One AI 'cheat' I find annoying is how their stacks attack lairs with no losses or damage. Perhaps some random damage (even loss) could be added to the units after the combat, based on the strength ratio. I'm not sure how much that would cripple the AI. I don't know how the AI deals with damaged units. I'll let others think about whether it would improve the game or not.
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Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread
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Mercenaries already come with magic weapons after a specific turn count.
Mithril/Orihalcon/Admant mercenaries are not planned. Showing node power could be a feature for the Geomancer instead. I don't want to overly penalize ranged combat, especially not in an unpredictable way. Mountains in general shouldn't be bad for ranged units because Chaos Spawns in Chaos nodes are cleared by ranged units. Forests and swamps already penalize ranged units quite a bit because they can't move backwards on cost 2-3 tiles and still have moves left to shoot, while the enemy can often ignore the terrain (due to flight, pathfinding, forester, waterwalking, etc.) Stumps are a decent idea but I don't feel like spending time drawing graphics for those when it doesn't actually do anything for the game except being a convenience feature. The whole point of the pick distribution is to share, obviously 15 would be way too much for one player alone. Getting additional books in any predictable way is a big no as it makes low book rush strategies better and long term, many books strategies pointless. Why pick books if I can find enough anyway? You mean, when the elimination feature is used in the battle, raise the winner's army loss percentage to like 98%? That can be done in theory but it will look unrealistic if the attacking army was actually stronger than the defenders. It also basically gives a free city to the human player (unless the other AI was their allies, they'll take the opportunity to attack it while it is down to 1 unit). (December 18th, 2020, 12:12)JustOneMoreTurn Wrote: One AI 'cheat' I find annoying is how their stacks attack lairs with no losses or damage. Perhaps some random damage (even loss) could be added to the units after the combat, based on the strength ratio. I'm not sure how much that would cripple the AI. I don't know how the AI deals with damaged units. I'll let others think about whether it would improve the game or not. That isn't even a cheat in the sense that those rules also apply to you the same way if you play using that combat type. Damage does happen, however : -It's distributed between the units, so unless it's like, over 75% the total army, none of the units will die, except maybe those that have high priority to receive the damage due to low defense or other priority modifier. The result will simply be a lot of wounded units, but those will generally heal back to normal in another 6-8 turns so unless you attack them right away, you won't even notice. -The AI doesn't do attacks that result in over a certain percentage of losses in the first place so they do try to minimize their losses intentionally. -As combat results are not random and the AI uses a full simulation of the combat to decide on attacking, there is no chance for failure, the AI literally plays perfectly and can't make mistakes that result in losing their army.
How difficult is it to change the map generation so that it creates larger and more solid landmasses instead of always producing a lot of tiny islands and strips?
I've tried the Plane of Earth setting and it still results in the messy strips of land. The old COM I's map generation sometimes produced big bulky continents, but this new generator always seems to produce island or peninsula structures. I'd like the Plane of Earth setting to result in a cleaner set of continents, similar to the real world Earth. The current 1:6 base ratio almost always causes wizards to spawn on separate islands far away from each other, and even the 1:4 Plane of Earth isn't much better. I don't mind if there's a lot of water in the game, but right now even if the continent size is set to the largest possible, they still look like tiny islands, and often have strips of 1-2 squares wide land. If I set the continent size to the largest, I expect continents to be big enough to hold several wizards each, and for there to be gigantic oceans in between, rather than always 15-20 squares between each island. Quote:How difficult is it to change the map generation so that it creates larger and more solid landmasses instead of always producing a lot of tiny islands and strips? Easy but larger continents are bad for AI performance so I've intentionally chosen not to offer that option. We'll need to consider if the AI changes made it more likely the AI can function on those larger continents properly or not eventually but it's not a priority right now. (December 23rd, 2020, 17:06)Seravy Wrote:Quote:How difficult is it to change the map generation so that it creates larger and more solid landmasses instead of always producing a lot of tiny islands and strips? I'm a little surprised to hear that. I would have thought that not having to deal with ships and flying as early would make things easier for the AI. It used to be on COM I that bigger landmasses effectively increased the difficulty of the game by a half level, right? What causes larger continents to negatively affect AI performance?
December 24th, 2020, 00:59
(This post was last modified: December 24th, 2020, 01:00 by Seravy.)
Bigger landmass increases difficulty through the AI having more cities producing units and the player having more cities they need to defend from enemies. Bigger landmass does not create larger continents.
Larger continents affect the AI negatively because it increases the amount of time it takes for units within a continent to reach their destination. For example when the AI wants to build a new stack of 9 units, if the continent is 30 tiles wide and the units move at a speed of 2 tiles they take at most 7.5 turns to meet at the center. If the continent is 120 tiles wide then that takes 30 turns. Same applies for attacking targets, if the city is 120 tiles wide then in worst case the AI needs 60 turns for a stack to travel the distance and attack the target. Meanwhile nonland stack don't have to deal with a continent system and instead are limited to pick targets within a range of 12 tiles or they have to go to their main action continent where they'll end up choosing a target the same way as land stacks..and this also answers the question why we can't have land stacks use the same system as nonland stacks if nonland stacks are unaffected - because nonland stacks solved the issue by dodging the question and relying on other systems when there is no nearby target.
I second the request for easier identification of cities. Maybe it's just my monitor or settings, but I can't tell the pale green from pale blue, and some of the others are difficult to distinguish too. I assume that a more complex 'coat of arms' would be too much work. Maybe a simple two-colour flag (first half one colour, the next half is shifted by a fixed number) would be easy enough to do?
(December 29th, 2020, 17:29)JustOneMoreTurn Wrote: I second the request for easier identification of cities. Maybe it's just my monitor or settings, but I can't tell the pale green from pale blue, and some of the others are difficult to distinguish too. I assume that a more complex 'coat of arms' would be too much work. Maybe a simple two-colour flag (first half one colour, the next half is shifted by a fixed number) would be easy enough to do? Larger flags on city graphics can easily solve the problem, or alternative city graphics with colored structures. With the resolution used, coats of arms would have to be quite large in order to recognize something. Theoretically, one could convert the cities on the overland map into coats of arms at the push of a button, but it is certainly not worth the effort. |
