Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[merlinp]

If it is working as intended then good.

I did one final test this time Myrror AI had draconian. By 1410 AI had 12 cities and was the weakest AI player.

Early expansion to other continents was better without the shipping bottleneck but those two cities fell to raiders. Then AI got one dark elf neutral city with 11 max population and produced all further settlers there quite slowly. However, shipping for those worked without issues, finally, and the resulting colonies were successful too.


I think if AI was capable of making setters from several good races it would help its overall performance without cheating. Also, making more settlers overall and simultaneously would have likely helped in all of these 3 games.

[Seravy]

Making more settlers simultaneously is a feature restricted to only the highest difficulty levels - it exists already.
Up so far the Myrran wizard becoming too powerful was the issue, not the opposite, so it's fine as is. Just because the land is there doesn't mean the AI has to use all of it immediately.

Building from several races can only happen if they have equal priority which is a thing that can happen, but if a race is strictly superior the AI will play for the long term and pick the better one. On turn 300 it won't matter anymore if the city was built 10 or 20 turns faster but it will matter a lot if it's Dark Elf and not Dwarven. Fortunately this bottleneck removes itself - soon enough the new cities from that new race will also be able to build settlers, so the slowdown only happens for those 2-3 years in between.

I'm more interested in why the other 4 players on Arcanus were stronger : They can't possibly have more than 12 cities each and their units should be weaker.

@Baghtru I mentioned it in the 5.57 brainstorming thread but I don't think I got any replies to it? Also it's not a nerf anymore if the cost reflects it. Getting a weaker unit for the same price is the point of a nerf. Darkness is barely affected - from 1.6 it goes to 1.5 damage but poison remains unchanged. Considering typical armor, poison is the majority of damage anyway (not the case with Focus Magic!), and the defense and resistance buff also remains unaffected. Overall, Darkness is like, 1-2% weaker? Not going to waste effort on reducing the cost of Ghouls by 1 MP.

[merlinp]

I'm more interested in why the other 4 players on Arcanus were stronger : They can't possibly have more than 12 cities each and their units should be weaker.

The Arcanus AI players were stronger. However, that, I realized, is just artifact of this test because the player only had one city.

[merlinp]

By the way if the AI is restricted in Arcanus too from making several settlers simultaneously then I think I don't like such restriction at any difficulty above and including 'fair' and better would be to have AI play better and with less bonuses.

[Seravy]

On lower difficulties than Lunatic the AI doesn't really have the production and growth bonus for this to be all that effective. Even there the feature only increased their city count by 20-30% as far as I remember.
More importantly, on Arcanus the free space gets used up way before this tactic would have any effect. In order to build more than 2 settlers at a time, the AI needs more than 2 large enough cities. By then, the settlers made in the capital already filled most of the available space.

Finally, this ONLY works for the "other plane", usually Myrror, regardless of difficulty. If there are enemy players, building only settlers instead of actual troops is a suicide move. You have to be 100% sure no one will attack you if you're going to spam settlers over doing everything else.
I do believe having 2 settlers at a time per continent is usually enough and any more than that only really benefits high difficulty AI playing on the empty plane alone, with Large or Huge land size settings.
Don't forget settlers cost 1 unit of population. Any settler that gets produced but isn't used up in a timely manner (or is killed in a war) is a major net loss of resources.

[Bahgtru]

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@Baghtru I mentioned it in the 5.57 brainstorming thread but I don't think I got any replies to it? Also it's not a nerf anymore if the cost reflects it. Getting a weaker unit for the same price is the point of a nerf. Darkness is barely affected - from 1.6 it goes to 1.5 damage but poison remains unchanged. Considering typical armor, poison is the majority of damage anyway (not the case with Focus Magic!), and the defense and resistance buff also remains unaffected. Overall, Darkness is like, 1-2% weaker? Not going to waste effort on reducing the cost of Ghouls by 1 MP.

Depends on the purpose, here i understood that it is to nerf the buffs not the unit or darkness. Darkness drops by 1.6/1.5, and when you account for armour that actually grows contrary to what you seem to imply. As a result, their use by a mono black is hampered, which i think you don't intend to cause.

Isn't changing cost just one number in a table? That just seemed to be a fast solution.

[Seravy]

Changing cost would also make them better with focus magic, and while changing the number is trivial, spending time thinking about the amount is not.

[calonso]

Hello, I need help with this please. I cant get this mod to work on my game. I have the game trough GoG galaxy with version 1.31. I unzip Master 150Final.zip and the then Caster557.zip into the MoM folder but the game keep playing at version 1.31. If i download MoM151RC8.zip this  patch works but I really want to try this new mod. I must be doing something wrong obviously, please i need help to install the mod correctly.

Thanks

[Seravy]

Possibilities :
-You unzip to the wrong folder
-You don't say "overwrite" when you unzip/copy the files
-You are on Linux and case sensitivity is messing with the files
-You don't have write privileges to the game's folder (try running everything as an admin)
-You have more than one copy of the game on your computer and run the wrong one.

[calonso]

Possibilities :
-You unzip to the wrong folder
-You don't say "overwrite" when you unzip/copy the files
-You are on Linux and case sensitivity is messing with the files
-You don't have write privileges to the game's folder (try running everything as an admin)
-You have more than one copy of the game on your computer and run the wrong one.

Thanks for the replay
I unzip it to the MoM folder on the GoG file but no i dont get the overwrite notificacion when i do