NATURE Realm

[Nelphine]

Why don't colossus have long range?

[Bahgtru]

Are you sure the tower wasn't at the edge of the spell?

Confirmed

The reveal effect doesn't work on the outermost tiles as technically those are not scouted (they contain some black fog over them, just aren't entirely covered - honestly the implementation of the fog effect isn't very good in the game, having "half scouted" tiles that actually show you 90% of the tile...can't do much about that unfortunately.)

I disagree:

1. the surveyor tells you the land type
   
2. you can actually see 5% of unscouted land and guess its type, at least if it's sea or land, despite the surveyor not telling you what it is, so you see 100% of the tile we're discussing and not 90 as you claim
   

Example: I can tell that to the southeast of the tower there's land and that to the east and northeast of it there's sea, the surveyor tells me what it is so it's scouted, and if I had a scouting=1 troop to its left and it was a city I'd see its troops. So the tower's tile is definitely scouted.

[Seravy]

...how do I explain this better.

Basically this is what Earth Lore does :

"For each tile in target area do <Reveal tile as if a unit with scouting range 1 was on that tile> and if the tile contains a lair, <Reveal lair contents>"

To make it work correctly, we'd need to use "scouting range 0" but that's not a valid input for the reveal procedure as far as I can tell. There are two procedures, one that always does 1 range, and one that's variable but works by calling the 1 range procedure for each tile if the range is higher than 1. So doing 0 range through either is impossible. 0 range would by the way mean no "half covered" tiles, the fog would just cut off as a straight line. So even if it was possible, it would look ugly. Problem is, those half covered areas are needed to make the fog look "foggy", but they count as scouted which pretty much rules out the possibility to scout anything less than a 3x3 area at a time. 

The other way would be to have two loops, one for the target area, and one for the target area +1 in each direction, but that would be very difficult to do, way more than what it's worth.

[Bahgtru]

IDGI. What's half covered for you in the screenshot above? The tower or to its right?

But ok, weird programming, too difficult, gotcha on that.

[Nelphine]

In that picture the tower is half scouted. (That's why he mentioned at one point it's not really half scouted, it's more 90% scouted, which just makes it seem worse.)

[Nelphine]

Why don't colossus have long range?

Actually, also stone giants.

[Seravy]

No one ever asked I guess that's all? At least I don't remember this being a discussion before.
Considering they are low ammo units that do well in melee, moving forward before shooting to reduce distance should be a viable strategy. (They also have enough + To Hit to not really care about the range penalty.)

[Nelphine]

Lots of things at that tier can move faster than them *cough djinn* and it just seemed odd.

Both of them are boulders so I figured it would be the same as other Boulder units. Plus long range makes them much more similar to magic attack summons instead of being slightly worse.

I noticed because I have ravashack up very high level so they actually should have had the magic +7 (autohit) level. Seemed strange that djinn or storm giants or efreet could do it, but not nature.

Given the existence of magic immunity I'm not sure it actually matters from a balance point of view though. So this is mostly a ramble, not a true suggestion.

[teelaurila]

Not just magic immunity, but even more elemental armor/resist elements/bless. Though mostly this just means that boulders are the biggest threat to the human's late-game ranged heroes, apart from combat casting. The AI can rarely create heroes that are that resistant to ranged magic attacks.

[Seravy]

I realized Seismic Mastery looks at the effective cost of spells, not the base cost. Looking at the base cost would have strange repercussions (slider and artifact costs being ignored as they are not part of the base cost), so I'm unsure what to do with this.

(In particular, I'm summoning Gorgons and it triggers the spell due to Divine Order being in effect and raising the cost to 388)