The link is on the left side, and you need the file Master150RCXX.zip, where XX is the highest numbered file. Direct download link.
You can install it over MoM 1.31 or 1.40, as 1.40 files are also included. Just unzip all the files into your MoM directory and overwrite everything.
You will need to start a new game, as the 8 slot vault required a change in storing the items in memory/saves.
This is a release candidate. It contains all intended functionality and has been through some testing already, but definitely needs more! Please post any problems you find, or your opinion about the new features in this thread. This is especially important as I cannot actively play both this and Caster at the same time, and Caster is my priority.
The goal is the same here as in insecticide : to eliminate bugs first and foremost, and to make the game better as a secondary objective.
It is not a balancing patch, does not change spells, units, or game mechanics, except for some really severe flaws.
There is one exception, diplomacy has been completely redone, and does include changes to game mechanics. The original system was beyond repair, as many of the formulas used in the rolls were simply poorly designed, not to mention many features were only halfway implemented, so I had to design the missing parts myself.
If you seek better gameplay, new spells, more balance, etc, you should get Caster of Magic instead. If you prefer the original, this one is for you!
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.
Wind
Faith
Hospital
Joy
Tear
Gun
Glove
Traffic
Suit
Dress
Ear
Stool
Beard
Leg
Vacuum
America
Horse
Team
Tattoo
Excuse
Night
Cliff
Lace
Couch
Millionaire
Each word will have a color assigned to it in secret that only the Moderator and the Team leaders will be able to see. I will randomly assign colors to the 25 word as follows: 8-9 Blue, 8-9 Red, 7 Grey, 1 Black (team that goes first has one extra word to guess). I will PM both spymasters the assignment of each word to its color, so that they know which word belong to their teams, but the other team members do not (All the other players know are the 25 words in the grid).
Here is an example of the above grid with colors assigned and Red as the starting team, that would be sent to the team spymasters:
Wind
Faith
Hospital
Joy
Tear
Gun
Glove
Traffic
Suit
Dress
Ear
Stool
Beard
Leg
Vacuum
America
Horse
Team
Tattoo
Excuse
Night
Cliff
Lace
Couch
Millionaire
Gameplay:
Each team's turn is broken up into two steps: giving a clue, and pointing at words.
Giving a Clue: The spymaster will post a clue to get teammates to guess a word or words of their color. He does so by giving both a one-word clue that is related to one or more of the words in the grid, and a number which tells his teammates how many words are related to that clue. For instance, he might say "Delay 3." That means that there are three words that are related to the word "Delay". He can say ONLY those two things: one word and one number. They must bold this to make it clear that is their official clue. After that, they are done posting for that turn.
The spymaster may give a clue as above, but offer no further commentary while a round is ongoing. If you are a spymaster, take care to review the typical-ish rules for giving clues in word guessing games listed below.
1. Your clue must be about the meaning of the words.
(e.g. You can't use your clue to talk about the letters in a word or its position on the table. GLAND is NOT a valid clue for ENGLAND. You can't tie BED, BUG, and BOW together with a clue of "B 3".)
2. Letters and numbers are valid clues as long as they refer to meanings.
(e.g. EIGHT 2 is a valid clue for SPIDER and FIGURE.)
3. The number you say after your clue can't be used as a clue.
(e.g. CITRUS 8 is not a valid clue for LEMON and OCTOPUS.)
4. You must play in English. A foreign word is allowed only if it can be reasonably used in an English sentence.
5. You can't use any form of a word that has not yet been identified on the grid.
(e.g. Until BREAK has been guessed, you cannot say BREAK, BROKEN, BREAKDOWN, etc.)
6. You cannot say part of a compound word that has not yet been identified.
(e.g. If HORSESHOE is in play, you cannot say HORSE, SHOE, UNHORSED, SNOWSHOE, etc.)
7. Rhymes are only valid when they refer to the meaning of the word.
(SNAIL is a valid clue for MAIL, but it is not a valid clue for SCALE.)
8. Proper names are allowed, if they follow the One Word rule.
(EINSTEIN is a valid clue, but ALBERT EINSTEIN is not).
9. Acronyms are not allowed, unless an acronym is primarily used as a regular word.
(RADAR is a valid clue, but CIA or USSR is not).
Pointing at Words: Now the rest of team must select words to guess at, one at a time. Players must bold this pointing action to make it official (eg, "Point to America"). They can guess up to a max of one more word than the number stated by the spymaster (To try to catch up from missing past clues, see below).
Once they point to a word, the moderator or one of the spymasters reveals the color of that word. If the word is the color of the guessing team, the team may continue guessing words (up to the number given in the clue + 1). If the color of the word is either Grey, or the other team's color, the turn immediately ends and the other team takes a turn (Though players can try to guess any words they had missed on a later turn).
If the color is Black (Assassin) then the round immediately ends and the other team wins the round.
The team must make at least one guess; after this, the team may stop at any time by posting the word "Pass" in bold in the thread.
Any player on a team can make a guess, unless the team decides at any point to use a different system (one official guesser, vote for guess, etc).
Win Condition: The first team to have all 8 or 9 of their words revealed (by either team) wins the round. If this is that team's first winning round, the starting team switches and another round is played. If this is that team's second winning round, that team wins the game.
Round #2 Red (Bacchus (Spymaster) & Commodore, ipecac, SevenSpirits, DaveV) vs Blue (novice (Spymaster) & Bobchillingworth, Psillycyber, Molach, David Corperial)
Hey, so I love Bang!, which is probably pretty obscure, but if you prefer to just call it "Wild West themed Werewolf" you can't go far wrong. Theme aside, it would be a bit more of a traditional WW than the open-shootout card game. SIGNUP CLOSED:
Player Character
Novice Chuck Wingam
Winston Kit Carlson
Lewwyn Pedro Raimirez
Psillycyber Vulture Sam
Zakalwe Paul Regret
Rowain Slab the Killer
Gazglum El Gringo
AdrienIer Belle Star
Jabbz Lucky Duke
Qgqqqq Calamity Janet
Ryan Bill No-Face
As 1.5 will be containing all of insecticide code (except the parts I further improved already), and I prefer to actually know what is in the files I release, I started processing the list of changed bytes between 1.31 and 1.40n.
Here I will list what questionable, or unknown purpose changes I found, when I need advice what to do with them.
I hope there won't be much of these, so far there is only one, but I only started today.
Probably some of you noticed "Sorcery Floating Islands" instead of just "Floating Islands". The unit gained the "Normal unit" flag which makes the race show up on it. Like Halfling Spearmen, that thing.
That's not the only one change to them however, they also lost Death Immunity.
Does this serve any actual purpose I'm not aware of, or is this an accident and the correct flag was replaced by another somehow?
Yes, that's right!
A unit enchanted by Wraith Form is completely immune to Holy Word, Flame Strike and Death Spell.
tested and confirmed in 1.31, and 1.40n.
Bug? Feature? Never even heard about this before, I just accidentally stumbled upon it when I wanted to check if Spell Lock protects against Holy Word and Dispel Evil (it does against both).
For the time being I update the help text for CoM to mention this but not entirely sure about keeping the effect. Maybe it makes sense for mass-targeting effects to not notice a "ghostlike" unit, but other noncorporeal units are affected by these so it just doesn't make too much sense.
The vanilla game's Berserk sets defense to -20, so unless there are enough buffs to raise it back to above zero which is impossible, it just stays negative.
Setting the issue of potential glitches negative defense might cause aside, I have another problem with this.
Assuming Berserk affects the mind of the target, making them ignore their own safety and fight better, it does not make any sense for this to disable the effects coming from spells like Iron Skin or Holy Armor...both of which do not rely on the capabilities of the target, but simply change the physical body (or the armor on it) to be harder to damage. A spell affecting the mental state should not be able to disable these effects!
For Caster 1.2, I'm going to make Berserk apply prior to Iron Skin, Chaos Channels, and Holy Armor, to see if this does not unbalance the spell too much. (Death can always use better combos and more power I guess.)
One other point of interest is that Berserk, when cast on overland, is applied before all combat only effects, so combat enchantments like Prayer and Iron Skin if cast during the combat, will still not get reduced to zero even in the current version. Having it go down to -20 was responsible for erasing buffs applied after it, and I don't like that solution.
What do you think? Should Berserk really make it impossible to buff the defense of the unit after the reduction to zero? Or is it better if you can combine it with spells that boost defense?
I think that it's time that I make my exit from the sorts of MP games that tend to get played around here, but I'm not sure I want to quit Civ IV entirely just yet. I've had a couple of ideas rolling around and would like to see if anyone else would be interested. In order of my interest:
1) Team MP game (Humans vs Humans)
I'm thinking 2v2, maybe 3v3 if there's that much interest, on a mirrored map of some sort. Probably a PBEM. Ideally, each team would be balanced by skill as much as possible, and if time zones allow, I think turn orders should alternate between teams. BtS, restricted leaders only. No barbarians, no huts, no events. Final Destination.
2) Team MP game (Humans vs AI)
As above, except it's... humans vs AI. This version cranks it up on the casual meter.
3) Succession Game
Maybe with a quirk or gimmick, maybe just a straight up game. Settings would be voted on by anyone interested.
As we could see from Hadriex's latests video, the AI is pretty capable of equipping their heroes now, which represent a huge force.
Question is, what strategy should the AI take with the heroes?
Currently, they are very likely to get stuck defending the capital until it's filled with units that have a higher cost, meaning normal heroes generally stay until the town is filled with a top tier normal unit like Paladins, but champions stay until stuff like Wraiths or better filled up the slots in the city.
Note that in insecticide, anything good was regularly sent out of the fortress which was helping offense but was a suicide move more often than not, and on top of it, the best units got stuck guarding nodes forever usually. So I'm talking about CoM (and Raid in the future) here.
The pros of the current behavior are :
-Heroes are kept safe for a long while, so when they do move out, they will have full gear and at least 2-3 levels.
-Fortress is kept at maximal safety all the time.
-As better heroes are kept together at the fortress, losing the items is less likely.
-They don't get assigned to unimportant locations or get stuck waiting for ships, nor die while trying to conquer top tier nodes. They are guaranteed to be use for a strategically important purpose : defending the fortress. Sending them to fight will not guarantee they'll do something useful, although it is likely. They might even end up in an idle stack if there is nothing to attack left on the continent.
-Low value non-champion heroes are still being actively used, and can be a huge threat with if well equipped. They can also gain exp actively.
-Heroes summoned when the Summoning Circle is not at the fortress can still actively participate in the game, only those that appear or are summoned to the fortress will stay there.
-Caster heroes contribute skill to the wizard.
The cons :
-Heroes don't gain more than a few levels, unless the fortress is attacked frequently.
-Heroes could win wars for the AI, or even eliminate the human player and win the AI the game, but most of them don't do it. Actually this might be a good thing, players don't enjoy losing? A good champion with some nice items is nearly unstoppable.
I think the pros heavily outweight the cons, but I wonder what does everyone else think about this?
How to use heroes is a critical strategic decision, and it's not an easy one even for the human player.
One thing I would like to mention is that I was able to make the AI actually use the vault today. So items can now be stored and immediately equipped if a new hero is obtained, which makes losing a hero somewhat less significant. Prior to this change, risking heroes was not even an option, as their items would have gotten melted down for mana unless another, unequipped hero was immediately available. Returning items to the resurrected hero later was not possible. Now that at least the items are safe (unless the entire battle is lost), sending heroes to participate in the game is more reasonable, but still a questionable strategy.
Look at all this excellent destruction! Now this is power! I didn't attack yellows towns at all, and see? Why bother destroying your enemies when you can just destroy the world instead? So much mooore fun!
Also, Santa has brought Flandre a new artifact. Now, who should be playing with it first, decisions, decisions...
