1.51 release candidate!

[Seravy]

I recommend doing the opposite, take the 1.51 patch and unapply the treasure patches from it.

Like this :

REVERSE M00x.txt Reverse.txt
FILESET magic.exe Reverse.txt


Runtime error 2 is File Not Found. M031AI is actually M031FEAT.

This reminds me, I was supposed to undo some of the treasure changes myself...but I don't remember which ones.

Also, treasure patches are in magic.exe, you don't need to change wizards.exe for that.

Insect.txt is the difference between 1.31 and 1.40n so you don't need it if you use 1.40n files.

PS : Reverse.exe is in the CoM tool folder, I should add it to the 1.51 zip as well.

[Seravy]

RC4 is up for download!

-Fixes swamps not producing food
-All the diplomacy improvements in the latest CoM.

Please test and let me know if you like the new diplomacy better or the old better. Making it optional is possible, if the old version was better. 
The new diplomacy includes these changes :

; -Changed the Militarist/Expansionist war declaration formula. If Military Modifier*(Current turn/150) + Visible Relation + Hidden Relation + Personality Modifier <= -65 then move towards war.
; -Changed the amount of gold needed to offer a gold tribute to AI wizards. The new formula is (Turn*8)*(1+Max(0,0.25*(Target's Gold in treasury/(Turn*8))) for the highest offer. The amount is no longer rounded to the nearest 25.
; -The highest amount of visible relation without an Alliance is now 79 instead of 65.
; -The Difficulty modifier is removed from the human player to AI "Propose Treaty" formulas, and replaced by a constant -15 (halfway between Normal and Hard).
; -The minimal amount of relation required for the AI to even consider a Wizard's Pact instead of refusing outright is reduced from +10 to 0.
; -The minimal amount of relation required for the AI to even consider an Alliance instead of refusing outright is reduced from +50 to +40.
; -The formula for the AI to offer a treaty or trade now has "-Difficulty*10" added to it, but checks for a 20 lower value.
; -Chanced the end-of-turn Peace Interest change rules. Peace Interest now changes by +Personality+15-10*Average Own and Allied army strength/Average everyone else Army strength, where "everyone else" includes all other players who are not allies, but players are war with the the player whose variable is being adjusted are considered three times. "Personality" is 0 for Maniacal and 5 for Peaceful, with other personalities being in between in increasing order of peacefulness.
; -In the AI to AI diplomacy formula, the part random(3-9)*Difficulty, is changed to random(2-5)*Difficulty. This reduces the difficulty level's influence from 0-36 points to 0-20 points.
; -Losing a city in combat causes the attacker to lose 40 Peace Interest towards the defender.
; -Fixed bug : Successful attack against a city sets Peace Interest of the defender to -200.
; -Ruthless personality modifier changed to +10, Aggressive changed to +20, Peaceful to +65.
; - Threaten now has the outcome "I will withdraw my troops" implemented
; - Successful Threaten now sets hostility to zero and sets peace duration to both sides of the variable correctly
; - Minimum value of units destroyed to trigger "thanks for killing my enemies" is now 22, chance to trigger is 12%. (was 30 and 25%)
; The personality modifier of Chaotic wizards changes to RND(50)+1 each turn and when the game is loaded.

The purpose of these diplomacy changes is to make the game less hostile and reduce the chance of everyone being at war with the player at once.

[Elestan]

Looking at my notes on things left to do, I found this :

1.51, remove AI starting relation change.

So yea, question, do we want to make this optional instead of mandatory? I remember someone asked for that.

I think that was me.  Yes, I would prefer that it be optional; it makes it so that evil necromancers can cooperate as easily as good ones, and that seems like a pretty big thematic change that shouldn't be in a bugfix patch.  I do think that the size of the modifier is so large that it could be considered a bug, though, and wouldn't mind seeing it reduced.  Maybe just change the relation multiplier for Death books from -3 to -1, and the multiplier for Life books from +2 to +1?  That would be a pretty easy change (I think) that would fix the bug without changing the theme.

I'll also put in a plug for fixing one of my biggest frustrations:  Have you ever had 11 or 12 books of one color, but then found an off-color retort, thereby screwing your chances of ever getting to 13 books of your specialty?  I wish that the limit on total books could be raised, while keeping the limit for any single color at 13.

[Seravy]

Looking at my notes on things left to do, I found this :

1.51, remove AI starting relation change.

So yea, question, do we want to make this optional instead of mandatory? I remember someone asked for that.

I think that was me.  Yes, I would prefer that it be optional; it makes it so that evil necromancers can cooperate as easily as good ones, and that seems like a pretty big thematic change that shouldn't be in a bugfix patch.  I do think that the size of the modifier is so large that it could be considered a bug, though, and wouldn't mind seeing it reduced.  Maybe just change the relation multiplier for Death books from -3 to -1, and the multiplier for Life books from +2 to +1?  That would be a pretty easy change (I think) that would fix the bug without changing the theme.

I'll also put in a plug for fixing one of my biggest frustrations:  Have you ever had 11 or 12 books of one color, but then found an off-color retort, thereby screwing your chances of ever getting to 13 books of your specialty?  I wish that the limit on total books could be raised, while keeping the limit for any single color at 13.

Changing the number of books is easy...but keeping 13/color takes extra work. To be honest I don't feel we need to encourage casting spells for 0 mana... (Yes I think the -10% per book modifier is way too broken)

About the starting relation, meanwhile I also got this suggestion :
-keep the CoM starting relation system, but
-Life and Death should be worth double of Chaos/Nature on the alignment scale
-Shared alignment bonus should be higher if the alignment is positive than if it's negative, otherwise (if it's a penalty) no change

It's a bit complicated though, it's easier to just roll back to the original and halve parts or the entire formula because the numbers really are pretty crazy like you say. It's not unplayable though, but it would be like, half the world is automatically an enemy the other half ally kinda system. (unless you play Death, then everyone is an enemy lol)

[Peter3]

RC4 won't let me start a game, after character creation and "building the worlds", the sound clicks and the screen remains black. No problems with RC3. I am running the game with DosBox.

[nevill]

Same here. Something got broken, and RC4 does not start the game proper.

[Zepu]

I had the same problem. I tried applying manually the new patches that are included in RC4 ( that is W606, W607, W608, W609, W610, W611) to RC3 one by one and I have determined that W610 is the one that causes the problem, at least that's what I think.

[Seravy]

I had the same problem. I tried applying manually the new patches that are included in RC4 ( that is W606, W607, W608, W609, W610, W611) to RC3 one by one and I have determined that W610 is the one that causes the problem, at least that's what I think.

Cool, thanks, I'll try to check it out today.

...confirmed, I found two incorrect bytes in that file, no idea how that happened. I'm going to fix that, and add the patches that have been piling up for RC5.

[Seravy]

RC5 is up, please test!

[Peter3]

RC5 is up, please test!

Works, thank you!