As some of the global enchantments clearly have a major effect on what spells you should or should not cast on the overland map, there is no way around it, the AI needs to know this.
Divine Order was already implemented a long time ago, making AI players cast more enchantment type spells and fewer summoning.
There is no good tactic to get around Evil Omens - everything costs more equally.
Herb Mastery makes Nature's Cures worthless but the AI never uses it anyway so it doesn't matter.
The AI already does not cast Chaos Channels during their own Doom Mastery, or Raise Volcano during Armageddon or Corruption during Great Wasting. It also already considers Detect Magic when using Spell Blast. It casts more summoning spells if it has Survival Instinct, too.
Zombie Mastery, Aura of Majesty, Time Stop, Enlightenment, Life Force, Crusade, Charm of Life have no effects on spellcasting.
This leaves Holy Arms, which should disable Holy Weapon, and Meteor Storm, Suppress Magic, Nature's Wrath, Chaos Surge and Eternal Night.
I've already implemented the following effects :
Quote:-The AI will cast the following unit enchantments at a higher priority if Meteor Storms are in effect : Elemental Armor, Bless, Resist Elements, Iron Skin, Regeneration, Magic Immunity, Invulnerability.
-The AI will cast more Chaos Channels if Chaos Surge is in effect.
-The AI will almost never cast the following spells if Suppress Magic is in effect and another spell of the same category is available : Resist Elements, Resist Magic, Holy Armor, Heroism, True Sight, Cloak of Fear, Waterwalking, Planar Travel, Blizzard, random Spell Blast, Stasis, Corruption, Raise Volcano, Black Wind, Drain Power.
-The AI will not cast Call the Void while Nature's Wrath is in effect. The AI will cast it at a higher priority if Suppress Magic is in effect.
-The AI will never summon the following creatures if Meteor Storm is in effect : War Bears, Nagas, Sprites, Giant Spiders, Hell Hounds, Unicorns, Skeletons, Ghouls, and will summon Cockatrices half as often.
-The AI will summon Chaos creatures at a higher priority if Chaos Surge is in effect, with greater focus on Hydras, Chimeras and Gargoyles.
-The AI will not summon the following creatures during Suppress Magic : War Bears, Nagas, Sprites, Giant Spiders, Floating Island, Hell Hounds, Gargoyles, Fire Giants, Skeletons, Ghouls, Magic Spirits, Cockatrices.
-The AI will priorize summoning these creatures higher during Suppress Magic : Gorgons, Behemoths, Colossus, Great Wyrms, Djinn, Sky Drake, Hydra, Great Drake, Archangel, Wraiths, Death Knights, Demon Lords.
-The AI will not cast the following spells during a Nature's Wrath : Storm Giant, Chaos Spawn, Angel, Wraiths, Summon Champion, Enchant Item, Create Artifact.
-The AI will cast the following spells during a Nature's Wrath at a lower priority : Djinn, Sky Drake, Hydra, Great Drake, Efreet, Archangel, Death Knights, Demon Lord, Resurrection.
Note that all of these are for the priority of the spell within its own category (buff, curse, summon etc). None of these spells change the priority of any of the main categories, only the spell selected from the category itself ones it was chosen. Also note that some categories redirect to others if no spell is available from them, summoning and city buffs in particular. Other categories do not so the chance of spells cannot be reduced to zero in them, as that results in the AI failing to cast any spell for the turn if the category is picked.
I'm not sure if implementing checks for Eternal Night is particularly useful, if it is the AI's own, it's likely to spam Death Wish often enough anyway and Black Wind doesn't have a smart targeting. Summoning more Death creatures might be a good idea but 1/1 isn't all that much of a boost to really matter. I rather be lazy and not bother with this one.
The AI also does not case Summoning Circle if the player has Suppress Magic in effect. Otherwise it doesn't matter because it costs nothing even if it gets countered, but the message spam is annoying.
If I missed anything important the AI should consider, or if you think any of the above are bad decisions, let me know. (Note that this is for overland spells only!)
i didn't want to jump the (different) discussion in the other general feedback thread, so i think it's better to start a new one.
let me start by saying that CoM is awesome (which, of course, merely means that it meets the expectations )
i do like that the game feels faster. the pace of the game is the great thing about CoM. i'm not quite sure about the sawmill and marketplace, because they favor even more spamming many small towns, but it fits the concept. same goes for the cheaper building buy costs in combination with higher gold income in general. it's now very easy to quickly build up a productive city as soon as you get mithril or adamantium. maybe it should at least be more expensive in the first turn. i do like that i have enough mana to cast lots of spells, which was never the case in vanilla.
call centaurs seems a bit too powerful. they are much more versatile than phantom warriors. in general, you tried to balance the realms by removing or mitigating their weaknesses. black got a nuke, green got a good combat summon and so on. that's a bad change in my oppinion. it was the beauty of the game that each strategy has serious weaknesses. for example playing black absolutely sucks when you encounter death immune units. now you can use heroic shout. i would prefer to have more weaknesses rather than less.
enchanting items should be a bit cheaper, like 75%
i like alot the reduced food upkeep
casting cost and research bonus for spellbooks could be higher, currently its negligible
heavenly light... is there any reason not to cast it on every city? a bit boring
divine order seems very weak. remove its upkeep?
water walking has no upkeep? same reason as ships?
one benefit of being myrran was less enemies on your side. you should keep that also for higher difficulties. i liked the "always on myrran AI" in vanilla.
enemy wizards are very annoying. i guess that makes them play better, but i doubt it makes the game more fun, at least not for me. on normal the game was boring, on hard or higher they declared war on me pretty much as soon as they found me (playing low land mass with islands). i guess i have to spam unit summons just to show enough military strength? they declared war because of my weakness, though not any one of them could kill me, or even conquer anything. i had more ships killing all theirs that shipped units towards me. of course in the long run i couldn't defend against all 4 of them, and some of my best spaces were always corrupted again as soon as i purified them. it seems it's even more important now to have a good (lucky) start.
I'm sure this is the wrong place for this, but every time I try to go to the caster of magic sub forum I get an error:
MyBB SQL Error
MyBB has experienced an internal SQL error and cannot continue.
SQL Error:
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Query:
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Please contact the MyBB Group for support.
If I go to a particular thread it's fine, any other forum on the site is fine. Is there something I can do to avoid this? (I'm hoping I'm just doing something silly and it's an easy fix on my end)
I am working on upgrading the forum software to the newest version of MyBB. This upgrade has a large number of bugfixes and changes. One of the side effects is a significant change to themes, and since the theme we use is heavily modified, it isn't an easy transition.
My current plan is to make the upgrade to the forums, and make enough changes to the theme to retain as much functionality is possible. After the upgrade is complete, I'll start working with KingOfPain (and any other volunteers) to rebuild our RB themes into 1.8 themes, so they can pick up all new functionality and hopefully last longer into the future.
The background:
I'm currently playing a new game on impossible huge Psilon
I'm in the right side of the map and on my top left is the Meklars that have an erratic leader that i have a NAP with
Right behind them and a bit lower there are humans which is diplomatic passive. Perfect combo IMHO for a long time friendship and trade.
I've colonize upward and pretty much got that corner cover and close off for the Meklars
however im currently racing with the humans on the bottom of my empire .
They did send one long range colony ship into a Ultra poor plant right next to my starting planet that i hadn't wasted my time to get yet.
i cut them off by quickly building a colony ship and take the planet before them. I really don't want them t have a planet in the middle of my empire.
The issue:
Humans and i are racing for the planets at the bottom. they have colonization ships down there. i have scout with NPG and gun board (4NPG). my ships are faster better armed . they have longer range but i do have planets closer so total range is about the same.
To avoid their colony ships getting planets i put my gunboat and scouts there. but since we have a NAP they can just colonize it below my ships.
I took the chance of breaking NAP so they couldn't land and keeping them off a big chunk of planets that way, that I can now freely colonize.
The status when from relaxed to neutral due to this diplomatic exchange
questions:
Was it worth it?
Did i get hit by an oath-breaker?
if so can i fix that oath-breaker by contributing some currency or worthless tech (giving them range 5 when they have 6 etc)
Its easily a bunch of 4 planets i get for myself plus it cuts off maybe 8 more planets for them to even reach.
Other info:
I'm am :
1st in technology.
1st in population.
2nd or 3rd on production. (Darn meklars and their enhanced robo tech)
2nd or 3rd in planets.
I'm current;y trying to get radioactive landing to get an UR planet
I have +40 transforming and soil enrichment so i can get the planets up to a decent size. and robot tech 3 width IDT8 to reduce cost.
Waste 80% and ER3. so i believe i can get the planets up to be very productive pretty fast.
chumchu, Cheater Hater and I are playing a teaching game of Through the Ages online, with discussion on these forums. The discussion is more about strategy than explaining the rules though, so I thought I might take the time to explain the game, and hopefully convince a few other people to give it a whirl. It's one of the best boardgames ever made, and it's completely free to play asynchronously online, so what is there to lose?
I'm going to have to start with a bit of a rules dump, for obvious reasons. Please feel free to ask questions, especially where things aren't clear.
So, what is Through the Ages?
It's a board game inspired by Civilization. There are quite a few of those (not to mention a board game that inspired the computer game in the first place), but this one's special, mostly because they removed the map! In practice, this means the designer (the legendary Vlaada Chvátil) has been able to squeeze much more strategic depth into the game without having to worry about all the tactical considerations of moving armies around, choosing settling locations etc. These things can be great for a computer game, but they really dilute the experience if you have to squeeze them into the length of a board game. You may think this all makes it nothing much like Civ, but there's a surprising amount of flavour in there.
What site are we playing on?
The rather strangely named (TtA is the only game it provides) http://www.boardgaming-online.com, aka BGO. The interface is good, if not particularly pretty, and it's largely stable. It's all browser-based so can be used on a mobile. There are one or two bugs floating around, but not much in the way of game-breakers.
Right, it's time for a picture of the interface:
So, what's going on here? Let's start at the bottom right with the area that represents your civilization:
Agriculture, Bronze, Philosophy, Religion and Warrior are your starting techs. They produce nothing by themselves though, you need people to work on them. Accordingly, you start with two people each working on your farms and mines, one philosopher and a warrior. You also start with one unemployed citizen, who is up in the worker pool. (In the real-life boardgame version, all of these are represented by yellow cylinders, but the website gives you little graphics instead.)
Let's look at how the economy works.
Your employed citizens [representing both population and the infrastructure and buildings to support their work] produce something determined by the technology card they are standing on. Your citizens on agriculture produce 1 food each per turn, your bronze miners 1 resource each per turn and your philosopher 1 science per turn. The warrior provides 1 military strength (this is a constant thing, not per turn). There isn't have a worker in religion, but if there were it would produce 1 culture per turn and 1 happy face (again, a constant thing). Later in the game, you will be able to discover more advanced technologies which will make your citizens much more productive.
Food is solely used, unsurprisingly, to generate new citizens.
Resources are mainly spent to turn your unemployed workers into productive citizens. They can also be used to build wonders.
Science is used to pay for new technologies.
Culture is victory points.
Happy faces are used to entertain your population (more on this in a moment).
Military strength is used for, well, size comparisons with other players (but not for a bit yet).
At the top of the civilization section is the bank of blue tokens (aka the blue bank). While science and culture are stored off on their own tracks, your food and resources are represented by blue tokens. At the end of the turn, these are taken from the bank and placed onto the farm and mine cards, one per worker on the card. They will return to the blue bank when spent. You can't just save up indefinitely though: at the end of the turn, before producing anything, you need to check for corruption. The blue bank is divided into sections: you lose the amount of resources depicted to the left of the rightmost empty section, effectively 2 resources per empty section. You income is only 2 resources per turn right now though, so that's a pretty big deal. As long as you spend most of your food and resources each turn, you won't have a problem.
Later farm and mine technologies produce more food and resources, but these are still represented by one blue token, it's just that a blue token on those cards is worth more. Hence later farms and mines are extremely valuable just for the ability to store up some resources without going corrupt.
Looking below the blue bank, just above the technologies, we have the bank of yellow tokens (aka the yellow bank). This represents territory you can expand into, which you do by spending food to increase your population. This moves a yellow token from the right of the bank to the pool of unused workers. The food cost is listed below the column of tokens; this goes up gradually. [You can think of this as the first new cities going in lovely sites with abundant food, while later ones fit into increasingly more marginal locations.]
Also in the yellow bank area is your entertainment meter. When a section of the box is empty, your population has grown enough to need entertainment. Once the first two spots are empty, you need to provide one happy face, after four more, another, then one for every two places emptied beyond that. For each happy face you don't supply, you have a discontent worker who refuses to work. If they reside in the unused worker pool, this isn't a major problem. If you attempt to put them to work anyway, there are very nasty effects. The little orange cube is on the zero space of the entertainment meter as we have no happy faces yet. It will move to the left as we gain them.
Finally in the yellow bank, there is consumption. This works much like corruption except that it is paid from your new production rather than taken from what's left at the end of the turn. It starts at 0, but when the first section of yellow tokens is empty, you start having to pay one food per turn, just to keep them fed (again, if you can't afford this, very bad things happen). And the consumption continues to increase the larger your population.
So it's easy enough to expand population early on, but before too long food costs go up, net food production goes down, and you need to invest into entertaining your new citizens too. This is all really expensive, but you're not going to be able to play a one-city challenge here! The thing to take away from this is that population is a very limited resource, so you're going to have to make what population you do have much more efficient through advanced technology.
Right, that's the economy covered, and if the word snowball has come to mind, you're very much on the right track, though there are lots of brakes and bottlenecks to stop you running away too hard. On to round 1 and the card row. Well, it should be Turn 0 really, but the game refers to it as 1, so it'll only get confusing later if I don't do the same.
I'm wondering if the current casting cost of Spell of Mastery is high enough, considering the high amount of skill a player typically has in the endgame now.
While the cost is double of the original, skill is also double most of the time, often even triple.
I had a game where I finished by casting SoM yesterday. It took me only about 21 turns to cast it despite not spending at all on casting skill for the second half of the game and not having AEther Binding. Now, 21 turns without casting other overland spells is a lot. Yet, it's very small considering the AI has to actually take out your capital in that time, just taking cities, even if you lose 90% of them, will not do anything.
I've implemented an elevated hostility system so the AI can at least be more aggressive and send in units to the capital even if they would normally think "this is too well defended to attack with just 5 Sky Drakes" , hoping to slowly wear it down by combat spells, because waiting for a stack that is better than the 9 best units the player has at this point is unrealistic, especially if it contains all 6 of their heroes. However that isn't the only thing preventing the AI from taking the player out :
1. Diplomacy. The number of turns are random but it can take anywhere from none to as much as 5-6 turns before the AI starts the war, until then they just keep warning you about breaking the alliance. (this doesn't apply if there was no alliance, then they attack right away) This is an insignificant amount of time or would be if the spell took longer to cast.
2. Logistics and distance. While the new AI will give up committing stronger forces on defense in this situation and will use all they have to form attacking armies, it takes quite a few turns to gather them on one spot, ferry them across the ocean somehow, then make their way into the capital.
3. Other cities. Even if the capital is the highest priority for an attack, the AI has multiple armies and they will target other cities simultaneously. If they manage to conquer them, some of them will be stuck inside as garrisons. There is also no guarantee the strongest army will go to the capital, in fact as it is now allowed to attack it with anything to prevent not attacking at all, chances are it will be medicore or even outright weak. Distance also isn't a factor, while the priority of targets is weighted by it the capital has a large priority so a unit going there from the other end of the continent is possible...and if they do so, nothing else will attack the capital until they reach it, except for stacks that are no further than 5 tiles. (maybe the "no secondary attack force for a target unless it is at a distance of 5 or less" condition should be removed? I suppose if a unit had nothing else to attack then...actually no. That would mean everything moves towards a weak target if one is found, leaving the stackbuilding and garrison refilling modules with no units left to choose from. So that shouldn't be done.)
4. Move Fortress. The human player will have their fortress at a place that is hard to reach. If the map allows they might even put it on a 1 tile island where only flying stacks can enter, which do not use the normal target priority system and will not be able to bypass the "too strong to attack" limitation.
So yeah...should it cost more or not? Even if it did, the AI's chances to stop it through military force are marginal but as is, it's zero.
Of course we can also say if you got the spell first and made sure no one remaining has Spell Blast then you deserve to win and ignore this as a non-problem. Many other 4X games just declare "X wins by <condition>" without letting anyone use force to stop it ; at that point, it's just a game over screen. They should have attacked while it was being researched, there was plenty of time. (except they can't do that if there is a stable alliance...)
Another thing, the human player can push their research bar to the max. The AI cannot and even with their power advantage, if they only spend a third on research while you spend the full, you will be faster (also the AI pays 50% more for researching SoM on extreme and higher, otherwise games would end too early to enjoy). On the other hand the AI shouldn't be allowed to max research intentionally to win unless we want to see games where "oh cool I have some very rare spells now, let's start summoning and prepare a plan to deal with the enemy....hey don't win the game when I haven't even used my best spells yet, where is the fun in that!" happens. They have a low research advantage to prevent this, but their power advantage is big and they can have very large empires, often two or three times the size of the human player. If they could push all that 3-5k power/turn into research they'd finish researching it in just 50 turns.
Finally there is the other side to this. The player also needs time to gather troops, get to the AI's capital and defeat what is inside. If they only have 15 turns for the whole thing, that might not be enough, especially if they need simultaneous attacks with multiple stacks to do so.
...it's worth mentioning I don't normally win by SoM, this was the first time in a long while. I had too few books (used random generator) and had no means to take out the capitals, aside from risking an all out attack with my heroes, which is just too risky when said capitals are full of Great Wyrms, colossus and both remaining wizards have web+crack's call and disintegrate and chaos books to go with it. Now that the AI knows what Spell Save items are, and prefers to equip it on their top hero, walking into a capital using heroes with "only" 15ish resistance is no longer safe. If the hero is the illusionist, it can take out 2-3 heroes with disintegrate on turn 1. I would have tried if there was no other way but conveniently no one had spell blast and I had a resource advantage so I went for it. SoM needed testing anyway, looks like it's viable on extreme if having a large enough power advantage.
Edit : I checked my save file. At the time I won, one of the wizards still had 30k left on their SoM research, the other had 45k and two unresearched very rares (probably from books). The latter is of no concern, they were behind me in power the whole game and playing Dwarves (although they had Sage Master). The former was Theurgist and had cities of all sorts of (arcanus) races, started with barbarians, but also had only half my power for most of the game (I took away about half their cities, that's why). I guess these numbers are reasonable, I feel the AI was a bit lagging behind research but it's only extreme not impossible and the conditions were far from ideal for them (fully or partially low research races and limited space for expansion - I colonized or conquered about 60% of Myrror so my ally only had 40%, and on Arcanus I took the cities from the player there so by the time they could have had good research from nonbarbarian cities, they started losing them one at a time). I finished casting SoM in 1425 which is surprisingly early for that but I was playing Dark Elves on high (maybe even max?) power settings.
I may not make this next version of the mod. It will be based off RtR 3.0.0.X if I do. I'll likely only make it if Civ 6 sucks at MP.
This is a disucssion thread. Go wild. Spam it. Just don't get banned by T-hawk. Discussion is good. NO DLL MODS! XML mods only.
I do not expect this to be quite as crazy as the mod used in PB26. No base output on buildings! No broken lumber mills!
What would people want to see in another SMEG mod? I'm thinking I'd like to see no start techs, but keep the 2 traits per leader and 1 trait/UU/UB per civ. Not sure what else I'd want to see.
I decided to start playing MoM again on a whim a couple weeks ago, and I gave your mod a try because I see threads from this subforum pop up pretty often in Today's New Posts. I enjoyed it quite a lot, so I figured I outta give some feedback too. I'm making a new thread because I don't want to make a dozen posts in a dozen different category threads (or have the time to read them all, heh). I apologize in advanced if some things I say already have a dedicated discussion going somewhere else.
For reference, I would play MoM on impossible but played CoM on extreme. (edit: my CoM version is 2.7)
In general, I really liked most of the changes, especially bug fixes and where severe abuses were patched out completely. (e.g. word of recall, recall hero, free artificer mana, various rare-magic openers, etc) I also liked a lot of various balance tweaks to various spells... the best example of this is that, in the midst of a critical battle, I would often find myself going slowly through my spellbook before each time I cast, which contrasts to my memories of MoM where the norm was just spamming the same few offensive spells in every battle.
I kinda wrote this as I played, so some sections are a bit lengthy... I'll wrap those in spoiler tags just so there's not an extreme wall of text in this post.
A few random things I thought were really great:
Between various buildings buffs and a smarter AI, the game feels a lot more fast-paced in general, which I really liked.
The AI sometimes uses actual tactics in battle! Like sometimes they'll lure out a hero and then drop a phantom warriors right on their face. They know how to kite, and they seem to be a lot smarter about when to use unit enchantments. This combined with the better balanced combat spells, I found that battles are much more interesting now.
Inquisitor - I really like this new retort a lot! It has a very nice balance of a very strong effect with a huge drawback. I really love how you can get a game started very, very quickly, either from cash-rushing in every building almost as quickly as you can, or pouring in all the money into mana. The drawback is very harsh too... for example, my first time using the retort was with the dwarves, and I thought the retort was insanely overpowered when I was pulling in 1000gpt with 6 cities, until Tauron (goddamn him) started spamming corruption on me. I was eventually able to put him out of my misery but not until at almost half of my tiles were corrupted! Another attempt with Halflings was a brutal battle of attrition when, against Tauron again (arrgh this guy) learned Flame Strike and would spam it relentlessly against my fragile stacks. It makes the game very fun and different.
Cult Leader is a very nice retort too for just 1 pick, and I really liked that it enables you to build a very respectable power base without needing to conquer nodes. It's such a relief to have this retort if you discover that all you have nearby are Sky Drakes and Doom bats.
Heroes aren't quite as crazy powerful anymore, which encourages you to use more of what you have on hand. Big thumbs up!
The AIs aren't as obnoxious anymore. My memory of the MoM AIs is that you can try to trade some spells when you first meet them, and then, randomly, they'll declare war on you and remain at hate for the rest of the game. I'm not gonna say the CoM AIs are super intelligent diplomats or anything, but at least its possible to make deals with them, know what pisses them off, etc.
A few random things that I found very frustrating but aren't necessarily unbalanced:
Chaos users spamming Corruption, arrgh! Races without a purifier have a big, non-obvious nerf.
Volcano spam in the end-game. =/ Better make sure that Tauron's wandering scouts don't find your adamantium mines, lemme tell ya. I never saw it once create an ore as the changelog says, only destroy every single resource I had. (although it's not as big of a deal in the end game compared to corruption in the early game, as you have lots of cities to compensate)
Lizardman settlers and waterwalking settlers. Ugh, I hate seeing these things settling up on me early on, before my own first settlers are out. They're even obnoxious in the mid game, as there's always that one spot in the middle of my empire, in some tundra or desert or swamp, that they'll find to sneak up to and settle in, leaving me baffled as to why the enemy wizard is popping up every turn to yell at me about encroaching on their territory.
Actually, I think I've become Adolf Hitler against the entire lizardman race. Arrghh, I hate these guys, and try to wipe out rivals that use them ASAP. Sometimes I'll just restart a game if I meet a meet a rival lizardman settler early on, as I know it's just a prelude to a nonstop flood of Javelineers coming from every conceivable direction and wandering around my territory, preying on whatever isolated units they can find. Removing them is always a huge slog, both in terms of resources in-game (it's never just about the single Javelineer, but the flame strikes and endless summoned centaurs that will inevitably come with it), as well as my own time in fighting tedious battles against single units inside my own territory.
Anytime I didn't take Archmage or Astrologer, I always ended up regretting it. As the game feels more intense now, you need every scrap of skill you can muster, especially with enemy wizards casting more offensive city enchantments and magicians stripping your own unit enchantments nonstop. Without one of the skill-boosters, I could only barely keep up in reaction to the enemies even having 100% of my power devoted to skill (with Aether Binding on top!), much less cast stuff for myself proactively like artifacts, big global enchantments, or high-end fantastic creatures.
There were a few occasions where I really missed Awareness; I'd finally kill what I'd think is the last city of an enemy wizard I banished, only to discover that they still have another one out there somewhere, often on a 1-tile island on the other side of the map (and perhaps on another plane). A pretty frustrating situation.
A few particular balance thoughts:
This section's a little more lengthy...
Heroic Shout
I feel like this spell is a little too good. As much as I love the idea of screaming your enemies to death, if there was any one spell in CoM that was "no-brainer, spam on almost anything", this is it. It's just too generically good for the price, being useful on lower-end multi-figure stuff (sprites, halflings, etc) all the way up to stuff like Death Knights. It can get especially bad when you've got some magicians in your stacks, as you could be potentially spamming it 10 times per turn. If possible, I think a restriction of *only* Heroes can cast it would be enough of a nerf.
Focus Magic + Sprites/Ghouls
I first want to say that I like Focus Magic by itself; it's a cool spell that helps you get a lot more outta your heroes and some high end caster-units. However, the combination of Focus Magic + Sprites (which I'll call FMS) and, to a lesser extent, Focus Magic + Ghouls (FMG), is simply too good too early.
Let's start with FSM, although much of what I say can be generalized to either. One well known advantage of sprites is that you can sometimes find some dungeons/lairs that you can whittle away (attacking to kill at least one unit, stalling to the end of battle, and then diving in again next turn) with only a few sprites much earlier than you otherwise could. No problem here. However, this is limited by what you can actually kill by the end of battle and survive. Ranged defenders will kill your fragile sprites straight away, while flyers and breathers (e.g. hell hounds, gorgons) will close the gap if any are left over by the time you're outta ammo. Focus Magic drastically changes this scenerio as you can now kill so much more. Great Wyrms, Chaos Spawn, Great Drakes, Death Knights, Chimeras, Gorgons, Angels, Wraiths, Chimeras. I've killed lairs/dungeons/towers/nodes guarded by all of these units in the very early game with just FMS! The snowball effect that conquering a high-end node in the first few dozen turns of the game is huge, to say the least, both in the conquer reward and the income from the node. In my most current game, I've already conquered four Arcanus nodes and I think I can do a fifth one soon, and it's not even the end of 1404! I haven't been pouring everything into magic either, as I have a 6 cities in which I've been merrily cash-rushing buildings as fast as I can manage, and have a base casting-skill of 80. (on top of which I have the additional Astrologer bonus) That feels pretty extreme compared to other strategies. FMG are a little more brittle as a strategy as there won't be quite as many different things you can conquer early, as you can't "whittle" a node away through repeated battles. However, once you win something once, now you can bring that whole new army with you to the next thing and begin to snowball from there. FMG are much, much better for conquering neutral towns as sprites tend to melt under mass shaman fire.
The essential problem with this combo is that what you get is relatively too powerful too early, and for too cheap in what it costs you on the retort-pick screen. If looking just at the mana cost of FSM, I'd say the combo was fine... at 160 total mana, a FSM has power/cost reasonable for a strongish but situational uncommon summon. The difference is that you can cast it on T0, unlike every other uncommon in CoM. FSM also has other advantages: for example, you don't have to cast FM until you need to, as there's still some dungeons/lairs that can be conquered with just plain sprites. You can also cast 3-4 sprites first, and then cast FM afterwards, giving the unit extra turns to move to its destination, which is perfect for a rush scenerio if you find an enemy wizard tower early. (and yeah, you can kill enemy wizards' capitals in the early game with just FSM if you give 'em resist elements)
Finally, if all that was the worst of it, I wouldn't think it was a big problem. The biggest problem is that getting FSM only costs 4 of your 12 retort picks. That means you have 8 more to use to enhance the combo further. For example, adding a couple more nature books gets you Web and Resist Elements, which allow you to kill sooooo much more with your FSM (resist elements for enemy sprites and ghouls, web to kill a lot of those big/fast flyers and heroes etc) and unlocks Archmage. Another book can get you Nature's Eye or Earth lore, which are both awesome spells now that Awareness is gone. You can also pick up Astrologer, to cast get your FSM faster, conquer more nodes types, and doubling your rewards. Alchemy+Inquisitor gives you tons of mana. Famous might get you a hero with Guilding Beacon or Spirit Linker. There's all sorts of great retorts to pair... and even though we're talking about an early-game rush strategy, it's not like you're gonna have a weak late game with retorts like Astrologer, Alchemy, or Inquisitor. In the old 11-book MoM strats, as broken as they were (and FSM isn't quite at that level), you at least had the downside of not being very robust as you didn't have any retorts to fall back on.
I think that either Focus Magic needs to be Uncommon so that it can't be picked up for 2 retorts (perhaps being cheaper in cost to compensate) or else it shouldn't be useable on fantastic creatures.
Magician Casters spamming Dispel Magic
Magicians having generic caster ability is a bit flawed right now. I like the idea in theory a lot, but its kinda problematic in practice.
On the player's side, this means that some spells become way too good, like Web, Black Sleep, Mana Leak, etc. However, it would be an easy fix to say, increase the mana cost of some of these to like 11 and 21.
The really big problem is in access to the dispel magic spell when magicians are controlled by the AI's hands. I'm not sure if this is an AI behaivor problem, a balance problem with the formula for dispel magic being way too effective at +10 power, or a problem with the spell being spammed repeatedly, but the net effect of AI magicians having the option to cast dispel magic is that if you go into battle with an AI with overland enchantments on your units, the AI casters will go insane trying to get rid of them. A 9 stack of magicians will mean you see dispel magic cast 10 times on the first round of battle.
On the one hand, this is extremely annoying for the player because it is simply impossible to keep enchantments on your units. It's extremely unlikely that'll ever last more than one battle with any wizard leading a race with magicians. Yes, even with spell lock; I don't know how the dispel magic formula works, but spell lock is usually gone within 1-3 dispel magics (which shouldn't have more than 10 strength, right?) and then the rest of your enchantments are gone with the next one. If they have a hero, they'll cast Dispelling Wave instead and crush everything you have. (and yet it never seems to work when I use it =/) So, overland unit enchantments are now almost useless in CoM... or, at least, too expensive (in terms of both mana and skill) for the amount of use that you'll get out of 'em. Some key enchantments on a few key heros to be recast each turn is really all you can manage.
In addition, any AI that spams magicians (and they all seem to love spamming magicians if they can) is extremely easy to defeat. In round one of a given battle, they'll use up all of their action/mana spamming Dispel, and then you can essentially wipe them out with some fast moving units, e.g. a hero with merging/teleport or some nice movement items, or your own casters spamming Heroic Shout or Fairy Dust. In round 2, they'll be either dead or out of mana and down to just a figure or two per unit, meaning their otherwise formidable ranged attack will not do any noticable damage. Furthermore, it's very easy to purposely abuse their behaivor by broadly casting a few cheap enchantments (e.g. resist elements or whatever) on your units before the fight.
I'm not sure about the right way to fix this behaivor, but the current situation isn't good.
A few other random things that felt off:
Artificer feels kinda useless now. As mentioned before, it feels like you've gotta cast something all the time, whether its reapplying unit enchantments, dispelling freaking chaos rifts, reapplying your global enchantments (especially Aether Binding), etc, that it's too big a liability to spend several turns creating an artifact even if you otherwise could afford the mana cost just fine. By the time you're able to cast a mid-range artifact within just a few turns, you've already filled up your heroes slots with spoils from dungeons and conquered enemies. Being able to cast some cheapish, specialized items is still useful, but it's a very disappointing retort considering stuff like Alchemy, Archmage, Inquisitor, Tactician, and Cult Leader are all also only 1 pick.
I wasn't really able to make summoning creatures work for me in the mid to late game, even when using Conjurer. It's a similar problem to the above... as awesome as e.g. a Sky Drake is, it's really a big liability to lock up your casting ability for even 5-6 turns casting the damn thing. I guess I never went for a deep multi-book strat combined with specialist, which perhaps would help a lot?
Doom bats feel way too strong for a rare. With 6 moves, they can completely demolish your entire first line on the very first turn of combat. It feels off to not be less worried about the Very Rares (Great Drakes and Hydras) appearing in a chaos node, but being terrified of even attempting one with Doom bats.
You shouldn't be able to cast web on Death Knights (which should be non-corporeal, like Wraiths) and Sky Drakes (magic immune)! It shouldn't be as easy and cheap to kill top-tier fantastic units that have "hard to kill" as a big selling point as spamming web with magicians and then beating them down with cheap ranged trash like slingers or longbowmen or whatever.
And that's about all I thought to write down. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm complaining too much because I had a lot fun playing your mod!
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