Hi!
Would it be possible to have some settings for the game in a property-file?

I would like to be able to set the required experience for each hero level myself and there are probably a lot of other things people would like to be able to configure.

Cheers!

This game the AI put Planar Travel on a few of its heroes and sent them to my plane alone, loaded with artifacts.
I think this is a very bad move and the AI should either not target heroes with the Planar Travel spell, or...learn to assemble an entirely planar travelling stack and move it to the other side together. (this could be a copy of the doomstack procedure except with the limitation to pick the 9 highest cost units with planar movement)
The former is likely easy to do, the latter isn't, but would likely mean the AI could be re-enabled to shift shadow demon stacks. However, another one of the reasons we disabled that was because it was unfair - there is no way to deal with random units poping out of nowhere that belong to an unreachable enemy (the fact they can also curse cities most of the time just makes it worse.) and also it resulted in the AI losing its main forces on their primary plane as they go to the other one, so we should think this through. Maybe limiting Planar Travel to settlers only would be a smarter move?

(also it would be great if the AI could actually tell which plane they need their units on, instead of just always trying to move them to the non-starting plane but I think I got stuck on that and couldn't come up with a good algorithm for a decision like that.)

As previously explained, the AI uses the "quantity" approach to overwhelm the players with lots of units. This works fine but... there is an exception.
Sometimes the AI just has too many units, in the sense that they cannot reasonably be used up in battles and instead end up just blocking paths for the AI.
In Hadriex's last game, the AI had 8x9 units surrounding almost all of its cities, blocking paths to the remaining unopened towers and blocking summons from appearing in cities. The game ended up this way because the human player had no cities on arcanus, all other wizards were dead, and the game dragged on until turn 400+. The few open towers were not enough to "swallow" all the units produced in the 20 AI cities.

So I'm thinking of teaching the AI a trick to deal with it, by adding the following city production rule :

If AI global owned units>X and units owned adjacent to the city>Y then do not produce units. If buildings are no longer available, build trade goods. If this is picked when the AI already has over Z gold, immediately convert the excess into mana through alchemy, during the city production decision (do not wait for the Alchemy procedure to handle it next turn.). Then the excess mana should allow the AI to put their MP slider to 0% and spend on skill and research. We might want to make cities that have special resources like adamantium exempt form the rule or use a larger number for Z.

How about it? (Also we need a good X, Y and Z number. I think something like 1000,30 and 18000 could work well.)

What are the conditions for an AI to miss the banishment and go directly to defeat?

(I know they're here somewhere but with these long threads, the search has become useless)


On a related note: should an AI with only outposts left not become defeated?

The way roads work in Myrran has changed from what it was in the original game. Is this a new feature or is it a bug? It used to be unlimited movement on glowing roads now it's very limited.

I really prefer the old method (aka unlimited movement).

Is there any way to make the game use the original unlimited methodology?

Looks like if the prompt raze -option is off, and you raze with the "r" key, you lose fame like vanilla. Otherwise you gain, which I thought was inteded.

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This is a belated attempt to not irredeemably clutter the setup thread while we work out our impatience. No spoilers, except maybe how you REALLY feel about our mapmakers...

It looks to me that the one being attacked is always the one who gets the starting turn in the battle.

Has this always been the case in Master of Magic?

I think Caster of Magic is much harder to play than the original game (for good mostly), but one thing that I have a hard time with is that it's very difficult to attack another unit just because the opponent will start the combat turns. I haven't experienced this difficulty before.

Lately I've noticed that my games on impossible difficulty tend to follow a pattern.  Hanging on for the first 125 turns is nail-biting and sometimes downright impossible indeed...and oftentimes more stressful than fun...but then if I can consolidate a decent position, the game hits a sweet spot of fun and challenge for about 25-50 turns, and it continues to get easier and easier from that point on.  It seems like I rarely get a chance to use most of the late-game toys because games that last more than 200 turns are rare.   

In short, I think the game would be more enjoyable if impossible difficulty were easier in the beginning, but then just as hard or even (dare I say it!) harder later in the game.  

I wonder...to what extent is this difficulty curve throughout the game due to the fact that the AI always has 4 insta-built colony ships on impossible?  Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the impossible AI also starts with more population and factories, correct?

I wonder how differently the game would play if the AI on impossible had to build its own colony ships like the human player, and started with the same homeworld resources.  

I understand that the AI might struggle with knowing when to build a colony ship...so, what if the AI only had a chance to have 1 colony ship insta-built at any one time instead of 4 on impossible?  And plus it would be nice too if this insta-built colony ship of theirs always had to start at their homeworld (or maybe at their world with the largest population).  It is frustrating to see the AI on impossible chain-settle planets on the frontier with a weak escort force and magically re-duplicating colony ships that seem to re-duplicate even while the AI fleet is en route to the next planet.  That sort of blatant cheating really brings the human player out of the game.  

I wonder how hard something like this would be to patch into the game....

By the way, I tried stepping down to hard difficulty with the Mrrshans, and it was a joke.  Total curbstomp.  No pressure at all until about 2375.  I had atmospheric terraforming by 2390.  Advanced soil enrichment by 2405.  Antimatter torps by 2410, which shredded enemy missile bases that had at most 7 layers of shielding.  Victory by 2425.  So, stepping down to hard is not the solution, unless I just want to mess around.

Since I had a feeling I'm not seeing each node type equally often, I generated 6 maps and counted the results :

12 S
9 C
9 N

11 S
9 C
10 N

13 S
9 C
8 N

16 S
8 C
6 N

11 S
10 N
9 C

16 S
8 N
6 C


As you can see, every single map had more Sorcery nodes than any of the other two kinds, sometimes significantly so. Are we happy with this or do we want to change it? If yes, to what?