Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[Seravy]

Testing out some more. Have you actually managed to win a game on Extreme? I'm still finding it pretty much impossible. In my latest game a neutral Klackon town started 6 squares away from my home town and it had 9 stag beetles defending it! It sent out raiding parties of 3 stag beetles. There was pretty much nothing I could do.

Edit: Oh, and Sprites still seem way too expensive for what they do. 3 mana per turn and they're not even close to being as good as Ghouls.

Basilisks are similarly underpowered. Cockatrices are way better at stoning and they fly, too. If you ask me, Basilisks should have a ranged stoning attack to help them out a little bit. Nature in general seems way less powerful than everything else.

I usually play on extreme and win, but the recent AI updates might change that trend. Considering games take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours each and I have other things to do as well, I'm making slow progress at testing difficulty. Balancing it out is a long term plan.
Neutral towns of that size are very rare, it's just bad luck to start near one. Also check if the Revolting Raiders option is on or off, with a start like that, you would want it off for sure.

Sprites do more damage than ghouls and fly. I might reduce the upkeep to 2 but not sure if needed, sprites are quite amazing. I guess 3 is a bit hard to afford in the early game though.
The difference between Basilisk and Cockatrices is that Basilisks can do decent damage even if the enemy resists the petrification, cockatrices cannot. Also, gaze is working differently than touch, which can be better in some cases.

[ChongLi]

Testing out some more. Have you actually managed to win a game on Extreme? I'm still finding it pretty much impossible. In my latest game a neutral Klackon town started 6 squares away from my home town and it had 9 stag beetles defending it! It sent out raiding parties of 3 stag beetles. There was pretty much nothing I could do.

Edit: Oh, and Sprites still seem way too expensive for what they do. 3 mana per turn and they're not even close to being as good as Ghouls.

Basilisks are similarly underpowered. Cockatrices are way better at stoning and they fly, too. If you ask me, Basilisks should have a ranged stoning attack to help them out a little bit. Nature in general seems way less powerful than everything else.

I usually play on extreme and win, but the recent AI updates might change that trend. Considering games take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours each and I have other things to do as well, I'm making slow progress at testing difficulty. Balancing it out is a long term plan.
Neutral towns of that size are very rare, it's just bad luck to start near one. Also check if the Revolting Raiders option is on or off, with a start like that, you would want it off for sure.

Sprites do more damage than ghouls and fly. I might reduce the upkeep to 2 but not sure if needed, sprites are quite amazing. I guess 3 is a bit hard to afford in the early game though.
The difference between Basilisk and Cockatrices is that Basilisks can do decent damage even if the enemy resists the petrification, cockatrices cannot. Also, gaze is working differently than touch, which can be better in some cases.

Sprites also have way less HP, pretty much no ability to melee at all, and they don't create undead when they kill stuff. Sprites are amazing when you attack a neutral town with nothing but swordsmen, but so is almost any Common summon. As soon as the town has a few bowmen then your sprites are just going to die.

[vicwaberub]

I have played the barbarians on the weekend (CoM 1.34), but I can't use mithril and can't build magical weapons. This looks a bit unfair against units with weapon immunity

IMO Pathfinder is too fast in mountains. I had a very huge 6x8 area of mountains, but with pathfinder it feels like grasland

[Seravy]

I have played the barbarians on the weekend (CoM 1.34), but I can't use mithril and can't build magical weapons. This looks a bit unfair against units with weapon immunity

IMO Pathfinder is too fast in mountains. I had a very huge 6x8 area of mountains, but with pathfinder it feels like grasland

Barbarians have other advantages in exchange for no mithril. Besides, Berserkers have a built-in +1 to hit so they don't really need that extra hit from the alchemist guild. Weapon Immunity can be a problem but 3 out of 5 realms can deal with that using a common or uncommon unit enchantment, and even those that can't, can summon stuff in combat, or nuke the weapon immune unit.
Moving fast in mountains is one of those "other advantages"

[raubtier]

Hello everybody,

I recently started playing MoM again - using the CoM 1.34 patch. First of all a big thank you, most of the modifications are very nice and improve the game a lot.

Here are my findings of the biggest problems I have found:

1. AI is greatly improved - really a HUGE step forward, however the AI has become VERY slow. In my current game it takes approx 2:45 min to press "Turn Done" - and this is running Dosbox at max speed! I only have 3 cities - so it is like 10 seconds moving of units (I don't have that many) and then almost 3 minutes waiting. That is not good and needs to be improved.
   
2. One settler can defeat a complete stack of 8 War Trolls/War Mammoths. Granted, it was a flying (Draconian) settler - so the Trolls were just moving around and after 3 turns of clicking "Done" the fight was over and the whole stack of Trolls was gone! (Plunderer, i.e. no magic involved)
   
3. Dwarves are much less powerful than in the original game. Shouldn't they be able to build Market Places? That's what dwarves are good at: producing things and trading them. Even hammerhands will loose against Barbarian Berserks - and in addition all units are very slow. So no more reason left to play dwarves. Instead I have seen Trolls with Adamantium weapons?! Since when are Trolls able to use adamantium?!
   

What I also find a little strange are the new roads. Wouldn't it be better if they would for example reduce required movement points by 50% instead of setting them to constant 1 (0.5 myrror)?

But apart from that: I really like CoM!

[Seravy]

Hello everybody,

I recently started playing MoM again - using the CoM 1.34 patch. First of all a big thank you, most of the modifications are very nice and improve the game a lot.

Here are my findings of the biggest problems I have found:

1. AI is greatly improved - really a HUGE step forward, however the AI has become VERY slow. In my current game it takes approx 2:45 min to press "Turn Done" - and this is running Dosbox at max speed! I only have 3 cities - so it is like 10 seconds moving of units (I don't have that many) and then almost 3 minutes waiting. That is not good and needs to be improved.
   
2. One settler can defeat a complete stack of 8 War Trolls/War Mammoths. Granted, it was a flying (Draconian) settler - so the Trolls were just moving around and after 3 turns of clicking "Done" the fight was over and the whole stack of Trolls was gone! (Plunderer, i.e. no magic involved)
   
3. Dwarves are much less powerful than in the original game. Shouldn't they be able to build Market Places? That's what dwarves are good at: producing things and trading them. Even hammerhands will loose against Barbarian Berserks - and in addition all units are very slow. So no more reason left to play dwarves. Instead I have seen Trolls with Adamantium weapons?! Since when are Trolls able to use adamantium?!
   

What I also find a little strange are the new roads. Wouldn't it be better if they would for example reduce required movement points by 50% instead of setting them to constant 1 (0.5 myrror)?

But apart from that: I really like CoM!

Hi!
First of all, you're welcome and I'm happy to hear you like the mod!

1 . I noticed it too, it wasn't as bad as for you though. Unfortunately the AI does need the time to think and DOSBOX tries to run the game at a real DOS machine's speed so it's a bit slow. Increasing the CPU cycles should help (but might also make your mouse too fast since it basically speeds up the entire machine). I need to try doing that, haven't actually done it for this particular game yet. Honestly, this has always been like this -although the addition of naval movement to the AI did slow it down further- moving 1000 units while considering all possible targets on the entire continent (or world in some cases) does take time in an emulated environment.
2. Neutral units automatically disappear if they are forced to retreat since they don't have an actual leader behind them to try again if they fail. It won't happen with any other army except neutrals.
3. Dwarves are probably the current strongest race in the game. They have a 2x gold and mining bonus so even without a marketplace they get much more gold than anyone else. Their units are also awesome. Hammerhands are roughly as powerful as berserkers, although if the berserkers hit first they have the advantage due to thrown. However, barbarians cannot build anything else worth mentoning, while Dwarves can and have a lot of racial extras. Aside from hammerhands, they can also build magic immune golems and really powerful steam cannons. The improved minerals make their double mining bonus extremely powerful as well. Almost every race can use adamantium now, only the two rush races, Gnoll and Barbarian cannot, unless I'm forgetting one.

Roads : maybe it would be better but I doubt I can do that and I want to keep it consistent with flight, noncorporeal and pathfinding all of which move for 1 over anything.

[ChongLi]

So after more playing around I figured out what's going on with the difficulty level: it all depends on land mass size. If you set it to Huge then the game becomes way harder as the AI rapidly expands out of control. Setting it to Fair makes the game a lot more reasonable at the Extreme difficulty level. Perhaps some tweaking of the land mass sizes is needed? The sizes below Fair are way, way too small. Would it make more sense to take the numbers for Fair as the smallest size and rescale all of the sizes in between Fair and Huge?

[Seravy]

So after more playing around I figured out what's going on with the difficulty level: it all depends on land mass size. If you set it to Huge then the game becomes way harder as the AI rapidly expands out of control. Setting it to Fair makes the game a lot more reasonable at the Extreme difficulty level. Perhaps some tweaking of the land mass sizes is needed? The sizes below Fair are way, way too small. Would it make more sense to take the numbers for Fair as the smallest size and rescale all of the sizes in between Fair and Huge?

Indeed, if the AI gets more resources, it benefits them, a larger land size or magic power setting makes the game harder on high difficulty.

The current landmass sizes are the following :
Tiny = 150 tiles
Small = 250 tiles
Fair = 400 tiles
Large = 600 tiles
Huge = 800 tiles.

I believe this spreads out the options reasonably evenly, each giving a unique playing experience. Any higher than 800 tiles is pretty much pointless as the maximal city cap would stop players from using it, even on 800 it can be reached.

[Drax]

Lots of developments for a couple of weeks I didn't visit

About Sprites I do think they could benefit from +1 to defend(i.e. 40% per shield/cross), back to 4 creatures (or +2 to def and 3 creatures and +1 attack) and lowering the cost/support a bit. They are supposed to be small creatures, hard to hit and powerful. If I'd to program them anew I'd use some random effect with their attack similar to that call chaos?!? spell... not sure if it is at all possible in the current environment though. ... Or random type of attack i.e. one of cold/fire/lightning/air/doom/death/illusion at random. Would make them rather fun to play.

If it is possible Sprites with 3 creatures, +2 to defend, +1 magic attack of random type and support cost of 2 seems pretty reasonable to me ... and possibly FUN!

Bowmen are a bit OP in CoM I think. +2 ranged makes basically any bowmen as good as lower level Longbowmen in MoM. I think +2 ranged is too much maybe should be +1 to non elven races. Sprites are just one of the units that were affected.

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About wall crushing, not sure how it is solved but I would make the unit target the wall if there is no other immediate target. Or if possible consider the targets ignoring the wall and then add the wall crushing as a middle priority to make it a step and lower the priority of targets behind the wall bellow that priority. This way the unit would fight whatever it could outside of city, or fall back to attacking wall.

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How about limiting the resources a bit to the AI on high difficulty settings? Latest AI is better and these resources become a bigger advantage now. It's logical to scale them down somehow.

I have found pretty annoying the ability of AI wizards to take over ruins way too easily. Often with stacks that I could not win against these monsters. It is very annoying with towers in particular. Do you have any thoughts about that? Maybe AI wizards are getting some abusive bonus when fighting neutral fights?

Just passing my thoughts hoping to inspire you further! So far it's pretty good all around and I love it!

[Seravy]

Lots of developments for a couple of weeks I didn't visit

If you knew how much more is coming soon

I already decided to lower the maintenance of Sprites to 2, aside from that I see no reason to change them. Your idea is good but I don't think it can be done, unless the unit just randomly swaps the attack type at the start of each combat turn. Even then we are limited to existing types, meaning Chaos, Sorcery and Nature.

Wall Crushing is unsolvable, the pathfinding algorythm is pretty much unable to comprehend these units that can move through walls. Even if the wall is selected as target, the unit is unable to move towards it because, well, it's a wall, not a valid cell to enter.
At the very least the difficulty of making this work far exceeds the importance of the matter.

I'm planning to lower the AI resource advantage on the long term but this takes time. I need to play many games in a state when there are no more major AI changes anymore I can properly balance that.

AI wizards use the "automatic combat only" setting which works entirely differently from normal combat. It ignores individual abilities, spells and stats, pools together all the units into three numbers, an offense,ranged and defense and uses those to decide the winner. You can do the same by enabling the setting, it's less fun but it can sometimes beat things normally impossible.
Normal combat would take a lot of time to execute and isn't an option, even if it was, it would result in 25 minute long AI turns.