New year, New Master of Magic! v1.5 fan patch

[Elestan]

Okay, a question. Why don't you apply the optional patch if you want it so badly? I mean the entire point of having optional patches included is that people who want to play with them can. I don't see why it's any better for you if it's also required for everyone else.

I probably will enable it for my next game. I guess I'm just surprised that anyone considers a forced choice between productivity loss and tedious, every-turn micromanagement to be a feature rather than a bug, but I do agree that if there's any disagreement about a change, it should stay optional.

Out of curiosity, how do the AIs deal with micromanagement? Do they switch workers to farmers to minimize wasted production, and always set their Research to the minimum value needed to finish on a given turn? Hopefully they do, at least at Normal or higher difficulty.

[Seravy]

Out of curiosity, how do the AIs deal with micromanagement? Do they switch workers to farmers to minimize wasted production, and always set their Research to the minimum value needed to finish on a given turn? Hopefully they do, at least at Normal or higher difficulty.

Why would they deal with it?
They have 400% production on impossible, they build, like, anything in a turn? Close to it...

Farmers, oh that's funny. Well, I have a patch ready for 1.51 which actually enables the AI to reduce the number of farmers in their cities, and reduce their taxes. Since, they were, like, both a one way thing that the AI only knew when to increase (and was horrible even at that, seriously, increase taxes if income<3*turns, an elementary school kid comes up with better than that.).

[Elestan]

Out of curiosity, how do the AIs deal with micromanagement? Do they switch workers to farmers to minimize wasted production, and always set their Research to the minimum value needed to finish on a given turn? Hopefully they do, at least at Normal or higher difficulty.

Why would they deal with it?
They have 400% production on impossible, they build, like, anything in a turn? Close to it...

Well, I was mainly hoping to see them do it on Normal. Ideally, I want to play at a difficulty level where the AIs are playing as tough opponents, but without cheating. They couldn't do it in 1.31, but they're putting up a much better fight in 1.50.

Farmers, oh that's funny. Well, I have a patch ready for 1.51 which actually enables the AI to reduce the number of farmers in their cities, and reduce their taxes. Since, they were, like, both a one way thing that the AI only knew when to increase (and was horrible even at that, seriously, increase taxes if income<3*turns, an elementary school kid comes up with better than that.).

Cool! Looking forward to it!

[Tiltowait]

Okay, a question. Why don't you apply the optional patch if you want it so badly? I mean the entire point of having optional patches included is that people who want to play with them can. I don't see why it's any better for you if it's also required for everyone else.

I probably will enable it for my next game. I guess I'm just surprised that anyone considers a forced choice between productivity loss and tedious, every-turn micromanagement to be a feature rather than a bug, but I do agree that if there's any disagreement about a change, it should stay optional.

That's because the rest of us don't do this. The "productivity loss" is so small as to be negligible. It's not worth the cognitive load to mess around with stuff like this more than necessary.

You do know there's an in-game spreadsheet that lets you view your cities and change their production, right? Right click on the cities to get the production menu. You can also use X and some other key in the production view to rotate between your towns. This helps a lot with managing your cities.

[Elestan]

The "productivity loss" is so small as to be negligible. It's not worth the cognitive load to mess around with stuff like this more than necessary.

It's an average of half a turn's production per building. If we ballpark 25 buildings per city, that's over 12 full turns of production lost per game, across all cities. It's actually rather more than that, because you lose a full turn's production every time you buy a building, in addition to the purchase price. Plus the research lost every time you research a spell without rebalancing the sliders. I don't consider those losses 'negligible', though of course everyone can decide that for themselves. Personally, I take the view that games should automate these sorts of 'no-brainer' actions, rather than penalizing the efficiency of those who don't want to bother with them.

You do know there's an in-game spreadsheet that lets you view your cities and change their production, right? Right click on the cities to get the production menu. You can also use X and some other key in the production view to rotate between your towns. This helps a lot with managing your cities.

Yep, I know about those, though I can't find the 'previous city' counterpart to 'X'. You can't adjust farmers/workers from there, though.

[Elestan]

...and I actually just thought of another micromanagement reducing fix: I'm nearing the end of my current game with a lot of Life books, and as often happens with Stream of Life, my Gold is overflowing while my Mana is draining fast, so I'm having to do Alchemy repeatedly to balance them out. It would be great if Gold or Mana that overflows the 30000 limit would be automatically converted to the other with Alchemy.

[Nelphine]

an easy solution, every city past your eighth or so, simply buy every single building. Prevents gold from capping, and you never have to worry about lost production! (Also when you buy a building, the cost is reduced by one turns worth of production, so you aren't losing production there. )

I've been doing strategies that dont rely on normal troops recently so all my cities are set to minimum farmers all the time, regardless of losing production.

I do tweak my research settings though.

[Elestan]

when you buy a building, the cost is reduced by one turns worth of production, so you aren't losing production there.

I'm not seeing this. I just tried buying a Wizard's Guild (1000 Production) from scratch, and it cost me 4000 Gold and completely filled the Production counter, which means that the current turn's Production from that town is going to be completely wasted. This also matches what the wiki's Production page says.

[Nelphine]

Huh. Strange. OK nm!

[Elestan]

Found another minor bug today. I got the following warning message; I think this is the text from two different messages, concatenated.

Dispel your X or I shall break our Wizard Pact.If you continue to maintain your spell of X, I shall be forced to break our Wizard Pact.