Game mechanics

[Seravy]

How would not being able to ATTACK make you lose things. Just move the ship onto the tile you want to defend. If the enemy is already behind your army and you can only reach them, not the city, too bad, they outsmarted you. Should have kept a garrison or at least, the defending army closer to the cities it was trying to protect. In fact if you let TWO enemy armies get behind your front lines, so you can't avoid having a unit blocking your ship, being able to get through the tile blocked by an enemy is weird in the first place.

I believe we are having a problem with intercepting enemy stacks being too effective anyway, I don't see this as a problem, not any more than being unable to attack them because the movement types in my stack add up in weird ways and the units can only reach that tile separately, moving on different paths, not if moved together or any of the other weird movement interations.

[Nelphine]

Enemy has a pile of stacks around, your ship flies through, takes your node garrison away. Lost node.

You have a stack of units patrolled on your ship, in myrror, and a road to the city that's about to be attacked. You move the ship the whole way, and it autopaths through another city, and the whole patrolled stack stays in that city, your ship finishes the move, and now you can't get your stack to the city under attack. You lose the city.

Etc

No, not the exact issue that started this discussion, but all issues based on how ship movement works. Therefore, if it's already causing these problems, anything that makes this worse is getting into the area of unacceptable gameplay issues.

And the worse thing is when you need to split your stack to attack, which a ground force can do just fine, your proposal would prevent a ship stack from doing that even though the units have not yet fought that turn. This inconsistency is too much.

[Seravy]

The unit that shouldn't be able to attack getting carried into battle is a much larger inconsistency and problem than the same unit not being able to disembark the ship. Which is why I'm offering to fix it, otherwise I wouldn't bother.
But I even offered a way that allows the battle without the illegal unit participating. That has zero inconsistencies. You can move through your tile with the stopped unit, fight your battle and kill the enemy.
So players who don't pay attention and didn't save and lose the combat lose additional units? Too bad, next time you learn to save or at least learn to use the autosave feature. That is nowhere near enough of a reason to leave a BUG and inconsistency in the game. To begin with, using an advanced feature like flying ships assumes the player knows what they are doing.
So that only really leaves the case when you go into the battle expecting to lose, only to reduce the enemy stack size. In this case you lose more units. Too bad, but sacrificing a flying ship for that purpose is a bad strategy to begin with. You should have cheaper units for that purpose, spearmen, cavalry, obsolete summons, whatever.

[Nelphine]

It's a larger inconsistency, but it's exactly the same class of inconsistency as losing the node or moving the wrong units. Developing further inconsistencies to avoid any particular one just creates more inconsistencies, and it begs the question: why aren't you simply solving the entire mechanic that creates all the inconsistencies in the first place?

Asking players to save after/before every move is exactly what we don't want. We call it savescumming for a reason, and whether you do it to cast a different spell in combat, move a unit one tile less, or avoid your overland unit using the autopath feature the game provides (and therefore implies is the right and expected way to play) it's still the same thing. You're using save/load to avoid your mistakes. And even if it's not as abusive as changing the number generator, it's still unfun gameplay to expect people to save every move in case the game rules don't sense to them.

Using a feature like wraithform ships requires 1 common death spell. It isn't beyond what we would expect someone at expert level to play, which is the difficulty we balance around.

And I've never suggested a case where you expect the stack to lose.

[Seravy]

I actually want to encourage using save/load to avoid BUGs. I'm neutral on loading back misclicks, but I see no problem with it. This isn't a fighting game where the UI/Input is a relevant game mechanic, it's up to you if you want to lose the game because you handle your mouse poorly or not. You outright are forced to load back after crashes (fortunately they are rare nowadays, but you can't be paranoid enough.)
So yes, I encourage saving often. Loading back without any of the above, I don't.

It's a larger inconsistency, but it's exactly the same class of inconsistency

That's a very roundabout way of admitting it actually improves the game because it reduces the inconsistency.

and it begs the question: why aren't you simply solving the entire mechanic that creates all the inconsistencies in the first place?

I don't have the source code. Provide me the source code and I'll add fancy "load" and "unload" buttons which is the only way to fix the mechanic. 
...I don't understand why you are even asking this unless you are actually trying to piss me off. You know the answer. We had this discussion recently in the main release thread.

And I've never suggested a case where you expect the stack to lose.

But if you win the battle, "not involved" units don't die, so the feature does absolutely nothing harmful. It ONLY makes a difference if you lose, so that's the only possible basis for claiming the feature has flaws.

[Juffos]

You don't have to play ironman in a game with bugs and crashes - honestman is enough. I try my best not to reload even from mistakes caused by complacency, such as mistakenly attacking a neutral AI. I wish the game had a warning message when moving into a stack you're currently not at war with, like what happens with a wizard pact. A lone nightblade in the middle of nowhere causing a war is extremely frustrating.

[Nelphine]

But if you win the battle, "not involved" units don't die, so the feature does absolutely nothing harmful. It ONLY makes a difference if you lose, so that's the only possible basis for claiming the feature has flaws.

Except you'll see all the units moving with the ship, and then in combat.. only some of the units will fight. But the ones that don't fight still die if you lose. And particularly if some of your units are patrolled, and some are simply done, there won't necessarily be anything intuitive to explain which ones do which. That's the inconsistency here.

Yes I'm aware we had the discussion recently in the main thread. We still both disagree. You're suggesting making (to me) the problem of ship movement worse. I would like to do anything to stop that, because I already consider ship movement extremely problematical, in terms of gameplay. At this point, I consider anything to do with ship movement balance, basically not worth worrying about, because the gameplay is that bad. So anything that will make the ship movement more inconsistent, no matter how small, even if it made the game magically one hundred percent perfectly balanced, just isn't worth it. And if you somehow gave all ships the ability to fight 4 battles per turn, but the gameplay was magically one hundred percent intuitive.. I would accept that.

Basic movement and ability to control your units and have them do what you want is the fundamental block of the game, and balance isn't worth damaging that fundamental gameplay.

[Seravy]

and balance isn't worth damaging that fundamental gameplay.

But you've just admitted in the previous post that this improves it because it removes a larger problem and adds a smaller one.
This isn't about balance - it's about players having the option of taking moves that are illegal according to the game rules vs being unable to take moves that would be legal vs neither of the two but risking accidental loss of units.

The first is very bad - players will usually not reload after such a move and in worst case intentionally abuse it or not realize they are cheating. Fortunately this isn't multiplayer, but that's still the greatest problem - the player will overrate their own skill and if they post videos they might get told they aren't playing fair and their victory means nothing. Also, such videos will be less useful for trying to judge game balance because this is the kind of thing that can severely affect the outcome of the game. But ultimately, a UI that allows illegal moves is a bad UI.

Not being able to take a move that's legal is also horrible - but the scenario of moving a ship through an already done stack is rare, and this isn't chess where every single move is critical. If your forces are so thin in your own territory that you can't kill an enemy stack before it razes your city if you have to take an additional step to avoid picking up the unit with the ship, something is wrong with that strategy anyway - if that enemy appears a single tile further, you can't defend against it. As it's very rare and only applies to bad strategies, it becomes a lesser evil compared to the first in my opinion, but this is subjective. Needless to say an UI that doesn't allow legal moves is a bad UI as well.

Finally, the third case is something you can fix simply by reloading after the bad move. This isn't true for the first two (on the first you could but won't, on the second, save/loading doesn't help.), making this option the best.

At least that's my opinion.

[Nelphine]

I'm actively going to not respond any further. You know my opinion (attacking twice is bad balance, but not bad gameplay - it reacts the same every time you do it. Moving a stack from tile a to tile b and having a radically different result - different units move or different units fight or different units die - than moving from tile c to tile d, is a major gameplay concern). I hope other people will voice their opinions.

[Seravy]

Something different. If I read the existing game code well, having "2" instead of "1" in the prisoner byte in the lair data has the same effect as the Summon Champion spell.

So regardless of the turn limit feature, it's possible to have "contains champion" as a specific treasure type, for a higher budget, if we want that. Don't know if we do though, as that devalues the summon champion spell and having fame significantly. If we do, it probably should be something extremely rare, like 0-2 of them per map for 2000 treasure points. The downside is, obviously, if you didn't want a champion then it wasted 2000 gold of potential treasure, also turn limits can be a problem if it's found before the lowest turn restriction among all champions. (in this case you'd likely get a normal hero.)