Fewer wizards on Myrror = easier game?

[massone]

...actually, if stronger towers are enough to be a solution, isn't it the easiest to simply recommend changing the tower budget in modding.ini?
I mean, I can of course hardcode a bonus to the budget that scales on difficulty, or add it to modding.ini but ultimately that's just a convenience feature at that point, those who want stronger towers might as well just raise the number for themselves even as is.

Would it solve the problem though? It for sure makes the tower unbreakable for the AI even way beyond when they would be allowed to do it as it forces the AI to have a 9 stack of very rares to do it but how much does 9 great drakes stop the human player?
Sapher has repeatedly demonstrated that taking out 9 drakes only cost like 2 nomad horsebowmen and some fire bolts or whatever other common spells he used to do that. There is no such node or tower garrison that can't be cheesed.
Which brings us to the counter effect which is pretty much mandatory and has no alternative solutions. But having a counter effect on a tile that's not a node and one that doesn't get affected by the spell and retort specifically meant to do that, idk, not a fan of that idea.

...a more drasctic but actually working solution without side effects would be to not have towers at the start of the game and have them spawn over time. But that also comes with an issue in the sense when the game tells you "cannot build cities on towers" and the tower is hidden until 3more years that's super confusing. And also, where do the towers come from? Ok, maybe they were invisible and the magic is wearing off or something... still feels a bit unnatural. I think the diplomacy consequences are more intuitive and might work better.

Like you said, if we only make the Towers stronger by budget or creatures, it doesn't really solve the problem of player cheese. To do that, we specifically need something that stops the 2 major categories of cheese strategies:
1) attacking with units that can't be attacked in return, and using a lot of combat-casting while kiting/invulnerable
2) attacking repeatedly to whittle down the forces protecting the tower over many battles

A counter effect would be a simplistic solution, but it isn't perfect either. In both cases the Counter effects just makes the Tower require more resources to tackle, but doesn't require qualitatively stronger armies.

I agree that it's somewhat unnatural too. A solution involving special Tower terrain effects that are unique to Towers might be better.

The first type of cheese can be partially solved with spawning ranged creatures, which I don't think modding.ini will work for.
The second type of cheese can only really be solved if the Tower received reinforcements or granted regeneration to the creatures guarding it, so it stays at full strength.

Some additional unique terrain effects that might be worth considering:

• Tower grants Supernatural to all creatures (so that Rare creatures can't be revived easily, and they can still be used for Tower spawns)
  
• Spacial distortion effect, causing movement of all attacking creatures to be halved, and prevent Teleportation (could allow Merging still, to give it another distinction from Teleportation).
  
• Spatial instability, destroys low resistance units and causes 100% casualties for both fleeing and exhausted withdrawal (so that you can't send in a lot of trash units repeatedly, and you can't flee with a hero, every attempt at a Tower is costly and risky--and this doesn't hurt the AI either because they can't flee or use the whittling technique anyways).
  

[Suppanut]

I think tower could be stronger and should also ignore realm template too. (like sky drake and great drake appear together, or great wyrm and demon lord together, etc) If want tower to be breaking late, its combination should be cruel to both player and ai.

[jhsidi]

I've never watched Sapher's videos but he sounds like the lockpicking lawyer, he can apparently kill a Sky Drake with a broken toothpick. I'd guess that the majority of us are like a very watered down version of that and can't do it quite so well.

For the non-Saphers, some towers are very intimidating. Lots of Archangels, Djinni, Behemoths, Demon Lords -- there's a theme here. All of these monsters are spellcasters and/or ranged. On the flipside, some towers are complete pushovers with really, really obvious techniques to take them out. Most of the Rare tier monsters are pushovers to various strategies, also some Very Rares like the Great Wyrm. I suspect the group of us could sit here and make a specific list of which towers are underperforming. So that's one option: to add a new mechanic that curates the list of what's allowed more.

Suppanut's idea of allowing towers to draw from multiple realms would give more potential good combos and have an extra benefit of giving a fresh new mechanic to the game. For the same reason -- I don't favor giving towers a copy of the dispel aura of nodes. Specifically because it's NOT new. Nodes are nodes, it'll be a bit boring and samey to also have not-node nodes.

Also, I'd suggest that the diplomatic options could backfire. If Myrror declares war on Arcanus... that may benefit me as a player, especially if the Myrror wizards are underpowered or closer to my peers than me. There's no telling.

I have two additional ideas:
- 1) Scale tower budget with difficulty level (is this already done? I don't know)
- 2) Give Towers a wizard AI. The wizard casts from the same Realm as the tower. He has a set casting skill that never changes. Let's say it's 70, or that it scales with difficulty, +20 points per level above normal. Early in the game, someone casting 70 SP worth of spells is going to give me heartburn. Later on, that spellcasting is going to have a negligible effect. So it meets the stated goal of preventing early game breaks, adds something new to freshen up the game, and also feels loreful (who put the Towers there? I suspect it was the past Master of Magic, who has now ascended but still wants to prevent others from replicating his feat).

[Seravy]

Also, I'd suggest that the diplomatic options could backfire. If Myrror declares war on Arcanus... that may benefit me as a player, especially if the Myrror wizards are underpowered or closer to my peers than me. There's no telling.

Certainly. That's why my suggestion is to make Arcanus players declare war on the Arcanus player who opened the portal and try to claim that portal for themselves. I don't want a global Arcanus vs Myrror war and it wouldn't make any difference. The player is attacking Myrror in the first place (tho dealing with 2 or 3 of them in high player count games can be harder but up to 6 AIs, there is only one) so it's not making a difference for him and other Arcanus AI's likely have no open tower to access Myrror so they aren't really affected either.

Do we really need to fix this because in my opinion this being a problem is a bit questionable? I mean if you find it not fun to open the towers then don't? The AI already cannot and we decided to let the player choose as they should be able to decide which way of playing is more fun for them. I'm pretty sure stronger towers were discussed and decided against when the AI tower turn limit was implemented.
But I do think the Arcanus wizards backstabbing you while you're busy fighting the Myrran one is an adequate solution. At least I can't think of anything better other than messing with the towers themselves but then people will ask, why those additional game mechanics don't apply when they are starting on Myrror or when they used one of the scoring options like Equalizer.

We need to fix the game as a whole but only "Master and above difficulty, Arcanus start, no Equalizer, Race or Boss option selected" has any problem and that's very specific. We need to target the solution to that specific case without changing the game in general and should do it in a way that it's not even noticable to players not playing this specific difficulty and setting.

There is one particular thing this very much reminds me of. There is a game, Chrono Trigger, where you get to fight the final boss around 30% into the game. You're expected to lose to continue the story. A friend of mine instead decided it's a good idea to grind levels up to 99 from 25 and beat the boss. Then complained the game is too short, the boss is too difficult, and the ending is weird. Well, yeah you aren't supposed to do that, the game wasn't designed for it.
Same applies here. Ok, you're good enough to break towers early and defeat the Myrran wizards. The game still wasn't designed for that so it causes problems.


...we're also kinda jumping the gun here. Is the AI still underperforming and too slow in 1.2 after all the bugs were fixed? Maybe we should start by testing that.
Aside from the Leave Me Alone bug, there was also this for example :
"-Fixed 1.1.2 bug : AI starting race selection only sets the city race but fails to set the AI's home race variable. This can lead to poor AI decisions and incorrect unrest values during the game."

What is the unrest table for a Barbarian wizard ruling a Myrran race? I can't imagine it being any good and that is race 0 which would be in the unset variable.
I also noticed the AI often had 1 rebel in their starting city due to starting on higher tax rate than they should have, that is another change that might affect this tho it might have been the consequence of the previous bug.
Then there was the ammo bug in automatic combat which might have prevented the AI from taking out neutrals and lairs if they had a mostly ranged army.

I'll try to get the update ready in 1-3 more days and then those who want to test it, can. There are a lot of changes so we definitely should give this update some additional testing beyond just me playing for a few days.

[Seravy]

...actually I just realized the diplomacy/war declaration solution is redundant.
We already have overexpansion warnings and they scale with difficulty.
If you conquer enough poorly defended Myrran cities to actually get close to winning the game, the amount of overexpansion penalties should be large enough that most Arcanus players end up declaring war on you.
Does that not happen for some reason? Maybe the overexpansion formula is wrong?

I checked and "No Overlap" does reduce the amount of cities allowed without overexpansion warnings, so it does function similarly to playing on a smaller map and shouldn't be a way to avoid the warnings.
...let's see.
DOS version : (years+6)*(2+Landsize)/4 cities
(land size goes from 0 to 4)
Windows version : (Years+6)*(3+Landsize)/6 cities
(land size goes from 1 to 7)

For Normal size the DOS version is 4/4 = 1x multiplier, Windows is (4+3)/6 = 1.14 multiplier
For Tiny, DOS is 2/4 = 0.5x, Windows is (1+3)/6 = 4/6 = 0.66x
For Huge, DOS is (6/4)1.5x, Windows is also (9/6) = 1.5x

So it does seem CoM Win allows for slightly more cities without a warning than the DOS version except on Huge and Maximal size.

Maybe it should be (Years+6)*(2+Landsize)/6 for the Windows version instead?
The amount of penalty is the same but I'm not sure about the probability of triggering it.
In the windows version the chance is 1 in 12 every turn.
Another difference is, the windows version added a safety period of 12 turns after a new wizard pact during which these warnings are not applied.

[Anskiy]

You do make a good point. If AI underperformance on Myrror was due to a bug, we should first test if solving that bug solves the issue.

[Slingers]

...a more drasctic but actually working solution without side effects would be to not have towers at the start of the game and have them spawn over time. But that also comes with an issue in the sense when the game tells you "cannot build cities on towers" and the tower is hidden until 3more years that's super confusing. And also, where do the towers come from? Ok, maybe they were invisible and the magic is wearing off or something... still feels a bit unnatural. I think the diplomacy consequences are more intuitive and might work better.

These were my far-fetched ideas on the subject where towers came from and how the planes could connect/disconnect:
Cities have tower buildings. Magic goes wrong sometimes. Hups - we have a tower that connects the planes. Unfortunately, the city - or two if there is a city in the same area on the other plane - no longer exists. Instead of "Hups", the capital of a defeated wizard, a new very expensive building and/or an Arcane spell "Astral Gate" could turn a city (or accidentally two) into a tower. Towers could be destructible structures. "Do you want to level the tower to the ground?" could pop up after conquest. Units or a stack of engineers stationed on the tower tile could be given a raze button. Tower open too early? No problem! The AI could do everything to destroy the opened tower. Hm ... I guess that would be too big a problem for the AI to solve with units. Towers opened too early could be instable and collapse immediately or after X turns.

[Seravy]

The update is mostly ready but before uploading I want to run some AI only test games to weed out any script crashes or similar issues.
I'm going to look at AI performance on Myrror while testing.
Any specific difficulty I should be running these tests on? Master? Expert? Lunatic? Which settings or number of opponents?

[Slingers]

Everything fair and normal might be just fine. In addition, the lowest level of difficulty in which the AI has no restrictions at all. Which one is it actually atm? 4 opponents and 13 opponents might be interesting to test.

[zitro1987]

Advanced, 6 opponents with close attention to myrran, especially ranged oriented myrran (dark elf)