Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[Seravy]

Yeah ships are still a pain even with all the improvements. We can't do anything about that unless we somehow add a "load/unload" function but that's way beyond what we can do in a hex editor. As long as the game has to guess which units need to move with the ship and which don't, it'll always have cases where it guesses wrong.

Ships always carrying units as an implicit definition of what's being carried is actually correct when the ship is on the sea and all units are land bound. But in all other cases, without some interface to define which units are boarding the ship and which do not that can be activated by the user, it's impossible to make it always work correctly - it would require actual mind reading powers to pull it off.

[Nelphine]

Sigh agreed.

Wish we could have a third 'mode' for units when a ship is in the stack - so you'd have 'selected' and 'unselected' and 'not following the ship' which is only available to units that can survive in the square the ship is in.

Actually, ideally, 'unselected' would do that, because right now, selecting or unselecting a unit when the ship is in the stack does nothing.

No never mind, it has to be a third mode because of units that run out of movement.

But even if that were possible, I can't think of a way to actually tell the human about it, except to put up a pop up each time you go to move a ship and some units in the stack have that mode selected. (Optional feature to turn off the pop up)

And that still won't help patrolled units from being left behind at cities (pop up every time an auto moving ship attempts to leave a city when it has patrolled units on board?)

[Nelphine]

I think I missed an update.

If you kill a ship while adjacent to land, the units on the ship have a chance to flee onto the land? (I say chance because I just killed a trireme with 2 magicians and.. a pikemen I think - and after the battle the 2 magicians were on land as if they had fled. This will actually cause me to lose my city, because the magicians couldn't have attacked from the ship, but now they are already on land.)

I hope this is intentional, as I think it's a good change.

[Seravy]

Yes, while not intentional that is the side effect of a fleeing bug fix from years ago. It'll stay.
Units "not involved" in the battle, are treated as fleeing, instead of the buggy original where they had a 100% chance to die even if your ship successfully fled the battle.

[Nelphine]

and, presumably that's then modified by the speed of the attacking units as per normal fleeing?

[Seravy]

Yes, exactly.

[Nelphine]

Explains why I don't see it much. I usually use endurance warships to attack AI ships

[Nelphine]

Did I miss a change? Why does my enemy (chaos/death) have a ghoul running around with 7 melee strength (as seen by right clicking on the overland map)? When I go into combat, the ghoul has flame blade (and wraith form) cast on it?

Unfortunately, I have no idea how long this ghoul has existed. It was that way as soon as it came into sight range on my continent. Given it's 1409 (or is it 1410 now?), it's possible it's been around for years. So it would be very difficult to identify which turn this happened on.

[Nelphine]

Nodes countering black prayer 4 times in a row (because it costs 16 mana? and why does my spellbook from hitting F3 overland say it should be 11 mana?) sucks. If the reduced cost IS the reason, Aether Flux is horrible for node combats. And heroes who don't get the discount become even more powerful.. because they can at least successfully cast the spell.

[Seravy]

Yes, AEther Flux is horrible for node combat.
Flame Blade on a ghoul shouldn't be possible - it seems we didn't update the spell ID for AI overland targeting - it's still applying the effect on the uncommon spell slot which now has Mystic Surge in it. Will be fixed in the next version.