Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[Seravy]

Yes, the Doom ability applies to the ranged attack on the Doom Bat, however, it only does 1 damage - 3 attack strength halved, rounded down.
The weapon doesn't apply unless it's a bow or a staff but then the unit didn't gain a ranged attack from Focus Magic, it already had one.

[MrBiscuits]

If focus magic won't give ranged gaze attacks, can it boost them another way? Maybe increase the save modifier by -2.
It doesn't seem right that cockatrices get a ranged stoning attack and gorgons the more expensive unit get nothing.

If we can't have regenerate map, can you improve weak starts by converting some swap/tundra/sea to grassland around the player's starting city square and adding a resource or two.
A lowish food start with mithril and crystals might be a fair trade-off, but having a 10 max population city with 0% production bonus is too poor and I just quit and go through the whole set up process again.

[MrBiscuits]

Node auras outside of the node don't seem to be working in this game. Move the sprites on the node North one tile to fight the earth elements and there's no nature aura. Also move the guardian wind sprites to fight the neutral nomad city and there's no sorcery aura.

Also for the nomad city, after the horsebowmen have fired all their arrows, the units can't harm my sprites, but I don't get the green flee option.

[Seravy]

Focus Magic increases the attack strength of gaze (and breath) attacks by 3.



So Doom Gaze 4 becomes Doom Gaze 7.

...or at least it should but it looks like that's not implemented. Will fix that.



Death and Stoning Gaze have no attack strength to increase however and changing the save modifier would be too powerful. (In the original game these also did an attack with a strength of 0 which FM increased to 3 but in CoM 2 they simply have no attack strength.)



City start location has to be at least 8 max pop on Dry, Volcanic or Frozen land, 10 on Normal and 12 on Wet. I believe these are reasonable and it should be unlikely to fail finding spots matching these minimal numbers for all players.



The game will reduce the minimal requirement if it wasn't possible to generate locations on the map but only if reducing the minimal distance between the cities wasn't effective. So if we raise the requirement, the probability of wizards starting closer to each other increases greatly.



If an artificial post-generation terrain improvement feature is added, it also has to apply to AI wizards.

In this case however we have to consider whether we can actually guarantee the numbers we desire.

Is it always possible to raise food to 10 or 12 in every possible case?

Sea tiles that would connect different continents can't be changed.

Forests, Deserts,Swamps, Volcanoes, Tundras, Hills and Mountains are changeable.

Rivers can't be changed but they are high food so that's okay.

Nodes can't be changed.

Is it possible to have a map area where 12 food can't be reached considering these restrictions?



XSSSX

SSXSS

SNXXS

SSXSS

XSSSX



This is the worst case scenario I can think of. S are sea tiles and none of them can be changed to land. N is a Chaos Node.

X are land tiles. We can change those to grasslands but the corners don't add to the city food. So this gives 4 grassland and 16 Shore tiles. A total of 14 food. But there might be worse cases I didn't think of.



Either way this is a quite complex feature that's difficult to implement. Unless you can show me map generation frequently puts you or AI players on starting locations significantly below the specified threshold, it's not really worth adding it to the game.

The 10 food example should be exactly the lowest allowed value on normal maps. It shouldn't happen that often, especially not with zero production bonus.

[MrBiscuits]

I think the difference between a 10 pop 0% production bonus starting position and a 20 pop 60% bonus is too large to be left to chance and poorer starting cities should get something to even it out.
A 60% production bonus is like getting a maintenance free miners and mechanicians guild from turn 1 - it's like a free couple of retorts the advantage that it gives you.

How Civ 4 did it, was if the starting location was below a certain level (this was determined by a score calculated from food, minerals and production in its city square) then it would give bonus resources. So you could add some minerals and food resources in the city squares. If it is coastal and has low food you could add a sea food resource eg. fish to boost food if there is nowhere to put it on the land. 

So a starting city that has low food/production, but gold and coal in its radius doesn't need a bonus, but the same city without the minerals gets some bonuses.

Edit. What is the issue with making death and stoning gaze a ranged attack like stoning touch?

Also I found a bug with the icons that tell you how long a spell takes to cast...aether binding should take about 15 turns, but there are way more icons than that. See attached file.

[Seravy]

Edit. What is the issue with making death and stoning gaze a ranged attack like stoning touch?

Gazes are attacks. They are not additional effects triggered by attacks. They are functionally different and handled elsewhere in code.
An attack is something that calls the "perform_attack" function. A touch ability is something that increases damage dealt within that function.
I could code it if necessary but it's not logical. It would be an exception to the rule.

Also I found a bug with the icons that tell you how long a spell takes to cast...aether binding should take about 15 turns, but there are way more icons than that. See attached file.

Wrong save file, you don't have AEther Binding. Maybe you don't have enough MP or your MP income is too low to be able to finish the spell on time.

[Seravy]

1. The amount of research I get from Omniscience doesn't match the formula. Have 4 sorcery books, so 16.5% + 3.5%*3 = 26.5% extra. But I get only 4 from 20 base RP. The sources are Halflings, Libraries and Nature's Eye. The discrepancy exists for cities without Nature's Eye too. (3.sav)

Percentages are rounded down to the nearest integer in the calculation so it's actually only 26%. Maybe I should increase the accuracy to include the 0.5% as well.

[Seravy]

2. I'm not sure if this is a bug, but on the F4 screen, there are brackets around Wizards that has a city 4 squares away from me. They also declared war on me, but the relations screen is still showing the brackets. (TURN58.SAV)

Not a bug. The city is only size 4 so it creates adjacency within a range of 4 only, which affects exactly one of your cities.
This creates a total empire adjacency of 4 which is too low to reach the treshhold of 20 or 1/4 of the total empire size of the wizard.
The war declaration probably came from a source not restricted by adjacency, like a chaotic war declaration or a reaction to your actions.

[mshih]

In the original, C key centers around the current selected unit. 

C now opens the cities screen.

Is there an equivalent bindkey which centers around currently selected unit?

[Seravy]

Yes, Space.
You can change it in the keys.ini file.