Spoiler thread for EitB 50. Other players, stay out!

See the heroes thread, here : http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...#pid682308

Based on these last two games, I'm having some doubts about sawmills.

Facts :

-They pay for themselves through production in 17 turns.
-It will always take more than 17 turns to build one, usually 34+x or 25+x turns, where x is how long it takes the city to reach pop 2. In other words, not buying it will always make you lose resources compared to buying it.
-They produce a significant amount of resources. (You get 12 gold value in hammers, after maintenance, per turn!)
-It's always the first thing you want to build in any city.

The net overall effect is, sawmills don't really have any meaningful gameplay to them - you always want it first and you always want to pay to buy it - but they contribute super massively to snowballing instead.
Assuming you lose about 15 turns on average by not buying, that means you are behind by 12*15 = 180 gold value. 
In other words, being able to buy a sawmill for 200 earns you an additional 180 value, on top of earning back the investment, meaning each early 200 gold you have doubles its value. That's prior to any other snowballing effect that gold would have, just for being able to spend it on a sawmill instead of anything else. Basically, the presence of sawmills doubles the value of any gold you find, as long as you still have a city where you can buy a sawmill.
This is without having to worry about the time it takes to earn back the investment - the city would remain unproductive during all of that time anyway, as it would be busy building the sawmill you haven't bought. So you aren't missing out on any possible other investment either, at least there. Globally, the gold cannot possibly have a better place than a sawmill, unless you are spending it on military, and even then, most military units you can afford from such small amount of gold won't be able to do much, you'd need to sacrifice several sawmill's worth to get a decent army capable of clearing at least a weak node out. Settlers aren't an exception either - while being able to build a new city earlier is a big deal, if the price is 45 turns worth of delay due to missing sawmill production in 1.5 cities, then it's not that great.

Long story short, are we really happy with this as is? I feel they escalate the luck factor of the early game way more than anything else in the game, which is not good (while also making it harder for military and settler production to work, as you are effectively starting your game in a debt of 400 gold - two settlers that will need a sawmill before anything else is done. One part of the reason why it's so hard to balance these two against each other.)

Do note sawmills also produce a huge "hidden" benefit for the AI - they can both build them earlier (in fact a lot earlier, the AI has plenty of starting gold so on higher difficulties they can get those two sawmills instantly) and also get more hammers out of them for less maintenance. So any modification on this would have a large impact on overall game difficulty. (This is the main reason why I didn't want to change this so far, but nowadays the AI is way stronger, maybe they don't need this extra? Even if they do, we can calculate the difference and compensate them in starting gold.)

A few possible ideas :
-Have cities produce a few hammers naturally, so building the sawmill without gold is faster
-Have cheaper sawmills
-Have cities produce hammers naturally, and sawmills produce fewer of them
-Give players 400 starting gold extra
-Have outposts start with a sawmill already built
-Have sawmills automatically built when population reaches X (makes housing a decent alternative, as well as builder's halls)


Of course we can also say "doesn't matter, anyone should be able to find 400 gold worth of treasure before turn 30", at least by using summoned creatures. Wizards who cannot summon are in trouble though...

(Sawmills are most definitely one of the things that make the early summon vs early normal unit problem worse, as they eat up your gold and hammers but not your mana.)

Can't help but notice how often events target capitals so I thought I'll investigate it a little.

The game picks a "target wizard" first. Each player has weight equal to the distance they are from the end of the bar on the three categories in Astrologer. For example if a player has all bars maxed, they have a weight of zero. If they have them all at half, they have 300. This means if there is a clear leader, they won't be hit by an event. Players behind are more likely to be hit. 
If a banished wizard would get chosen, consider it a failed attempt and try again.

To pick a town, roll a random town. If it doesn't belong to that wizard, skip that town and try the next in the array (start from the beginning if it was the last one). If the racial unrest modifier for that race is 1 or greater with the home race of the wizard, also try the next.

What this means in practice :
The system is biased to hit the weakest person most often. (this does include positive events as well as negative)
The system doesn't consider the number of cities that person owns, in fact the weakest person is usually the one with the least cities.
The system is heavily biased towards hitting a capital. (Assuming you have unrest with all but your home race, any cities that get rolled which were made after the last city using that race, will result in hitting your capital. For example, you play Orcs, city 0, 3 and 7 are your Orc cities, and you didn't build an Orc settler this game nor did you conquer any cities friendly with orcs. Rolling anywhere from 8 to 100 will hit your capital.1-7 hits one of your other two cities.)

If not intentional, then this is horrible a algorithm choice. Otherwise, it's really underhanded...

Since some folks were requesting it in the Alpha Centauri thread, here's a speedrun writeup for one scenario in Heroes of Might and Magic 2.  http://dos486.com/heroes2/

Feel free to talk anything HOMM in this thread.  Like the time you induced your college roommate into failing out of school by introducing him to HOMM 2 which he spent all his time on instead of classes and schoolwork.  (True story.)

Some of you may have noticed it, but for those who didn't. The EU is currently looking into abolishing daylight saving time in the EU. But before that they want to get the opinion of their citizens. For that reason they started an online poll. You can find it here

PBEM LII game info:

Aurorarcher (Shekinah of the Sidar)
Dave V (Capria of the Bannor)
Bobchillingworth (Dain of the Amurites)
Mr. Cairo (Averax of the Sheaim)
mackoti (Ethne of the Elohim)

Rules/map info:

Mirrorland, Standard, thaw, Quick, Immortal
No Acheron, Orthus, unique features, huts or lairs
Tech trading off, no vassals, AI diplo
Blessing of Amathaon
Living world
Normal barbs
Strategic Resources: Critical resources close
Water Style: Waterways
No preplaced improvements

Note: Cultists are banned!


PBEM LI game info:

We've improved the game mechanics regarding to when the AI is or isn't allowed to travel to the other plane, however, the AI is still dumb as brick on deciding where to go.

I don't remember whether we discussed this in detail and had a "can't be done" conclusion or not, if someone remembers, please tell me.

Either way the problem is, the AI decides whether to move into a tower and switch planes depending on one thing - if it's the plane they have their fortress on, then they switch planes.
So when you banish the Myrran wizard, and they return to the Arcanus plane, all their otherwise idle troops will go back to the tower and stay on Myrror doing nothing - assuming you raze the cities there instead of trying to keep them, the units will be as good as never existing.
This is obviously very bad for the AI and reduces their chance of winning drastically.
In most other cases, the current simple decision is good enough, but in this particular case it's very bad.

I'm changing them.

Old :

If player has 4*(land size setting+1) cities or more then there is a 25% chance to activate.
If it activates, generate a ((Land Size+1)*4-Cities)/(8+Land Size-Difficulty)*random(4)/3*4 strength diplomatic warning event from all other wizards. This can't be stronger than -15 and is halved if the player receiving it is an AI.
Allies and uncontancted wizards are not giving a warning.
(land size is 0-4, difficulty is 0-6)

New :

If player has 7*(land size setting+1) cities or more then there is a 1/12 chance to activate.
If it activates, generate a -(6+random(4))*(Difficulty level+2)/4 strength diplomatic warning from all other wizards. Double the amount if the player also has at least 10*(land size setting+1) cities. Halve the amount if it's an AI.
Allies and uncontancted wizards are not giving a warning.
(land size is 0-4, difficulty is 0-6)

Which means a loss of this much per year :

Fair land size, Fair Difficulty : 0-20 cities, no warning. 21-29 cities lose 6-10 REL, 30+ cities lose 12-20 REL.
Fair land size, Lunatic Difficulty : 0-20 cities, no warning. 21-29 cities lose 12-20 REL, 30+ cities lose 24-40 REL.
Huge land size,Fair Difficulty : 0-34 cities, no warning. 35-49 cities lose 6-10 REL, 50+ cities lose 12-20 REL.
Huge land size,Lunatic Difficulty : 0-34 cities, no warning. 35-49 cities lose 12-20 REL, 50+ cities lose 24-40 REL.
Tiny land size,Fair Difficulty : 0-6 cities, no warning. 7-9 cities lose 6-10 REL, 10+ cities lose 12-20 REL.
Tiny land size,Lunatic Difficulty : 0-6 cities, no warning. 7-9 cities lose 12-20 REL, 10+ cities lose 24-40 REL.


Number of cities sounds about right? Maybe the penalty amount is too much? The concept is to have less frequent warnings with higher effects, to avoid triggering a "repeated warning war" too easily. Maybe difficulty shouldn't raise it so much that Lunatic is double of Fair? With (difficulty level+4)/6 in the formula instead, it would only increase by 66%, to 20-33 instead of 24-40. (Which is still a hell of a lot...idk. )
...if the higher amount of cities would do +6 instead of "double" then...

Fair land size, Fair Difficulty : 0-20 cities, no warning. 21-29 cities lose 6-10 REL, 30+ cities lose 12-18 REL.
Fair land size, Lunatic Difficulty : 0-20 cities, no warning. 21-29 cities lose 10-16 REL, 30+ cities lose 20-30 REL.
Huge land size,Fair Difficulty : 0-34 cities, no warning. 35-49 cities lose 6-10 REL, 50+ cities lose 12-18 REL.
Huge land size,Lunatic Difficulty : 0-34 cities, no warning. 35-49 cities lose 10-16 REL, 50+ cities lose 20-30 REL.
Tiny land size,Fair Difficulty : 0-6 cities, no warning. 7-9 cities lose 6-10 REL, 10+ cities lose 12-18 REL.
Tiny land size,Lunatic Difficulty : 0-6 cities, no warning. 7-9 cities lose 10-16 REL, 10+ cities lose 20-30 REL.

Yes, this sounds better. Which would mean this rule :


If player has 7*(land size setting+1) cities or more then there is a 1/12 chance to activate.
If it activates, generate a -(6+random(4))*(Difficulty level+4)/6 strength diplomatic warning from all other wizards. Add 6 to the random value if the player also has at least 10*(land size setting+1) cities. Halve the amount if it's an AI.
Allies and uncontancted wizards are not giving a warning.
(land size is 0-4, difficulty is 0-6)

I started the second attempt to make a build around invincible spell lock heroes. Since lizardmen failed early game, I shot for klackons and a risky rush strategy:

6 sorcery, 2 life, 1 death, alchemist, omniscient, specialist (specialist does seem misplaced here, but eh)
Klackons

At master difficulty, all fair.

I got quite lucky with the spells. I got stream of life, dispelling wave, aether binding and ghouls, black sleep, zombies.
My capital was a sweet 25 pop spot, but otherwise no spectacular spots. Met Raven (sorcery+nature lizardmen) and Horus (sorcery+life halflings). Looks like there are 2 wizards on Myrror this time. Horus is lawful, and promptly got pacts with me and Raven. Raven was expanding faster. I got some time to expand as well, including a sweet spot with 2 gold. Also got 3 neutrals, but on 3 different continents. My empire is 8 cities before the first uncommons, with the furthest city having full x3 combat casting. Tax is sky-high so other than klackons cities are struggling to produce, even with just cause.

As war loomed with Raven (aggressive), my first important decision was to mass-produce halberdier garrisons before going for beetles. Also I went for full research early on to get ghouls asap, alchemy from the high taxes for mana. I was getting started with ghouls as the war with Raven broke. I was winning the first cities heartily due to the ghouls, and getting undead bears and lizardmen. Luckily they went for amplifiers before armorers. The first 2 beetles that landed on Raven's continent buffed up my ghoul stack enough to take on his fortress with beastmaster + 7 sprites. I lost the stack, but the next stack killed the remaining 2 sprites.

Horus decided to join in the war as I banished Raven. Raven still has one continent with 3 more cities. Also Raven slipped 2 water walking stacks to my home continent. The first was stronger (barbarian hero, 4 nagas, 2 bears, 2 sprites). The hero stack was aiming for one city, and when I reinforced, then another. I scrambled to build up halberdier garrisons even in cities I had relegated to resource production, and beetles in my capital, while I was playing "bait the doomstack" luring it by leaving one city on low garrison, and then another on the other side. The weaker second stack (mostly lizzy halberdiers) I hadn't seen coming, so it managed to raze one (orc) city. Smashed the remains of that stack with beetles. Even at present, the hero stack is outside my continent, seemingly off to target something else than my city. I am about ready to lure it in and smash it with beetles.

The game started off very strong. By the end of the early game it has come apparent that I have managed to take almost no treasure at all. At this point in the game this is a big minus. I am shooting for turtles as there are maybe 4 cockatrice lairs and nodes.

Also I got a total of 3! nodes so that the AI cleared the node and then left it empty. I promptly garrisoned it, and brought in the spirit. This really should not happen, at least not in peacetime.

Graph wise I am almost even with Horus on all accounts, and Raven is almost dead. So this should be looking up. With Horus just entering the war, I am a bit worried about waves of incoming nagas. Halberdiers, and beetles too, are vulnerable to poison, but it's not hopeless to defend against nagas with halberdiers behind walls (with blur poison is all they do). If most of them come with focus magic, I am so screwed, though. But where I can get ghouls, I can take on nagas easily (and if I get undead FM nagas it'll be hilarious). Horus is also warlord, so heroism ultra elite halflings are expected. Lucky I got dispelling wave, and next I will research Aether Binding. After that, hopefully stream of life will be coming up.

I do wonder what has been going on in Myrror...

I am a bit disappointed that the 1 death I took for omniscient -rush lured me into yet another undead creation game - at least the early game. It just is too awesome. But next I think I'll try
6 sorcery, 3 life, alchemist, archmage, specialist.
And restart if I do not get stream of life by the early midgame.

Right now I am thinking if I dispel wave the hero stack, can I sink the bears and the hero when the ww goes out?