I've bought Overwatch a few weeks ago and have been enjoying myself a lot with it. I was a huge fan of Team Fortress 2 and put a few hundred hours into it, and it's looking like Overwatch will command the same or more time all told. Plus it's a Blizzard game so it has to be at least pretty decent.

If you aren't familiar with the game, it's a team and class based first person shooter (closest comparison is definitely TEAM fortress 2). Being a class based shooter, a lot of the game is tied into character selection. There are 21 different character, which boast a lot of variety in abilities (think League or DOTA) while being sorted into general categories (attack, defense, tank, support). Playing the game successfully is bound in being able to play classes well and in knowing if and when to switch mid battle to counter your opponent.

Anyone else been playing a lot? If so I'm on the NA server a few nights a week and would love to group and play some.

I'm utterly fascinated by this game. I think it's kinda fun, but it's the overnight phenomenon it's become that really blows me away. Several times now I've seen small huddles of people of all ages with their phones out catching stuff together. Not to mention the uptick in people walking on the sidewalk lately. As I type this I hear a neighbor kid freaking out over a nearby pokemon, and my social media feeds are riddled with people who don't normally play games posting screenshots of pokemon they've found.

Also, it's only a matter of time before someone dies playing this game while driving, right? Not to mention stuff like this which felt inevitable:

http://gizmodo.com/armed-robbers-used-po...1783416898

When's the last time a game has caused this much instant hysteria? Wii Sports? Pokemon Red/Blue?

I'll be without civ access starting tomorrow for 5-6 days and need a temp sub to play a few turns. Should have asked for one earlier but it completely slipped my mind. There're instructions in my thread. Thanks!

If anyone has the original Master of Magic disks or files, please let us know. This means the first disks ever released, unpatched. Version 1.01 was issued shortly after release on 10/04/94 to fix crash bugs and "Misc bug fixes and gameplay tweaks". This is the earliest version we can find. If anyone can help, please post here. Thanks!

When they say "sign a wizard's pact to prevent accidental conflict" they mean it.
Several types of nonmilitary purpose movements do not check if the tile they move to is free or not.
However if a Wizard's Pact or Alliance is in play, at the time the human player would get prompted for "You have a treaty with X, do you want to attack anyway?", the AI takes back the move, so it never happens if not intended. This does not cover the peace treaty which is also not warning the human player about its existence.

Question is, I think it wouldn't be hard to extend this check to - only for the AI - cover all cases of unintentional attacks : those can be easily recognized, if hostility is zero, the attack was unintentional - so do we want the AI to do unintended attacks, or do we not? Note that sneak attacks without war declaration are intentional and will not be affected.

3 examples of unintentional attacks I've observed happening are :
-engineers build the road towards an enemy city (which is correct to do for the gold bonus) and do not stop but attack the city
-Idle ships that randomly move around to prevent naval "roadblocks" attack a unit being next to them. (I had no space to add a check to prevent this)
-If enemy units are moved into the tile the AI selected as the gathering spot for units, the units still try to gather there and attack : I've only had this happen once, most of the time the AI manages to select another gathering spot, or it's already occupied by the AI's units.

If we prevent accidental attacks, having or not having a treaty would be identical except for having a treaty also disabling intentional sneak attacks.

Unintentional attacks can test the patience of the human player and provoke them into starting a real conflict, and might possibly make AI players fight each other so it's not a clear "this is a bug / unwanted feature" case, however I am leaning towards no such attacks - both because it can violate a peace treaty and because it doesn't fit into the concept of "smart" AI.
If we do this however, then it'll be a strong indicator of the AI's status : if ANY attack is incoming, they are hostile and more can be expected. This wasn't a case before, although it's pretty easy to tell apart intentional attacks (stack of 9 swordsmen) from unintentionals (2 engineers) anyway :D

By the way, the chance of the AI turning hostile on its own (no war declaration and was not attacked, rerolled every 10-25 turns) is calculated like this :

If there is a treaty (peace, pact, alliance) : 0%
If peaceful or lawful : 0%
Negative relation : (50+ABS(REL/2)+8*Personality)%
Positive or 0 relation : ((100-REL)/4+8*Personality)%
where personality is 4 for maniacal, 3 for ruthless, 2 for aggressive and 1 for chaotic.

So at REL=0 (neutral) it's a 33 to 57% chance of becoming hostile.
At REL=-20 (unease) it's a 68 to 92%
at REL=+20 (relaxed) it's 28 to 52%.

pretty high numbers, maybe too high? Or about right? Makes forming a wizard's pact all the more important.

Someone put this video on the wiki and I was surprised to see it had a couple of retorts I had never seen before. This was evidently a beta version of MoM.

Far Seer
Omniscient
Special Race

In a later video, clearly labeled v1.0, these retorts are missing and have been replaced with the ones we know so well. In one of the screenshots, the starting city has a viewable area of 3 instead of 2, which is my guess as to what Far Seer does. Cool retort. It seems the entire exploring/viewing algorithm was smashed at some point hence Scouting never working correctly, so maybe that's why they removed Far Seer. I could see myself taking this in a game, at 1 pick it seems fun once in a while. Omniscient, I've no idea. Maybe grants Earth Lore or Awareness or those other map spells? Special Race is obviously what became the Myrran retort. Charismatic is missing, my guess is that Famous was deemed great but cost too much gold to use properly?

Stone Skin (Research cost 60) and Holy Armor (Research cost 130) both provide a +3 bonus to defense. Interesting, Magic the Gathering did the same thing I believe, offering identical powers in different colors but at different costs reflecting the differences in that color's philosophy.

Resist Elements works against Sorcery but lacks defense against magical ranged attacks.

Gnolls are depicted as building a Maritime Guild.

Gunther the Barbarian is 12 attack and 14 HP to start! And there is no "by five" separation of the rows of icons, making them hard to count.

I've made it so that they cannot desert due to low gold at all - my main intention for this was to prevent the AI from losing them, however recently we found out the AI doesn't even lose units to maintenance - they disband them on their own and that already has heroes as an exception to never disband - so this change might have became unnecessary.
On the other hand, not losing heroes randomly - with all their items - due to temporal low gold is a pretty nice feature, and in 99% of cases other units will be lost instead to the missing gold : the only way to get away with not paying without losing every other unit is if all units have no gold maintenance or are heroes.

So the question is, do we keep this feature or revert it? (question valid for both CoM and the possible 1.51 patch)

I will be out of the country with no access to internet from 7/20-7/29, and I am really interested in seeking a temporary turnplayer for those 10 days for PBEM71 and PB30. Please let me know if you are interested. Thanks.

I'm going on holiday in Italy soon, and where I'm staying doesn't have good wifi, so I'll mostly have to use data on my phone to play in PB 32. But I have several options for getting that data, and which one I choose depends on how much data I'll need to play.

Does anyone know how much data (in MB) it actually takes to log in to and play a turn in a pitboss game?

Welcome lurkers. Feel free to speculate to your hearts content. As always, I prefer no spoilers, but if you must do so please use a spoiler tag.