auto and at length won the battle because my unit was stronger.

That's how confusion was supposed to work, but the spell was buggy and gave permanent control of the unit instead of temporal.

I am saying that it worked correctly.

I was still able to attack when adjacent to an enemy unit but all units immobilized.

This sounds like a bug. What caused your unit to be immobilized? Did it actually have movement points left somehow?

Same as before, confusion caused my only unit to be unable to move. I had a TON of combats with one warship fighting galleys and triremes against a wizard with confusion.

[Seravy]

It's amazing how many bugs are still being found. Latest : AI targets random things (including their own stacks) with Fire/Ice Storm. There will be an RC14 coming soon.

[Seravy]

RC14 is available for download!

[Seravy]

I've successfully made a patch that entirely eliminates lakes from the map at the time of the generation. Lakes are absolutely crippling to the AI as both their ships get stuck in them, and worse, units try to leave the continent by boarding them on the lake. There is no reasonable way to fix this problem in the AI itself, however, creating maps that do not have these traps on them is a solution.
I wonder if this should be in the 1.5 patch, or kept for CoM only, as lakes do look nice and make the land more varied, and I liked them...but their effect on AI is far too severe.
(the filled land works as though it was land to begin with, with random terrain. The lakes are removed right after the empty continents are created, before the actual type of land is decided.)