Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[WhiteMage]

S96. Adding Earth to Mud to spell charges is the same for 1 or 4 charges. I think it should cost more than 0 to add a second charge. Having 2 instances on the battlefield is significantly better than having 1. Similar comments on other spell charges. Nothing should come free.
S97. Teleporting artifacts among multiple heroes every turn is a boring and mandatory exploit to play optimally. It would be better to impose some drawback for doing it. It used to be 20 mana cost. I agree removing it, but it would be better if receiving hero loses all movement points that turn and can only receive if has not moved yet. Currently I use Pathfinding artifact with multiple heroes in each turn. As is, it does not make theoretical nor practical sense.
S98. When a +1 movement artifact is passed around then each hero incorrectly displays the increased move if right clicked.
S99. When city grows to max pop it overflows. 12035/12000 pop is displayed. Doesn’t make sense. Don’t allow that.
S100. Since plague event imposes a fixed known pop growth, it should display projected growth impact on city top right below Natural, Race, Stream of Life.
S101. Having Misfortune on a unit should have glowing effect. It is too easy to not see it and time consuming to check every turn to make sure it is the correct one not wanting to kill it by accident.
S102. Make new option available: offer all Wizard music playing in the Background in round robin. Some are beautiful and I like to play them in my head. Instead I never hear them and I have to listen to the short and annoying background music in the overland map over and over.

[occasionalplayer]

I would like to make a suggestion which could be toggled on/off: 
How about "Outposts are instantly pop 1-town"?
Some people dislike the outpost system, and I appreciate the counterarguments. But why not leave it to everybody's choice, same as "Tree of Knowledge"?

[Seravy]

It should be possible to set the outpost growth rate of every race to a very high value like 900 so they instantly grow into a city next turn.

[Suppanut]

I have balance issue request on Power Link, spell that could not be modded yet.

Current Power Link is based its balance from 4 opponents in original CoM but due to maximum number of opponent in CoM for windows is 13, appearance of Power Link mid-game (from lair) could be the most OP thing imaginable due to result scale based on activity of opponent alone. I have one of my playthrough on Warlord mod on max size map with 13 opponents that end up with 3 wizards casting Power Link around mid 1510s that still has no wizard defeat or retired by that point and their power fluctuated up to 9k (even at point I convert whole map to forest (literally), I still get less than 3k from Root of Genesis) and have to fight 3 Spell of Mastery Wars since lated 1510s.

I think power gain from power link should be limited by number of opponents (more opponents mean less power per activity) to even out it's usefulness regarding number of opponents a bit

[Seravy]

I'm pretty sure very rare spells should be unavailable in treasure that early?

In theory this is the issue why the "elimination" feature was added to the game but it probably can't keep up with AI research speed on the highest levels of difficulty.

Even so 1410 to research a very rare is extremely early even on high difficulty for three wizards in the same game....unless the mod changes the resource balance of the game.

That said, adjusting the spell's formula to somehow include the number of players is a reasonable idea but maybe adding a (moddable) hard cap of maximal power is better? Also the spell formula is already way too complex and hard to understand, not sure I like the idea of making it even more complex. Any suggestions for a new formula?

[zitro1987]

A power link hard cap is not a bad idea (max 4000?) especially if capped by turn #.

For example we could do a cap of 15*turn number, limiting it to 3600 power by year 20, 4500 by year 25

[Suppanut]

I think I agree with Zitro1987 here as another similar spell which scale by opponent activity (Fairy Ring) is also more or less capping by third factor as caster's own casting skill for quality of units summons too.

Also as now try to find way to diversify soul linker fortress garrisons by create different soul linkers heroes. May I request....
1) option in modding.ini to make optional option for only one copy of hero could appear at the same moment (no other wizard would gain the same hero that already joined other wizard)
2) how to bring back alternative heroes names as it was in original MoM. I recalled that there is method for each wizard to get same hero clone to be different names from player's but I forget method to do so.

[Seravy]

Instead of turn count, how about using Casting Skill?
For example, maximal power gained from Power Link equals the owner's casting skill (overland) times 10?
1. sounds easy enough in theory but does open a bad can of worms - what about dead heroes? If they are unavailable, eventually heroes run out and no one can get any. It's easy to abuse it and hiring heroes to kill them, too. If they are available, then Resurrection leads to duplicate heroes. Same issue with hired and disbanded heroes, your copy of the hero will have levels while everyone else's won't unless the setting also transfers hero levels between all players.
2. This was removed for the simple reason that we have up to 14 players now and the original name set only had 5 names per hero. If anyone can provide a good hero name set with 14 names per hero, I can do it. Use some formatting compatible with ini files like [0] for Hero #0 and then Name1=, Name2= etc. for the intended names. Ideally the first 5 should be the originals. Obviously avoid using any offensive or copyrighted name so no Harry Potter or anything like that

[mshih]

Please don't make this change. Or if you do make it optional.

In the base game, -- powerlink is already meh... It suffers from high disjunction targeting and bad relations modifier.

I can never keep it up for more than 2-3 turns anyways before it's dispelled.

The existing wizard elimination mechanic should prevent the 13X wizards from persisting too long. And powerlink gets weaker in the late game when very rare summons are cast by everyone.

[Suppanut]

Instead of turn count, how about using Casting Skill?
For example, maximal power gained from Power Link equals the owner's casting skill (overland) times 10?
1. sounds easy enough in theory but does open a bad can of worms - what about dead heroes? If they are unavailable, eventually heroes run out and no one can get any. It's easy to abuse it and hiring heroes to kill them, too. If they are available, then Resurrection leads to duplicate heroes. Same issue with hired and disbanded heroes, your copy of the hero will have levels while everyone else's won't unless the setting also transfers hero levels between all players.
2. This was removed for the simple reason that we have up to 14 players now and the original name set only had 5 names per hero. If anyone can provide a good hero name set with 14 names per hero, I can do it. Use some formatting compatible with ini files like [0] for Hero #0 and then Name1=, Name2= etc. for the intended names. Ideally the first 5 should be the originals. Obviously avoid using any offensive or copyrighted name so no Harry Potter or anything like that

Use casting skill to cap power link is sound like nice idea for me. Although it also true that power link is not that good if coming too late. Perhaps not only should power cap tie to casting skill, spell cost cap should also tie to casting skill too?

I will help you listed 14 versions of names of each heroes but how to check if names are copyrighted?