After a fair amount of technical problems the game is afoot (hopefully). The players seem to have very different opinions on where to settle on this mirrored start:

- Ichabod's Persia is moving north and coastal, forsaking the river for coast and better hammers. Persia is a very good liberty civ and SIP is not very good for liberty as the settler production bonus is only hammers. With a lighthouse a coastal trade the cap should be good in mid game but it has little late game potential as coastal tiles are weak. He might make it into a guild city and work specialists. They give up some chops in the south but they may place there second city there and chop out a wonder or worker/units.

- Nicolae's Ethiopia settle on the stone by the fish lake for the fastest possible start, he will need to find gold to buy some tiles though as the other tiles are plain plains. Tradition border expansion might work as well, but long term you would have wanted a tradition cap on the river for more farms, watermill and hydro plant (like levee in civ 4).

- HAK's Inca settles in place for lack of a better plan. I'm amazed he did not choose England.

- Oledavy's Russia is moving inland where there is a little more food but not much production. Russia bonus production from horses should help in the early game though. He saw right through my placement of them as well.

-Yuris' Songhai settle as the Ethiopians aiming for a fast start. Songhai's bonus gold might be really good for buying tiles here. He is planning a mixed liberty/piety game without any extra happiness (like egypt) and with Ethiopia in the game: smoke:
Let us just say that it is very dependent on getting happiness beliefs. If he can scout and settle the islands near him that might help with getting happiness as well a sufficient number of decent cities. Coastal production trade routes is really good for liberty as you are low on happiness and need infra out of your small cities. But it is possible that he will try for conquest on his continent with the Songhai bonus and delay sailing and optics for too long.

- AdrienIer's Rome we have no info on other than that he is having technical difficulties.

Mules open to all - Refreshed 10/Sept/2016

I've uploaded the collection of patch files I've been keeping for 1.51.
Download is at the usual place, it's for151.zip
http://seravy.x10.mx/CasterofMagic/
I haven't tested any of these, so I have no idea if they will even apply correctly. If you see any warnings when applying them, those probably won't work. I'm releasing these early so that people can try them out and report if anything does not work, then I can leave those ones out of 1.51 when the time comes to compile it.
File descriptions are somewhat less organized as they were in 1.50 since the difficulty of fixing stuff has skyrocketed meanwhile and I have no time to bother with that, working on the game all time already.
Use the same method to apply patches as you do/did with the 1.50 files. See http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=7911

You all set out from the village with mild trepidation; Anya the tall half-elven druid, Lucas the human ranger, Robern the swashbuckler, also a son of humanity , and Nial the young magus brother of the lost man up here.

A cold wind blows here near the bluffs, carrying a salt smell and the sound of surf. The aurora are bright in the winter sky, casting eerie shadows on the cold winter ground, dusted lightly with fresh snow. You reach the old ward stones, carved with strange glyphs. They are toppled over and defaced. A dark crack lies beneath the largest of the stones, leading into darkness.

Roll for perception. Knowledge (history or religion) for the standing stones. (Random.org or own die)

Looks like we need a sub for one of the leading civs. It is T75, you will play for Ghengis/Zulu, who got early conquest. More information in thread.

Any volunteers?

AI Main settling continent is the continent towards the AI is sending the ships loaded by settlers.

Default selection for this is, a random tile on a random eligible continent, which means :
-The continent cannot have any non-neutral non-settler unit of another player
-And it cannot have a non-neutral city, including own.
-The tile selected cannot have a node, lair, etc or city or unit of another player.

That's very restrictive and generally means the AI will only ever send settlers by ships to land which has not been discovered by anyone else.

The good news is, I was able to force a check for the continent having spots where a settler can build a city, so continents already filled with cities by others will not be selected, making that restriction not longer necessary.
The most important part is, continents where it's impossible to build do to a nearby continent having a city too close will not be selected (typically tiny islands).

However, by removing the "no one has city" restriction, it is now possible to ferry settlers backwards : from the continent containing the best race available to the home continent with inferior races. I suspect this was another reason why the AI overlooked territory : Since it was already own, but the continent couldn't produce settlers due to being of an inferior race, the settlers produced elsewhere, but they could only go to uninhabited continents.

Now this however raises a question. Own cities on the continent are fine, but what about cities of other players? Do we want to allow the AI to send to a continent that has enemy cities? Or armies? Note that here, "enemy" refers to ANY player including the AI's allies or people who have no treaty whatsoever with them.
Basically there are 6 continent ratings :
1 - Own armies make up 90%+ of the units on the continent and it contains owned city
2 - Own and other player units both exist and it contains owned city
3 - No owned city present (other wizards might have cities)
4 - Allied city present but owned city is not
5 - No targets (an own large stack found nothing to attack and is leaving)
6 - No targets 2 (There are literally no more neutral or enemy units or objects left on the entire continent)

I don't feel like any of these would make a good condition on settlers destinations... 1 and 2 are obviously good, 3 might be either suicide swarming with enemies or an empty place no one claimed, 4 is, well an ideal place to steal land for allies, and 5/6 say absolutely nothing about the continent aside form it being non-hostile.

Actually...how about this :
Send settler if
-Continent is NOT type 3 (no targets or presence of own city, or presence of ally should mean it's likely safe)
OR
-Continent has no enemy military present (so unclaimed lands still work)

As opposed to many other threads on here, which are about mechanics and improving the game overall, I would like a place to discuss tactics.

So, I havenot found my opponents capital yet. He has numerous troops and I've seen storm giants around.

He has suppress magic cast and casts great unsummoning every single turn (just to give you an idea of his spell casting and mana pool)

I have around 130 casting skill, and I've got troll, draconian, dark elf and dwarf cities. currently I have dark elf with both adamantium and omihilacron, and dwarf with adamantium.

I've got 3 death books, 4 life, 1 sorcery and 1 chaos.

My biggest problem (aside from that wizard) is I don't have flight, nor do I have an archer hero - so I can't fight sky drakes (please tell me his capital doesn't have sky drakes. .. he only has 5 sorcery books so, fingers crossed) or great wyrms.

My current thought is to fortify all the towers with super warlocks before going to war (he's lawful) and then just burn and pillage until he ha low enough mana income I can threaten him (assuming I can't just spike his wizard tower. But i don't think I'll be able to. Unless he has no combat spells?)

I decided to go for the long shot and have completely rewritten the procedure the AI uses to equip heroes, so that it won't just pick the most expensive item but actually considers what the item is.
The new algorithm is the following:
Go through all heroes in an order of preference based on the hero's type, generally better heroes have higher priority and heroes likely to stay for fortress guard duty in the mid or late game have higher than equally powerful heroes that do not stay.
For each of the heroes, generate all possible set of 3 valid items that can be equipped to them from the remaining items. Calculate a priority value for the set and equip the set with the highest priority, then continue with the next hero.
The new thing is, it considers sets of 3 items instead of just each item individually, and ofc that it considers individual stats on items and the hero itself instead of just item costs.

The priority calculation currently uses the following number for each ability or stat, and opinions on these are welcome :

Vampiric : +40 (medicore ability)
Guardian Wind : +50 (Decent ability)
Lightning : +80 (good ability)
Destruction : +50 (kills entire units and cannot regenerate...overrated maybe?)
Cloak of Fear : +40 (medicore ability)
Wraith Form : +400 (hero is protected from web and crack's call, the two most likely ways the human player will use to kill them, also can move though water, and ignores walls and combat terrain. 400 Might be overkill? Might pick a WF item with crappy stats over an actual good item that has no WF)
Regeneration : +80 (isn't that good for AI because they can't guarantee they'll be the winning side unlike the human player)
Pathfinding : +10 (unimportant)
Waterwalking : +20 (nice but secondary)
Resist Elements : +30 (probably the weakest defensive enchantment)
Elemental Armor : +80 (very strong protection against magic damage)
Doom : +120 (extremely effective offensive ability especially against the human player)
Stoning : +15 (weakest instant KO ability, generally unimportant for a hero)
Teleporting : +140 (Hero is impossible to chase down, or run away from, and gets extra defense, amazing ability)
Haste : +150, and doubles the value of ATK, MOV, HIT (Hero deals double damage and moves twice as fast. might be overrated? )
Invisibility : +120 (Surprise factor can win the AI critically important battles. Defensive effects are huge even if this doesn't happen)
Death : +20 (Better than stoning but instant KO isn't what heroes are for usually. Might be underrated? )
Flight : +60 (Hero can attack flying enemies, is protected from being attacked by ground units, and can move over ocean. Forces the human player to waste a turn on Web before they can try to Crack's Call the hero as well.)
Resist Magic : None, instead it counts as +5 Resistance stat points.
Magic Immunity : +1000 (Most OP item power in the game)
Flaming : None, instead it adds +3 attack to the stat points directly.
Exorcism : +50 (Contains Bless and a medicore instant KO attack)
True Sight : +70 (One of the easiest way to dispose of an AI hero is using phantom beasts. This blocks that and a few other nasty spells.)
Phantasmal : +180 (Strongest weapon ability in the game)
Divine Protection : +100 and also adds +1 to the To Hit stat total
Bless : +40 (Slightly better than Resist Elements)
Lionheart : +100 (adds 8 health which is often enough to survive a Crack's Call or two Doom Bolts etc) Also adds 3 to the attack and resistance stat points so this is only the value for the health boost.
Inner Fire : +50 (Cold and Fire immunity can protect the hero against some threats, Immolation is decent when fighting many medicore units that can barely damage the hero but would win by their numbers)
Planar Travel : 0 (AI cannot use this item power, only unit enchantment is recognized due to space problems)
Merging : +80 (Like teleportation minus the defense boost. Maybe underrated?)
Shadow : +100 (Unit can attack flying enemies, and damage output increases roughly by 50% too)
Invulnerability : +120 (2 damage reduction is worth about as much as 6 shields.)

Any ability that is redundant in the item set (appears more than once) is only worth half of the above points to encourage the AI to distribute those on different heroes unless the other stats outweight it.
If hero is over ocean then Water Walking, Flight, Wraith Form : +5000. If hero is Draconian, Water Walking and Flight -50.
Various other modifications for pairs of abilities that strengthen or cancel each other, like Merging+Teleport = bad.
If hero has the ability granted by item by default then reduce priority (Missile Immunity, Illusion, Illusion Immunity, Lucky, Charmed vs Resistance items etc).

Bow or Staff : +250 (prefer these to melee weapons on heroes who can use both)

each point of ATK : +10
each point of DEF : +20 (defense is generally more important for heroes than damage output)
each point of RES : +18, however each point above +7 counts as it it was -2 instead, to avoid stacking more than needed.
each point of HIT : +40+4*ATK on items
each point of SKILL : +2
Spell Save : For each point take the next value from this table instead : 40,100,170,250,500,750,1000,1250,1500,1750,2000,... (to encourage stacking multiple SAVE items on the same hero, preferably the best one)
each point of MOV : +8
Spell Charge : +2*each point of casting cost of the spell * Number of charges

A spiritual successor to Diablo 2 has emerged in the form of Grim Dawn. Both KoP and I are playing and enjoying, and he even (gasp) compared it favorably to D1 as well.

The active thread is in the Gaming Table forum HERE! T-Hawk split it off from the Blim Blim thread in this forum, but that may actually have hid it from some of you, thus this post.

Anybody itching for a good Diablo-esque experience would do themselves a favor to check it out.


- Sirian

Don't know if its something everybody can access, but in the UK a new TV show called go 8 bit started last Monday, and i found it quite entertaining.

Essentially a bunch of comedians and celebs playing challenges on retro (mainly) computer games

Can check out the first episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkIoM8e78Gs

Hopefully it proves popular and more series will follow