Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[Seravy]

Updated :

2020-09-08
-Fixed bug : Some victory portrait animations have fewer frames but the game doesn't know that
-Fixed bug : Offering gold shows the wrong lines in grey
-Fixed bug : misplaced "end" in AI ship movement function causes errors
-Fixed bug : Flying and noncoporeal units cannot cross city walls
-Fixed bug : Cloak of Fear spell does not grant the Cloak of Fear ability.
-Fixed bug : Gate of Hades uses a game tick for each unit including those not in combat
-Fixed bug : Dead units try to regenerate at end of turn, causing division by zero
-Fixed bug : Own invisible units don't show up on unit list view when targeting spells.
-Fixed bug : unit "portrait" when unit is on sea is misaligned
-Added missing feature : Doomstacks move away from nodes.
-Fixed bug : units refill their overland movement to their base amount instead of the current maximal.
-Fixed bug : Peace Treaty roll required positive relation which is normally impossible
-Treaty offers now require relation to be >= the required amount instead of >.
-Fixed bug : Sky Fires targets the caster's own units instead of the enemy
-Fixed bug : trying to load from an empty save slot causes errors instead of showing the intended warning message
-Autosave is now queued to happen only after the player responds to any events and animations that happened between turns, such as summoning animations, reports, etc.
-Adjusted clickarea positioning for book selection
-The Flee button will now always as for confirmation, even if fleeing is 100% safe.
-Fixed bug : When neutrals rampage in a city and leave without destroying it, the city turns neutral anyway.
-Fixed bug : The fleeing button confirmation prevents the "Banished, return?" window from appearing.
-Fixed bug : The combat report and the "cast spell of return" window are visible at the same time.
-Fixed bug : The banish animation does not skip the part where the lightning hits the wizard when neutrals are banishing the wizard and use no lightning.
-Banish wizard animation can now be skipped by clicking the mouse or ESC key.
-Fixed bug : When returned to the main menu after losing the game, the UI variables are not cleared. (for example you see the chancellor report of the previous game in the next one.)
-Input text is now cleared when renaming a city.
-Input text is now cleared when creating a custom wizard.
-Added "Shift-P" debug key to set all wizards to high mp, gold, skill and all spells learned.
-Experimental : Monsters gone wild now generates 50% stronger monster stacks instead of 100%.
-Implemented AI attack target optimizing system : for non-naval battles, if more than one of the AI's stacks has the same destination as best target, the closer stack will attack the target and the further one has to select another, even if the further stack was processed first.
-Cleared the original tile backgrounds from combat rivers for more seamless display

[Slingers]

Hm, no trading of spells, no empires to conquer ... Utilising the big advantage can take too much time. I remember an unstoppable Tauron from Arcanus sending Chimeras through all the towers in MOM 1.51 long before I had the whole big plane. I would say it is unknown what would happen in COM2, since there never was such an option. When choosing only 1 opponent and starting on Myrror in COM1 I lost easily, bc I did not break a tower early enough. The player concentrating on "his plane" can lull himself into a false sense of security.

[Seravy]

 When choosing only 1 opponent and starting on Myrror in COM1 I lost easily, bc I did not break a tower early enough. The player concentrating on "his plane" can lull himself into a false sense of security.

That's it, "1 opponent", if there are 4 of them, each of them is only 1/4 as powerful...

[Slingers]

Okey. But they will not stay like this all game long. One wizard might snowball eventually or cast a nasty global ...

[jhsidi]

Thanks for the testing mode, I found some bugs fairly quickly:

Bugs continuing yesterday's Death game:
- Offer Kali an Alliance. She'll agree to keep the terms of the Wizard's Pact. But the treaty stays as a Pact instead of becoming an Alliance. https://ufile.io/noau2d1o
- Same file, try attacking the stack of ghouls with a magician east of the Vampire. Either Merlin or the magicians will cast Star Fires, but it hits the magicians instead of the Vampire. You may need to repeat the battle a few times to get them to cast it.
- Same file, as you're fighting with the Vampire, keep right clicking to open its sheet and looking at its number of hearts. The # of hearts changes around as it takes damage and heals. This can be replicated in various battles and monster types as long as they have over 15 health, they don't need to heal or regen for it, it's just convenient to see it happen with the Vampire.
- Same file, I noticed that as this game has progressed I'm getting neutral monster invasions a lot now. Every other turn, I think? I'm not sure if it's a bug or just scaling as I get more settlements but it's quite annoying for them to be that frequent. You can see my city of Craagut on Myrror is already targeted by two stacks and over the end-turn one more is generated.
- Cascade of errors from casting Drain Power over the end-turn: https://ufile.io/i2a9whrv
- Wall of Darkness appears to stay in place on a city after it's cast during battle, the above-mentioned city of Craagut has it after I had a battle there (didn't notice it until later so I don't have a save for you, sorry).
- The Summon Demon ability of Demon Lords causes a range check error when either AI or the player uses it.
- I'm getting a bug on character generation that you may have to try a few times to replicate; I'm not sure what's causing it. Choose 10 books of something (so far Life and Death have worked for me) plus the Myrran retort. Maybe a fifth of the time, I get an endless loop range check error from that. Other game options are Easy mode and 1 opponent plus default everything else.
- On this new game, something happens on next turn that causes the app to time out; no errors thrown but it has to be force closed. Actually this happened to me with more than one game, so it's not really possible to start a new game today I guess. https://ufile.io/1g1heopm

Bugs discovered via debug mode:
- Entangle doesn't work in combat, enemies move as normal
- Regeneration, the nature spell, gives Regeneration 60
- Call the Wild has no effect in combat (it claims to keep 25% of monsters from participating, I'm not sure whether that means that the monster should not appear at all or not do anything, but neither effect is happening)
- Fairy Ring may not be working? I've tried casting it a couple times and the end-turn gets stuck in endless range check errors, but I can't be sure that Fairy Ring is why. Here's a file: https://ufile.io/7akim9c2
- I don't know how Earth Gate is supposed to work; maybe it doesn't work in outposts? I thought in MoM it worked by just clicking the target city for the stack. You can check in the above file.
- Chaos Surge only adds +2 hand to hand, it claims +3; it also appears to add to defense although the spell description doesn't mention that
- When more than one Magic Vortex has been cast, only one can be moved each turn
- When an enemy wizard cast Time Stop, her turn stalled out indefinitely. Happens on this turn: https://ufile.io/pjploq15
- Holy Arms doesn't seem to add any to-hit chance either for overworld or battle.
- Units affected by Destiny can still have normal unit enchantments cast on them.
- Final Wave appears to have affected my own units too. I thought that's actually how it works, but the spell description says "enemy units".
- Defeating the last enemy wizard doesn't end the game, and produces an endless loop access violation when trying to click the Wizards screen. (Easiest to test this with only 1 opponent and Easy, of course.)


Notes:
- Destiny seems a bit overpowered. Using just one unit as an example, Destiny-affected Hammerhands have 6 figures with: 18 attack, 8 defense, 15 resist, 11 health (for a total of 66). I walked them into a tower and killed a Great Wyrm in one hit, and I imagine they'd take out anything else in the game, too. Other high-end units like Nightmares and High Men Magicians (or Rangers, if you want to kill some Sky Drakes) would similarly out-scale any other fantastic unit in the game. I love the concept of transforming normal units, but maybe the effect should be more like Chaos Channels, adding something to the unit; can help brainstorm if you're open to a change.
- In debug mode most of the enemy wizards cast Spell of Mastery; maybe remove that spell from the debug mode? Otherwise the games can only last for so long.

[Seravy]

Same file, I noticed that as this game has progressed I'm getting neutral monster invasions a lot now. Every other turn, I think? I'm not sure if it's a bug or just scaling as I get more settlements but it's quite annoying for them to be that frequent. You can see my city of Craagut on Myrror is already targeted by two stacks and over the end-turn one more is generated.

Yes, monster frequency scales with territory controlled.
In CoM I, monster frequency was a constant value for the entire game map, so the more cities you had, the larger percentage of monsters spawned in your territory.
In CoM II the monsters spawn per player, so the amount scales up with the controlled territory size to retain that behavior (and also because the real purpose of monsters is to make overexpansion harder.)

You only control 14 cities though which is not that high a number.

The timer increases by Difficulty to Difficulty+2 at random each turn.
A stack spawns when the timer is 240/(2+owned cities).

With 14 cities, that's 240/16 = 15.

Assuming a difficulty of 7 that would be every second turn - but difficulty 7 is the highest and is meant to be brutal. A difficulty of 3 (advanced) would be about every 4th turn instead. Expert would be one roughly every 3 turns.

But the same formula at 6 cities would only be half as much monsters so every 8th turn on Advanced or 6th on Expert difficulty which are quite reasonable for a smaller empire.

Maybe we could tweak the formula a little but we shouldn't make it too low.

[Seravy]

- I'm getting a bug on character generation that you may have to try a few times to replicate; I'm not sure what's causing it. Choose 10 books of something (so far Life and Death have worked for me) plus the Myrran retort. Maybe a fifth of the time, I get an endless loop range check error from that. Other game options are Easy mode and 1 opponent plus default everything else.

Tried about 10 times but nothing happened. It probably needs a specific condition to reproduce.

[jhsidi]

But the same formula at 6 cities would only be half as much monsters so every 8th turn on Advanced or 6th on Expert difficulty which are quite reasonable for a smaller empire.

Maybe we could tweak the formula a little but we shouldn't make it too low.

That would be fine, but maybe there's another problem that I didn't mention. Specifically -- the monster stacks have no animation when they appear, there's no warning that they're there, and with how fast stuff moves at end turn, it's very easy to miss them moving. As a result, I'm constantly blind-sided by battles I didn't know were going to happen OR I have to scroll around the map looking at every dungeon/tower/node that might spit out a stack, every turn. Neither thing is fun.

So maybe it would feel better if there were either A) an animation when the stack appears; or B) a popup informing me that it appeared. For A), it could just be focusing the camera on the stack location when it appears and fading in the stack, opacity 0>1, over 0.3 seconds or so. For B) I'd be fine if the Chancellor reported it: "Rampaging monsters are headed for Miroban!"

As for the frequency, it's a little too clockwork-y for stacks to appear every X turns. You're suggesting reducing the frequency by half, e.g. instead of every 3 turns it'd be every 6. What if you randomized it instead: every 3 to 6 turns? Then it would feel less repetitive. I also think there should be an absolute cap of 2 turns as I wouldn't want to fight a stack every turn.

[Seravy]

That would be fine, but maybe there's another problem that I didn't mention. Specifically -- the monster stacks have no animation when they appear, there's no warning that they're there, and with how fast stuff moves at end turn, it's very easy to miss them moving. As a result, I'm constantly blind-sided by battles I didn't know were going to happen OR I have to scroll around the map looking at every dungeon/tower/node that might spit out a stack, every turn. Neither thing is fun.

So maybe it would feel better if there were either A) an animation when the stack appears; or B) a popup informing me that it appeared. For A), it could just be focusing the camera on the stack location when it appears and fading in the stack, opacity 0>1, over 0.3 seconds or so. For B) I'd be fine if the Chancellor reported it: "Rampaging monsters are headed for Miroban!"

As for the frequency, it's a little too clockwork-y for stacks to appear every X turns. You're suggesting reducing the frequency by half, e.g. instead of every 3 turns it'd be every 6. What if you randomized it instead: every 3 to 6 turns? Then it would feel less repetitive. I also think there should be an absolute cap of 2 turns as I wouldn't want to fight a stack every turn.

Not even the original game focused on neutral stacks spawning. That would need to be added as a new feature.
Adding to the list of reports "Rampaging monsters were spotted near <cityname>!" might be the best.

Something I forgot to mention. While that is the formula for spawning monsters FOR THE PLAYER, that doesn't mean there can't be stacks spawning for someone else in the player's territory, if it's adjacent to another player's cities as well. So the perceived amount of monsters can be larger if the player does not wait and see where they go and fights them anyway even if they are not their monsters.

We could, in theory, make the report feature ignore stacks meant for other players, but that will be perceived by most players as a bug and the monsters can switch targets if the original player loses their city on the continent so we most likely shouldn't.

The formula is random - notice that the counter increases by Difficulty to Difficulty+2 each turn.
So at difficulty level 2, that would be a random increase of 2-4, so the amount of turns could be up to 100% more than the fastest.
However the higher the difficulty is, the less influence this randomness has, mainly because there is less room for it as the non-random part of the formula is already larger.

I didn't suggest halving the frequency, I only posted examples - using the current formula, a player with 6 cities gets half as much monsters as a player with 14 cities.

If we do want to change the formula, I recommend opening a new thread to discuss the changes because it isn't trivial, there are two major variables (empire size and difficulty level), three if we also consider the difference in number of spawns for human and AI players. (currently, AI spawns are half as frequent)

Finally, if the player clears the lairs in their territory, they don't get monsters. There has to be at least 4 lairs that can spawn monsters in the player's territory left. So unlike the original where monsters came from far away, now it's more reasonable to prevent monsters by clearing all nearby locations at least in the second half of the game when the large empire size would create a lot of monsters.

[jhsidi]

Not even the original game focused on neutral stacks spawning. That would need to be added as a new feature.

I'm not suggesting you have to do all these things right now, although I'm not sure how you track suggested changes or if it might get lost in the mix. 

But, the feature exists and I'm usually testing with it on, hence the feedback. As it was (prior to your changes) the stacks are far more difficult than they were in MoM, which prompted me to make suggestions. However... sometimes it's quite fun! I enjoy having another source of challenge besides the AI wizards. So IMO I think neutrals deserve a little fine-tuning, both in terms of player experience and ensuring the AI wizards can handle them. In the distant future, I can imagine a game mode where the player has to endure more environmental challenges.

Btw, on the subject of the game modes, I wanted to ask about the Race to the Unknown feature. I love the concept but for me, the weak towers are a bit disappointing. There's always at least one that's ridiculously easy and for me it's not that fun to break into a new plane in 1503 when I'm still racing to settle the first plane. I guess this feature took its current form for a reason; does it need the weaker towers, maybe for the AI?