The defender gets to move first and can instantly flee the moment the battle starts. The attacker cannot do anything at all to stop this from happening.

So how do you kill units this way? It's especially annoying when someone is running around with one man stacks and you can't get rid of them.

I would like to create a separate thread to discuss how we will go about this, as there are a number of issues.

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The basic task seems simple at first: rank X players, rank X starting locations (starloc), assign them to each other appropriately.

Three problems immediately arise however:

1) Assigning a player to a starloc affects the ranking of the neighbouring starlocs, depending on that player's skill and agressiveness.

2) Variance in player levels might not match the variance in starloc's quality. Maybe the best two starlocs in the game are of very close quality, whilst the third is much worse; whereas the second-ranked player, by general perception, is significantly weaker than the first-ranked player, and quite evenly matched with the third.

3) Rank aggregation. Say there are three lurkers, and they rank players as follows:

We will see how this goes.

I've decided to take a look at the book distribution of the new default wizards and how this compares to the original game.

The original game had

4 Life wizards, for a total of 24 Life books.
4 Death wizards, for a total of 25 Death book.
5 Sorcery wizards, for a total of 30 Sorcery books.
5 Nature wizards, for a total of 29 books.
5 Chaos wizards for a total of 29 books.

A roughly even distribution with only Life and Death being a bit less frequent than others. Sorcery was the most common type.

This is my current setup.

7 Life wizards, for a total of 35 books.
6 Death wizards for a total of 29 books.
7 Sorcery wizards, for a total of 36 books.
5 Nature wizards for a total of 16 books.
6 Chaos wizards for a total of 30 books.

Life and Sorcery are the most frequent, with Chaos and Death being closely behind....but Nature is seriously missing out on stoplight. Most split wizards have fewer nature books than others and there are fewer wizards that even have any Nature book at all than of any other type.

I think there should be more nature books but not sure how to squeeze them in. I like the current set of wizards and don't want to replace any of them.

For single realm wizards we have
Reimu for 10 Life
Aura for 10 Sorcery
Yuyuko for 10 death
Suika for 10 Chaos (she also gets an extra Nature book to spend all 12 picks)
and...no one for Nature.

For dual realm there are
Flandre for Death+Chaos
Byakuren for Death+Life
Clow Reed for Chaos+Sorcery
Silver for Life+Sorcery
Vanilla H for Nature+Life, she is the most "Nature" wizard at 7 books+Nature Mastery.
Tenshi for Life+Chaos
Yukari for Sorcery+Death
Nature+Sorcery is represented by Satori but she also has Death books.
Nature+Death is not represented unless we consider Satori as one at only 2 Death books.
Chaos+Nature is not really represented, wizards sharing this book have at most 2 of the one they have fewer of.
That's all the possible dual realm wizards.

For 3 or more realms there is
Satori for Nature+Sorcery+some Death
Seravy for all realms except Death
Patchouli for all 5 realms.

Nature is left behind in all of these categories. I don't think that's a good thing.
Sorcery and Life being most frequent is...not optimal either. Life wizards are not very aggressive, but they are quite powerful if left alone. Sorcery is outright a pain to deal with, with all those spells countering and stealing your stuff.
Chaos and Death have an appropriate amount of users.

I see the following possible options (without changing wizard portraits and names which I don't want to).

Vanilla could have more Nature and fewer Life books (10+1). We would lose the nature+life wizard however, which feels a bit of a must-have category.
Seravy could lose some Life or Sorcery books to gain more Nature, but I wanted to keep him roughly evenly distributed between his realms. I could see him with only one Chaos book though.
Satori can drop the Death books and become fully Sorcery+Nature. We don't have a Death+Nature wizard either, though. Alternatively we can lose the Chaneller ability and add 2 more books, most likely 1 Nature and 1 Death.

Anyone has better ideas?
I do want to keep the wizards and I want to keep the books matching their character and personality.

Out of retorts the default wizards use
Node Mastery
Guardian
Cult Leader
Archmage
Chaos Mastery
Conjurer
Artificier
Nature Mastery
Warlord
Chaneller
and 4x Myrran because we don't want to have the AI select the same wizard every time for that plane.

The following retorts don't appear :
Sage Master
Famous
Runemaster
Charismatic
Sorcery Mastery
Mana Focusing.

I think it would be nice to have at least a Runemaster and a Sage Master somehow.
Node Mastery, although powerful, is not very interesting and could be dropped, Chaneller as well.

I've changed this spell to be both combat and overland like most unit enchantments are.

I used it today and found out the game crashes at the end of turn if it was cast overland.
I suspected the high attack value causing some sort of an overflow (I used it on a 40 atk hero so it got raised to 80), but using the spell on a spearmen instead still caused a crash. I also suspected the zero defense so I edited a unit to have naturally 0 defense but it didn't crash so that wasn't the reason either.

...actually, nevermind, I found the problem.

I'll leave this thread here if anyone else runs into this.

Berserk sets the unit's defense to -20 instead of 0. Which is obviously not the safest thing to do.

8F87D : EC->00

I suspect the crash is actually caused when my new unit value calculation for the AI takes place, which assumed defense is non-negative, but I wouldn't leave it like that even if the rest of the game doesn't crash from it. It just feels really bad to set a unit's stats to negative values like that, who knows what other incompatibilities it might cause.

As a side effect, it might be possible to raise the defense of the unit through effects that get applied after berserk, I would guess they used -20 to make that impossible but...negative defense really isn't the way to do that.

I noticed how this personality exists in the game yet the AI never, ever selects it. It only ever influences the game through the Grand Vizier, which builds based on the player's personality which, although not displayed in the game, defaults to pragmatist.
Maybe it would be nice to make it available for the AI?

I've been thinking...Infernal and Divine power are redundant, they do the exact same thing.

What if we renamed one to something like "Cult Leader" or whatever that sounds realm neutral, make it unlock for both life or death books, and use the other to make a completely new retort with a completely new effect? We could even completely drop the book requirements considering it has nothing to do with books, just boosts religious buildings.

I don't have any good idea for a new retort at the moment, though.
Maybe a retort to produce more food or gold?

My preference would be something for 2 picks.

How about "Guardian : Units defending this wizard's cities get an additional +1 to defend, hit and 2 resistance." ?

Edit : successfully added Guardian with +1 to hit, +1 to defend, +1 resistance granted. I'm worried about adding too much resistance as it directly hurts the usefulness of half the combat spells in the game.
Not sure if the ability is worth the 2 picks, though, but it most likely does, you are effectively getting a free, cumulative prayer for every home battle.

I'm going to make a list of stuff in the game I'm still not 100% sure are properly balanced.
If you use these frequently, please share your opinion.

Spells
War Bears - Kinda unimpressive, I have never summoned these when I had any other choice. [Current plan : 55 cost, 1 maintenance]
Earthquake - Might be too weak? Only 25% chance to hit the enemy armorer's guild might not be enough to stop an enemy invasion. [Current plan : 40% building destruction chance. It's only a single city and a one-time effect, gotta make it count.]
Phantom Beast - High Illusion damage with enough health to often survive several turns and attack many times. [Current plan : No change, due to their 0 defense they are not too hard to deal with]
Spell Binding - Steals any global enchantment, 100% success and only 1000 mana. Might be underpriced, almost all the good enchantments cost over 1k. [Current plan : Myrran wizards will not always be chosen from the default, so Sorcery mages and Spell Binding in particular will not be encountered too frequently. Cost raised to 1200 ]
Flying Fortress - Never really used this so not sure if it's any good even at a low upkeep. Walking units not entering the city sounds pretty powerful in theory, though. By the time you get very rares, you aren't focusing on defense, though. [Current plan : Guardian retort encourages defensive play which makes city protection enchantments more valuable.] [Moving to Uncommon or Rare would be ideal but nothing to swap it with.]
Drain Life - Summoning zombies in early game, using Syphon Life later is always superior to using this. Might need a cost reduction. [Current plan : costs 12 mana instead of 15.]
Summon Zombies - at 3 health per figure and only costing 18 this might be too good for a common summon.
Zombie Mastery - get a free garrison of 6-9 units halberder tier every time you take an enemy town? Too good. They come with Create Undead so the garrison can renew itself even if Zombie Mastery is dispelled.
Lycanthropy - 5 attack strength might be too little to damage troops of a similar tier. [Current plan : 120 cost, 2 maintenance]
Wall of Darkness - This should really be Sorcery not Death, it's an illusion spell. [No room in Sorcery realm to move or exchange this with.]
Animate Dead - looks really underpowered compared to Raise Dead. Yes, you get more health and can take enemy units, but if you use it on your own, it'll be permanently undead and on top it is more expensive and Very Rare too.[Current plan : Unit returns with +1 to hit, attack, defense, weapon immunity.]
Heroic Shout - damage might be a little bit too powerful for 8 MP. Almost always a better choice than using the hero's ranged attack, if the target has more than two figures.

Item Powers
Magic Immunity - Pair it with high movement and your hero will never get killed, ever. Cost was raised sky high, though.[Current plan : removing the ability from the game other than the 4 predefined items that have it.]

Races
Dwarves - Gold and production bonus is a very powerful combination, although they have received several changes that made them overall weaker in previous updates.
Lizarmen - Lack of production buildings might make them way too slow to be playable, needs testing. [Significantly higher population growth rate and cheaper settlers to make up for very slow production.]

Heroes, other units
Amazon hero - Might, Blademaster and Charmed + Thrown weapons is very powerful for a nonchampion hero. Random pick allows taking Agility to be truely unstoppable. [Current plan :Starting defense 2 lower]
Agility might be overpowered, +9 defense is the difference between a good unit and a near invincible one.

Retorts
Famous - I'm not sure if it is worth 2 picks. Higher chance is nice but lower cost is better and that one only costs 1 pick. Couldn't find out how to change it, though. [Current plan : Famous costs 1, the 2 cost slot will be used by Runemaster, Runemaster loses the book requirements in exchange for costing more.]

I've looked into the relocation tables in the exe and found that only the normal, non-overlay segments have the entries there.
No wonder my editing attempts didn't work for overlay parts.

The disassembler however recognizes the far calls in the overlays properly, and they obviously work when the game is running, which means there has to be relocation information stored somewhere else for the overlay segments.
Question is, where?

We definitely need to crack this wall if we want to fix autosave, anyone knows?

I've tried to search but I found zero useful information about dos overlayed exe relocation.

I've encountered this today and want to fix it :

Quote:Duplicate Items: This happens to me from time to time when I create and destroy artifacts for mana (artificier + runemaster combo), and the enemy is also crafting artifacts. In this case an item will have the properties of another item, e.g. a Plate Mail having the properties of a Sword. Destroying an item may also destroy the other item.