Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[massone]

I might have missed that report. What exactly is moving slow?
City tiles inside battle should cost 1 move each, if you mean they don't, that is a bug, if you give me a save file, I'll try to find why.

Yes that's what I mean. It's happened in multiple cities but I'll have to dig around for the saves where I got attacked. In the meantime, I've found a couple of new possible issues:
-Transporting items between heroes/fortress not on the same square seems to be free now
-Queued actions are happening at the beginning of a turn now. They used to happen in a different sequence. This new sequence is a problem because after seeing the AI turns, I sometimes need to cancel and change orders but I can't because the queued action goes before I can do anything to stop it.

[Seravy]

-Transporting items between heroes/fortress not on the same square seems to be free now

This one is intentional. Item teleport costs add absolutely nothing meaningful to the game so they were not added to CoM II.
Ever since it's not possible to bring the same item into two different battles the same turn, the cost lost any relevance whatsoever.

-Queued actions are happening at the beginning of a turn now. They used to happen in a different sequence. This new sequence is a problem because after seeing the AI turns, I sometimes need to cancel and change orders but I can't because the queued action goes before I can do anything to stop it.

That's how it was supposed to work in the original as well, and usually did, tho sometimes it did not. It was somewhat inconsistent, I remember something like leaving the city screen by selecting a unit was a way to cut ahead of the "going" queue and manually cancel the movement, but once the game did call the automove function there was nothing the player could do to stop it. I'm not entirely sure on that though. Maybe there simply wasn't an order at all, so it was random - if the going unit got picked first, it moved, if not, then you had a chance to stop it, or something like that. Anyway, I do know it isn't always 100% possible to cancel your previous going orders before the units move in CoM I. The only difference is that it's less consistent in when you can or cannot do so.

Not sure what can be done, even if I forced all units with a going order to be picked last, it would still result in an inconsistent system. If you don't have an idle unit to get selected first, or that idle unit shares a stack with units that have a go order, the order will be executed anyway.

It's also a bit of a "both solutions are bad" situation because automove not automoving the units when you don't want to cancel is wrong as well. It's unfortunate but relying on automatism means you give up control on what happens.

[massone]

So it looks like there hasn't been a fix for the slow-moving terrain in city tiles issue I mentioned several builds back and no comment on it either. Is that supposed to be intended behavior in COM II, or just rather difficult to fix?

I might have missed that report. What exactly is moving slow?
City tiles inside battle should cost 1 move each, if you mean they don't, that is a bug, if you give me a save file, I'll try to find why.

Here's a screenshot with mouse over identifying the square with 3-cost in movement inside a city: https://pasteboard.co/JwGqDM9.png
Here's the save file at the end of turn before I get attacked: https://we.tl/t-lT0WtcYImj
Should be the first combat, there's a Fire Giant as well which died by the time I took the SS.

EDIT: I should also add that I find the placement of roads rather awkward as well. One would think that they should lead to the town gates, but they seem to be random.

[massone]

Is Sky Fires supposed to ignore Node Auras, Counter Magic, etc?

[Seravy]

Is Sky Fires supposed to ignore Node Auras, Counter Magic, etc?

Yes.

Here's a screenshot with mouse over identifying the square with 3-cost in movement inside a city: https://pasteboard.co/JwGqDM9.png

It's a river tile. Should cities interrupt rivers the same way they do to roads? Or leave the river there but override the cost?

[jhsidi]

Not sure what can be done, even if I forced all units with a going order to be picked last, it would still result in an inconsistent system. If you don't have an idle unit to get selected first, or that idle unit shares a stack with units that have a go order, the order will be executed anyway.

I really doubt this would be a problem. There are a lot of units on the map in any game beyond the starting turns, and a lot of them typically don't have queued moves. So it's unlikely players would see this situation of queued units moving first, if the movement order was behind non-queued units; and even if they did, it would still look logical and solvable (queued units obviously move on their own, if you don't like it, have a non-queued units somewhere).

Whereas queued units moving before non-queued units is a problem every 2-3 turns, at least for me. Constant reloads because some unanticipated enemy stack popped up on my map, and my queued units initiated its turn and blithely walked past it or away from a city that's in danger.

[Seravy]

My main concern is that if the units did not automove before I move manually, I would consider that wrong as well because I told them to do so. If the game doesn't read my mind to know if I want to cancel the move order or not, it's wrong either way - it's not much of an automove system if the units don't automove until I manually confirm it.

That said there is a technical issue as well. The way CoM II handles movement is basically, if something is selected and has a go order with moves left, then it'll execute that order. Even manual moves are handled that way, when you tell a unit to go somewhere, it simply sets them to have the "go" order and then calls automove which sees "there are units in this stack that needs to be moved so I'll move them now".
What that means is even if you manually selected the stack due to it being delayed in selection, as soon as you do anything that has a "and process the going queue afterwards", like tell one of the 8 units to patrol, it'll make the others move instantly. So we are back to the usual "it's either automatic or manual, can't be both at the same time because the computer can't read the user's mind".

The good solution is to move units one tile at a time if you want to have perfect control over what happens. If you rely on automatic convenience features, you have to accept they won't always do what you want. For example they might take a very long detour or even move the opposite direction if the path is blocked by some enemy units you haven't seen due to your scouting range being limited. Or worse, they might violate a wizard's pact...

The only semi-decent solution I can think of is a hotkey that tells your entire army to cancel all their orders because it's an emergency. But you need to press that during the enemy turn, before they finish their turn, and that's not really good because you usually only have a fraction of a second to do so. Or the game could pop up a "yes/no" window asking if you want to cancel but seeing that every turn would be super annoying - you do have much more turns when you don't want to and accidentally clicking yes if you don;t mean it and losing all your unit orders would be a much larger pain.

[massone]

Where can we find the intended Starting Relations formula for COM II? I started a new game, using the updated build that fixed the Starting Relations. Once again using 5 Life 4 Sorcery, yet I have neutral with with pure 10 Sorcery, and Relaxed with 5 nature 7 Sorcery. The first one is Lawful and the second one is Ruthless. Shouldn't these be the same based on Sorcery shared books, or the Lawful one to be higher instead of the other way around? Or does Life also have a bonus with Nature?

[Seravy]

It's the same as CoM I.

Starting relation = 2* (total shared books) - 3 * (Alignment difference -4)

Alignment = Life+Nature - (Chaos+Death)

The 10 Sorcery wizard has alignment =0, the other one has alignment = 5 for the 5 Nature books. You have alignment = 5 as well for the 5 Life books.

[jhsidi]

My main concern is that if the units did not automove before I move manually, I would consider that wrong as well because I told them to do so. 

Based on what, exactly? As far as I'm aware, the queued movement behavior of strategy games doesn't have a consistent design pattern across different titles.

Some people in here reference Total War-- so, for example, in TW:W2 you set movement locations, but then those have to be confirmed on the next turn. I haven't played Civilization or Age of Wonders in quite a while but I think it's the same idea, you have to do something to confirm or enact the move.

That said there is a technical issue as well. The way CoM II handles movement is basically, if something is selected and has a go order with moves left, then it'll execute that order. Even manual moves are handled that way, when you tell a unit to go somewhere, it simply sets them to have the "go" order and then calls automove which sees "there are units in this stack that needs to be moved so I'll move them now".


What that means is even if you manually selected the stack due to it being delayed in selection, as soon as you do anything that has a "and process the going queue afterwards", like tell one of the 8 units to patrol, it'll make the others move instantly. So we are back to the usual "it's either automatic or manual, can't be both at the same time because the computer can't read the user's mind".

This, on the other hand, is definitely an unexpected action. If I'm selecting a stack, I have a reason to select it, which may not be to re-affirm whatever I did last time. If the game immediately says "whatever, I'm doing the previously planned action" that's always going to be unexpected. Anyway, as I probably mentioned before I currently do not use queued actions at all because, while the MoM bug may have been "fixed", the system as is doesn't work well with the gameplay; unexpected things always happen. At least the MoM bug gave you a chance to make changes sometimes.

I can think of one more solution. While any queued actions exist, the Next Turn button could be replaced with an initiate actions button. Clicking it runs the whole queue, or the player can select any stack to clear its orders. If there are no units with actions queued the button would revert back to the next turn state. That would be in line with what actually seems to be the standard in most games -- confirming that the player doesn't have any modifications to make on their older plans.