Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[Seravy]

The greatest problem I see with 7 planes is accessibility. While it's sometimes hard to reach an enemy due to distance and/or another player in between, this is on a manageable level in most games.
But let's say there are 7 planes. You play for 200 turns, colonize your entire plane (A) and are winning a war against someone else on another (B). You also discovered plane C and D but haven't scouted them yet. You have no access to planes E,F and G, the portal to E is in enemy territory, you still need another 50 turns to finish the war to advance there and found no portals to F and G : these are on planes you haven't scouted yet, C,D,E and each other.
In this situation you see "Tauron has finished casting Armageddon". Do you go and scout plane C? D? rush though enemy territory to reach E? or assume Tauron has a 40% chance to be on the last 2 planes and rage quit since Armageddon wins the game for them before you can even find their location?

It's not much different from having only one plane that is 7 times larger (which by itself would be inconveniently large) but there is a difference, the bottlenecks. It's very likely to not find all planes until after defeating half the enemy wizards already. With MoM's 2 planes you usually make contact with all 4 wizards and know their general location by the time you finish defeating the first, sometimes earlier, and if you have no idea where to look for the person who used armageddon it's entirely your fault for not scouting. Also for this same reason, some wizards might have an insane amount of territory while others have barely any, unbalancing the game. This also happens in MoM with continents, but ships are easy to make - if they work lol bugs -clearing out a portal and advancing into another plane is harder, especially if there are several planes in between.

[Anthony]

With MoM's 2 planes you usually make contact with all 4 wizards and know their general location by the time you finish defeating the first.

Though there's a significant minority of games where that's not the case; if you run into another wizard really early you can sometimes just headshot him.

[vicwaberub]

@Seravy: Good arguments.

In MoM two planes are ok: One is more a PvE the other more a PvP map. 1994!

[zitro1987]

so ... this happened to an opponent wizard on hard difficulty - a single town and never expanding despite having triremes and settlers around (year 1410 or turn ~120)

Maybe they just haven't yet selected a target continent to move to, it happens randomly. Did they finish building the ship wright's guild recently? If yes they might have just started loading them now. I hope it's not wraithform on the ships bugging the AI. Can I have the save?

My other guess would be a tower under one of those units, causing the AI to send their stuff to the other plane instead.

I never noticed your reply so I apologize for the lateness. That was an observation from a 'rvl' cheat to see how our AI expands. When playing for 20-30 more turns, the following good things (in terms of AI intelligence) happened:
*a large stack of stag beetles and skeletons surprise-attacked 2 poorly defended towns (via a ship)
*a small nearby island was colonized within these 20 turns or so with 2 tiny towns (1 pop)

Despite the wizard's later good moves, I still included an attachment save file from that day I played (may be off by 10-15 turns from when I took that image) if you're still concerned about the wizard's earlier inactivity.

[Seravy]

so ... this happened to an opponent wizard on hard difficulty - a single town and never expanding despite having triremes and settlers around (year 1410 or turn ~120)

Maybe they just haven't yet selected a target continent to move to, it happens randomly. Did they finish building the ship wright's guild recently? If yes they might have just started loading them now. I hope it's not wraithform on the ships bugging the AI. Can I have the save?

My other guess would be a tower under one of those units, causing the AI to send their stuff to the other plane instead.

I never noticed your reply so I apologize for the lateness. That was an observation from a 'rvl' cheat to see how our AI expands. When playing for 20-30 more turns, the following good things (in terms of AI intelligence) happened:
*a large stack of stag beetles and skeletons surprise-attacked 2 poorly defended towns (via a ship)
*a small nearby island was colonized within these 20 turns or so with 2 tiny towns (1 pop)

Despite the wizard's later good moves, I still included an attachment save file from that day I played (may be off by 10-15 turns from when I took that image) if you're still concerned about the wizard's earlier inactivity.

Thanks. I think there is no problem here, land size is normal and objective is perfectionist so the AI didn't have an increased chance to build a ship wright's guild, and ended up building all that other stuff first. With military buildings already done, they also had some extra priority on producing units, further lowering ship wright's guild chance. They only have 3 ships on the entire map which confirms the building was made recently, and all these ships are being used as transports so it's just bad luck from the AI.

It would be nice if the AI could check if they have any ship building anywhere on a plane yet in this situation, but it's hard to do, especially the "am I on a tiny island" part of it.

[namad]

The greatest problem I see with 7 planes is accessibility. While it's sometimes hard to reach an enemy due to distance and/or another player in between, this is on a manageable level in most games.
But let's say there are 7 planes. You play for 200 turns, colonize your entire plane (A) and are winning a war against someone else on another (B). You also discovered plane C and D but haven't scouted them yet. You have no access to planes E,F and G, the portal to E is in enemy territory, you still need another 50 turns to finish the war to advance there and found no portals to F and G : these are on planes you haven't scouted yet, C,D,E and each other.
In this situation you see "Tauron has finished casting Armageddon". Do you go and scout plane C? D? rush though enemy territory to reach E? or assume Tauron has a 40% chance to be on the last 2 planes and rage quit since Armageddon wins the game for them before you can even find their location?

It's not much different from having only one plane that is 7 times larger (which by itself would be inconveniently large) but there is a difference, the bottlenecks. It's very likely to not find all planes until after defeating half the enemy wizards already. With MoM's 2 planes you usually make contact with all 4 wizards and know their general location by the time you finish defeating the first, sometimes earlier, and if you have no idea where to look for the person who used armageddon it's entirely your fault for not scouting. Also for this same reason, some wizards might have an insane amount of territory while others have barely any, unbalancing the game. This also happens in MoM with continents, but ships are easy to make - if they work lol bugs -clearing out a portal and advancing into another plane is harder, especially if there are several planes in between.

In planar conquest there is a retort that turns all nodes into gateways into that plane. Also most Armageddon style spells, of which there are many, only target a single plane at a time.
The bottleneck theory would be good, except the ai has no concept of bottlenecks in planar conquest. They never garrison a stack on the gateways between planes. Even if the gateway is inside their territory you can slip inside and travel through it. A settler might be too slow but the default option in planar conquest is doubled movement on the overland map for all units. So even a slow melee unit with 2movement will move 4 tiles a turn. Although an average unit has 3 movement and moves 6 tiles a turn.

Ships are almost entirely worthless in planar conquest for various reasons having to do with land generation I suppose. I guess the main issue being that a Pangaea takes up the entire plane with no water tiles except a few tiny lakes or the edges of the map (water instead of tundra).

[vicwaberub]

In planar conquest there is a retort that turns all nodes into gateways into that plane. Also most Armageddon style spells, of which there are many, only target a single plane at a time.
The bottleneck theory would be good, except the ai has no concept of bottlenecks in planar conquest. They never garrison a stack on the gateways between planes. Even if the gateway is inside their territory you can slip inside and travel through it. A settler might be too slow but the default option in planar conquest is doubled movement on the overland map for all units. So even a slow melee unit with 2movement will move 4 tiles a turn. Although an average unit has 3 movement and moves 6 tiles a turn.

Ships are almost entirely worthless in planar conquest for various reasons having to do with land generation I suppose. I guess the main issue being that a Pangaea takes up the entire plane with no water tiles except a few tiny lakes or the edges of the map (water instead of tundra).

Terrain generation is a problem in WoM/PC. I don't know why, but I can't understand it. There a lot of algorithms to create good worlds (Seravy told us the algo of MoM on site 47 of this thread). I have no immersion in games with bad worlds. MoM has good worlds with a lot of bottlenecks and curiositys like small ship canals to a big sea in the middle of a continent. Strategy games needs good worlds. Games with heroes needs it. Fantasy games needs it. I hope the turn based games of the near future copy the idea of altitude levels like the terrain of Endless Legends.

[zitro1987]

Is it just me, but when it gets to the later parts of the game, it feels like my casting skill overland is fairly low while my casting skill in combat is too high?

The balance seems to break down on the later parts of the game. Enchanting cities, summoning creatures takes some time (as it probably should? improved by amplifying towers) but at the same time, it seems like you can cast way too many spells in every combat battle and the AI as well, making combat sometimes too spell-centric.

I wonder if the amplifying towers could instead provide overland-only skill, or is that too confusing? Maybe 12 overland-only skill. This way, combat spells eventually run out yet overland casting gets more fast-paced to match the military and city pace of the late game.

[Anthony]

I sort of feel like it should be possible to have multiple summoning circles; the thing about combat skill is it's usable every battle while overland is only once per turn, and number of battles per turn goes up as unit count increases.

[namad]

Is it just me, but when it gets to the later parts of the game, it feels like my casting skill overland is fairly low while my casting skill in combat is too high?

The balance seems to break down on the later parts of the game. Enchanting cities, summoning creatures takes some time (as it probably should? improved by amplifying towers) but at the same time, it seems like you can cast way too many spells in every combat battle and the AI as well, making combat sometimes too spell-centric.

I wonder if the amplifying towers could instead provide overland-only skill, or is that too confusing? Maybe 12 overland-only skill. This way, combat spells eventually run out yet overland casting gets more fast-paced to match the military and city pace of the late game.

I agree I have felt this way as well. Summoning a storm giant takes me a million turns but at the same time I can cast dozens of battlefield enchantments in the same turn and bankrupt my mana supply.
I think this is fun though.

I sort of feel like it should be possible to have multiple summoning circles; the thing about combat skill is it's usable every battle while overland is only once per turn, and number of battles per turn goes up as unit count increases.

Huh? This makes no sense. Summoning circle was made to cost 0mana so you could move it for free whenever you wanted and summon a creature into any city at any time. This already exists?