Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[Intaka]

Entangle + Call Lightning can make a single Cavalry take a node of Gorgons. No other 2 cast spell combo makes that possible. Even just Call Lightning alone can often take down multiple Very Rares with a single flying unit which never even engages. It is SO much more powerful than Doom Bolt, if cast early. It's so good that it is one of my guaranteed picks on every deep Nature build. You must never go in undergunned. Maybe all your fights are less than 7 rounds? A single Pegasi and one cast clearing a 7 Wrym nature node? Only Nature can do this. On the plus side, I guess this means the spell is balanced, since there's split opinion on it!

I do agree with you that Power Link turns a run away win into a rocket away win with many wizards still in game. Perhaps if it only applied to the first "X" spells cast each turn it could be better regulated and work as intended but not overscale. What do you think about that as a solution?

Call of the Wild "monsters" effect is detrimental to player and useful to the AI (xp), but the -25% monsters in each lair/node you attack is the real benefit. One less Sky Drake etc can be a huge difference in how hard a node is to tackle earlier. Personally, I don't care much for the rest of the effect, but the 25% less to kill for the same reward is worthwhile. Maybe once this build is stable I'll edit the spell down to 25% only.

Planetary Mastery's vision effect is annoying if enemy moves are on. You do have to toggle off view enemy moves, and just take a look around your cities at the start of each new turn. Makes ship sniping very very easy though. Again, powerful when its strengths are leveraged. I like your idea about free Natures Eye on all cities + a random (not you) earthquake every turn, but I would miss the sea dominance. The earthquake is the real carrot of the spell anyway, and if you aren't a 370+ spell caster, you miss out on that essentially.

[jhsidi]

Entangle + Call Lightning can make a single Cavalry take a node of Gorgons. No other 2 cast spell combo makes that possible.  Even just Call Lightning alone can often take down multiple Very Rares with a single flying unit which never even engages. It is SO much more powerful than Doom Bolt, if cast early. It's so good that it is one of my guaranteed picks on every deep Nature build. You must never go in undergunned. Maybe all your fights are less than 7 rounds? A single Pegasi and one cast clearing a 7 Wrym nature node? Only Nature can do this. On the plus side, I guess this means the spell is balanced, since there's split opinion on it!

Yeah.. that sounds like fun. But, I've noticed that on the last few versions (since before release I guess) the AI has really got its stuff together on lair / node hunting. By the time I reach Very Rare spells, there's really only a handful left. Like, single digit handful. There were 0 remaining at the time I got Call Lightning.

I'd be surprised to see it Call Lightning work on anything like that 7 Wyrm node. Doesn't seem like it's doing much damage to units that have 10+ armor or really deep health pools. Those wyrms would have 315 health. I did manage to take out 9 water elementals (AI owned) though.

[Seravy]

Perhaps if it only applied to the first "X" spells cast each turn it could be better regulated and work as intended but not overscale. What do you think about that as a solution?

That's not bad I think. I rather set a total power limit instead of spell count though, for example, no more than 3000 power.
Although..does it matter if you already won either way?

[Cruel100]

I would very much like the normal/fantastic/hero units to be renamed.

[Slingers]

WhiteMage wrote: “… For example, check city Konstanz. They produce 1 to 4 hammers each. This is not a unique example. This problem comes up way too often and without exception I squeezed out every last piece of food and hammer from my games in the past 27 year. That is over 2 months of my life just clicking MOM farmers and workers, which was extremely boring even hurting my Carpal Tunnel syndrome wrist. But that’s what I did since I loved this game so much and intentionally playing suboptimal is not my thing. COM II appears to continue to have this same problem.”

A while ago I was thinking about a semi-automatic City screen - worker manager. Could something like this solve this problem? Or did I misunderstand you? I also think that to some extent the problem is created by the player himself. But okey, one game theme is total control and even some AI wizards are perfectionists. Have a look at >here< and the attached image.

[Seravy]

I think he wants some magic button that automatically sets workers and farmers so that the total hammers produced in the empire is the highest and excess food is zero.
Which is one thing but completely disregards what a strategy game is about : producing hammers where you actually need to build important stuff, and food where you don't. And you can't automate that without a really good mind-reading device.

[enna]

1. Allowing cities to be built, say, three east and three south of an existing city both makes sense and should not cause any issues. In that configuration, there are two tiles of overlap (right now it's possible to build a city with three tiles of overlap), and it's just as "far" as a city that is four tiles south and zero tiles east. It's also still not possible to have one tile shared by three cities if you allow this, which I saw was a concern that you had in response to a broader suggestion about city placement.



2. A "cast previous spell again" hotkey would be extremely useful.

[WhiteMage]

I think he wants some magic button that automatically sets workers and farmers so that the total hammers produced in the empire is the highest and excess food is zero.
Which is one thing but completely disregards what a strategy game is about : producing hammers where you actually need to build important stuff, and food where you don't. And you can't automate that without a really good mind-reading device.

I do not want any magic button on this. And yes, one of my heuristics I used since 1994 is to maximize hammer production, maximize food production, and minimize waste. This is not the only heuristic I used, so there are some exceptions like the example you gave.

Apparently, my heuristic and strategy are not too bad, since I almost always won my MOM randomly generated setup games on Impossible with a long list of additional rules imposed on myself; I won my randomly generated setup COM game on Large Master level, and I today just won my COM II game on Lunatic with all the added difficulty settings (all >1x score modifiers, none of the <1x ones). All without cheating. But this is not about imposing one person’s strategy over another. It is about lowering rounding errors that motivate micromanagement. In my case it would be huge time saver. I can’t imagine I am the only one who likes to get 4 hammers instead of 1 in most cities every turn, which is doable.

I did not propose a mind-reading device. I gave my proposal twice already in writing. Simply have each city a uniform food and uniform hammer production from each farmer and each worker. That value can be a fraction.

Here is an example using the same Hammer.gam file I uploaded earlier.
City Azurtfall.
Current values:
Citizen 1 as farmer food output: 3f
Citizen 2 as farmer food output: 3f
Citizen 3 as farmer food output: 1f
Citizen 4 as farmer food output: 2f
Citizen 5 as farmer food output: 1f
Citizen 6 as farmer food output: 2f
Citizen 1 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 2h
Citizen 2 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 4h
Citizen 3 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 1h
Citizen 4 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 4h
Citizen 5 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 2h
Citizen 6 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 3h

My proposed solution is calculating their average and let every citizen produce the same:
Citizen 1 as farmer food output: 2f
Citizen 2 as farmer food output: 2f
Citizen 3 as farmer food output: 2f
Citizen 4 as farmer food output: 2f
Citizen 5 as farmer food output: 2f
Citizen 6 as farmer food output: 2f
Citizen 1 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 2+2/3h
Citizen 2 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 2+2/3h
Citizen 3 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 2+2/3h
Citizen 4 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 2+2/3h
Citizen 5 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 2+2/3h
Citizen 6 as worker hammer production on top of what a farmer would produce: 2+2/3h

Every city has their food and hammer production rates listed. If a new building changes it, then the rates are updated. This would be a major micro management prevention by simply eliminating the very rough rounding errors, which some players including myself took advantage of, but was boring. No magic. No mind reading. Simple rules. Only need UI how to display fractions. I have ideas for that as well.

[Seravy]

Yes, I can read and know you want that, this is about the fourth time you ask for it. And I'm still saying no.

It won't be uniform numbers anyway. There are overfarming penalties so there is a breaking point between this and that many food per farmer, and it's not from rounding, it's a game mechanic.
In particular for your example, the overfarming seems to kick in at citizen 3 and every farmer after that produces halved food. Even with your idea, it would be 3,3,1.5,1.5,1.5,1.5, and not 2,2,2,2,2,2.
Not sure if there are any similar non-linear formulas in other resources though, maybe not.

And yes, you are the only one asking. I've never, ever seen any person micromanage the game to anywhere near this level in the 6 years I spent working on it, even less tell me they spend 200 hours to win a single game due to micromanagement.
Yes, people like to get 2-3 more hammers each turn. But they value their time higher than those hammers so ignore them.

The economy scripts are available for modding in 1.2 and the variables can hold fractional numbers, so you can change it any way you like, except the end result must still be integer, but you can adjust the rounding any way you like.

Overhauling the entire game to support fractions would take too much work and we'll of course have a bunch of new bugs and crashes from it and I don't want to go back to there now that the game is finally becoming stable and free of the more severe bugs.

[Anskiy]

What do you think about cities rebelling and turning neutral if the number of rebels is like 50% or more of the population? We could have the chance for rebelling scale with the percentage of rebels linearly, starting at something like 25% and going up 5% for every 10% more of the total population rebelling. This could finally make breaking buildings with curses matter for players, since it would increase the impact of smashing Oracles, Shrines etc etc. Though perhaps the numbers need to be adjusted since I rarely see half of the populace of any settlement rebel, outside of overtaxing with ridiculous tax rates.