One of my heroes got killed recently by a single life drain. He had 16 hearts ( full life ) and 14 crosses, actually he even had 22 crosses because he was accompanied by a super prayermaster hero. How on earth is that possible, according to the wiki site it is not possible to kill a hero with that stats. No things like black prayer or mindstorm were in effect, I'm playin 1,40n insecticide.

Besides he was wearing a regeneration ring and was not coming back after I won the fight, but I consider this part rather a feature than a bug.

Regards,
Mortu

Just kidding, no patience here, someone give us some combos to think about!

Is everyone satisfied with the amount of raiders, its scaling based on difficulty, the frequency of the spawns and the effect of Revolting Raiders?
I'm currently editing these for CoM and think they might be worth changing for 1.50 too.

This is the current behavior :
-Each turn, add random(Difficulty level+1) to a variable. If it reaches 30, reset to zero and generate a raider.
This will, on average, yield a raider in this many turns : Easy = 30, Normal = 20, Hard = 15, Extreme = 12, Imposs = 10
There is no turn based limit, Impossible may generate the raider as early as turn 6 if all turns roll max on the RND.
-First, find a neutral town to send the raiders from, and count the units in it.
-Multiply the units by Difficulty (0-4) and divide by 6.
-If there is an AI fortress on the continent, reduce it by 1/3. Skip this step is Revolting Raiders.
-If it's before turn 200 and it's the Myrror plane, halve the number of units. Skip this step is Revolting Raiders.
-If the number of units would be fewer than 1, set it to 1.
-Send out this many units of any type present in the town (can be mixed). Remove 1/3 of this many units from the town (do not need to be the same type sent out).

I'm not too happy with this, because, according to my understanding it
-means Revolting Raiders has no effect unless there would be a penalty to stack size on your plane or continent, in which case it merely removes this penalty but does not increase the amount of raiders beyond that.
-means scaling on difficulty is very poor, on Easy and Normal, the max stack size possible is 1. On Myrror this extends to hard as well prior to turn 200. 1 unit stacks are a joke for anything but Easy I think.
-There is no scaling based on turn count whatsoever. If a large neutral town is near, you might get the max amount of raiders on turn 10...

For CoM I'm planning to make Revolting Raiders actually add to the stack size and spawn frequency, remove the Myrran penalty, make the difficulty scaling better, and add a turn based scaling on top to make sure early turns aren't unreasonable.

First lesson: Don't despair if an AI gets air superiority over one of your colonies in the early game when the AI has slow engines.

Let's imagine that you see an opponent in the early game (pre-2375) massing a nice little fleet. What should you do?

A. Build preventative missile bases. These are expensive early on. It will severely harm your growth curve. Plus, missile bases are kind of an all-or-nothing kind of thing. If you just build missile bases at some of your threatened worlds, the AI will just target one that you haven't built bases at, and your bases will have proven useless. Although...if you build just, let's say, 1 base at your low-production and/or frontline worlds, and leave your backline and/or high-production worlds without bases, then that might be a useful way to lure the AI into sending a slow fleet against one of your stronger planets that will be able to rushbuild plenty of bases to deal with the threat, now that you can be certain where the fleet will be going.

B. Build a preventative counter-fleet that can move to where the enemy goes. This only works if you have a narrow frontier zone and/or you have faster engines than the AI. This also eats up resources (probably not as much at first as building missile bases at every planet), but what's worse is, those preventative ships will have to be scrapped at some point...possibly without ever seeing battle.

C. Build no defense of any sort until you are sure that the AI has a fleet coming for you. This strategy lets you build and tech faster, which means, when you do finally start building bases or a counter-fleet in response, you'll be able to do it cheaper, faster, and more effectively. Even if the AI initially gets air superiority over a planet of yours before you have assembled a response, it's not the end of the world. The AI will probably bombard for 1 turn and then send in a slower-than-molasses transport wave. In many cases, it will be possible to re-obtain air superiority before the transport wave hits in order to shoot down all of the incoming transports.

Option C is what I went with in my latest ongoing Mrrshan game. Let me show you what I mean:



The year was about 2370. The Klackons and I actually had relaxed relations, but that doesn't necessarily stop the AI from attacks of opportunity when they want to poach a random planet.

At this point, I could tell for certain that this Klackon fleet was incoming against Zoctan at warp 2. I had no fleet at the time and no missile bases anywhere. Zoctan was a new-ish tundra colony that had no chance of getting even 1 missile base up in time.

I still think it was the correct move, in any case, to focus purely on building up to this point because, as it turned out, I was more than able to destroy the invading Klackon fleet before the ensuing transport wave hit by assembling a counter-fleet from scratch in time.

Here you see that transport wave crawling in at warp-1, some ~8 turns later:



In the meantime, the Klackons only chose to bombard Zoctan once, killing 7 million colonists and 3 factories. After they decided that they were going to try to seize the planet with a ground invasion, they stopped bombing. This seems like a reliable AI pattern. If they get air superiority over a planet that they CAN invade, they WILL invade. And once they decide to invade, they will not want to spoil their prize with further bombardment. And early game bombardment is not too harsh; even a sizable fleet like this only killed 7 million. And you can usually survive something like that.

Plus, it seems like the AI will generally not target planets that it cannot invade in the first place, so for example, nearby Draconis was a new dead planet that I had colonized, and the Klackons only had controlled tundra, not controlled dead. So I was fairly certain that Draconis would be safe for a while. In other words, the AI will generally not go out of its way to glass an enemy planet out of spite that it has no hope of invading. So if you like peaceful buildery strategies for the early game like me, this observation should fill you with some confidence in the Option C of doing nothing for preventative defense in the early game.

By the time the massive 65 million transport wave hit, I had assembled a force to intercept them and dispense with the orbiting Klackon fleet. I timed this fleet to converge on the turn that the Klackon transports would arrive in order to give myself as much time as possible to build a response fleet:





Here's what I was up against:



The result: I lost only a couple of medium cheetah ships. The Klackons lost all of their fleet, AND:



In all, this strategy ended up being way more effective than trying to build a preventative fleet or missile bases because:
A. In the meantime until this fleet arrived, I could build and tech, making my subsequent build-up much stronger.
B. By tempting the Klackons into sending half of their homeworld in a futile attempt at invasion of Zoctan, I put a serious dent in their production for a while.

However, I would not push this strategy past 2400 because the AI will start to get its hands on better engines by that time, and you won't have enough time to assemble a counter-fleet from scratch. At that point, you really do need to build preventative missile bases and/or a preventative, standing fleet, even if you are trying to go the peaceful builder route.

Second lesson: gatling lasers can be useful.

Say what??? Now, make no mistake: gatling lasers are still my least-favorite of the tier-1 techs to get saddled with (hand lasers is almost always my favorite to pick, followed by Hyper-Vs, then gatlings. Gatlings are just too expensive. None of the tier-1 weapon techs is going to make-or-break your game, so really my first consideration with tier-1 is just to get ahead to tier-2 as soon as possible. And so hand lasers, being so super-cheap, win out against the others regardless of whatever qualitative use those hand lasers will have. You really ought to get a peek as soon as you can at whether you have the real goodies in tier 2 like neutron pellet guns or fusion bombs. THOSE are techs that can single-handedly carry your weapons strategy for a large portion of the game).

But gatling lasers give you 4 laser shots for about the cost of 3 normal lasers at first, and it seems like that ratio gets better and better for gatling lasers as you advance up the tech levels (probably having something to do with power requirements or something else scaling better with miniaturization). 1-4 damage lasers and gatling lasers are also relevant for longer than you'd imagine: I'd say, up to about 2400. After that point, the AI will probably be fielding some ships with class III and class IV deflector shields. But up until that point, lasers will work just fine. Against unshielded enemies, gatling lasers are actually better than everyone's favorite neutron pellet guns. Up until class II shields, they are about equal (NPGs are slightly better).

Assume class II shields:

Gatling lasers: 0-2 damage x 4 = 0-8 damage.
Neutron pellet guns: 1-4 damage x 2 (NPGs are about half as expensive) = 2-8 damage.

Higher than class II shields, NPGs become MUCH better, of course!

But as you can tell from the Mrrshan game above, gatling lasers will seriously tear up enemy transports and the enemy's early game unshielded small designs.

In the Mrrshan game above, I actually had gotten hand lasers as my tier-1 pick. Then I had researched anti-missile rockets (it was either that or ion cannons), and I was halfway through mass drivers (no other choices for tier 3). But I had a chance to trade some insignificant tech like deep space scanners to one of the more backward races in exchange for gatling lasers because I thought, hey, why not give myself just a little more of an edge over using just regular lasers? And I think that 33% boost in firepower helped. I don't even think ion cannons or neutron pellet guns would have been better against what I was facing here. Gatling lasers paid off nicely for once.

Hello and welcome to my thread!
I wish everyone will have good luck and enjoy the game!

Thanks for watching and commenting!



List of the players
TBS+GJ -------> Ghengis Khan (Agg/Imp) of Zulu
OT4E -----------> Sitting Bull (Phi/Pro) of Inca
Old Harry -----> Suryavarman (Exp/Cre) of Sumeria
Commodore -> Catherine (Imp/Cre) of Portugal
Mackoti -------> Willem (Fin/Cre) of Vikings
2metraninja -> Boadicca (Agg/Chm) of India
REM -----------> Peter (Phi/Exp) of Holy Rome

Main events:
T39 - Buddhism by REM
T48 - Hinduism by OT4E
T50 - Stonehenge by Pindicator
T55 - The Great Lighthouse by Mackoti
T56 - Oracle by OT4E
T64 - Judaism by Mackoti
T65 - Colossus by Commodore
T81 - Pyramids by 2metraninja (razed by pindicator)
T91 - Mausoleum of Mausoluss by Old Harry
T96 - Circumnavigation by Commodore
T98 - The Kashi Vishwanath by OT4E
T105 - Hanging Gardens by REM
T108 - Confucianism by Commodore
T113 - Great Wall by OT4E (captured by Old Harry on T126)
*T114 - Bureaucracy by Mackoti
T117 - Great library by 2metraninja (razed by pindicator)
T118 - Temple of Artemis by OT4E (captured by Old Harry T124)
T132 - Christianity by TBS
T137 - Apostolic Palace by TBS


Shrine statistics:

Official Codenames Rulebook PDF.  The following writeup is originally by BRickAstley.

Codenames is a team-based party game based on cluegiving with limited communication between a team's spymaster and his fellow agents.

Players will be divided into Red Team and Blue Team. At the start of each round, each team will select a team leader, or spymaster. The two spymasters will be told secret information about a grid of words, which they will need to convey using limited clues to their teammates. The team leaders will take turns giving clues and taking guesses from their teammates. Once all of one team's words have been guessed, that team wins the round. The spymaster changes from round to round. The first team to win two rounds wins!

Setup:

A 5x5 grid of 25 words (codenames) will be generated by the Moderator and given to the players, as seen below.

Has Commodore quit already?

Edit:
Password is OH

Reference stuff at (t120) [128] 141

Mackoti
Willem of Viking (FIN/CRE)
Judaism, Gt LH, 5 land tiles, SoZ
(14) [14] 14 cities
TECHS:
Probably: Music,
Definitely: Calendar, Monarchy, CS, Philosophy, Nationalism, CoL, Aesthetics, Literature, Compass eot134, Machinery eot135, Theology eot 136, Optics eot141, Paper eot142, Education eot145
Check: Construction

Harry
Sury of Sumer (CRE/EXP)
MoM, Landlocked cap, TGWall, ToArtemis
(14) [16] 19 cities

Commodore/dtay
Cathy of Portugal (CRE/IMP)
Colossus, 5 land tiles
(14) [14] 14 cities

TBS
Ginghis of Zulu (AGG/IMP)
Landlocked capital
(17) [18] 18 cities

REM
Peter of Holy Rome (PHI/EXP)
Buddhist Shrine, Hanging Gardens, 5 land
(14) [15] 16 cities

Pindicator
Charlie of America (PRO/IMP)
Stonehenge, Landlocked cap, War with 2metraninja
(14) [14] 15 cities

OT4E
Sitting Bull of Inca (PRO/PHI)
Hindu shrine, Oracled Monarchy, 8 land tiles in start square, TGWall, ToArtemis
(11) [10] 10 cities
TECHS:
Definitely: Construction, HBR, Metal Casting, CoL eot144, CS eot149

2Metra
Boudica of India (AGG/CHA)
Mids, TGLibrary, Landlocked cap, War with Pindicator
(?) [?] 11 cities

Thought it was worth doing one for Codename 3 too

I set up a game for myself this morning Huge Inland See game, Kurios into Mercurians. Right on turn 190 the mouse stops working (in the game, not in toto), I can't pan the screen, zoom in or out with the mouse wheel, select units, bring up diplomacy screens or the advisor screens (the advisors work under the F buttons, alright). I haven't a bloody clue what is going on here, can anybody help?

Have tried exiting the game and starting the save, and tried playing from an earlier auto save, neither work.

Attached is the settings screenshot.

Attached Files

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