Thoughts on aggression and resources

[Dragonfabri]

Oh I completely forgot. I know it's counter intuitive but a perfect counter to Raise Volcano exists at Chaos Common. I don't often bother because I don't value resources as high as most players so it's hard to remember it's there. It's a spell people rarely use so it gives it extra value, which it needs, too.

...it's Corruption. You can corrupt your minerals when they are expected to be at risk, defeat or make peace with the Chaos wizard causing the problem, then send a Shaman to clean it up. The AI will never raise a Volcano on an already Corrupted tile.
What makes this an extra good solution :
-The price is fair. Your mineral doesn't produce anything while it's invincible so it can't be abused.
-It doesn't disrupt human gameplay. The AI will never corrupt their own resource and even if they did, it can't prevent you from raising a Volcano on it anyway. So it specifically only works against the AI which is what we want for this case (as human players don't use Volcano often enough for mineral destruction anyway, there is no need for the AI to be able to counter that.)

So I don't think we need another spell to counter Raise Volcano at all. We already have one. I unfortunately forgot about that.

Now i feel silly, we already have a goodish solution! This is a meaningful choice: if the player feels at risk, is it worthy to "ensure" the AI will not touch that precious mineral at the cost of not being able to use it until public relations stabilize or the Chaos wizard is neutralized?
It's an interesting choice with a very interesting and risky trade off. It's not 100% perfect since it still makes strategies reliant on resources kind of unreliable (what's the point if you can't use them half of the game to protect them), but it's definetly a good option.

[Slingers]

...it's Corruption. You can corrupt your minerals when they are expected to be at risk, defeat or make peace with the Chaos wizard causing the problem, then send a Shaman to clean it up. The AI will never raise a Volcano on an already Corrupted tile. What makes this an extra good solution :
-The price is fair. Your mineral doesn't produce anything while it's invincible so it can't be abused.
-It doesn't disrupt human gameplay. The AI will never corrupt their own resource and even if they did, it can't prevent you from raising a Volcano on it anyway. So it specifically only works against the AI which is what we want for this case (as human players don't use Volcano often enough for mineral destruction anyway, there is no need for the AI to be able to counter that.)

So I don't think we need another spell to counter Raise Volcano at all. We already have one. I unfortunately forgot about that.

Lol. The perfect protection against volcanoes already exists! And it's even a common spell! I also think the problem is solved. Perhaps this should be mentioned in the Manual: "Corruption protects the tile from volcanoes, cast by an AI." It's hard to guess because as a human player you don't have this limitation. Does that actually also apply to the volcanoes from Armageddon, cast by an AI?

[Seravy]

Does that actually also apply to the volcanoes from Armageddon, cast by an AI?

No, those are random.

[MrBiscuits]

Oh I completely forgot. I know it's counter intuitive but a perfect counter to Raise Volcano exists at Chaos Common. I don't often bother because I don't value resources as high as most players so it's hard to remember it's there. It's a spell people rarely use so it gives it extra value, which it needs, too.

...it's Corruption. You can corrupt your minerals when they are expected to be at risk, defeat or make peace with the Chaos wizard causing the problem, then send a Shaman to clean it up. The AI will never raise a Volcano on an already Corrupted tile.
What makes this an extra good solution :
-The price is fair. Your mineral doesn't produce anything while it's invincible so it can't be abused.
-It doesn't disrupt human gameplay. The AI will never corrupt their own resource and even if they did, it can't prevent you from raising a Volcano on it anyway. So it specifically only works against the AI which is what we want for this case (as human players don't use Volcano often enough for mineral destruction anyway, there is no need for the AI to be able to counter that.)

So I don't think we need another spell to counter Raise Volcano at all. We already have one. I unfortunately forgot about that.

A solution to making your minerals permanently unusable is to make them temporarily (or potentially to the end of the game if there are a number of chaos wizards on the other plane) unusable instead. It's not a nice intuitive and elegant solution IMO. Also it creates yet more micromannagement.

How about instead of change terrain has a chance of creating a mineral on a volcano, it just exposes the old one underneath that was covered up by the volcano.

[Suppanut]

I think another possible solution is that make volcano deny resource gathering from wizard who not cast this spell on that tile, resource would not always be destroy by volcano (has chance for old mineral resource to destroy a bit more than new one spawn on it, but all non-mineral guerentee destroy), but as long as volcano still active, resource on that tile include other bonus could not be harvest by other wizard. Just consider it as harder to solved corruption as it permanently change terrain to less fertile land and fixing it could only be done by time (randomly) or by spell of nature realm.

It also add another layer of spell as resource protection too. As only volcano's raiser could take bonus from the tile and if add condition of not allow to raise volcano on volcano tile, it means that volcano with resource in your land safe from other volcanic attempt others. But this does not mean it safe from corruption spell.

[Seravy]

About the AI raise volcano changes, I started working on that.

Destroying resources that belong to cities you are about to conquer is a very bad move, while destroying resources on cities the AI cannot conquer is very good, but the AI has no way of knowing whether the target is going to be conquered successfully soon, or not. Targeting an unrelated player is actually a safer and probably more profitable strategy than casting it on War targets.
In fact even adjacency is questionable since distance is not relevant for an economy spell. If anything, the further enemies should be targeted because they are less likely to retaliate and will have more time to snowball using the resource while closer players are more likely to get conquered and stop being relevant.

So while I understand why people would think the AI shouldn't cast these spells further away from their place, it's actually good strategy for the AI.
However, curse spells generally don't get their rules based on strategy in the first place, and this case is like Spell Blast and Disjunction where overall game balance is better if the AI does not play optimally. So I'm going to change the priority so that War targets are always first, and targets belonging to adjacent wizards are always before targets that do not. We'll see if that helps or not, I think it should.
What if this had a difficulty level based toggle though?
On Expert and below, cast on War targets and adjacent wizards first, on Master and above, do the opposite?

[Slingers]

The more distant wizards (with names in brackets) do not declare war. Therefore the interest in a targeted volcano could also be low. Maybe you can let chaotic and maniacal personalities do it anyways? The extent of the threat from volcanoes could be dependent on the level of difficulty.

[jhsidi]

Personally I play Master or Lunatic and really would not like to see some rule that requires AI to cast on non-war, non-adjacent targets. You can reason out potential strategic reasons for casting in that way, but the AI can't back it up with its behavior.

As I've observed in a couple cases, the AIs are actively losing wars that result in them being banished or abdicating and yet, still spam casting curses on some distant, unrelated target -- the focus on curses, in my view, contributes greatly to their loss. And if you're going to lose this war and die, there's no sense in planning for some later war with a distant enemy.

If any strategy would be good for the AI, it would be to have a high priority of casting those curses when they have no war target. I'd totally get it if a Chaos wizard who's at war with no one suddenly starts cursing me -- he's preparing for war.

[Anskiy]

Yeah I am not a fan of Chaos wizards screwing up resources for no plausible reason. Trying to justify it with "but farther targets will take longer to respond" doesn't make much sense either, why would you pointlessly blow up factories in Russia if you rule Saudi Arabia and want to conquer Iran? Curses are supposed to weaken a target you can feasibly attempt a campaign on soon, not pointlessly annoy far off rulers with the assumption that "they will take longer to respond". By that logic Pearl Harbor was a great strategic decision, yet look how it turned out for the Japanese..

[Seravy]

Trying to justify it with "but farther targets will take longer to respond" doesn't make much sense either, why would you pointlessly blow up factories in Russia if you rule Saudi Arabia and want to conquer Iran?

Mainly because in this game everyone is expected to eventually attack you because the victory condition is "conquer the world". I guess we do have retirement victories now but that still means you lose your power and can't rule your country anymore.
Blowing up factories in Iran would just make me have less factories after conquering them. Unless I can't conquer them quickly, it makes no sense to blow them up. They are as good as mine. Russia on the other hand might be silently developing nukes in their factories...