Experimental version

[Seravy]

"ehhhh people actually play 4 books? That's not fun at all...it's one thing to do that for "let's try to beat impossible" games but for usual games, nah"

There's no such thing as a "let's try to beat impossible" games. There's also no such thing as usual games. Do you intentionally handicap yourself when creating your wizard? You're welcome to do so (I'm also fond of challenge setups), but you should consider the norm to be when the player tries to perform as strongly as possible.

Well, I'm playing to have fun. If I know in advance I have a 100% chance to win, that's not fun, and 5-6 retort wizards do that on extreme which is the difficulty level I normally play at. So I don't play those there and leave it for Impossible...

However, Impossible is for an additional level of challenge - not something I play often nowadays. Considering how much the game changes everyday, I see no reason to go for the highest difficulty right now - I need to adjust myself to the changes before doing that, not to mention the constant tweaking of the AI resource numbers. The majority of people play Normal to Extreme, so testing those is priority.

I do believe people play at their strongest - but for an average player that "strongest" is not the same as my "strongest". Look at Hadriex - he usually beats Hard with strong wizards and consistently loses on Extreme. And he is a veteran with 20 years of MoM experience. The other guy who made let's play videos took 3 games to win one on Normal and that was before any of the big AI upgrades.

I like the changes, but at first glance they look unbalanced. I think I can still crack lairs with the new sprites as effectively as before, and I think low book strategies remain as potent as before. But I appreciate the structure of the changes, that's definitely in the right direction.

I don't normally do experimental versions but I also have my doubts about these particular changes which is why I did it now. If things don't work out, it's easy to restore the original system (or sprites) without having to write new code, merely by replacing the numbers.

[Catwalk]

As guessed, the sprite strategy still works. It's slightly less effective against great wyrms, phantom beasts and earth elementals, a lot more effective against nagas, phantom warriors and war bears. It's also a lot more effective for striking at enemy wizards, sprites both do more damage and can absorb more damage.

If I have the time I'll put up a game report. I don't think I'll have much time for MoM in the coming months, I'm working long hours and spending a lot of time on my puppy as well as pool practice.

[Catwalk]

After beating 2 war bears and getting 200 gold, the game crashed:


http://www.filedropper.com/save9

The bug did not happen when I reloaded and fought the battle again.

[Catwalk]

My halfling spearmen are corrupted:

http://www.filedropper.com/save9_1

They went back to normal when I reloaded.

[Catwalk]

And two turns later the game crashed straight to desktop without warning.

[Catwalk]

Now my sprites are busy building roads, neat to have the Construction ability

[Seravy]

This doesn't sound good.
I've reuploaded Experimental 1, could you try and see if you have similar problems in that too? If not we can at least know the source of the problem is in the last update which limits the amount of code I have to check.

[Catwalk]

Checking with the new version.

[Catwalk]

No bugs at first glance, but only played 15 turns or so.

Sprites are absolute monsters in this version, much stronger for taking neutral cities fast and more potent against many early lairs. I don't think this version impairs my strategy much, if anything.

[Nelphine]

Their offense was increased a huge amount on anything with more than 1 figure, so that isn't terribly surprising.