Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[Suppanut]

If you want to alter 'Ruler of Heaven' vs Chaos stacking, maybe a better choice would be to boost units' defence and resistance vs chaos damage.  Does Life face the same issues vs Death, Nature or Sorcery?  Would this unbalance Life vs those realms?  Wizards who depend on summons or combat casting would face the same 'can't keep up with demand' problem.

Life also has several economic buffs, to be able to produce more mana and units than a Chaos wizard.  It also already has several city or global spells that automatically buff each unit produced.  Halving the cost of Rare or VRare buffs might be a bit much.

If global stacking is a problem on large maps, maybe the fix is in limiting that stacking.

I'm not agree with you on life have superiority over chaos in mana generating. Although it is more likely that chaos wizard would not have large mana reserve due to how spendthrift chaos magic are, once Armageddon coming into play, chaos wizards would tend to have much more power income than every type of wizards in game (except death wizard which cast dark ritual on every cities) due to how AI not willing to disjunct global enchantment.

[Suppanut]

Since we're discussing altering spells, does Call of the Wild need altering?  I've never actually used it or seen it in play, but it seems that it's a spell that weakens over time, which is depressing.  By the time it's cast, many lairs are gone, and with each one gone, the spell offers less benefit.

One idea: since I think the game keeps the record of popped lairs, the spell could generate random units from popped lairs (the monsters went into hiding when their homes were destroyed).  It might be interesting if the spell created monsters not under the player's control, but which attacked any units not of the caster's ownership (even attacking annoying scouts and settlers from allies).  Instead of getting weaker over time as lairs were cleared, it would grow more powerful.

With multiple castings, the monsters would fight each other, unless it ignored 'neutral' units.

Would the extra units significantly slow game turn processing?

It is not weaken overtime, just that it reach plateau (and yes, it spawn any node that not belong to caster) in term of stack size and composition of rampaging monster. And it also has other issues too.

1) This spell don't have diplomatic penalty
2) This spell spawning rate could stack among different copy due to they trigger separately
3) Once Doomsdays and Armageddon start to stacking up, it is Call the Wild that really world-ending for AI after their garrison start mass desertion

If there is anything to complain it is that when it cast by AI, I have seen rampaging monster target other AI's cities but it not target my city at all.

[Anskiy]

I don't think Amplifying Towers are really a fix to the buffing issue. The problem with Life is that you have to manually buff lots of stacks in the late game, which gets quite tedious indeed. Holy Arms, Altar of Battle, Crusade and Charm of Life help, but any serious army still needs lots of buffs like Discipline, Holy Armor, Bless, perhaps even Lionheart and Invulnerability if they are facing huge stacks of very rare summons or highly buffed armies themselves. High Prayer and Supreme Light are great, sure.. but your troops need to survive the initial strikes first on the offense. Angels and Archangels are certainly powerful creatures, but it's not always viable to put them in your army, especially since they tie up your overland skill and take away time from buffing. Perhaps it would be good if you could aoe buffs on a stack, like maybe right clicking a stack applies a certain buff to all of them if you have the mana and casting skill for it.

[Seravy]

Casting multiple (buff or otherwise) spells simultaneously is not possible without implementing a spell queue system and all the necessary UI. It's not happening, sorry.

[drake178]

Casting multiple (buff or otherwise) spells simultaneously is not possible without implementing a spell queue system and all the necessary UI. It's not happening, sorry.

That's some box you're stuck in.

One For All

Life Uncommon - Global Enchantment
Casting Cost: 150 mana
Upkeep: 10 mana

Your overland unit enchantments cost 8 times as much to cast, but affect the entire stack they are cast at.

[Suppanut]

Casting multiple (buff or otherwise) spells simultaneously is not possible without implementing a spell queue system and all the necessary UI. It's not happening, sorry.

That's some box you're stuck in.

One For All

Life Uncommon - Global Enchantment
Casting Cost: 150 mana
Upkeep: 10 mana

Your overland unit enchantments cost 8 times as much to cast, but affect the entire stack they are cast at.

I think only 4 times is enough, if you do 8 times, you would not able to cast mass lionheart until around near year 1430, too late for many players. And with mass life spell such as mass healing, cost still only 2.333 times higher than normal single unit version. And this should be for overland cast only, it would defeat point to have life combat enchantment if you could cast mass unit enchantment in battle.

[Seravy]

Casting multiple (buff or otherwise) spells simultaneously is not possible without implementing a spell queue system and all the necessary UI. It's not happening, sorry.

That's some box you're stuck in.

One For All

Life Uncommon - Global Enchantment
Casting Cost: 150 mana
Upkeep: 10 mana

Your overland unit enchantments cost 8 times as much to cast, but affect the entire stack they are cast at.

That's doable of course but it's not an UI modification, instead a gameplay change. I have to remove an uncommon spell to add that and it doesn't work for players who didn't get, research or cast that spell so even then it's only a partial solution.
It also has the disadvantage of being forced to pay 8 times more on every buff even if it will only affect a single target - not every stack in the game has 9 units - and comes with nasty logistics requirements the AI has zero chance to fullfill - the intended targets being all on the same tile.

[drake178]

The numbers were merely for illustration, they would obviously need to be toned to make the spell both worth casting and actually fulfill the intended purpose. The idea was simply to show you a way to implement multi-casting buffs without a spell queue system. Adding an additional power slider to unit enchantments could be another way to do that. Anyway, I'll shut up now. :P

[drake178]

Okay, one more idea. Wouldn't it be simple enough to auto-select a spell for re-casting if the target was chosen with a shift-click? The animation could possibly be postponed as well based on whether the next cast would be instant or not. I guess counters might be a pain to handle, but this could still allow multi-casting without a comprehensive spell queue, on a number of different spell types. Unless, of course, there are scope issues in the code that can't be resolved easily.

[Seravy]

Shift-click storing a "cast this spell again" effect is simple and should probably work. I'll consider adding it.
The downside is, you still need to target the spell 9 times manually and even hold shift to do so. But you can skip opening your spellbook so it's an improvement.