New experimental version

[Nelphine]

While we did calculate everything casting based around the overland casting skill bonuses, if that is reduced across the board for all difficulties it shouldn't matter. My goal is to have the AI cast less: summons, curses, disjunctions, globals. While technically this means buffs are theoretically fine, its also hard to tell if this is actually case - and it shouldn't be an issue to be casting slightly less of them regardless. So doing a blanket reduction will simply mean everything stays at the same ratios as now, but the AI just casts slightly lower numbers of spells.

I'm fine with not changing anything yet, but I do think we should keep it in mind.

[Nelphine]

I just noticed something.

How is that orc city producing 28 gold when it has only 1 person paying taxes???

[Arnuz]

Finished the Expert game I was playing. I believe Normal and Advanced are fine as is.

Expert I'm unsure about - Most of the games went as expected (tho since we defined goals I only played one) but there are a few older lost games I marked red, and I don't remember why. Maybe I was playing a bad wizard or ended up in a 4v1 war or something, idk.
As this is fairly inconclusive data and we recently changed AI behavior, I prefer not to change the difficulty level right now. To be honest the numbers between Advanced and Expert aren't that far apart so if I had to reduce it, I wouldn't know where to start.
Advanced is :
100
66
130
130
160
130
100
50

While Expert is
120
50
148
160
180
150
100
40

None of the categories have a higher than 30% difference but most are 20 or less. Also, we calculated almost every AI casting related stuff with the assumption the bonus there is ~50 on any serious difficulty level, so I rather not mess with that unless absolutely necessary, and that is the biggest jump I see in the table, all the others are more subtle.

Unfortunately I'll be busy tomorrow, so I have to do the 5.0 release earlier - no time to play more games.

What are these categories?

I'm still unsure of what the aim is for each difficulty level.

[Seravy]

The city produces 16 gold on the screenshot. That's from the Marketplace, the 1 taxpayer, and the gold bonus buildings/roads/terrain.

if that is reduced across the board for all difficulties it shouldn't matter.

At the very least it would completely alter the functionality of Fairy Ring by providing fewer creatures.

AI resource categories from top to bottom :
Population
Overland casting
Production
Gold
Mana
Research
Food
Maintenance

Each number is a multiplier in percentage, 100 means it gets the same amount as a player, 150 gets 50% more etc.
For costs, 75 means it pays 75% total so 25% less.

[Nelphine]

Modifying the function of an untested spell that could very well need number tweaks anyway is something I can live with but in theory it shouldn't even need to. I want less summons and whatever percentage less we do from overland casting will directly correspond to that same percentage less from fairy ring, which means it should be exactly where we want it.

[Nelphine]

Isn't it making 29 gold and then paying 13 in maintenance? Or is it making 16 gold and paying 29 gold in maintenance?

[Seravy]

Or is it making 16 gold and paying 29 gold in maintenance?

This one.

[Nelphine]

As a diplomacy report: my current lunatic game has 2 maniacal and 2 peaceful wizards. There's a 3 way alliance.. but the last AI is actually at war with all 3 of the other ones (despite several aura of majesty in play). So, I can confirm that the change to diplomacy has definitely had an effect. That being said, diplomacy has so many factors in it, it's really hard for me to say if this is a good/intended thing. My guess is it's because the maniacal wizard at war has almost identical army strength as the 2 peaceful wizards; while the other maniacal wizard was at war with me and got smashed into a wreck, so the army strength wasn't remotely comparable.

[Arnuz]

Minor issue. Some time ago I mentioned that astrologer is not calculated in the magic screen, what confused me is that the help text on the right click mentions astrologer for casting skill. Maybe it could be worth it to add the parenthesis also to power? Otherwise get rid of "and astrologer" from that right click?

[Seravy]

Yes that refers to the old "astrologer" retort, it should be removed indeed.