Immunities
Make these give a bonus rather than a fixed level, and reduce the bonus. Maybe rename them to resistances? Ie. Fire Resistance instead of Fire Immunity. All would give +20 defense and +5 resistance.

Capturing cities
When razing a city, give the player a whole lot more gold than presently.

Starting conditions
- size 6 town
- an extra unit of spearmen (or a different unit for each race, if possible)
- a unit of settlers
- higher casting skill?
- starting 0 fame hero, random or selected?

I recently noticed that there are some differences between the unrest given in the 1.3 patch notes and the strategy guide. Upon testing, neither appears entirely correct.

For example there seems to be no animosity between halflings and trolls (as the SG claims) and +20% unrest between high elves and orcs (as per patch notes... sort of, as they're inconsistent with themselves).

Is there any easy way of getting this data directly from the game? The other entries I checked were in line with the OSG but I'd rather be sure.

The Insecticide project has gone quite far from my point of view, I never expected it to become so large. Many bugs keep a coming, but in general we can already see an end to it (I remember my own illusion, when started, that the game is not at all that broken as MoO, hehe). There are a few important interface themes, that will increase substantially the playability - and I am looking forward to make them work.

What cannot be called a success till today, in terms of "seeing the end of the task approaching", is the in-game AI. Many crucial corrections (the number may float around 200) were made inside the code. But they were, most of the time, an attempt to avoid the most stupid AI decisions, rather than to force the AI to state long-time goals and to create plans to execute them. We are being limited from inside the code, by condensed space, by cumbersome AI data structure and - most importantly - by the simple fact that writing any new code in assembly is painfully slow.


Maybe it is time to make a step in new direction - to create an External AI for MoM. Of course, this cannot be a work of an individual (not me surely, as I am a pure amateur). There are a few people here, who, as it seems, have professional pre-requisites

(1) to write the AI in a modern programming language of their choice (WhiteMage in particular, maybe others with a good experience) and

(2) to create a connection between the program and the would-be AI external utility, so that the MoM program asks, when necessary for decisions that are externally fetched to it by the AI utility (ILSe could help here, others with a good experience).

(3) finally, I could provide addresses that represent the final AI choices in almost any matter in the game (my guess is that 98-100 % of the decision points are known to me). I would try to force the program to ask for the external input (if somebody helps me, gives me advice how to do it). I could also work on internal AI data structures to provide better information, better input for the utility if necessary.

Questions
- Is this technically possible or is it just a dream?
- Are some of you interested to put a work in and create a much better MoM, while respecting the original?
- What are the limitations? What would be necessary to do from both sides (external, internal)?

Okay some filler comics in case of accidental clicks:







--------------------------------

So I wrote up almost all of this earlier then accidentally hit "back" on my browser, which caused me to lose all of this. I was so annoyed that I set this aside all day long, and I'm finally just now getting back to it. This probably won't be as long as my original preview was, but it should still be fairly comprehensive.

TT told me that they wanted a Tiny Mirror with early contact, but not close enough that it was all about early choking. That sounded pretty much exactly the same as what I'm playing currently, so I shot for something similar to that. I'm going to give you a big overview shot, then I'll look at the start from the players perspective, then I'll take a closer look at a couple regions. I'll then wrap up with my leader/civ choice for them. Here we go:



Note that I'm only going to look at one side, since both sides are identical. I made various minor changes on the map, but I'll get to that later, so let's get straight to the start:



Mirror maps are not normalized, so I made a lot of changes to the start. I rolled a lot of maps, though I was mostly just looking for something that started the players in the middle of their section, and just about every start either put them in the tundra (no thanks) or on the far edge of the map, and I didn't feel like completely moving their starts. So when I rolled the map, I went with it. My goal with the changes here was to get them to start in place, and have a decent capital, so I made these changes:

1. Added the corn (I think? Pretty sure 0-food starts are possible on Mirror)
2. Added the rice
3. Removed 2 jungles and changed another into a forest
4. Changed starting tile from flat jungle grass to plains hill
5. Added a horse SW-SW of the capital. (obviously invisible here). It's an awkward position (something I'll mention it later) but I specifically wanted it two tiles diagonal from the capital, because it means it's not in the workable tiles for the capital, but it also prevents them from founding directly on top of the horse, which could end the game very quickly for someone. It also means they have to defend the horse from the other guy.
6. Put the scout 1SW of the capital, hinting at them to scout towards the center of the map. I went ahead and moved him 1NW for purposes of what they might see when they make their decision, although it's probably more likely for them to move SW-SW or something like that.

So that should get them to start in place if they are sane, though TT makes it sound like Mackoti might not have done that right away. Can't think of why he'd make a move, but perhaps he'll tell us. Also, I was going to remove the peaks in favor of better tiles, but WorldBuilder tended to distort these tiles into weird looking shaded tiles, which just looked horrible and screams that they were edited. Anyone know if this is fixable? Or is it just a WorldBuilder bug? Next let's look at the region just southwest of the capital:



TT also mentioned "nice amount of resources" so I tried to help out areas that were a bit barren. I also wanted to make sure both had pretty good access to strategic resources. I made these changes:

1. Added the horse + rice - you knew about this already, but I wanted to put it in perspective. It looks odd having three resources in a row (it's my most obvious edit), but coal won't be visible for a long time so they won't notice. In retrospect I should have moved coal to the backlines just to make this edit less obvious, but it's not that important. The reason I added the horse was because if you saw the overview, the only other reachable horse was way up north, and I want to see some Keshik action! I'll address Keshiks later.
2. Added iron - again, I wanted easy access to strategic resources. This kind of game is more fun when decided by tactics than by who has more guts to settle iron a mile away.
3. Added spices - purely because happy resources were lacking on this map, so I added it as a mild bonus. It also pushes them towards the center of the map for earlier action.
4. Boosted the big circled area. I'm doing this whole report by memory, so I don't remember exactly what changes, but this area was really barren when I first saw it. Tons of desert and a few plains, maybe 1-2 grass tiles apiece. I do know that the grassland hills used to be desert - I added it so someone had the option of settling right on the border to get a defense boost. It's a riskier move to settle right on the center, but the payoff is a hill defense boost AND possibly snagging both Wheats. An interesting strategic decision I hope. Boosting this whole area will also (hopefully) push them to settler closer to the middle again, which would make for more fighting - and hopefully some razings like has happened in the southern middle of my game - where there's been a combined 6 razes!

It's possible I did a few other things, but I can't think of anything else. Here's the north:



I left this area mostly alone, though I made two minor changes:

1. Added copper - Again, wanted all resources to be available. Also needed to be in the vicinity so that spears were buildable to repel Keshiks, but I didn't want the Spears to be automatic either. This way the player gets to decide if they want to settle a weak 2nd city (no food) and get Spears or if they want to fight fire with fire and build more Keshiks.
2. Added a food - I can't remember which I added, but I added one of those two food resources. This map in general was really food poor, so I made a couple additions like that just to keep it from being too bad.

That about wraps it up, as the rest of the map I left pretty much untouched. I think I added a random corn and/or cow wayyy up against the edge of the map just because the area was pretty barren again, but I mostly left it alone. I made one other addition just for the fun of it. Way down in the icy corner of the map, I left each of them a DVD copy of the movie "The Departed," which their citizens will hopefully enjoy:




Finally, the leader/civ choice. They wanted to be the same leader/civ, but TT wanted "nothing too crazy" which I'm guessing means Shaka of Zulu is out. First off, I wanted them to be Mongolia, mostly because I think the Keshiks are one of the most fun units to play with in the game. Definitely not the best UU ever or anything, but being able to ignore movement costs opens up a lot. This is partially why I didn't remove some of the jungle from the very center of the map - because I figured it let Keshiks have an advantage for awhile.

So Mongolia was an easy decision, but picking the leader was harder. I decided I wanted them to have Creative, just because it's fun to not have to worry about borders and instead get straight to the killing. This also discourages them from going for a religion, when really the more interesting decision is how quickly to run for HBR. If one guy sprints for HBR and the other fools around with religions and then heads to Iron Working, it's game over for him. So I settled on Creative as the must-have trait.

From there I wanted Charismatic to be the second trait, since it's fun to have more promotions available in this kind of game. Unfortunately there is no Cre/Cha trait. I thought long and hard about swapping to Exp/Cha, but decided against it. Briefly considered Agg/Cre, but Kublai of Mongolia is a bit boring for obvious reasons, so I skipped that. I then thought of using Philosophical, which in the end I went with. This adds another dimension to the game, and I just felt it would make for an interesting situation, since GP are more important in this kind of game. Is someone going to churn out tons of Artists and try to culturally dominate the middle? We going to see some lightbulbing to get an advantage to get a player back into the game? I figured Philosophical allowed a lot for someone to get themselves back into the game by out-thinking and out-planning the other player.

So I think I covered anything. Any questions? Any criticisms/suggestions?

My aim in this game is to make my play in PBEM3 look awesome.........











*cough*

Ok, so basically these are the game settings:

Tiny mirror map
Prince difficulty
No Barbs
No Huts or Events
Always War

and scooter chose for us the lovely combination of....

PERICLES OF MONGOLIA

Couldn't think of a good name I politely request permission to use this thread to make random requests for stuff the tweaker can change in-game to enhance the game experience somehow. I'll start with:

Retreating
WhiteMage made an interesting suggestion about retreating which concerns letting units flee on an individual basis. Details aside, would something like that be possible? Would be much easier to balance something like that, although there'd be obvious AI problems.

nothing


nothing



nothing


Me and TT will play a duel(on a tiny map) ,I just got my save and from first glance i know that this a miror map(ye thats called in the lobby when you pick the map),The difference is that i have 2 foods on capitol(usualy 1 or non in this kind of map),and thinking that might scooter set us cooper under the setller i moved 1 back, or perhaps he set it diagonal(i see thats a fashion in our time), and more i was looking for fresh water(ye health is a problem on this maps).
I played more than 20 this map( ye usuly with 1 city elimination), but i dont think is a big diference.

Catnip 2.0 is scheduled to release by Christmas. However, we're still in early discussion of spell changes and there's no way all of that will be decided on by Christmas. I'm excited about the work we're doing, but I think 2.0 needs a smaller, more realistic goal. So for 2.0 we're going to make much simpler numeric changes, and we'll leave the heavier stuff for later. I don't want to confuse the long-term spell balance threads, so I'm making a 2.0 spell thread and long-term spell discussions will continue in the appropriate threads.

So what will we be changing for 2.0? Numbers. Resistance, damage, bonuses, cost, etc. What won't we be changing for 2.0? Everything else. Spell rarity, deleting and adding spells, etc. are all out for now. Please keep talking about them in the appropriate threads so we can move on to those changes once the Christmas rush is over.

For example:
Change Stone Skin to +2 defense - Good
Change Chaos Surge to an uncommon spell - Wait till after 2.0

The hopeful good news is these 2.0 changes will feed into 3.0 and later. Once we've changed Fire Bolt to x damage, we don't need to come back and do it again. Instead we can spend our time tweaking other interesting elements. I do think it's important we get some changes in now, though. If spells are still working based off of old resistances and old health then people aren't going to get a good idea of what Catnip is improving.

So, without further ado, some magic...

I'd like this thread to be used to discuss game balance principles and concepts (as they pertain to MoM) in this thread. Knock yourselves silly!

I'm currently working on designing a Civ-like game, to be implemented as a mod. (Doesn't really matter much whether it's based on IV or V, but I'm going with V. Hexes, and - I predict - more modding activity. Even though its rules will be more similar to IV.) Naturally the implementation is indefinitely delayed until Civ V modding tools (the codebase) are fully available, but until then I am planning it, and the main puzzle remaining is combat.

I'm sure some people have thought about this quite a bit. What is important for a good Civ combat system? Would you just flat-out-copy IV? Can we do better? Unit stats are not in the picture at this point, I'm just considering the actual rules.

I consider 1UPT to be trivially out of the question due to simple control issues; it's a giant pain to order all your units individually. However I do consider V's goal of having combat not just be about attacking and defending city tiles to be laudable, as well as particularly relevant to this mod, which emphasizes tiles and improvement variety a lot.

Thanks for your help!