Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[Seravy]

A question.

Which should be the preferred behavior?
1. If placing capitals fail, allow having less distance between wizards first, less max food next
OR
2. If placing capitals fail, allow having less max food first, less distance between wizard next
OR
3. Keep as is (max food required so low it cannot fail on that so lowering it isn't implemented seriously) - note, currently if everything else fails, the game drops required max food by one exactly once and that's it. Which is why I dropped the required max food to start at 6 to be safe - but if we make it able to drop it more than once, we can start at a higher amount.

Note this is separate from ores which are not yet placed on map at this time so cannot be considered. However it's possible to consider mountains and hills and forests as "good" tiles and raise their "food" value as though production was food, because it's not used for anything else.

Also, dropping the 6th nonexistent wizard from the loop seems to have shortened generation times fairly significantly on Tiny.

[Settemio]

My node placement is superior to yours! Behold!

Wow, cool. Is that a recent game? Or something you encountered long ago and are mentioning it now because of the other weird node placement?

[Nelphine]

I'd prefer option 1.

[Kaiku]

I think he still believes I have Evil Omens up.
http://puu.sh/yqM3U/12a265d7f4.png

[Seravy]

Giving it more thought I guess the best bet is to make the food and distance requirements drop simultaneously.

[Seravy]

Done improving the starting capital placement for the next version, did it like this :

-When rolling capital locations, the “neutral player” will no longer get one, as they don't need it and placing 1 more than needed reduces the chance of success.
-When rolling capital locations, the minimal required distance from other wizards is 16 (unchanged) but the minimal food is 18. If placement completely fails, both numbers are lowered by 1 simultanously, until they hit 6 tiles and 8 food.
-Swamps now correctly count as 0.5 food for starting capital placement.
-When the map is being generated, if all attempts to place capitals fail and all options are exhausted, the game will now re-roll all lairs to reposition them. The limit of not allowing cities adjacent to lairs and nodes is the cause for Tiny size maps where placing them is impossible and the game freezes, however, this limit is necessary otherwise AI wizards might find themselves walled in behind a lair with no tile for units to leave the city. With this change, map generation will always be successful, but if multiple lair rerolls are needed, it can be very slow, as each failed attempt takes about 10-20 seconds.

What this means :
-Usually, starting cities will have a decent max pop of 15+ unless playing on tiny maps where you can expect 11-15 most often
-Even in worst case, max pop won't go below 8 and distance below 6
-Map generation never freezes, even on Tiny (but it might take a long time to finish)
-Placement with extreme, unbalanced production bonus such as 70-100% is unlikely (as mountains produce 0 food)

I decided not to count production as "better quality terrain" because merging with food could result in placing a city on 0 max pop but 16 mountains which is obviously undesired. (more for the production bonus itself than the inability to grow in population, actually. 112% bonus production is IMBA for the beginning even is the city can't grow.)

The only remaining question is whether the changes are safe. I don't think the neutral player needs a fortress position (it's not like it comes with a city or is used in any way), and rerolling lairs should be safe as well but better test it in practice...

[Seravy]

PS : suggestions for numbers are welcome if the above are not good enough, for example we could have 8-16 tiles with 8-16 food, or 9-16 tiles with 7-14 food etc, as long as it's not overly restrictive.

[Nelphine]

For myself, I don't care that much about population in my capital - production on your capital is the most important city in the game.

Even having a 20% vs 60% can make a huge difference. (Especially combined with AI producfion and gold bonuses.)

I know you've said you don't like minimum production due to tiny games - can we put a minimum production in that scales by land size?

Also, for me, pop 18 is crazy high. I normally play large poor dry games, and can go entire games without seeing a pop 18 location.

[Seravy]

The problem with minimal production is not just Tiny, but the lack of a "production" procedure to call. Nothing cares about production in magic.exe so it's not calculated anywhere.
I can change the food procedure to treat production as though it was food but I can't add a new procedure of that size (there are some 700 different terrain tiles, sorting that out is not trivial.) so calculating production would be a difficult task.
That said, Tiny is a problem of its own with its lack of mountains.

I tried a few random maps, I usually got 12-15 minimal as 18 with 16 distance is too restrictive for most maps, even Huge. So that 18 is more like in theory. The realistic result seems to be around 12-15 with 10-13 fortress distance.

That said, if we start at a lower amount it finishes faster so that's a possibility to consider, more importantly the question is what should be the ratio of fortress distance to food. Like 12 food should be paired with, 10, 12 or 14 distance? What should the lowest allowed amount on them be? Should food drop by 1 or two for each dropped distance?

...maybe we should open a new thread for this?

[Arnuz]

Another option for the low production could be to transform useless tiles (tundra, desert) into forests, and ensuring that there's always at least 1 forest (to build the essential forest guild).

I'd also love it if forests generated 1 food/ 2% prod, and hills maybe a bit more prod, 0.5f/4%. A grassland plus a mountain would still beat a forest plus a hill but not so much as now. This would make map generation easier, by allowing more food.

In another thread you've motivated why coasts shouldn't be too useful, but again, now they're really useless and the best empires have often had seashore capitals. Again, this'd make map generation easier. It wouldn't make the game easier because AIs would have the same, no?