Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[zitro1987]

I floated in post #170 the idea of making the city wall corners have ballistas on top (aesthetic) shooting weak ranged attacks once a turn. This adds more strategy to wallcrushers and disrupt and adds a feeling of conducting a siege battle.

Inspiration idea: heroes of might and magic

[texasman]

For adding a city defense enchantment, I'm not particularly opposed to this either, since it does work. But do we really want to keep it limited to a specific realm? I think it would be better to add an option for all players. If not a building, then Arcane.

I wasn't talking about adding anything. I was trying to imply the existing city defense spells do a good enough job and we are trying to fix a non-issue. Every realm except Life and Nature have strong city defense spells, and those two realms can build the best and most importantly, earliest unstoppable doomstacks (with buffs or regeneration) in which case not having good city defense options is better for game balance.

I also want to mention again that allowing for bigger reinforcement garrisons, the version which the AI assigns based on city value being over a certain threshold, doesn't seem to have any major drawback that I can think of. That's still an alternative option for fortifying high value towns.

Not having a drawback doesn't equal having a benefit. Unless there is a clear and significant benefit, there is always the drawback of having to spend time implementing the feature and this one isn't even trivial. It needs a major UI rework to be able to store the and show the garrison units.
As you suggested the AI not filling the spots on medium and below difficulty, there is no benefit there.
Which leaves high difficulty but on high difficulty, strategies that lose no units in battle dominate already. Those strategies will not be slowed down by additional AI garrisons, but will need to commit less forces on self-defense as those units will not be coming to attack them.

I really see nothing that would make this worth the extra work and risk of possibly making the game worse in a way we didn't think of.

I'm new here but have been reading all of the recent CoM/CoMII posts.  I love this game and thank you for your hard work and dedication Seravy!  I am thankful that you are making the correct choices when developing CoM and CoMII to make sure the spirit of the theme and game continue.  I agree with your logic that adding unnecessary features (more city defenses for example) may ruin the game and burden the AI even more.   I want the AI to continue to be challenging -- like good AI in a chess game.  I don't want CoMII to become a fantasy battle simulator that is just one-sided (plenty of those games out there and they are boring)....please keep the "Magic" alive

[mercy]

Sniping fortresses is not a big problem in the game these days.  [..]

What do you mean by "sniping fortresses"?  What is that?

[massone]

Sniping fortresses is not a big problem in the game these days.  [..]

What do you mean by "sniping fortresses"?  What is that?

I mean the act of sending a powerful army in a beeline for the enemy Fortress for the purpose of banishing the enemy wizard, skipping any other towns on the way. It's "sniping" in the sense that with enough movement speed, transport, or roads, the army can move from out of visible range direct to the Fortress in one turn. A ship plus flying units can very easily cross 8 squares in one turn. On Myrror, Flying units still benefit from magical roads' half movement cost, so they could potentially cross 16 squares in one turn with a flying ship. Even without such tricks, typical flying doomstacks have 4-5 movement, and they can't be easily intercepted by defender armies unless the defender keeps around an active field army for defense. Even if they do get intercepted, the invading army now has the advantage of being the defender in combat. So an army that could conceivably stop the doomstack which is strong enough to take on the fortress, would need to be itself strong enough to take out the enemy fortress. But who would keep such an army on defense in their own territory?

Additionally, as I explained in the original post, it's also possible to launch more than 1 attack on the same square on the same turn using 2 different armies, but the defender only has a maximum of 9 units on that square because they can't do anything during the attacker's turn. This means that the Fortress will inevitably fall if it sustains any losses during the first combat of the turn, because they can't replenish their casualties.

These dynamics favour the invader, so it becomes viable to target the Fortress first to cripple them, instead of it leaving it for last in a serious war. That said, it's not a big problem now because the AI generally keeps a very strong army, sometimes with heros in its Fortresses. The Fortress Lightning has also been significantly powered up, so it can deal a huge amount of damage when the wizard has higher casting skill. So they're not that vulnerable anymore. And banishing is no longer as devastating as it once was, because wizards still generate gold and Power while banished. Preventing their overland casting and causing them to suffer 4x combat casting costs is still crippling--especially when done repeatedly when they respawn in a location with a weaker army, but it's not a death sentence.

[mercy]

Unit Sprite Animation Speed:

Since you are writing the source code now, the sprite animation speed should be always smooth and playing at natural speed, independent of framerate. Wonderfully matched to the original MOM speed. Nice and harmonic wing flaps, just like in Mother Nature.

It would be even better, if you construct your algorithm and then put a multiplier on it, like "x0.0015" or something and make that multiplier a variable so everybody will be able to fine tune the anim-speed to taste. Put a slider into Options/ SETTINGS  "Animation speed", so players can slightly increase or decrease the multiplier, thus making the animation speed just a little bit faster or slower.

Here is an article about using an internal clock, so framerate = sprite animation speed remains the same, no matter how slow or fast a CPU one has:  

   DT  DELTA TIME

This is just the idea, how DT is used in games programming:
1.
https://www.construct.net/en/tutorials/d...endence-71

2.
https://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadios..._time.html

[Misiulo]

How come MoM on top of everything else, even features one flying race but no aquatic races? Let's create one! (At the very least)

The seas of Myrror an Arcanus alike seem so empty and great bodies of water are a little more than an obstacle;

Let's call them Sirens.
Swimming, water walking and such would be renamed to amphibious and most basic units of the aquatic race would be limited to water.

Trow in aquatic rampaging monsters like Krakens, Leviathans, Sea serpents (This could be an easy mod of the Great Wyrm!) 

It would make crossing the ocean an adventure and mystery the way it used to be in our World in the antiquity or in the medieval ages. 
Needless to say, aquatic ruins and treasure coves should be added as well.

[Seravy]

How come MoM on top of everything else, even features one flying race but no aquatic races?

Lizardmen...

The seas of Myrror an Arcanus alike seem so empty and great bodies of water are a little more than an obstacle;

That's what they are for, to be an obstacle.

[Misiulo]

No underwater cities = no true aquatic race in my book

And that's the whole point; to the underwater peoples, the land is going to be an obstacle.  

This concept has been tested in some Civ-like games in the 90s. Civilization Call to Power for example.

[Seravy]

So I play the aquatic race. I'm the only one allowed to build on water and no one else can because they aren't playing this race.
So far this is like being Myrran except there is no need for two game mechanics of this kind.
However unlike Myrran where Myrror and Arcanus are roughly similar in size, there is about 3-5 times as much water on the map as land. So the aquatic player would be 3-5 times more powerful than all other players combine. That's a recipe for disaster.
It might work in other games (where map generation is different and there are no other planes), it will not work in this one.

[Misiulo]

Well, what about the new sea monsters? Come on, throw the sea-dog a sea-bone

Speaking of monsters; 
I've got vampires and mummies on my mind, which seem to be missing form MoM; 
Mummies would look great near pyramid ruins on the desert whereas the vampire sounds like a great hi-level monster of death with powers such as life drain, and flight. Gosh, now that I wrote it down it sounds exactly like the death knight. Well, none the less, the more, the scarier
Perhaps wizards with casting skill over 240 could be allowed to raise fallen enemy heroes as vampires?