Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[MrBiscuits]

Also unrelated is there any chance of increasing the walking speed of engineers to 2 or even 3?

Definitely not. That allows them to build multiple tiles of road per turn if the road is finished in a single turn - as building does not consume movement points, if it did, the engineers couldn't leave the tile and would waste a turn moving so each tile of road would take 1 turn longer to build.
We'd need to completely redesign road building if we want faster engineers, but I don't see why it's worth doing. Boats move them at a speed of 3 and I don't see the case of having to move them inside the continent over large distances with no shore nearby. Continents aren't that large, if you need to move a lot, you're on already the shore.

Cities buying roads would be nice but I think having to protect the engineer units from enemy attacks is an important part of the game so it's not good for this particular game.
In games with well defined borders where enemies cannot possibly be inside your territory, it would be the best.

Why couldn't building roads be changed to use up movement points for CoM 2? I understand why you can't change it for the current game.
Also something I've noticed on the current game, the dialogue box telling you how long it takes to purify a tile has gone.

I suppose I find the having to micromanage the movement of hundreds of units around the map and onto and off boats an annoying part of the game.

[Seravy]

Why couldn't building roads be changed to use up movement points for CoM 2? I understand why you can't change it for the current game.

I can but do we want that? Wouldn't it make road building confusing? Or do you have a particular ruleset in mind that results in something intuitive?
I mean this isn't as trivial as "and it consumes movement points".
When does movement points get consumed, before or after the road is built? Before or after moving to the next tile? How much is consumed? How much is consumed if multiple engineers are building the road? What happens if there aren't enough movement points left for building but moves left aren't zero? Do we build a road as part of entering the tile even if entering the tile consumed all the movement points? If yes, wouldn't that make it inconsistent with how building one tile at a time works? If no, wouldn't that make it inconsistent anyway, but for engineers not running out of movement points? What happens if the engineers in the stack have different total movement points remaining in all the above cases?

Also something I've noticed on the current game, the dialogue box telling you how long it takes to purify a tile has gone.

Do you have a screenshot of that? I don't think I've ever seen that feature.

[MrBiscuits]

Why couldn't building roads be changed to use up movement points for CoM 2? I understand why you can't change it for the current game.

I can but do we want that? Wouldn't it make road building confusing? Or do you have a particular ruleset in mind that results in something intuitive?
I mean this isn't as trivial as "and it consumes movement points".
When does movement points get consumed, before or after the road is built? Before or after moving to the next tile? How much is consumed? How much is consumed if multiple engineers are building the road? What happens if there aren't enough movement points left for building but moves left aren't zero? Do we build a road as part of entering the tile even if entering the tile consumed all the movement points? If yes, wouldn't that make it inconsistent with how building one tile at a time works? If no, wouldn't that make it inconsistent anyway, but for engineers not running out of movement points? What happens if the engineers in the stack have different total movement points remaining in all the above cases?

The civilisation games dealt with it nicely (well up to Civ 4 as I didn't like the ones after that, so haven't really played them).

1) Movement and building turns are handled separately, engineers can have multiple movement points, but only 1 building point.
2) Engineers need movement points left to start building during their turn (half a movement point is ok). 
3) Building uses all movement points up for the turn.
4) A tile needs a certain amount of "building turns" for a road to be built


So say a tile takes 6 turns for a road to be built, an engineer can start it and build for 2 turns, meaning there are 4 turns left to build the road. Then another engineer can join him on the tile to build and the road will get built in 2 more turns. The turn the road gets completed the engineers can't move as they built during the turn so all movement points also get used up.

The other aspect is that tiles can be left partially finished and you can bring engineers back to it to complete the building of the road later if you like. This prevents the annoying situation where you are 7/8ths through building a road and had to move your engineers and then start all over again. Or more likely accidentally wake them by moving other units onto the tile to protect them and click "patrol" for all of them.


Also worth mentioning how they handle "done" and "patrol". These actions are actually performed at the end of the turn, they just sleep the unit until then so you don't cycle through them again.
It means that if you click "done" on a unit to get to the next one, but then realise that you would have liked to move them then you can change your mind. It makes sense as "done" doesn't really do anything, so should use up movement points until the end of the turn.

Actually I think this is the same as for the "build" action, it just sleeps the unit until the end of the turn when it builds and uses up any remaining movement points. If you change your mind you can go back and move them instead if you like.

[Seravy]

It means that if you click "done" on a unit to get to the next one, but then realise that you would have liked to move them then you can change your mind. It makes sense as "done" doesn't really do anything, so should use up movement points until the end of the turn.

I guess this is doable in theory if we also change the system to not autoselect units marked done.
You can't undo any other orders though (like movement) so why should "done" be the exception?

For engineers, if we add 1, we can have the desired effect even without adding 3. (2 and 4 already work that way in MoM.)
If the engineer used up it's ability to build, and receives a build order again, the game can simply tell the player "that engineer cannot build anymore) or simply do nothing. If the engineer is automoving during a longer road, it can be set to have 0.5 moves left so it never has movement left when entering the next tile.

However, then we lose the "flying ship roadbuilding" strategy, where transporting the stack of engieers on a flying warship can allow them to build 4 tiles of roads. And that's something very suitable for sorcery, and also fun to discover.

[MrBiscuits]

It means that if you click "done" on a unit to get to the next one, but then realise that you would have liked to move them then you can change your mind. It makes sense as "done" doesn't really do anything, so should use up movement points until the end of the turn.

I guess this is doable in theory if we also change the system to not autoselect units marked done.
You can't undo any other orders though (like movement) so why should "done" be the exception?

For engineers, if we add 1, we can have the desired effect even without adding 3. (2 and 4 already work that way in MoM.)
If the engineer used up it's ability to build, and receives a build order again, the game can simply tell the player "that engineer cannot build anymore) or simply do nothing. If the engineer is automoving during a longer road, it can be set to have 0.5 moves left so it never has movement left when entering the next tile.

However, then we lose the "flying ship roadbuilding" strategy, where transporting the stack of engieers on a flying warship can allow them to build 4 tiles of roads. And that's something very suitable for sorcery, and also fun to discover.

Done should be undoable, because you've not actually used any movement points by doing anything. It just tells the game that you're not planning on doing anything with it this turn.
Also patrol doesn't have an effect until the end of the turn either (or at least shouldn't), so the same applies to that.

At the moment if you add an engineer, it doesn't continue work already done, but resets it all to a shorter time I believe. So if your 8 turn road is 2 turns in, then adding a new engineer will require 4 more turns and not 3 like it should if it was 1/4 built.

I don't understand the point about automoving.

The flying ship strategy is fun, because it does away with the annoying micromanagement of engineers in the late game, which become unfun when you have multiple cities in my opinion.

[Seravy]

At the moment if you add an engineer, it doesn't continue work already done, but resets it all to a shorter time I believe. So if your 8 turn road is 2 turns in, then adding a new engineer will require 4 more turns and not 3 like it should if it was 1/4 built.

That will be different in CoM 2, the tile will store how much building was already done.

I don't understand the point about automoving.

Let's say you have a stack of 2 engineers building a road on 3 tiles of grasslands and they can move more than one tile.

Grasslands cost 2 "build" but there are 2 engineers, so the first tile of road is built. The engineers keep moving to the next tile. There is no "building" ability left so they are not building the road. But they have movement left, so they move onto the 3rd tile of grasslands, skipping the second.

So the engineers will need to somewhere lose the extra movement otherwise they won't stop on the second tile. They can't lose it BEFORE moving either, as then they are stuck on the first tile and while that is fine for this particular example, if the second tile was a mountain, it'd make them lose a turn.


.. did Civilization games even support building roads multiple tiles at a time? I don't remember anymore.

[MrBiscuits]

At the moment if you add an engineer, it doesn't continue work already done, but resets it all to a shorter time I believe. So if your 8 turn road is 2 turns in, then adding a new engineer will require 4 more turns and not 3 like it should if it was 1/4 built.

That will be different in CoM 2, the tile will store how much building was already done.

I don't understand the point about automoving.

Let's say you have a stack of 2 engineers building a road on 3 tiles of grasslands and they can move more than one tile.

Grasslands cost 2 "build" but there are 2 engineers, so the first tile of road is built. The engineers keep moving to the next tile. There is no "building" ability left so they are not building the road. But they have movement left, so they move onto the 3rd tile of grasslands, skipping the second.

So the engineers will need to somewhere lose the extra movement otherwise they won't stop on the second tile. They can't lose it BEFORE moving either, as then they are stuck on the first tile and while that is fine for this particular example, if the second tile was a mountain, it'd make them lose a turn.


.. did Civilization games even support building roads multiple tiles at a time? I don't remember anymore.

I didn't realise you can autobuild roads in CoM, how do you do that?

If the engineers build a road in the current turn then their movement points are used up for the turn too, so this wouldn't happen. If they can move they can also build.

[Seravy]

I didn't realise you can autobuild roads in CoM, how do you do that?

Click build. Then click the tile you want to build to. Then click Ok.
In CoM II it'll also go around obstacles but in CoM I it can't do that.
There seems to also be a maximal length, somewhere around 10 tiles or something.

[Settemio]

Done should be undoable, because you've not actually used any movement points by doing anything. It just tells the game that you're not planning on doing anything with it this turn.
Also patrol doesn't have an effect until the end of the turn either (or at least shouldn't), so the same applies to that.

The point about Patrol makes me wonder, why is Done even in the game? If I don't have a plan for my unit right now, Patrol is the best way to tell the game to ignore it, as it can be changed later in the turn if I decide I do want to use that unit after all. The only reason to use Done rather than Patrol is that you are afraid you could forget about the unit next turn; but if you are always using Patrol you probably know that you have units who need to be manually activated for instructions.

[Seravy]

The way combat spell targeting is handled is a bit inconsistent. Some save or die spells prevent the player from casting them on immune targets, while some don't, and direct damage also does not. For example, you can't target a unit with Illusions immunity using Confusion, but you can target a unit with Stoning Immunity with Petrify and you can use Fire Bolt on a Fire Giant.

We should decide how we want to handle this, let the player waste their spells on immune units in all cases, or always prevent the targeting. Alternately we can allow targeting with direct damage (as 0 damage will be an obvious warning sign in most cases) but not with save or die spells (as it's hard to notice the difference between an immunity or simply making the save roll.).
My personal opinion is to let the player make mistakes but there are a few cases where that could be really punishing - undead units being the top example as they aren't obviously different from their living versions but have immunity to a lot of spells. (actually, what if we rendered undead units with a slightly different color, like a bit more green or purple? Then that's not a problem.)