Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[Seravy]

When an undead (e.g. undead efreet) casts syphon life now, the spell adds HP to their bar but preserves their existing, missing HP. So for example, if my undead efreet starts the battle with 4 HP missing and does a syphon life, it gains all the HP from the syphon but the UI still shows the 4 missing HP. After the battle, it's back to how it started.

That actually seems to work correctly.
Life draining adds extra hit points the same way as Exaltation if the unit cannot be healed for any reason.
We could make being unable to heal exempt from this but then Exaltation will also heal instead of adding new hit points.

It shouldn't affect gameplay either way, unless you need so much healing that you hit the hp cap, not sure how much but maybe 90.

[jhsidi]

If that's the way it works now that is a change from older versions, and a nerf to Death. Not allowing the temporary hitpoints to become permanent means undead that were previously valuable for their spellcasting skill -- efreet, angels, magicians -- are now worth much, much less. Since they're spellcasters they're preferentially targeted by enemies, and without any way to permanently heal, they will only last a handful of battles at best.

So yes, I think that it affects gameplay for Death quite significantly, and loses some strategies that worked well previously. I don't know exactly when this change came about, but I recall still using undead magicians and the life during alpha testing. I wouldn't have been doing that if they couldn't heal with drains.

As for exaltation, does it really matter? That's a rare spell so it's only going to benefit people who have high numbers of both Death and Life books. Considering that the synergy between the two schools of magic isn't great, I don't see any problem with giving it a boost. Personally I'd still never choose Death+Life even if exaltation is somehow helpful to undead.

[Seravy]

That makes sense, I'll add it to my bug list then.

Edit : done.

btw in case of Exaltation this can be detrimental instead of beneficial.
If a 4 figure unit with 1 damage on one figure is healed by that spell, in the 1.1.1 version they'd gain 2 hp each for 8 total.
In the fixed version, they heal the 1 damage then gain (7/4)=1 hp each for 5 total.
So the spell heals 3 less.
However, it already works that way for every unit that isn't undead so that's fair.

[Malk500]

Played a full game on normal, maximal land size and 14 wizards (so, max land size). Focused on dungeons, cleared heaps including hard ones, in terms of retorts and spell books, only picked up 1 retort, no spell books.

Checked modding.ini file and it *looks like* a certain amount of picks treasure is generated on a *per world* basis, and this does NOT scale with the world size setting.

So basically the smaller the world, the easier it is to find picks treasure (because same amount generated as in a maximal world, but crammed into smaller amount of dungeons).

1. Am I interpreting this correctly?
2. If so, please change it so picks treasure scales witg world size setting, not just number of wizards (more picks treasure please).

[Seravy]

1. Yes, however, the world size scales with the number of wizards even more than the size setting.
2. Most definitely not, at best I can add a modding.ini option to scale by world size but the formula is already too complex. However if you want more picks, you can already do that by editing modding.ini. For example if you want 15 picks, set the "A" values to 15 and all others to zero. You only need to do that once each time before starting a new game.

[Malk500]

Thanks for the info / confirming things.
I believe classic mom generated picks on a per dungeon rather than per world basis, I am wondering why this approach was changed?
I know the values in modding.ini can be adjusted as needed, but right now it seems like you would need to basically have a different version for each world size setting? It seems a bit cumbersome.

[Seravy]

I believe classic mom generated picks on a per dungeon rather than per world basis, I am wondering why this approach was changed?

Because it was unreliable. Some maps had no books at all, others had like 20. While the former is "only" disappointing for the player, the latter can lead to runaway AIs that have 6 books in every realm and all of the most powerful spells in the game, especially now that the AI is more competent at clearing lairs and nodes.
Ultimately, the old method offers zero direct control over what's in the treasure. What's worse, as Myrran places have/had more monster budget, most of the books were on that plane. This gives even more time for the AI to pick them all up and puts the player in a very bad position with no good way out if they started on Arcanus, forcing them to play Myrran all the time.

Finally, this is a game where the players are not supposed to have access to the entire "tech tree" only a small part of it, and deciding which part at character creation is a major part of the strategy in the game. If extra books are too common, these choices and strategies won't matter. Why pick 1 Nature book to have the Web spell, if I can pick one up on the go 90% of the time? Why pick more than 4 Sorcery books if I can be sure I'll be able to pick another 4 up every game from Sorcery Nodes? Why pick anything I don't need immediately at the beginning of the game if I can find it later?

I guess I'll add a modding.ini value that scales by plane size and defaults to zero for the next update, it's already so complex it won't really make a difference to have one more.

[Malk500]

Thanks, that all makes sense

[Anskiy]

With debug and god mode enabled, your units are still vulnerable to curses. Also, life drain doesn't create undead for you with those on. Is this intentional?

[Anskiy]

Oh! I also found that the Spell of Return doesn't use mana you stored, rather it takes mana from the mana bar directly. Pretty weird behavior, that.