Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[BoomBoom]

I have been always wanting to learn and play this game, but the lack of multiplayer discourages me. This Caster of Magic mod would be fun if I can play with other people.

[Ozymandyus]

I have been always wanting to learn and play this game, but the lack of multiplayer discourages me. This Caster of Magic mod would be fun if I can play with other people.

If you're looking for multiplayer, you're really in the wrong place.  MoM and mods like CoM are all about a great single-player experience.  There are lots of other MP games out there, if that's your favorite flavor.

[Seravy]

Believe me it wouldn't be fun.
A typical game takes 10-30 hours to complete, single player (ofc less on low difficulty but that doesn't apply against human opponents). With 2 players that would be double this long at the very least - probably more because less predictable opponents = longer time spent thinking. Now, imagine the person you're playing against does not want to sit for 50 hours in front of their computer without breaks and has to sometimes eat, sleep or even go to work. Then imagine it's not 1 other person but 4 of them and you're looking at the possibility of spending a whole year playing. What's worse, there is no way to cut down wasted time - combat requires both involved parties to be present and combat can happen during any turn. So basically you'd spend an hour waiting for the other 4 people to end their turn but can't even go afk because you need to be there is any of them attacks you.
Multiplayer only works in faster games and usually utilizes various mechanics to save time, for example you don't have control over your battles or moves happen simultaneously or you have limited time for your moves or all three of these. All of them are bad for the strategy aspect of the game. 4X is not really a genre where multiplayer is a good idea in my opinion.

[Sapher]

I dont think it would be that long. To win a multiplayer game you dont need to kill all the AI opponents. You only need to kill 1 human opponent. Even if players start on different planes i would just rush opening a tower and try to conquer human fortress. I think it would take 2h of preparation from my side until the final battle took place. So 4h total for a game. Not that much compared to heroes 3.
Anyway single player games can also be competitive. For example dungeon crawl is single player game but it has a nice scoring system that encourages that. Realtime speedruns, turncount speedruns, winstreaks, max score and a lot of other challanges.
There are also sports like running, swimming e.t.c that are more like a single player game where you just compare results with other people

[Seravy]

Except...if we ever manage to fix game so rush is no longer the winning strategy... I mean, keep in mind you typically win games in one third-fourth of the number of turns actually intended by design. And later turns take a lot more time on top of that. Besides, unlike the AI, the human opponent will be able to stop you or rush back, they won't just go down with minimal resistance like an AI. They can even attack and destroy your stacks before they reach the fortress which the AI is literally unable to do.
That is, assuming they also WANT to play a rush game. If not, they might just ALT-F4 the moment they realize what you're doing. Because sadly, human players don't take the beating as patiently as AI players do

[BoomBoom]

Long stalemates are only an issue if the win condition is to totally annihilate another player, there needs to be an objective that simulates aggression:

Control points, a unit can capture a control point by walking to it, a player wins if he captures 65% of the control points in the map.

[Seravy]

That's a completely different game then. MoM/Com doesn't have that win condition but... this isn't about long stalemates, if games aren't long, higher tier spells and units will not ever be used. The game is designed to last long, if you somehow manage to win faster, you're missing out on most of the content. (which is the main reason I dislike rushing even on single player. The best and most fun part of the game is the time very rare spells start to become relevant, though even rares are a big deal.)
Anyway if you have to miss half the content and change core game rules for multiplayer to function, you can't really say you're playing the same game anymore. Sure, it's possible, but what's the point? Better to make a new game that's actually designed for multiplayer in the first place.

[Nelphine]

I agree mostly with seravy.

I don't agree that very rare by definition is the most fun, because I think the while idea is to enjoy the entire game, which is where the replayability comes in. Some games, that early very rare stage is the most fun, but sometimes it might be late very rare or uncommon or early rare.

But I completely agree about the basic concept that the game should be designed around playing it and getting use out of each tier.

How many games like master of orion 1 and 2, is the game decided far before keystone research. How many games like civilization do you just not ever see certain units used. How many games like Warcraft and StarCraft have to build in very major bunkering systems just to get people to play past early rush.


We don't want to ban early rushing - there areany people who love that style of gameplay - but it should come at a cost. For instance, ideally, you might give up a tier of rarity, and that should let you rush say 1/2 tier early. 

That means to defeat the first ai midway through common, the second ai midway through uncommon, the third midway through rate, and the fourth midway through very rare - which since you don't have very rare, should put you at a huge disadvantage.

If you go all in on rush, and completely eschew both rare and very rare, ideally, you'd rush 3/4-5/4 of a tier faster. But that still means the last ai shouldn't be defeated until near the junction between rare and very rare, and you don't even have rares, let alone very rares.


Now note, you should be able to give up economy instead of an actual tier. So if you still have access to very rare, you should be forced to give up enough economy that you're behind by about a tier (so when the enemy is in late very rare, you're barely completing your research of your first very rare spell.) In theory, this is what the choice of barbarians contributes to.



However, the only way I see to remotely achieve this is to a) do a lot more math on the scaling of every possible pick, and then try to identify by 'thirds of a tier''. 12 picks, 4 tiers, each pick is therefore 1/3 of a tier. Except you really have 13 picks due to race, so each pick is actually 4/13 of a tier, but that makes race VERY difficult to differentiate, so race should be the basis for economy instead, and considered separately. Maybe then each pick is 1/3 of a tier for spell power, and 1/4 of a tier for economy, and race is a full tier of economy.

But b) rush picks, including things like barbarian, need to be far more costly. To use barbarian as my continuing example, if race is worth an entire of economy, then barbarian would give effectively zero economy BUT would only boost you by half a tier in rushing. 

Or choosing 3 rush retorts (granting 1 tier of spell power) only grants 1/2 a tier of rush capability.

And then c) choosing to maximize rush, say barbarian plus 6 rush retort picks, would lose 2 tiers of spell power and would lose 2.5 tiers of spell economy, putting them at starting to research late uncommons like prayer, when the AI is already using stacks of very rares), BUT would only be worth 3/4-5/4 of a tier in power.

Note that this means rush picks not only have to avoid synergy, they in fact need to have negative synergy and actively be worse if you've already chosen some rush picks.


But that means completely redoing picks, economy, and unit balance, including how treasure and neutrals influence that. Probably not worth doing. Which means probably simply living with rush, and accepting that's the best way to have a good win ratio.

[Seravy]

one pretty large problem with that math approach is people can and will use non-rush picks for rushing. None of the retorts are really "rush" retorts, some are better for it, some worse, but all of them work both late and early game.
Like Chaneller and Runemaster, both of which decidedly late game retorts with minor early benefits for 2 picks. In theory these should be the worst possible picks for Rush, in practice, Chaneller turned out to be one of the best, and Runemaster is also quite decent still, even despite the fact we nerfed curse dispelling.

[Nelphine]

Absolutely. That's why I said it would require a complete revamp. It would literally require redoing everything, specifically with rush in mind.