Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[Seravy]

Actually several of their settlers died to mountains. As in they founded an outpost but the food bonus and max pop was too low due to mountains and lost the settler. A mountain start that lets you build settlers faster than your population grows is likely to have settlers settling in mountain locations.
I don't see a solution to this though other than to disable outposts from killing themselves entirely for all players.

I'm not sure I actually killed any settlers at all. (although I think one attacked me then fled and died).

While I'm complaining would it be possible to nerf AI combat against neutrals? A great drake and 8 fire giants were taken out by a stack of berzerkers with almost no loses to the berzerkers in this game. (although since I am not all seeing I could be wrong about this statement).

I took out ALL advantages the AI had against neutrals like 1 or 2 months ago. At this point that is the real influence of their casting skill on the combat, if you turn on the "automatic combat" option and do the same you get the same results (if you have the same skill, books and units).
One more thing you don' see the actual damage done to the berserkers unless you fight them. It's quite probable that all of them were heavily wounded and the AI was lucky they barely survived. Damage is spread randomly so it's likely to have more wounded survivors than when you send them to attack the drake one at a time manually.

PS : added what I think happened in your game (first 40 turns) to the end of the previous post.

[namad]

I moved back up to extreme for this game, because I know how OP life warlord is (if this save isn't on extreme I'll be sad at the error I made). The other thing I think is that yeah. You're right. They had several settlers, but those outposts you saw except for leer never became hamlets, like literally ever. Maybe outposts should grow faster? or at least dark elf outposts should grow faster? if growth even effects outposts?

Good point, maybe the berzerkers were all hurt (I attacked them and killed them, or so I thought but he may have retreated his injured stack and swapped it for a healthy stack, he had lots of stacks in the area so I couldn't know which was which).

On the flip side maybe no one should ever have a starting location as bad as they did? Their max population for a starting city was quite low. I guess though I don't mind having 1 weak ai opponent and 3 strong ai opponents randomly in some games. I've just never seen an ai be so pathetic ever before. The blue player did manage to stay alive just long enough for the red player to break a wizard's tower and steal the dying wizard's territory from me. Maybe that's as long as could be expected against a life warlord rush.

[Seravy]

Maybe outposts should grow faster? or at least dark elf outposts should grow faster? if growth even effects outposts?

Good point, maybe the berzerkers were all hurt (I attacked them and killed them, or so I thought but he may have retreated his injured stack and swapped it for a healthy stack, he had lots of stacks in the area so I couldn't know which was which).

On the flip side maybe no one should ever have a starting location as bad as they did? Their max population for a starting city was quite low. I guess though I don't mind having 1 weak ai opponent and 3 strong ai opponents randomly in some games. I've just never seen an ai be so pathetic ever before. The blue player did manage to stay alive just long enough for the red player to break a wizard's tower and steal the dying wizard's territory from me. Maybe that's as long as could be expected against a life warlord rush.

Outposts grow different from cities.
They have a random chance in % to gain 1 to 3 houses each turn, and the % depends on terrain and race. A dark elf city on bad terrain has like 12-15% chance to grow per turn, plus the AI bonus. However there is also a 5% chance to lose 1 or 2 houses each turn. So in theory it can take an infinite amount of time or as low as 3 turns.

They had 10 max population which is not bad. With a granary and farmer's market that makes 15. I rather have the game not crash when generating maps than to try finding a better location and freeze since there aren't any on the map.

[namad]

Well growing slowly is all well and good, but sometimes outposts simply die, it doesn't take 3 turns or 30. Sometimes the settler just disappears because the outpost killed itself, this happens about half the time I've paid attention to it for cities with a maximum population between 5 and 9.

I guess it hurts the player about as much as the AI, but the player can see that their city is at 1 house (they start at 3) and send another settler that direction before it happens, whereas the AI is stuck waiting for the shoe to fall without queuing up a spare settler for the occasion?

That said, the AI getting unlucky is entirely fine to have in the game, I guess I just underestimated how small the ai bonus to outpost growth was (I'd literally never seen an ai outpost die due to losing houses before this game, but I may have simply never been looking before.) Maybe I am on hard and not extreme, that might explain why the outposts died, they had the smaller growth bonus?

[Seravy]

Maybe I am on hard and not extreme, that might explain why the outposts died, they had the smaller growth bonus?

it actually was extreme, I checked again. So they had 175% of the normal growth, roughly 20% chance to grow and 5% to shrink.

[zitro1987]

Selecting 10 books of 1 realm is a marginal benefit late in the game (more researchable v. rare spells) and only allows 2 picks for retorts. Retorts work best when you have a bunch, not just 2 picks.

What if 10 books allow 1 uncommon spell at beginning of the game (by choice or random, preferably random)? With fewer retorts, it may be costly to use the uncommon expensive spell.

[Seravy]

Selecting 10 books of 1 realm is a marginal benefit late in the game (more researchable v. rare spells) and only allows 2 picks for retorts. Retorts work best when you have a bunch, not just 2 picks.

What if 10 books allow 1 uncommon spell at beginning of the game (by choice or random, preferably random)? With fewer retorts, it may be costly to use the uncommon expensive spell.

No, starting uncommons are overpowered. Random doesn't help, people can restart until they get what they want.
It would be hard to do anyway, these picks only worked on the 11th book correctly. Even though the table entry is there for uncommon and rare and even very rare picks for all amount of books, the code doesn't support it correctly and you end up with a spell selection screen that doesn't allow starting the game ever, like wanting you to spend another pick first when you have no more left.

I'd say 3 very rare spells is a pretty big deal unless you plan to harvest all 3 from treasure. But to do that you still need to have 3 uncleared places with spells in them and have to be lucky not to draw a new book of another realm, which enables you to instead of very rares, find commons of that realm.
More so than the "3" spells is the fact this is the only way to be 100% sure to get a spell you want : if you play Life for Crusade, or Sorcery for Sky Drake etc, you must have 10 books or risk not finding the spell.
At 9 books you might even miss a rare spell : missing survival instinct or gaea's blessing on nature is a big deal, missing a spell from the complete "power denial" package is very painful for death if the strategy needs to be used, most realms have very important rare spells.

[namad]

I agree with seravy, although I do wish 4*10=40 and that the 9th and 10th book gave you 4 spells each.
Why does the 7th book grant 5 spells? and then the 9th book grants 3?
Why not make all the books give 4 spells? this would buff the 9th book a lot. Personally I'm liking builds where I take 8books in a realm, that way I don't pay 1 pick for 3spells.

Also the mod already gives every wizard 1 free pick and removes the need to consider an 11th book making retorts much much more common for both players and ai in caster of magic compared to master of magic. You can always skip myyran and go 8books and have 4points for retorts. Or go 10/2 or 8/4 or 2/2/8. Although maybe an optional patch that gives every wizard +2 picks would be fun?

[Seravy]

Why does the 7th book grant 5 spells? and then the 9th book grants 3?
Why not make all the books give 4 spells? this would buff the 9th book a lot. Personally I'm liking builds where I take 8books in a realm, that way I don't pay 1 pick for 3spells.

Because...well..really, why? I mean aside from I didn't notice there are 5 spells in book 7 there is no reason.
Moving it to book 9 would mean however that 9 books are required to get every uncommon, and that feels a bit too high up.
I don't think that's acceptable. 8 books+ 4 picks on retorts (like myrran plus chaneller) is a viable start for strategies that don't rely on getting any specific rare or very rare and is frequently used on myrran wizards. However, also having a chance to miss an essential uncommon, that would make those wizards no longer work. (10% chance of missing black prayer, shadow demons, transmute, flight etc would hurt a lot of otherwise great strategies)

So it's 7 books = all commons, 8 books = all uncommons, 10 = everything. The 9th book is a bit lacking but still important : filling 4 slots of missing spells from treasure is reasonably possible, filling 7 is unlikely.

[namad]

7th book can be both 4spells and every uncommon spell (it can lose a rare which gets moved to the 9th?)

Obviously you do not have to make this change, but I am almost certainly never going to pick 9 books in a realm ever in my life until the change is made. (I'll pick either 8 or 10).

This isn't a problem though, no matter the numbers there will always be a best "meta".

edit: another option would be leave 7th book at 5spells but move one rare/very rare from 10th to 9th. So then the 9th has 4 and the 10th has 3. This would make 9picks more popular with players and 10 less popular. As long as 7th book has 5picks though another book will have to have 3. Another option might be to move the 3 spells down to the 1st book, which would massively nerf 3/4/5 realm wizards which IMO is anti-fun.

edit2: totally unrelated but I think orihalcon ore might have a bug. It seems in my current game there is only one in both worlds combined and that one is on arcanus and the whole world is settled EXCEPT next to that ore. I know one game is an awful test but it seems like it might be too rare, and the ai might not know it's useful?