Been a long ass time since the last Werewolf game.. Dont know how Brick and his situation is doing, but if anyone else wants to run one im sure we can get a good amount of people for it.

1. Superdeath OR someone else
2. JR4
3. Tarkeel
4. Gazglum
5. Novice (Gaz fren)
6. Lewwyn (Gaz fren)
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13. Commodore

I have a few thoughts that relate to playing at high difficulty levels with multiple wizards.

The summary: resources (gold, mithril, etc) cannot be kept and are either irrelevant or actively harmful, beyond the first few turns of the game. I would rather not have resources at all, in fact, because their targeting priority is so high that they will, with 100% certainty, be destroyed early game AND that then ruins the tile underneath as well. The current balance is not fun and is intensely discouraging if you want to have any kind of resource.

More detailed examples from my current game:

• The targeting priority is just ridiculously high. Example: Freya has 3 chaos books in my game and got raise volcano. She is at war with 4 wizards, not including me. My lands are extremely far away from her (I actually don't even know where she is). Despite all of that, Freya has spent her entire casting budget over the past several turns raising volcanoes all over my land, because at some point she flipped to aggressive.
  
• Aggressiveness has no management. I can't ask for peace or negotiate an end to it. She silently flipped to aggressive -- there's no kind of message, either -- then just started spam casting at full tilt. And I have no recourse at all.
  
• Going back to the distance involved, there is absolutely no reason for Freya to be interacting with me at ALL. She's an ungodly distance away.
  
• Regarding prioritization, I'm sure Freya would be better served by summoning more creatures, considering she's at war with everyone. Switching to another example, I've also been watching Tauron raise volcanoes on Ariel's lands as they've been at war. Tauron was losing their war very badly but somehow, the targeting prioritization has him trying to ruin her capitol lands instead of summoning or casting buffs that would keep him from getting utterly steamrolled.
  
• There are no counters. Corruption has a fix... sort of, although it takes shaman / priests a very long time to clear it and not all races get them. Volcanoes are only countered by change terrain. And while volcanoes do occasionally create resources, the targeting priority for resources ensures that the created resource will be immediately destroyed; in other words, that mechanic is useless.
  

• Engineers -- give engineers a way to fortify land against volcanoes. Rivers already block volcanoes, so the base idea is already there. Let me spend resources to preemptively counter it. The problem here is lack of a button; they'd end up building roads instead. Not sure how to solve that.
  
• Priests / shamans -- similarly, for uncorrupted land, let priests or shamans consecrate it against corruption. The alternative is that you have a shaman permanently stationed on whatever valuable land in an endless loop of purification which, again, is just intensely annoying and not fun at all.
  
• Nightshade -- for some reason, nightshade is highly prioritized for destruction even while it's completely useless, since it is only activated by cathedrals and only used against rare and higher tier spells, which are not being built / available to cast at the stage of the game that wizards are already spamming destructive spells. The resource itself is not that common, and considering its priority for destruction, I can't think of any game where I was able to actually use it, nor where the AI was able to use it (since they suffer from spam destruction as well). So; make nightshade permanent. It's supposed to prevent curses, so make it prevent corruption and volcanoes from being used on itself.
  
• Arcane spell? -- Maybe at uncommon or rare tier, it would be neat to have an arcane spell that somehow counters or rewinds destruction. Something like "Recover Resource" would make sense to me. Since most resources are minerals of some kind, I don't know why volcanoes would completely destroy it anyway.
  
• Raise volcano change -- Disallow raise volcano from being used on a volcano, to stop this silly loop of repeatedly casting raise volcano until all resources are gone. It's just an annoying mechanic and I doubt it's helpful to the AI either, since they're not gaining power. They can still use corruption to block the resource if they want, or cast raise volcano on the tile when the original volcano converts to mountain.
  
  

I'd love to be able to see a larger map portion when the game starts.
Instead of the default 2 tiles from the capital, something like 7 or 8 tiles. This way it would be easier to see if the area around you suits your particular strategy (e.g. you need Orihalcon or Mithril or Adamantium, or you need a lot of gold, or you count on a neutral city nearby).

Could this be added to the initial options, and the number of tiles be configurable in modding.ini?

So I'm playing on Lunatic and thought I was doing quite well. Until Freya cast Roots of Genesis in December 1505. Game over!

Her spell power is, I think, about ~80? So it probably took her about 15-20 turns to cast (depending if her SP grew much during that time); indicating that she must have gotten the spell around mid-1503.

According to the new treaspell.cas file, it looks like the earliest Very Rare should drop in treasure would be around 1508? Or 1509? (I'm not sure exactly what # Lunatic represents in the formula). She has 7 Nature books and no relevant retorts. I'm pretty much at a loss as to how she got this spell.

Also, I dunno how to research this any further. I can't recall the cheat codes, and log.txt seems to just have a list of a few spells and all the heroes now? Anyway, here's the save file: https://ufile.io/crqhn0yr

And for everyone's amusement, here's what happens to the power graph when someone casts one of the best Very Rares while everyone else is still on Uncommons:

I know there are a few fans of football (that's soccer for our US readers) here. The Premier League is starting up next week, so I was wondering if there was any interest in running a Realm's Beyond FPL league?

Personally I don't watch any of the games, but I find it quite interesting to play regardless. FPL can be quite daunting at first due to the sheer number of options available, so I'll try to give a helping hand to those that are interested.

Edit: For those starting out, here's a surprisingly decent template team.

If you attempt to move the Spirit directly south which I think is off the map, the game crashes with an Unhandled Exception.  The save is attached.

Attached Files

  AUTOSAVE.zip (Size: 12.78 KB / Downloads: 1)

The last game I finished went shockingly smoothly. The Win button appeared somewhere around the year 1518. I had an alliance with all enemy wizards & had never gone to war against any of them. How often does this happen?

I played the version 1.01.01 on Advanced difficulty on a maximal, volcanic, & rich map with average continents & full-power nodes. This was by far the easiest game of Caster of Magic I've experienced. It was the easiest MoM game period, apart from 11-book Wraith shenanigans. After a while with CoM I, I became mostly comfortable with Expert difficulty. I won one game on Lunatic, but that required considerable care & concentration. CoM I on Expert customarily felt desperate until turning the corner in the late game. I started CoM II on Fair difficulty, which I completed without too much trouble but still some back & forth. I've got another game on Expert going that I expect to win, but it's a bit of a slog akin to what I remember from CoM I. 

My build was 5 Life, 1 Chaos, 1 Death, 1 Earth plus Myrran, Omniscient, Famous, & Charismatic. I choose dwarves on rich map, which explains a lot of the ease. I got lucky with good, though not incredible, minerals near in my initial city. I snagged a few quality mercenaries early, helping me expand. I cracked my first tower around 1507 by spamming it with mass-produced adamantium troops. While I'd run out of space to settle on Myrror, Arcanus contained many uninhabited lands. I continued to spread, founding cities & hunting treasure with Torin & other heroes. I wasn't even finished building settlers when that Win button popped up. 

The strangest part was how much work Charismatic put in. As mentioned, I spent about ten years allied to literally everyone. Enemy wizards contacted me regularly to demand I attack whoever they were fighting at the time. I refused over & over & over again. Relations deteriorated, sometimes to hate, but they still never broke the alliance. (I did usually try to mollify them with tribute when relations soured too much.) 

I didn't have Aura of Majesty, only Charismatic, & didn't put that much effort into calming enemy wizards down. I'm not sure what think about this. I appreciate what amounted to a diplomatic victory, which MoM has always lacked. I do wonder about how much unclaimed territory was left on Arcanus & how little effort I had to put in to maintain peace.

Does the maximal map just make it too hard for the three wizards on the opposite plane to expand sufficiently sometimes? I believe this was my first time playing on maximal. In my few other games of CoM II, it felt like building settlers became pointless past 1510 at the latest.

Bow using heroes have a massive list of cons, very few pros, and typically have absolutely abysmal performance in combat.

Here are a few cons of bow heroes:

• No long range trait -- at any range over point blank, they typically do 0 damage, even to low defense enemies; this automatically makes any bow hero less valuable than a magic hero
  
• Fully countered by two of the weakest spells in the game (animate ammo and guardian wind)
  
• No traits that increase ranged attack power (contrast with many magic ranged heroes having arcane power)
  
• No other traits that improve ranged (magic users can get traits like armor piercing, destruction, etc)
  
• Terrible starting power (usually 8 ranged, which is barely higher than some 6-figure units!) and terrible growth (my super-hero level beastmaster is at 12 ranged; my grand lord orc was, I think, at 10 ranged)
  
• Lower chance to get useful artifacts than magic ranged characters (staffs / wands drop far more often than bows)
  
• Usually, no other benefit; note that ALL magical ranged characters get spellcasting power; that spellcasting power is the one thing that makes the beastmaster and ranger tolerable
  
• Weak in hand to hand and can't even be used for hand to hand by the player, since there's no option to turn off their useless ranged attack and just hit something
  

• ALL bow heroes get long ranged; there's absolutely no reason not to do this. How the heck did these people become "heroes" if they can't even shoot their bow as well as a run of the mill elven longbowman?
  
• Higher starting value for bow attack (+1 for orc, dervish, beastmaster and ranger, +2 for huntress)
  
• New random chance traits specific to bows such as quick shot (2 arrows per shot) and power shot (bypasses guardian wind)
  

TBS expressed that it might be better if we find a replacement for him in our big PB59. I think without spoilering anybody I can say that he has a well established empire. Help us get this PB back to a good pace. I think it's also fine if any eliminated players take over.

<p>What is caster of magic 4 windows? It's what gog offers as a download now. But, uh, how is it different from the dos version?&nbsp; <br><br>The version numbers are a new system of counting, we're now on "1.01.01_(48185)"&nbsp; &nbsp;<br>Instead of the old dos numbers like 6.0.6&nbsp;&nbsp;Is everything the same? or is there a changelog somewhere? <br><br>I don't see it mentioned in the main thread?&nbsp;https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=7751</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>edit: Uh, why is this post full of weird symbols like &lt;p&gt; &lt;br&gt;?</p>