Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[Sapher]

I just call earth elementals - bears sometimes...

[Seravy]

Each "turn" in automatic combat, each army attacks once. The results are more accurate that way, as even in normal combat, it's attack, counterattack, attack, counterattack. It also compares better to ranged because ranged units will usually walk away and you can only attack them once, while they also do once ranged attack.

So basically 2 turns of melee = 1 real turn in normal combat.

Alive bear deal 5 damage vs swordsman(http://prntscr.com/vs8wt6) and 8 damage vs ghoul on average. 2

8+5 = 13, which is almost 12. Accurate enough considering it's from one attack, not two.

[Sapher]

Ok, i guess i just need to accept that auto combat is just a different type of combat and although tlaloc's army should lose there every time in strategic combat it wins in auto.

Because last answer doesnt explain anything. If that's that a damage from 2 fully alive bears why in the 8th round damage went down to 9.15759153980881 Melee damage? 2nd elemental is still alive ..
In 11th round the damage from elementals is 2.22284172082624 Melee damage ... 1 alive elemental should deal more

[Seravy]

Yes, it's a completely different type of combat. It tries to have results as similar to the normal combat as possible, but some game mechanics can't be represented accurately.

Because last answer doesnt explain anything. If that's that a damage from 2 fully alive bears why in the 8th round damage went down to 9.15759153980881 Melee damage? 2nd elemental is still alive ..

In 11th round the damage from elementals is 2.22284172082624 Melee damage ... 1 alive elemental should deal more

By then they took 13+10 = 24 damage, so it's only 1.2 Elementals attacking, not 2.

By the 11th turn they take 24+9+7+7 damage = 47 damage so only about 0.4 Elementals are left.

The system doesn't know about individual units or figures so armies made of few, 1 figure units might perform worse than usual because it can't round up the damage to a full figure. In most cases that's not a problem because fewer, 1 figure units are much more vulnerable to spells, for example if Tlaloc used Black Sleep successfully, his victory would be guaranteed because it kills an entire elemental instead of just a swordsmen. However in this battle he wasn't using magic making the difference more noticeable.

[Seravy]

Test game progress...
   

13 wizards definitely make a big difference, it took this long to catch up to the leaders on the plane, and obviously I will have no chance to conquer any of them before the Myrran wizard shows up. At best, I'll grab some lairs (finally have units better than spiders and longbowmen) and maybe take a few cities from one of the four who are weaker than me.
The game sure feels a lot harder than usual, I'm playing 10 Nature with Specialist and Conjurer and started on a pretty good and large continent (actually three continents almost touching each other) with only one other player in the area in the furthest corner. However diplomacy went badly, there are literally no other "Good" aligned wizards on the plane and only two people had any Nature books, plus my good start even triggered a few overexpansion warnings and thanks to spiders my military was high enough to also trigger army strength wars AND this seems to be the center of the map so everyone was in war declaration range. There were times when I had 6 parrallel wars of which only one was against the person I tried to conquer.
I managed to avoid losing cities due to concentrating most of my resources on garrisoning. I still lost some nodes which I'll have to take back. Enemies didn't attack all that often but when they did, the stacks were dangerous. Most of the time I was saved only by spamming 9 MP Wild Boar summons and taking advantage of the free webs from the spiders. I should have lost one city but fortunately the AI missed the chance because it didn't know how to snipe low resistance units using a Night Stalker when in "hide from stronger enemy" mode. So the battle ended with my 1 lizard against their 1 stalker which should have been the stalker winning but it retreated so my other lizards came back to life. This won't happen again though as I used this opportunity to teach the AI to use invisible units with gaze attacks for proper "Stalking".

Overall it wasn't as hard as it sounds, but I'm playing a top tier strategy on... Advanced difficulty. In CoM I this would be a trivial victory, but it's as hard as I was playing above Expert difficulty here. And I'm nowhere near winning yet, I'm "only" equal to 3 other wizards on the plane so basically, the starting position in CoM I's 4 wizard games. The real game starts now...
   

I didn't record it this time because recording, playing and debugging at the same time is too much.
I wonder how much of this is the improved AI, how much is the increased player count, and how much is the bad luck. (also the opponent I fought was playing orcs so I had to raze several cities and build new ones. Elves don't like orcs, half my empire being +4 unrest isn't an option when the game will be this long.)

[Seravy]

Today's update :

2020-11-29
-Fixed bug : Hourglass cursor is shown when getting an item from an enemy hero.
-The AI will now consider units with Web Spell ability as being able to attack fliers when deciding on a combat spell.
-Changed the number of wars allowed on certain war declaration types against the human player from 1 per level of difficulty to 1 per two levels of difficulty. (Easy and Normal allows 1 war, Fair and Advanced allows two, Expert and Master allows three, Lunatic and Phantasm allowed four.)
-Generic War declarations targeting the human player will not happen if the player is already in as much or more wars than allowed, similarly to how it is done in low relation based wars.
-Generic War declaration formula gains a +7 modifier for each war the human player is in - again, similarly to low relation wars where there is a +5 modifier.
(Please note that other war declaration types are not affected by this mechanic, these two only have this limitation because they are basically impossible to avoid on high player count games.)
-Wars started by the human player do not count into the above for either Generic or relation based war declarations to avoid possible abuse of the mechanic by declaring war to wizards who aren't a threat.
(Please note the variable to store if the player did or did not start the war won't be initialized when loading earlier saves so it'll treat all wars as if you didn't start them.)
-When an invisible unit with Death or Stoning Gaze is stalling, after turn 12, if they have a 50% or better chance to kill their preferred melee target, they'll cancel the stall order and attack that unit if they are in melee reachable range, otherwise move towards them as far as possible without becoming visible.
-The AI will always count confused units at half power in both player's armies, not only during the turn they change controller.
-Automatic combat now has ranged turns equal to the average amount of ammo available in each army instead of 5 turns.
-Fixed bug : Chaotic War declaration message is not shown to the player.
-Fixed bug : Neutral caster units cause a range check error
-Renamed Fantastic Stables to Fantastic Stable because the name was wider than the available space on the production screen, making it flow outside the buttons.

[Seravy]

Much fewer changes today :

2020-11-30
-Changed number of rivers on normal map from 8 to 7.
-Fixed bug : During combat, Chaos node is drawn higher on the screen than intended.
-When showing enemy overland moves, unit icons can be drawn outside the map area when they move far enough to leave the visible region.
-fixed bug : Research completion and hero leveling is shown at the same time.

[Slingers]

The Score Modifier "Easy Lairs" freezes the screen during the world generation.

[Seravy]

Today's update :

2020-12-01
-Fixed bug : Secondary monster on lair is marked as scouted even if the attacker wasn't the human player
-Abundance now costs 150 MP
-Gaia's Blessing now costs 100 MP
-Fixed bug : Wave of Despair attack strength is 255/units instead of 255/(2+units).
-Fixed bug : Wave of Despair does an attack roll equal to strength then a defense roll equal to resistance
instead of doing only an attack roll equal to (strength-resistance), resulting in more damage variation than intended.
-Fixed bug : Wave of Despair doesn't subtract 10 from the attack strength.
-The AI will not use Wave of Despair when the average damage per unit is less than 2.
-Fixed bug : Easy Lairs effect on monsters
-Combat Mountain tiles cannot be generated directly in front of the city as they would block entry.
-Fixed bug : Overfarming had no effect
-Fixed bug : In the city resource details, negative amounts aren't shown.
-Fixed bug : AI spends wrong amount on combat spells
-Fixed bug : AI disbands the same unit multiple times when low on food/gold/mana
-Fixed bug : Right clicking Wind Walking unit enchantment shows minimal 3 movement while spell grants 6.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

Has anyone gotten COM II to work under Wine? I've tried it, the no sound version, and it simply crashes before starting, without any useful information on what sort of exception caused the crash.

I did get it running on my old Vista box. It looks good, and I like the new options. I just can't use that computer for long, since it draws more power than my solar system can provide except on absolutely clear sky days.

One thing that did strike me: even on the tiny map setting, the world is huge. It looks several times the land area of that setting in COM I. I tend to get tired when I get too many cities, so I tended to play on small or even tiny maps. I think most players prefer big maps, the bigger the better, so unless it's trivial to include a smaller world size, it's probably not worth the effort.