Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[jhsidi]

Hm, seems a bit odd for mithril to be nonexistent on Arcanus. Mithril is the Arcanus special mineral, the way adamantium is for Myrror. If the only way you can get mithril is transmute... then you won't use mithril, you'll secure some gold and use adamantium. It's meant to be a mineral people find rather than create, basically.

I guess if you had a discussion where it was carefully tuned, then there must have been some reason for it, but I don't know what that reason would be other than believing that mithril shouldn't be in the game / should only be accessible through uncommon spells.

[Seravy]

One possible explanation might be that the table itself is correct but the amount of mithril also depends on the number of tiles where it's applicable.

I looked at a CoM I map and it had only 9 hill/mountain ore tiles.
However that's with "fair" land size. Huge would have double the amount of tiles and a higher ratio of hills and mountains so a Huge map averages 1-1.5 mithril per plane.
If "Fair" had 1 mithril then huge would have 2-3 on average.

Then there is the "rich" setting which increases the number of ores by some 50-75% on top of the chance going from 5 to 7% so those maps again have double the amount of mithril.

These are all applicable to CoM II as well and it has the Climate settings on top of that - pick Volcanic and you get much more Mountain tiles so higher chance of Mithril, but pick Frozen and you get more tundra so less useful tiles for minerals to be placed on. 

It also has continent size settings, which greatly affect the amount of hills and mountains - larger continents have more of these than smaller islands.

In the end, the system doesn't look at a map as a whole and assigns X amount of mithril to it, so the amount of ores highly depends on the type of terrain generated.

[Seravy]

I wasn't able to finish all the AI diplomacy/conquest testing because I kept running into other AI issues.

To be continued tomorrow, the current version looks like it's working correctly as far as moving units on the map goes so here :

2020-09-24
-Fixed bug : When no unit is in combat selected, clicking to move causes a crash
-Fixed bug : Combat turn doesn't end after casting a spell if no units can move
-Added Sky Fires global enchantment image (by Slingers)
-Fixed bug : Warp Wood crashes
-Wall Crusher will now only apply for the attacking player.
-Fixed bug : Raise Volcano doesn't destroy ores
-Spy (F5) screen will no longer show relation between players who haven't made contact yet.
-AI chance to do positive diplomacy with other AI is scaled down by the number of players contacted above 3.
-Fixed bug : AI checks Need for War with other AIs only on turns when positive diplomacy rolls are done instead of every turn.
-Added logging of "Need for War" and "AI to AI diplomacy" calls.
-Fixed bug : Crysx and Quork crystal generation were swapped.
-Added logging of city conquest
-Added logging of units that died in automatic combat.
-Added logging of units that regenerated after combat.
-When the AI expects automatic combat, it is willing to take more percentage losses based on the number of regenerating units they have, up to 95%.
-In automatic combat, regenerating units have the highest priority to take the damage when owned by AI players to further minimize losses.
-Experimental : Raised AI's willingness to take damage in battle to 75% normally, 66% with heroes.
-Saving thread will now pause itself if there is another saving thread already running to prevent trying to open the same "autosave.sav" file more than once.
-When Shift-T is used, autosaves are skipped and turn saves are only done for every 12th turn because the saving can't keep up with the processing speed of the earlier turns and ends up crashing.
-Added logging of AI doomstack building
-Fixed bug : Flying units were not recognized as valid doomstack material due to bug in allowing flying ships to be included
-Fixed bug : The AI does not consider nodes with no units on them as targets to occupy.
-Fixed bug : The AI does not consider nodes as locations to pull garrison for if they haven't yet melded the node, but already have a unit on it.
-Fixed bug : Game crashes when the AI tries to target Disjunction
-Fixed bug : AI ship request array bug caused AI transports to fail to pick up more than one stack at a time
-Added logging of Main Action Continent selection
-Fixed bug : Already assembled stacks that were chosen not to move were not removed from the available unit list
-When an AI stack fails to move, it'll no longer be set to 'done' status, instead, it is allowed to perform a different movement in the next AI turn phase.
-When an AI continent has at least 20 units that were waiting to board a ship last turn, cities on the continent will have a high chance to build a ship.
(it seems the AI's navy can't keep up with the units it has when they need to be transported over longer distances. It's more efficient to build new ships bear the boarding area.)
NOTE : SAVE FORMAT NOT COMPATIBLE beyond this point. (number of units wanted to board last turn are stored in a new variable.)
-Fixed bug : Starting an animation doesn't always set the animation frame counter to 0, causing a crash on Raise Volcano sometimes.
-Fixed bug : Desired stack size wasn't capped at 9 units
-AI Board ships phase now happens after doomstackbuilding but before normal stackbuilding.
(this prevents doomstack quality units to get stuck in land stacks that wait for boarding a ship.)
-Fixed bug : Lake tiles were not excluded from possible continental stackbuilding destination and land stack attack destination
-Added logging of Alchemy usage without retort
-Fixed bug : When an AI movement is cancelled due to potentinally causing a unit to drown, the red warning used for the human player is shown.
-Instead, for the above, the failure is logged with the coordinates.

[Seravy]

2020-09-25
-Added "Elimination war declaration" for AI players to use against other AI players.
Declare war if both total historian and army strength is 40% of own or lower.
Cannot be used if peaceful, if allied, or if lawful and have a wizard's pact.
Can only be used against AI players, not the human player.
-Fixed bug : Continent marking "no target" doesn't expire
-When a war declaration happens, all continents that have cities of the new enemy have their continent marking of "no target" cleared, regardless of remaining duration.
-Added logging of continent priorities when selecting a main action continent.
-Defeated wizards now have a zero on the spell power and power income historian bar.
-The AI is required to have a stack of 9 units with no targets instead of 8 to mark a continent as "no target".
-Fixed bug : Crash when AI casts Spell Binding
-Added logging of when the AI marks a continent as having no targets
-The AI will not target cities with less than 4 priority using Disillusionise
-Fixed bug : When there are no valid targets for Disillusionise, the spell might be cast anyway
-Fixed bug : Crash when AI casts Spell Ward
-Increased direct damage dealt by spellcasting in automatic combat
-Increased curse damage dealt by spellcasting in automatic combat
-Increased summoning spell category effect by spellcasting in automatic combat

[Seravy]

2020-09-26
-Further adjusted curse damage automatic combat formula
-Automatic combat now calculates weigths to each spell category type each turn instead of always using each category at equal weight.
--Summoning is used more if the army is at low health
--Damage and Curse damage are used more if the enemy army is at low health
--Buff is used more if own army has a lot of health
--Ranged Buff is used more if own army has high ranged attack strength
--Damage or Curse Damage is not used at all if the other damage category is at least 33% more efficient, instead the other category uses the sum of the two category weights
--Categories with only very low level spells known are used less
-Added logging of Automatic Combat spell effects
-Added logging of Automatic Combat army attack damage amounts
-Added logging of AI mana saving during automatic combat
-Fixed bug : When the AI wants to cancel a city curse on their own city, instead it is set to be owned by the human player.
-Fixed : logging of mana upkeep is wrong
-Added logging of total power income for each wizard
-Improved the outline color of several flag colors on city enchantment text
-Fixed bug : random items with unlimited budget had no abilities
-Fixed bug : "Summon Hero failed" message is shown when the AI fails to summon heroes.
-Fixed bug : Evil Presence is not transparent in city view.
-Fixed bug : Transparent pixels in Corruption animation
-The AI will be less willing to spend mana on noncity automatic combat if their army has fewer number of units than 9.
-When the AI is the attacker in automatic combat, they'll never spend MP if there are fewer than 6 enemy units and the combat isn't for a city, node or lair.
-When the AI is the defender in automatic combat, and another AI is the attacker and the battle isn't a simulation, the defending AI will not spend mana for the battle.
(AI only attacks if they win based on simulation of combat (which has 100% accuracy). So if we are defending against an AI we are guaranteed to lose, so spending the mana is very wasteful.)
-Reduced the weight of distance in AI continent selection for continents very close to the player.
-Increased the weight of enemy cities during war in AI continent selection greatly and added extra priority to the fortress city.
-Moved AI production selection from phase 1 to phase 4. This allows the AI to see their city as empty if a doomstack left it, allowing the selection of unit production as the city is now undefended.
-Aura of Majesty now improves relation up to (45-3*Player count) instead of 30, as it's a far too large advantage to cast it and get 6-8 allies.
-Fixed bug : Range Check error when a wizard who owned a warped node is defeated
-Fixed bug : Range Check error if AI Disenchant Area finds no target on resolution.

I still haven't managed to make the AI capable of eliminating other AI reasonably fast but at least all these test runs uncovered many remaining bugs, AI as well as spells, and we managed to improve diplomacy to function better between AI as well.

[jhsidi]

Have been a bit busy the past couple days so I forgot to post some bugs. Hopefully the files still work on the current version.

Bugs:
- Guardian spirit node auras are not working, check this endturn battle: https://ufile.io/cmozfh8v
- Not sure if it's a bug per se, but I keep getting this item "Rod of Revival" in every game. It's a wand with 1xRaise Dead and no other stats. I decided to see how much it pops up and replayed a lair 5 times. It gave me the rod all five times even though the spell treasure varied. OK, next game, I found another lair granting it. This lair drops two items. Once again, the wand was in the treasure all 5 times, even though the other item varied each time. Trying it a couple more, something besides the rod actually did drop on one of them. So maybe it's just a cost issue? Here's the file if you want to look at it: https://ufile.io/kwqbxk0f ... OK, I started another game, first item I get is the rod of revival yet again, it's the sorcery node adjacent to my sprites: https://ufile.io/hb6thmlk
- Also not sure if it's a bug or just my imagination, but I've noticed something with rampaging monster spawns: anytime I take a new city, the spawns always seem to appear at that new city. Not 100% of the time, but it's pretty reliable; and if they don't appear at the last city I took, it'll be one of the last three or so. On the flipside, if you aren't taking new cities then the stacks seem to spawn at the same cities over and over. Anyway, here's a save file, I have several new Myrran cities and from loading a few times, I saw the rampaging monsters exclusively targeting my Myrran cities. A stack appears over his endturn: https://ufile.io/4zmyspls ... a few turns later I took another new city, and the next two stacks that showed up both targeted that city. All my starting cities have valid lairs near them, they just rarely spawn stacks.

Notes:
- Tried creating some items with various insta-death attributes: stoning, death, exorcise. Not sure if this is correct but: it seems like stoning can affect an entire unit. However, exorcise and death can only affect 1 figure in the unit. Is that right? My ranged death items have ended up being major disappointments; most units have 4-6 figures so the attribute is usually quite ineffective. Alternately, maybe the save for death / exorcise just isn't working correctly, or I've had bad luck.

[Seravy]

- Guardian spirit node auras are not working, check this endturn battle: https://ufile.io/cmozfh8v

No one attacked the node at the end of turn. The code seems to exist for the bonus.

Rod of Revival : The game failed to load the Divine Protection ability on it which made it the only very low budget item in the database.

Lairs :
I tried but got a monster stack on Arcanus the first try.
Next one was Myrran.

Your Arcanus territory has 3 spawn locations (the towers).
Your Myrran territory has 2 ruins, a chaos node on the small continent, 2 lairs, a chaos and a nature node on the larger.
That's a total of 7.

So your overall chance to get a Myrran stack is 70%.
(The spawn range is 4, anything further than that isn't included)

All touch abilities except Destruction should affect one enemy figure per attacker. Heroes are single figure units so they only kill at most one enemy figure.

Destruction is the exception - it destroys the entire unit.

[Seravy]

2020-09-27
-Added Reinforce Magic global enchantment image (by Slingers)
-Fixed bug : There is no warning message when Incarnation is selected but already summoned
-Fixed bug : Incarnation does not fail if you already have the hero summoned
-Fixed bug : Hero summoning spells do not set the hero's status to "Hired" so it's possible to get the same hero again.
-Fixed bug : "corruption" text overlaps with node name
-Fixed bug : Divine Protection doesn't load on predefined items
(requires deleting Items.DAT to refresh the database)
-Fixed bug : Stoning Touch counts as a Life ability instead of Nature
-Replaced Myrran Combat Forest trees.
-Adjusted Myrran Combat Grassland pixel colors and weighting.
-Added new setting : Remove trees in combat
-Added new combat hotkey : T - toggle "Remove trees".
-Fixed bug : Markers don't move with the unit during walking animations
-Fixed bug : Markers are not shown on Tundra forests.
-Updated combat mountain images
-Made Myrran combat sea color slightly lighter and bluer

[Seravy]

2020-09-28
-Updated Myrran combat mountain pixel colors and rock type
-Updated Arcanus desert pixel colors, fixed cactus axis position
-Added a function that determines for a wizard if their elimination from the game is desirable.
--The wizard needs to have both army and total historian below 50% of the average of all players
--The wizard needs to be in the bottom X military strength players when X is the amount of players the game wants to disappear based on turn count.
Currently this function is used to determine if a wizard is a valid target for elimination based war declaration only, but will most likely have other uses in the future.
-Fixed bug : AI turn freezes when the AI has Earth Gate
-The AI will now use Earth Gate both before the "Doomstack leave city" phase, and between the spellcasting and city production setting phases.
-Fixed bug : AI doomstack building causes range check error if the AI has units on both planes.
-Fixed bug : AI puts more than 9 units into their fortress using Earth Gate
-Fixed bug : The AI can set their summoning circle to an invalid location
-Fixed bug : When a city is destroyed, the AI frontier city variable is not updated.
-Fixed bug : AI doesn't skip sending units to the frontier city if there is no frontier city set.
-Fixed bug : AI earth gate use doesn't recalculate units
-Fixed bug : Human earth gate use doesn't recalculate units
-Fixed bug : Plane movement doesn't recalculate units
-Fixed bug : AI sometimes teleports units into cities that don't have Earth Gate
-Fixed bug : AI fails to target their fortress first with Earth Gate
-Fixed bug : scroll buttons on enemy city view do not work

[jhsidi]

Here's a bug similar to what I reported a couple weeks ago; maybe a battle didn't end properly? Now the AI wizards are spellcasting in battles over the end turn and using my mana. 

Here's the save you can see it happening on, you may or may not see the animations playing on the world map, but you can always see my mana being deducted as each AI plays its turn: https://ufile.io/dpur1gcv

Here's a zip of five previous turns: https://ufile.io/ahn70bya
And the log file: https://ufile.io/zemywwsb