Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[mshih]

Thanks. Work around was to disband the 2 move swordsman in the city being attacked.

[WhiteMage]

I have not seen your responses to my earlier batch of Bug reports B64 – B72 and B87-B88 (these 2 had wrong B numbers, which I fixed now). I see 0 downloads of those bug report files. It seems you accidentally skipped it. Also, I made suggestions S74 – S81 that time.

“B76. Possessed units die at the end of combat. Fleeing happens after the end of combat. Works as intended.”
In this case add this to Flee text or Possession text.

“B78. You lost the confused Gorgon. It was your unit when it died so you lose fame for it.”
OK, but this is not intuitive and feels unfair. Not what a user would expect. Even worse, this ridiculous rule calls for exploiting it. Optimal play now calls for not fighting with the confused unit not wanting to lose Fame. So this will drag the game out longer to confuse even more units 1 by 1 instead of using them to fight each other. There goes the fun of killing other monsters with confused units on lairs.

“B83. Lairs can only have at most 2 different types of units in them. That one has 1 Ghoul and 1 Night Stalker, so it cannot raise undead.” OK, but I think it would be better if allowed to raise them as undead. More intuitive and fits the narrative. Current game rules have many arbitrary thresholds and constants that are not necessary. Those should be minimized, IMO. having 2 different types of units is fine to start with, but I would not enforce it later, such as raising undead and rampaging monsters razing towns.

“B86. Known, unfixable rounding problem.” Really? Then why don’t you remove the rounding from the Magic screen as I proposed? That would fix it. No research bonus, no rounding, problem solved.

B89. When razing is in progress pop growth is displayed as +0. It should display -2500.

B90. Neutral shamans captured an AI city that has no building in it after. Then they spawned new Shamans from there. Since it does not have Shrine, it feels wrong. But OK for the added challenge and game diversity. Those raiders are like viruses using towns like cells to clone themselves. BeforeCloneNeutralShamans.sav AfterCloneNeutralShamans.sav

B91. New Outpost displayed 29 Max pop before and 0 max pop after using settle. 29To0MaxPop.docx, 29To0MaxPop.sav, but unable to reproduce. It works fine after I loaded or replayed. Seems like a graphics bug and maybe something is stuck in the memory.

B92. Neutral shamans captured an AI town. Then they lost 1 shaman per turn for 4 turns. No known reason for them to keep dying. (But they captured another town and did not lose any. Instead they spawned even more with no building there.) NeutralsLoseShamans1.sav, NeutralsLoseShamans2.sav, NeutralsLoseShamans3.sav, NeutralsLoseShaman4.sav, NeutralsLoseShamans5.sav

B93. Chancellor reports if a town grows pop, but does not report when an outpost grows into a hamlet, which would be even more important.

B94. Neutral Djinn banished 3 out of 4 figures of my Shadow Demons. Then it killed the last figure by ranged magic. We won, but the Shadow Demons remained Banished after the battle. The 1 figure that was not Banished still survive and Regenerate. I have save if needed.

B95. My Ranger hero cast Syphon Life and created undead. But it did not retain its HP after the battle. It was only temporary. Hero survived battle with only 1 HP even though Syphon life showed 10 in the battle. BeforeSyphonLifeHero.sav, AfterSyphonLifeHero.sav

B96. In Wizard Relations start to draw the lines from the point they met. It does not make sense to have relations before that.

B97. Raise volcano text says it provides 7% production, but it does not provide. AfterGalleyRetreatsToLand.sav

B98. I retreated from city defense. My galley did not participate in the battle, but retreated to land. BeforeGalleyRetreatsToLand.sav click Next Turn. Results in AfterGalleyRetreatsToLand.sav

B99. Golem Resist Elements not displayed in production. But displayed in battle.

B100. When I killed a unit with Syphon Life, its tile was marked with red x not allowing to move there. Only became available to move there when I stepped next to that tile.  LowExperienceAIMagicians.sav Attack the Red town.

B101. AI Dervish hero has Wind Walking spell on it. But only normal walking is displayed on the overland map. WindWalkingDisplay.sav Attack Dervish to see.

B102. AI Dervish hero overland map shows walking with Movement = 7. But in battle it Wind Walks with Movement = 5 WindWalkingDisplay.sav

S89. Scale overland map mana range penalty smoother. Increment by 0.1. Don’t jump from 1.2 to 1.5 then to 2. For example, currently on maximal map 6 opponents, max water: 8 range = 1.2x, 9 range = 1.5x, 17 range = 1.5x, 18 range = 2x. Too much of a step function that calls for strategy to exploit the exact threshold and memorize the thresholds in various maps, which are even different from game to game depending on setup. Scale formula as follows: If distance > half the max possible distance from the Fortress then range = 3x. If less than that then linearly decrease towards the Fortress, but round up to nearest 0.1. So no more counting of exact distances of where I place my units to fight inside the cutoffs.

S90. It should not vary which 4 spells the Diplomacy Offer Tribute shows. Currently I repeat try it, but don’t give the AI anything, which gives away the long list of spells they don’t have. I can exploit that info to prepare my strategy against them. It is a boring, no brainer to keep doing it.

S91. Add gold cost to initiate any Diplomatic action. Every new diplomatic action should cost 1 more gold than last time. So player would abuse it less and would become less of a no brainer boring repetitive action. It would be a hard decision to do it or not.

S92. If Water Walking is dispelled in naval battle, then the unit should drown and die immediately.

S93. Add to Holy Bonus text that it does not apply to ranged magic attack.

S94. Stay consistent in naming Death units. Currently, I have Death spearmen, but not Death Longbowmen. Only Longbowmen who are Undead.

S95. Add 3rd option in diplo: when AI asks to declare war, we too can ask for a spell or money just like they have this option.

[Seravy]

B89. Razing effect is not part of growth, this is just nitpicking.
B90. 9 Shamans attacked the city and survived. There is no room to spawn a new unit so this is impossible. If you mean the city spawned a NEW raider stack that contains extra shamans, that's how raider spawns work and always worked.  It doesn't make any more or less sense than a lair spawning rampaging sky drakes when there are only nagas inside. It's just the game rule so it does that.
B92. Game rule. Neutral cities too small to feed the troops lose units. A city can have at most twice the number of population as units.
B93. You're taken into the city like when buildings are completed. That's more than enough.
B94. 50% or more irrecoverable damage means the unit dies irrecoverably. Game rule.
B95. Bug. Fixed for the next update, not sure when though, as version 1.3.0 was sent in yesterday. Bad timing.
B96. Not bug, this is nitpicking or at best a feature request. Date of first contact is not stored in game data.
B97. You don't even have the Raise Volcano spell in that file. Volcanoes only provide production for the owner of the volcano. So you have to cast the spell yourself. This is in the spell description.
B98. Not sure if this is true for the dos version or not but the game tries to first pick an empty tile as fleeing destination that is the same type as the battle location (sea or nonsea). If one exists, all units flee there. If none exists, units flee separately. Basically the game assumes the units fighting do so on a tile they were allowed to enter. I don't think this is worth fixing under the current circumstances. Maybe later.
B99. Difficult to fix, would require special casing the unit. Maybe later.
B100. Bug, fixed for next update.
B101. A windwalking icon for that type of window does not exist and never existed.
B102. The unit has 7 overland and 5 combat movement. Not a bug.

Please report real bugs only. Your bug reports have a hit rate of less than 40%.
Additionally, version 1.3.0 sent in yesterday is planned to be the last major update that adds new features. Beyond that, I will only fix bugs at least for a while.  I have been working on this nonstop the past 2 years. I need a very long break. I might be a somewhat of a perfectionist but not to that extent.

Edit : some good news, the two fixes above make it to be included in 1.3.0. Good thing I did it as fast as possible.

[WhiteMage]

“B89. Razing effect is not part of growth, this is just nitpicking.” OK, but I am not nitpicking. I am not looking for small errors to criticize your great work. I just try to help you create a masterpiece game that does not exist yet in the game industry. I would love to see your game becoming the first.

“B92. Game rule. Neutral cities too small to feed the troops lose units. A city can have at most twice the number of population as units.” OK. So when they are raiding on the map they don’t need food support. But when they capture a city they need. Not intuitive, but fine.

“B97. You don't even have the Raise Volcano spell in that file. Volcanoes only provide production for the owner of the volcano. So you have to cast the spell yourself. This is in the spell description.”
Tauron the red AI cast Raise Volcano spell many times on the West side of my island.
The Raise Volcano text in the Steam 1.02.01, 2021-10-04 version is: “Volcanoes provide 7% production as though they were regular mountains to the owner’s cities only”. 
I misinterpreted this as the city’s owner where the volcano is. To match the intended logic, change text from “owner’s cities” to “caster’s cities” to clarify for the users.

“B101. A windwalking icon for that type of window does not exist and never existed.” 
Hero being displayed to walk normally on the overland map while it uses Wind Walking is usability error, IMO. No clue for the user what is going on. There is a nice little icon for Wind Walking already that is used on my own Wind mage hero on the bottom right, just above patrol. Can that be inserted for the AI’s movement display to replace the boot? See save file: WindWalkingOverlandIcon.sav

“Please report real bugs only. Your bug reports have a hit rate of less than 40%.”
OK. I will start a new thread for usability errors that you can choose to ignore. Hopefully not forever though. Also, many of my past reported bugs could be easily fixed with just added text to explain to the users. After 27 years of playing this game, I still don’t understand many things even after reading a lot about it. So it would be helpful for future users to be clear. Fixing text can be done by someone other than you to save you time.

Also kindly check my earlier bug reports Bugs2021Oct8.zip on page 168 of this Thread. The Plane Shifting bug is so severe that it breaks my games. ~50% of the empty tiles can’t be used to Plane Shift and the tiles on the 2 planes are not in pairs.

[Seravy]

B101. I know but that icon is not the same size.
B65. Confirmed. It checks for the stack size of the destination tile plus source tile being less than 9 instead of less than or equal to 9. It also includes the entire source stack instead of just the selected unit. I will fix this for the next update but it's not a serious enough issue to resend the files, and Slitherine has already started working on the ones I re-sent yesterday. It's unfortunate but this is exactly why I'd prefer if real bug reports weren't mixed in with random unimportant stuff.  This could have made it into 1.30, but now it might take a very long time. I don't know when, if ever, we'll have enough significant bugs to do another update.

[Cruel100]

 I have been working on this nonstop the past 2 years. I need a very long break.

[Intaka]

@Seravy:

Honestly, you have exceeded my every expectation with the near instant fixes on discovered bugs, the incredible access to modding variables... just the entire thing. I thank you for your herculean efforts to make CoM2 the very best it could be, and hope that a maintenance period gives you some rest and recuperation.

I wish you had an art team of your own caliber. You could be rich, buy matching overpriced sports cars, and finally nail down that cocaine habit which seems to be every developers dream.

[Fringe]

In this game, Kali has a stack (Draconian hero + 8 demons) surrounded by 9 of my warships, to the northeast of Craagpool. I surrounded the stack before we were at war but we've been at war for several turns now. While I'm happy I don't have to deal with that stack rampaging around, it doesn't seem right that it just sits there doing nothing. What do you think?

Edit: version 1.02.01

[WhiteMage]

OK. Sorry to mix in the usability errors into bug reports in the past. There was no other thread to report them and I consider usability errors much more important than just suggestions.

The Plane Shift bug is more serious than what you found. A second problem is that sometimes if I Plane shift twice without move, the unit comes back to a different tile and not where it started. I explained this earlier.

New bugs:

B103. AI petrified 2 out of 4 figures of Magicians. Then I cast Life Drain that recovered 2 figures. PetrifyLifeDrain.sav

B104. My Magician hero with Wraith Form died from Earthquake. WraithFormEarthQuake1.sav, WraithFormEarthQuake2.sav

[Seravy]

The Plane Shift bug is more serious than what you found. A second problem is that sometimes if I Plane shift twice without move, the unit comes back to a different tile and not where it started. I explained this earlier.

That's not a bug. I explained that already. Planes are not equal size.

B103. Tested and it worked as intended. 3 petrified figures from the cockatrice and last figure had 1 damage on it. Casting Life Drain healed the 1 damage then added 4 gold hp to the single figure still alive without restoring figures.
I assume in your case none of the figures were petrified, they simply died to the ranged attack damage. Cockatrices attack at strength 3 which is not much but it's 4 figures attacking and with 50% chance to hit. Taking 4 damage to kill figures is a reasonable result.

B104. Fixed for next update. Also added flying and merging.