This does not use a table, instead it adds spells in a predetermined order while picks are available, but each spell might have conditions (or might appear in more than one position in the order with different conditions).
Mana Leak was the AI's 6th common Death spell choice. It's no longer a common so it'll be replaced by "6. If nature books>=4 then pick Mislead.".
Endurance was simply replaced in the same choice order with Discipline.
Fire Storm was the AI's 1st uncommon chaos choice. It'll be replaced by adding
"1. If climate=frozen then pick Raise Volcano"
and
"4. Pick Mystic Surge"
as Gargoyles are already picked as the creature if a better one from a different realm isn't available, and Fireball is not really worth the pick. Without Fire Storm, this spell tier is a bit weak for the AI, it isn't that great at using Immolation or Chaos Channels. Maybe Chaos Channels might be better though. Either way, this 4.th pick is only reached if the land isn't frozen and the AI picked Giant Spiders, so it implies 5 Nature books (or 8 Death books but that's not possible with 7 Chaos books needed to have 2 uncommons). Nature is good with fantastic units so maybe "4.Chaos Channels" might be better here?
Life picks Divine Order as it's 6th choice but it's not uncommon now. (the first 5 have very specific conditions so this is actually reached often)
Picking Endurance might be good here, without any additional conditions.
Magic Immunity is gone from Sorcery rare, so I'll replace it with picking Invisibility.
Now the interesting part, there is 1 more rare spell pick at 8 books.
For Nature, I'll add these :
3. if Life books>=3 then pick Abundance
4. pick Earth Elemental
I'm not sure about "4" as it has an obvious weakness in its movement speed, but it's still by far the most important thing to have other than an overland creature because Nature is really lacking in combat spell options at rare.
For Chaos, it always picks Flame Strike, and occasionally picks Doom Mastery (if there are combo realms for it).
The second pick could be Fire Storm or Doom Bolt, not sure which. Warp Lightning is solid, too, as are the creatures although Efreet is not that obvious now that is has bad resistance.
3. If Resist Magic was picked, pick Efreet
4. Pick Doom Bolt
sounds like a solid choice. Although for Chaos+Sorcery, picking Inner Power (the fire mastery spell) might be even better?
For Sorcery, I think it's obvious that it wants Storm Giant as its second pick of rare. Having a creature is always important for the AI. (Conjurers already used the pick on Air Elemental though.
Life always uses the first pick on Invulnerability.
For the second, Holy Arms sounds like a solid choice.
Death picks various things depending on retorts or personality already, and then picks Wave of Despair.
If none of those conditions applied, the second pick is probably best spend on Cloud of Darkness (if the Death AI can defend itself, the undead and curses do the rest) or Terror (to have something that is good against many enemies while Wave is good on fewer.)
Finally, the very rares. This is the part I'm worried about, although only 1 realm AIs really get any and those had almost all the spells in the old system either way.
Nature needs a creature but I really don't want to lock the AI into using one of the three and missing all 3 is super unlikely.
It also needs Call Lightning the most I think.
So...
1. Call Lightning
2. Random creature (any one of the 3)
3. Entangle
Sorcery.
Life probably wants Magic Immunity for buff stacking and Nature for its creatures.
Time Stop if alchemist.
Spell Ward for Sage Masters and Runemasters for SoM wins.
Otherwise, idk. Spell Binding, Spell Ward, Time Stop obviously but it wouldn't be very fun to see that on the AI all the time...although it doesn't really happen unless they picked enough books and are monocolor. Sky Drake and Djinn are quite important too to have at least one creature. I guess the creature at random if there is only one pick, otherwise the other spells and hoping to roll one creature?
So 1 pick = random creature, 2 picks = Spell Binding and Spell Ward, 3 picks = Spell Binding, Spell Ward and Time Stop.
Or pick Time Stop instead of Spell Ward on 2 picks?
Chaos.
Disintegrate if we picked Mind Storm for the combo.
Armageddon - it is the spell that wins the game afterall.
Then Apocalypse or Chain Lightning at random.
..or always Apocalypse? But we always pick Flame Strike so maybe don't even need either?
This still leaves 1 pick on 10 book wizards. Doomsday and Meteor Storm are the best choices but aren't fun to play against.
Chaos doesn't need the creatures that much. Call the Void is similarly unfun as the globals but at least avoidable by diplomacy and city protection spells. 10 books implies we do have all the rares though so that means we have Doom Mastery so it's worth picking Chaos Surge or Blazing Eyes, or even Warp Reality. WR might be the most powerful but it's a bit of a "why bother" when we also have the damage spells.
What if we picked the combat damage spell only if books<=9 and otherwise picked BOTH chaos surge and Warp Reality? I think I'll go with that.
Life.
Archangel, no doubt.
Probably High Prayer next and Charm of Life as final one.
Call to Arms can be a quite powerful AI choice as well though.
This is a bit of a problem one because the military globals are only good if you have them all.
Maybe like this :
1.If Sage Master then Enlightenment
2.Archangel (the AI will be too stupid to use Destiny effectively)
3.If Conjurer then Call to Arms
4.If 10 books then Crusade and Charm of Life
5.If Cult Leader then Ruler of Heaven
6.High Prayer
and finally, Death
1. If we took Mind Storm then Annihilate
2. Maniacal or Ruthless then Pestilence
3. Demon Lord or Death Knight at random
4. Massacre
5. Eternal Night
This is the current "default spell pick table" for human players.
It determines what spells are chosen when a predefined wizard is picked, the random option is used, or what spells are ticked by default when picking "custom".
We need to add 1 more rare, and 3 very rares to this table. The criteria is to offer a selection that best defines the realm, is newbie friendly, useful and fun to play, and where possible, is not the most powerful pick available.
So... here is what I've set up as a first attempt :
This thread aims to consolidate any ideas we might have for added convenience/user-friendliness in CoM II (or possibly future versions of CoM).
Combat
Auto-Stalemate: If in any battle one side becomes both a) incapable of attacking any unit on the other side and b) incapable of throwing spells, allow the player the option of immediately ending the battle as if 25 rounds had passed (i.e. both sides retreat exhausted).
No Auto Casting: Allow option to disable spellcasting in auto/quick combat.
Results Screen: After quick combat, give screen listing unit casualties.
Quick Quick Combat: Hotkey to enable/disable Quick Combat (as opposed to going into Settings).
Advisors
Surveyor: Highlights possible city locations (alternatively: greys out/"dehighlights" invalid city locations); option to outline city radius for selected square.
Cartographer: Different "layers" - display city names (for quickly finding targets of events/spells); display only nodes (filter by type); display only encounter sites; etc.
Chancellor: Include events like spells cast and known cities that were conquered; include events from past 3-5 turns.
Tax Collector: New screen, shows total gold income and upkeep. Both can be broken down by source (tax/trade/building/trade goods/heroes for income, units/buildings/heroes for upkeep). Also shows total mana income and upkeep, the latter broken down by summon/unit enchant/city enchant/global enchant. Might need name change, something like Treasurer or Majordomo.
General UI
Ability to (re)map hotkeys ingame.
In bottom right "magic" square of main UI (currently displays mana income), display remaining turns for current research project.
Right-clicking on spellbooks on Mirror and Wizard Creation screens gives breakdown of how many spells per level can be researched based on current amount of books. Possibly also include total casting/research discount from spellbooks, if applicable.
Cities screen also displays turns until population growth.
"Done" button no longer removes all movement points.
Optional minimalist UI: Removes side and top bar from main screen; gold+income, food, mana+income, research turns displayed along small bar at bottom of screen instead, advisors and other screens reached through hotkeys.
Colour-coded stat enhancements: When a unit has increased stats, give those stats a different colour based on the source (e.g. keep gold for unit enchantments, white for holy bonus, red for hero abilities, blue for combat/global enchantments and/or auras, etc). This would make it easier to quickly see, for example, how much of a unit's attack bonus is coming from a hero's Leadership ability.
I wanted to float this in its own thread rather than the brainstorming thread because it's a fairly sweeping change that would have a big impact on how the game in general plays.
What is it?
Master of Magic features an "I go, U go" combat system where one side moves every unit at once, then the other. This would get rid of that and instead add a new Initiative stat that determines when in the battle each unit acts. So if I've got one unit with 4 Initiative and one unit with 2, and you've got one unit with 3 Initiative, my Ini 4 unit would move/act, followed by your unit, followed by my Ini 2 unit. If units on the same side have equal initiative, which one goes first is determined at random. If units on opposing sides have equal initiative, the defender goes first. If a unit waits, they go to the end of the queue. If multiple units wait, their actions are resolved in reverse (i.e. highest Ini unit would be the last of the units who waited to go).
Why bother?
The short answer is that it would make combat faster-paced and more dynamic while adding an interesting new variable into the mix. You might want to include a high-initiative unit in your stack even if it's weak, just so you can hopefully be the first one to get off a spell in a battle. If you're up against a wall of Magicians, you might want to temporarily leave behind units with low initiative as they're more likely to get turned into pincushions before they can act. It would also open up new avenues for balancing: Steam Cannons, for example, could be given an attack that's a fair bit stronger than what they have now, since as siege weapons they'd probably have terrible Initiative and as a result a more powerful shot would be balanced out by often going last i.e. being less likely to survive until their turn.
Why a new stat?
Why not just use a unit's movement speed, like in early Heroes of Might and Magic games? There are two reasons, one mechanical, one conceptual. The mechanical reason is that movement speed is already a tremendously powerful stat, and having it make an even bigger difference would be too much. The conceptual reason is that "Initiative" more represents a unit's situational awareness, reaction time, etc - things that may not necessarily correlate with a quicker movement speed. For example, mounted units move much faster than infantry, but it's the horse doing all the hard work there. There's no reason for them to have an Initiative that's higher than infantry by much, if at all. Meanwhile, it would make sense that certain relatively slow units might have a high initiative due to heightened senses or supernatural ability (Chaos Spawn and Hydra come to mind).
This thread was made to collect any suggestions to improve Graphics on CoM II. I made a small research on pixel art and probably most filters will work better if screen is reduced (I know... common sense but...) and possibly keep the "dark edges" as we have in current dosbox version of CoM I. If someone knows a better way to enhance graphics and keep the full screen please share. My current suggestion is to reduce screen size and add one of the filters (hqx) used on current dosbox version of CoM I. Here a list of sites about the algorithm:
It may be because I'm new to this game, but I never seem to get much effective use from Fantastic Stable units. In theory, a flying unit with good speed should be a valuable addition to my army. In practice, they often are too frail, do too little damage, or simply get produced too slowly to be effectively deployed. What gives?
I'm going to rerun the Season 4 games, 20 times each, and publish the results here.
I originally intended to start going with season 5 (fresher in memories), but the games aren't available yet, so I'm going back one year.
The objective is twofold:
- See how random the prediction game actually is.
There's a natural tendency when your predictions come true to go "See! Told you!", and on the contrary to dismiss the result as a mere fluke when things don't go the way you expected them to (pleading guilty there, Your Honour).
Hopefully, with 20 iterations, we'll get a sense of how flukey the actual result was, and of how actually predictable each game was.
- Get a more accurate idea of each leader's performance.
Over 5 seasons, we'll have a 60+ games sample. That might seem a lot, but it's actually a very small sample, with each leader appearing 5-10 times only.
With this much larger sample, we'll be able able to better gauge each leader's performance, in the specific context of each game.
See, if we wanted to get a fair assessment, we'd need to test a game will all possible combinations of starting spots and neighbours.
Which, if my math is correct, would mean 6! = 720 possibilities for a 6-player game, and 7! = 5040 possibilities for a 7-player game.
Multiply that by 10 to get more than a single data point for each possibility, and... yeah, not gonna happen.
And that would still only be with a given field of 6 or 7 AIs, not the whole set.
So if an AI is given a dud start, or really tough neighbours, it won't perform well. Which will only be an indication about the balance of that map, and not really about that AI's general performance.
But conversely, by running the game 20 times, we'll get dumb luck out of the equation.
About the first objective, a caveat right there : I won't exactly be comparing apples and oranges, but oranges and tangerines maybe?
That's because I'll be running all those tests following season 5 rules, not season 4: so no goody huts, no Apostolic Palace.
It will make AI cross-season comparisons more reliable, but will obviously have an impact about the season 4 predictability results it yields. For instance, no AP should mean a lower average amount of war declarations (no forced peace/redeclare cycles, no holy crusades).
I'll track the results in the Excel file attached to this post.
I'll also make a dedicated post for each game, where I'll attach the game replays, the edited worldbuilder file (removing the second observer civ to get a consistant Domination threshold across seasons, removing goody huts, fixing missing starting units*, making the AI players non-playable**, removing fixed random seed***), and the resulting starting savegame (where I moved scouts/workers to the position they had in the actual game, added archery tech to the barbs, and added the Great Spies to mess with the AI sliders in order to stay consistant with the official games).
I've also attached the very simple mod that removes the AP (you'll need it if you want to run the savegames).
For each game, I'll also provide the "best prediction", based on the 20 test results.
Now, by "best prediction", I merely intend the prediction that would yield the best average score across those 20 results. Which is not necessarily the "best" prediction you could make (discarding the obvious outliers would probably be a better strategy for instance), but well, that's what I mean here.
I'll also include:
- said average score
- the score it would have yielded for the actual game that Sullla ran ("actual")
- and the running totals for both.
(*) @Sullla: this is something you might want to double-check for future games. In several cases, an AI was missing a scout or an archer.
That's something I've noticed over the years: when you try and add units to a stack in the worldbuilder, sometimes the unit doesn't get created.
(**) The AIs seem to get an extra warrior for free at the start of the games (happens in the streamed games too), but it doesn't seem consistant (some AIs do, some don't). This was my attempt at fixing that (based on the hypothesis that it was related tp the human player's free warrior), but it had no effect. Well, it at least makes for one less click when starting the scenario.
(***) I originally intended to provide each game's initial start so it could be replayed... but I tested it and the replay diverged from the original after 120ish turns.
Since the replay is not reliable, I went instead for ease of use: with no persistance of the random seed, no need to fight barbarian units at the start of each game to get a new seed. Just launch the game, and get going.
Seravy's mention of the Subversion spell being useless before, but now possibly useful with the better diplomacy system made me think that diplomacy really should have some more thought. If the number of opponents is going to be much higher, then the system designed for 4 may not be adequate. If you're going to have a dozen or more AIs, there's a lot of potential for really interesting strategic decisions. Having one or more solid allies might be critical for surviving. I'm imagining a system wherein the human player faces many real decisions about assisting a potential ally, such as:
Requests for help in defending cities (or nodes)
Requests for attacks on another AI
Requests for resources, spells, units (the AI lacks ranged troops, so offers to swap some wolf riders for bowmen)
Agreements for trading territory or lair access (race A gets a bonus from desert tiles, so would benefit from the desert area your scouts found, while you'd like that mountain area they dislike)
Overland spells (you cast Heavenly Light on their city, they cast Resist Elements on several of your units, or maybe they pay you mana to cast Ice Storm on the enemy units threatening their city)
Use of special resources (mithril, nightshade) within limits, so as not to trivialize the value of such special tiles
The benefits of good relations would include:
Trade bonuses
Access to otherwise unavailable resources, spells, units
Military assistance
Information
Turning your potential worst enemy into an ally
This expanded diplomatic system would allow opportunities for new spells, units, resources, etc. It would allow for winning by diplomacy. It would allow for really liking one AI leader, and really, really detesting another. It would allow for getting potential enemies to fight each other (so satisfying!). It would also allow for bigger threats (enemy federation).
I expect that some of these possibilities would be too difficult to program, but maybe some are more reasonable. It would need to avoid stupid requests, such as asking for help in a battle that you can't possibly get your troops to in time. Penalties for refusing a request might have to be small or even zero, since the AI can't understand your very valid reasons for being unable to fulfil the request at this time, and the benefits for fulfilling requests should be really worthwhile. Chances for gaining diplomatic points should be something to look forward to. I think it has a lot of potential for making the game more interesting.
I expect that these suggestions are too much to expect from COM at this time. This is more of a suggestion to think about it for future expansions or new game development.
So CMF asked for somebody to keep his a game rolling he was playing on a different site. As I am currently working a lot from Homeoffice and there is no indication of this changing, I volunteered and will report my efforts here.
I was surprised to see that his token works alongside mine for PBEM18 but that is very convenient. The current player (Hungary) has a note in PYDT informing me that he is on a Kayak trip returning on 02.08.2020.
As CMF is starting his vacation / relocation tour on Friday/Saturday, I believe he will not get the same another time to send some screenshots, so we have to take it like it is.
![[Image: OwewysF.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/OwewysF.jpg)