Myrran lair budgets

[Nelphine]

Two different things in your question: one, a single city can have a doomstack. I think I get my first stack of 9 bezerkers in 1402 or 1403. Single city is not late game.

However, I disagree on late game not doing treasure hunting. That should be where very rare spells and spellbooks come from - we do want this in late game.

Almost as importantly, Seravy wants late game strategies to be viable - they must be able to do dungeon ceawking if they are going to be viable.

[Nelphine]

@seravy:

Can we tweak how many tiles each plane gets? The defenders for the same size node need to be comparable, so if we can't do that with current tile numbers, I'd rather change tile size rather than arbitrarily make myrran nodes relatively super weak for the same size node. Something like name arcanus nodes 2 tiles bigger, and make nyrran nodes 2 tiles smaller, then use the tile -5 formula for myrror.

[Seravy]

Yes, we can reduce Myrran tiles and that might be a better solution.

How does 8-20 tiles sound?
Then at -6 we have 400-4200 the exact same amount as my previous target (I miscalculated the upper half there it seems). So Myrran gets 3 additional tiles, that's 3 mana per node, not bad but it costs a full pick to start there so I think that's fine. For a pick you can have guardian spirit or heavenly light on arcanus for this same benefit...

[Nelphine]

That's 4.5 mana per node on the middle setting. That's why I'm trying to get tiles-5. 2 tiles is 3 mana per node. However, having -5, and having a slightly higher minimum than the 400 you wanted is probably still fine.

[Seravy]

Well, calculated some probabilities and not happy with the result.

So I have a better suggestion. We make the formula -5 as you say BUT we hardcode a new rule "first 4 Myrran nodes always have exactly 8 tiles" while the rest stays at 8-20 tiles randomly. Meaning the there are always at least 4 nodes that have exactly 600-900 monster budget while the rest can be anywhere from 600 to 4200.

[Arnuz]

That rule doesn't matter, as the problem is where those nodes land....

[Nelphine]

Agreed. That's basically just sayong 'nagas with focus magic from AI get 4 nodes.'

[Seravy]

An interesting discovery.
I found code that sets node type according to the land in the node's aura, based on the most frequent type of terrain.

Ocean, Shore -> Sorcery node
Mountain, Desert -> Chaos node
Forest, Grasslands ->Nature node

except, the game throws away the calculated amounts and rolls a random number for each afterwards.
And the rolled numbers are not the same. Ocean is rolled on D25 while the others are rolled on D15. So Sorcery nodes are more frequent than the other two. Based on these rolls, about 55% of the nodes end up sorcery?

But there is more...
In another procedure after all 30 nodes are generated, it counts how many of each type there are per plane.

For Arcanus, If there are at least 10 Sorcery nodes total then the game replaces Sorcery nodes until there are at least 6 Chaos and Nature nodes on the plane.
For Myrror, if there are at least 4 Sorcery nodes, then some will be replaced until there are at least 4 Chaos and 4 Nature.

(assuming we set a 17/13 for the planes for the following
So on Arcanus the game can generate 6 chaos, 6 nature and 6 (now 5) sorcery nodes, or if the amount of sorcery was below 10 to begin with then even 9 sorcery, 4 nature, 4 chaos is possible.
So basically instead of checking and replacing each type, the game generates too much sorcery and replaces those to bring up the amount of the others to 6 each.

On Myrror it's the same but the mechanism is triggered by 5 or more Sorcery nodes, and brings up each type to a minimal 3.

...not sure if I like this system, feels...weird. And it's perfectly possible to end up with 0 or very low of any type as long as the sorcery roll is not high (albeit that actually isn't like to happen...)

[Seravy]

Agreed. That's basically just sayong 'nagas with focus magic from AI get 4 nodes.'

So how many should I make it? The number (and type) are things I can change. The distance from various players, I can't. Players are not yet placed on the map at this point...

[Nelphine]

That is bizarre. Sounds like several iterations of developing nodes that just ended up with a bit of a mess. To be fair we've often thought there were too many weak sorcery nodes, so this supports that theory.