Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[Seravy]

How do you create the source code?  Based on your knowledge of the game mechanics, you write it from scratch?

Pretty much yes.

[mercy]

How do you create the source code?  Based on your knowledge of the game mechanics, you write it from scratch?

Pretty much yes.

Then you could raise the 9 number unit limit arbitrarily. However this is still impossible, since the COM2 simply must be based on MOM logic, otherwise you could call the new game: War of the Ducks.  Its impossible to recreate the thinking processes of the original developers, which made MOM a classic and created this cult following.

[massone]

Can you lift the 9 units limit on a square? Make it 12 or something? So that I can have 12 units in my army when attacking a location? Like raise to limit to 12 and then allow to summon more creatures when in battle raising the limit to 16 MAX including the combat summons.

I can but there is no room on the UI for another 3 units.
It also makes AOE spells even more powerful, as well as strategies that rely on a single unkillable unit (as it can then take out 12 enemies in one go instead of 9).
As larger stacks are more effective, allowing larger stacks only means you need that many more units to do anything.
It messes up the pacing of the game - players, including the AI will need to produce an additional 3 units for their garrisons and most likely also for the offensive stacks.
I considered this a long time ago but I believe it would make the game (much) worse.

Here's an idea: what about mid-battle reinforcements? At the beginning of the battle, a popup lets the wizard select the starting 9 units, and at any point after units die, there's an option somewhere to deploy the reinforcements, which appear from the upper left corner (defender), city square (town defense), or lower right corner (attacker).

This doesn't make AOE spells more powerful, and if the wizard's undeployed troops are considered to "retreat" if they remain undeployed the whole time, it doesn't let the unkillable unit take out more than 9 units per turn.

Well, in open field battles I don't care that much either way, but I would like the towns to be more able to add more fortifications and units, and the same with city attackers.

Or alternatively, instead of having more than 9 on one square, allow reinforcements from adjacent squares to join the battle.

Still, the first version is preferable. I dislike the way that fortresses can be "sniped" because you can attack more than once per turn with different stacks, but the garrisoned units can't replenish themselves because of the way the turn system works.

[Seravy]

More units per combat doesn't change anything except that everyone has to produce more units.
The fortress still gets sniped, just not by 3 stacks of 9 units vs 9 defenders but 3 stacks of 12 vs 12 defenders. No difference.
Reinforcements  is the same thing except for the AOE issue. It still means more units are necessary to defend (or conquer) a town.

Still, the first version is preferable. I dislike the way that fortresses can be "sniped" because you can attack more than once per turn with different stacks, but the garrisoned units can't replenish themselves because of the way the turn system works.

In this case only the defender should be allowed to get reinforcements. Not that it helps any - players will simply kill all nearby units first then attack the fortress.
However this really is completely useless for anything but the AI garrisoning their fortress cities.
Other city garrisons are almost never maxed out - they have 9 units but not 9 of the best unit available for the player or AI. No one defends anything but their fortress with 9 Sky Drakes - the maintenance would not be worth it. More normal units would make little difference, and garrison space is not the limiting factor for the better units - casting skill and maintenance are.

But if it only matters for the fortress - nothing else is really worth more than one stack of your best available units, neither to defend nor attack - then it should be a game mechanic that helps defending a fortress. We already have one : the lightning. However it isn't powerful enough to be able to solve the problem of multiple stacks attacking. Problem is, something that is powerful enough to cancel out the strength of multiple full stacks of good units attacking is obviously too powerful, so we can't really do that either.

The only solution I can think of would be "all units defending a wizard's fortress can regenerate" but that would feel weird if you aren't playing a Nature wizard.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

Massone's suggestion of mid-battle reinforcements could be limited to cities, or even to just the capitol. It does make sense that population centers would have potential reinforcements, even if they're limited to fresh ordinary troops. I've always felt that taking cities was a bit too easy. Taking a city should be a significant undertaking, not just 'invest in troops and spells until you reach the point where you can take a city per turn without losses'. Taking a fortress should require multiple stacks, and maybe multiple turns. Extra reinforcements for the AI might help balance their worse tactical abilities.

I think reinforcements for attackers would be a bad idea. Just one more thing for human players to exploit.

[Seravy]

So where would these reinforcements come from?
-nearby map tiles : bad, the enemy can kill them first.
-stationed in the city : bad, everyone needs to build and maintain even larger garrisons, pacing suffers
-produce instantly from gold : this could work but the AI won't be able to judge when buying a unit changes the battle and when it's wasted money because they are guaranteed to win/lose anyway. So it'll turn into an exploit of forcing the AI to spend all their gold on reinforcements.

Where would the units appear?
Inside the city there are only 2 unused tile remaining, so more than 2 units would need to start outside the city walls.

I don't see a good solution to these problems.

If we want to make cities harder to conquer - do we? In a 13 wizard game on the "Maximal" map size, players will likely be unable to even conquer half of the first plane due to the sheer size of the map! - then improving existing city fortification mechanics (Walls, fortress lightning) or adding more (maybe towers could shoot arrows at enemies) is the correct solution.

Finally, consider that cities can no longer be razed (or at least not instantly), so quickly conquering one city each turn with an unkillable stack will only result in losing all those cities soon afterwards because you can't afford garrisoning that many new cities. That play only damages the person you attacked first, while making whoever ends up with the cities afterwards stronger.

For this reason, if we do improve city fortifications than they need to get destroyed after the city changes owner, and have to be very expensive to rebuild.

[mercy]

Respawning Monster Lairs:

Each time when a rampaging monsters group finished rampaging and they "go away", they could establish a Lair, a Temple or a Tower nearby. Any location that will have their group concentrated in these newly created locations now.
If the player waited out in his well fortified city for the rampaging monsters to go away, then on higher difficulties, these now retired 'rampaging monsters' and new groups of them coming repeatedly could effectively fill up the surrounding area with newly created lairs..
Maybe if strong city garrisons are present the Rampaging-AI might decide its monsters won't attack the cities for some reason.. just create a lair nearby. Effectively infesting the region with increased monster presence. Then the player, coming out of his city after a rampage, now might even have to tip-toe around newly created Lairs, Burrows or similar monster caves, because so many rampaging groups were NOT massacred, but were allowed to rampage, then retire.

This should create lots of respawn opportunities for lairs, so both worlds should nicely fill up again with monster-locations, lairs, temples, etc...  And we would have the opportunity to loot these for prisoners, spells and artifacts again and again.  Maybe higher level lairs should get created as the years go on...  especially on higher difficulty levels.

[massone]

So where would these reinforcements come from?
-nearby map tiles : bad, the enemy can kill them first.
-stationed in the city : bad, everyone needs to build and maintain even larger garrisons, pacing suffers
-produce instantly from gold : this could work but the AI won't be able to judge when buying a unit changes the battle and when it's wasted money because they are guaranteed to win/lose anyway. So it'll turn into an exploit of forcing the AI to spend all their gold on reinforcements.

Where would the units appear?
Inside the city there are only 2 unused tile remaining, so more than 2 units would need to start outside the city walls.

I don't see a good solution to these problems.

If we want to make cities harder to conquer - do we? In a 13 wizard game on the "Maximal" map size, players will likely be unable to even conquer half of the first plane due to the sheer size of the map! - then improving existing city fortification mechanics (Walls, fortress lightning) or adding more (maybe towers could shoot arrows at enemies) is the correct solution.

Finally, consider that cities can no longer be razed (or at least not instantly), so quickly conquering one city each turn with an unkillable stack will only result in losing all those cities soon afterwards because you can't afford garrisoning that many new cities. That play only damages the person you attacked first, while making whoever ends up with the cities afterwards stronger.

For this reason, if we do improve city fortifications than they need to get destroyed after the city changes owner, and have to be very expensive to rebuild.

I don't think having more than 9 units garrisoned in cities is a bad thing. As you said in your previous post, it's generally not worthwhile to garrison anything except the Fortress with maxed out best troops. This means that the extra units are usually weaker ones--normal units especially, and units do have an upkeep so the choice to garrison more will cost the wizard a weaker field army. It's useful precisely because this allows wizards to make up for lack of top quality units with more quantity--at least for defensive purposes. If an unkillable unit can kill all of them anyway, then there isn't anything wrong with this feature, it's just that the difference between the wizards' units was too large. This mechanic only plays a role when more quantity actually makes a difference, and provides a sort of counter against AOE attacks.

Another thing is ammo. How about making all ranged troop defenders have unlimited ammo within city squares? They can resupply from the city.

I don't follow the logic about destroying city fortifications. Wasn't the purpose of preventing razing so that players cannot quickly move on and sweep through? If city fortifications are destroyed, it's not that much different from razing the city entirely, since you can't protect it, it might as well not be yours. It also makes it too easy to reclaim the city once lost--but pointlessly so because they can't keep it either without the fortifications. It makes more sense to destroy the population and other economy buildings, and keep the fortifications, because you can't control your troops looting/pillaging, but the whole point of capturing specific locations is to have fortifications to project power from. That was the reason castles played a large role in controlling territory historically.

However, the best way to deal with this is unrest and revolts. In general, the problem with conquest and razing now is that conquest is more better than building your own settlement even with racial unrest because the economy buildings aren't affected, while razing lets your army move too quickly. In real life, conquered territories were not so easily managed because of unrest and rebellions. In this game unrest doesn't mean much, but it should. The unhappy population should actively attack the garrisoned troops and attempt to defect back if they win, or turn neutral. Razing in real life is very effective, as the Mongols were famous for. However, it makes everyone hate you, not just the victims, but everyone that hears about it. The base game used fame decreases to mimic this, but fame doesn't actually mean much. It would make more sense to turn this into a mechanic that drastically decreases both population and unrest, but gives diplomatic penalties and causes your own good-aligned troops/heroes to desert.

[Seravy]

This should create lots of respawn opportunities for lairs, so both worlds should nicely fill up again with monster-locations, lairs, temples, etc... And we would have the opportunity to loot these for prisoners, spells and artifacts again and again.

...except, not really. The lairs created by rampaging monsters have the gold looted from the destroyed city and nothing else. Unlimited respawning lairs with good treasure breaks game balance so that's not an option.

This means that the extra units are usually weaker ones--normal units especially, and units do have an upkeep so the choice to garrison more will cost the wizard a weaker field army.

Exactly. AIs always max the number of units in garrisons and players except them to, which means AIs will always have a weaker field army and that army gets deployed later. As AIs generally win through "strength in numbers" especially on medium difficulty levels, that actually matters even if the units aren't so great.

Another thing is ammo. How about making all ranged troop defenders have unlimited ammo within city squares? They can resupply from the city.

That is a good idea. Unfortunately, it doesn't help melee garrisons at all, so I think the towers shooting the enemy would work better, although that has the downside of improving defenses without having units.

Wasn't the purpose of preventing razing so that players cannot quickly move on and sweep through? If city fortifications are destroyed, it's not that much different from razing the city entirely, since you can't protect it, it might as well not be yours.

The premise is correct, the conclusion is not. If city fortrifications are destroyed, the player has to keep their stack in the city until they are rebuilt, slowing down the expansion. Or they can keep going in which case, "might as well be not yours" which isn't the same as razing it : it's the same as if it was still an enemy city. Big difference. Razing everything wins the game. Enemies reclaiming the cities loses it.
If fortifications are not destroyed, the stack can keep going : the fortrifications will defend the city along the minimal 1-2 units you bought and spells you cast in battle. So then the "raze and go" strategy will still work except without the razing part.

[zitro1987]

Would it be possible for city walls 4 corners to have the graphics of an archer or non-race specific ballista and shoot each turn until that section of the wall is destroyed? It will give more meaning to disrupt, wall crushers, and ranged wall damagers and will make city attacks more of a feeling of a siege battle. The game design seems compatible with this

The up-to 4 attacks could be a fixed weak attack or dependent on city size. City walls will cost 150. Number of shots could be limited to 10 (or unlimited)
-Strength 6 physical attacks (assuming 0.3 to hit). Up to four 1.8 before shields
-Strength 3 + 1/4 city pop, maximizing at 9 (or 2.7) before shields
-higher strength but with range penalties (would be more interested in hitting nearby melee than faraway archers/mages)


To expand the previous idea is a city building ‘fortess’ that is built after city walls and costs 300 or more.

Fortress: strength 12 or 5+1/2 pop in four corners
City walls: nothing or just 1 front corner only
This would require some rebalancing of wallcrushers, disrupt