Suggest, discuss:

• The information you get and how you get it.
  
• The way you could handle the game better.
  
• How can the interface be simplified to enjoy the game more, without taking away any content?
  
• How can the game be customized (to increase the replayability f.i.)?
  
• Which interface elements would immerge the player more into the game lore?
  

9/03/2015
Latest stable version 1.4n here:
  insecticide140n.zip (Size: 783.61 KB / Downloads: 351)

DOWNLOAD v1.4n Insecticide patch

Version 1.4o patch is unstable, for testing only.

What the Insecticide patch is all about?
---------------------------
to make the MoM game as bug-free and as AI-challenging and as user-friendly as possible
without modifying the content. The patch now features more than 200 bug-fixes, AI improvements and interface changes. Enjoy!


1) Unzip into your MoM folder, overwrite existing files.
2) Before playing game, check Game/Settings screen, if the settings are correct!


Release notes:

Version 1.40o - ALPHA (small problems and display bugs)
------------------------
- [interface] cities now have a QUEUE with 2 extra objects. Use Q button or left-click on "Producing" area. Downside: you cannot put in the queue a building for which you haven't build prerequisite yet.
- [setup] a new landmass in between (previous) medium and large landmass is selectable. The landmasses are called "Tiny-Small-Medium*-Large-Huge", where medium is the new one.
- [AI] AI now tries to shoot arrows only when closer to the target.


Version 1.40n (latest)
------------------------

- [bug] Lucky and Prayer bonus was incorrectly making all incoming attacks less efficient (-1 to hit), on top of its correct effect
- [bug] arcane spells clutter the research options for player and AIs, due to incorrect choice mechanics.
- [bug] Runemaster 200% to_dispel bonus now works / does not work, only whent it should / should not work .
- [bug] instable data preventing early mercenary offers to the human player
- [bug] Myrror cities had normal roads passing through them

- [insecticide bug] "Revolting raiders" option is now connected with the right button on the Setting screen
- [insecticide bug] serious data instability issue on Cities screen

- [interface] you may cycle through all your cities with "X" key, when viewing the inner City screen
- [interface] Cities screen can be accessed with "T" key
- [interface] Cities screen can be paged through with up and down arrows
- [interface 1.31] right-clicking on cities opens the Change screen in the appropriate location, giving you an easy management tool



Version 1.40m
------------------------
- [bug] AI will now always attack aggressively
- [bug] AI units now always attack twice, if possible
- [bug] Extreme and Hard difficulties now have correct opponent's number of picks (13 for Hard, 15 for Extreme)

- AI: better summoning
- AI will not hesitate with settling nodes with Spirit
- AI heroes are preserved in AI-AI combat, and they will be resurrected
- AI creating items have been postponed to the later stages of the game


Version 1.40l
------------------------
- [bug] Armageddon does not destroy all pacifying effects, it just increases rebels by 2
- [bug] ditched all (?) the stupid dispel bugs I've put in the game (please report any further problems with dispels!)
- [bug] AI is now able to create all magical items from the whole power range
- [bug] new items, written by player with use of itemmake.exe, will now have correct book prerequisites

- [game option] new world size, "Huge", is 33% bigger than Large. It creates one big continent to fight on.
- [game option] new difficulty level "Extreme", same as Impossible, but with 25% lower AI bonuses
- [game option] new choices for magic strength, ranging from 0.5 - 2.5 x normal level. It influences the strength of lair monsters, the rewards and the mana you get from nodes

- AI now tries to protect his fortress with better defense
- AI mercenary hiring decision has notably improved
- AI will occasionally buy a magical item from the merchant

-it is now impossible to get better hero by reloading before a summon
-it is now impossible to get better reward from lair by reloading before the battle

- [interface] all hidden To hit and To defend bonuses are now displayed in the detailed unit infobox


Version 1.40k
------------------------
- combat dispel now should not make a spell permanent outside of combat [major Insecticide bug corrected]
- looping music fix reversed since the problem lies elsewhere (music for buildings is back)
- option "Strategic combat" was renamed to "Automatic combat"
- new game options should be by default off, after a fresh install [credit to Ickus]


Version 1.40j
------------------------
- major instability issue in combat corrected
- RNG is stable for overland (reloading should give you the same overland events) - a reverse of an old change


Version 1.40i
-----------------------
reversed ship speeds to the original

(Bugs in general)
Animate dead should now work (but casting when > 6 units are dead still crashes the game!)
monsters extra difficulty option - significantly harder
raiders extra difficulty option - easier
the human player cannot run into an enemy unit when using enchanted roads pathfinding
AI is not trying to dispel Haste from a hero with an item
AI stacks, after an attack, can move in the next turn (bug fixed)
Great wasting does not destroy any pacifying effects from city buildings anymore
AI priests are now capable to cast healing in the battle
the "250 production" bug allowing you to miraculously complete any production, gone
Conjurer trait now rounds 25% mana bonus on monster maintenance up (2 maintenance -> 1 saved, 5 -> 1 saved, 6 -> 2 saved)
Invulnerability and Possession on a unit now can be dispelled in the combat
Combat Dispel from all pre-combat spells now actually works!
Dispel evil is impossible against non-dead, non-chaos units
a hero will not disenchant the positive spells from his own peers (second attempt)
removed text "Endurance, as swiftness spell"
looping music for 'Building was completed' was removed from the game to avoid CPU consummation
you will see Demons and Werewolves in lairs, also Air elemental and Phantom Beasts had their values switched (corrected)

(World creation)
the fortress placement has been optimized and runs without any delays, in the same quality
all races now can be AI wizard's starting races on impossible
SOM research now costs 60% (36.000 RP, was only 3.000 RP, a bug) of its value for wizards with 11 books
Torin and Alorra won't have arcane power, useless to them
the small lairs monster cash has had its maximum increased; the big lairs have got bigger minimum to avoid becoming often small
fixed a bug where the game would sometime fail to give a lesser companion in the lair

(AI)
AI ships - earlier expansion based on world_size
AI pathfinding is not updated (unit blindly bumps into your army) - should be fixed
AI should care more about the closer units in combat (reversed)
AI mana leak dispelling obsession
AI aggressive mvt in cmbt (temporally reversed, before better solution can be found)
AI contra immunity factor is less important in combat casting
AI is not getting scared by Immolation



Version 1.40h

Attached Files

  140oPatch.zip (Size: 782.21 KB / Downloads: 87)

A thread for discussing the MoM in-game AI.

Please note: the thread title is focused on the current negative, dysfunctional AI. I know that everybody and his brother too can suggest a great and complicated algorithm that would work perfectly or works in game XY. But it's impossible in 99% of cases to implement something into the game architechture if you don't know how it is built, how many space is there in the code, how many man-hours it would take to accomplish your suggestion.

So this thread focuses more on the phenomenology of the MoM AI. Let's describe what's wrong on different stages of game AI, let's suggest (in general way) what could be better, what should AI treat differently, which cases it should discern.


Important notes:
1) Repairing whole parts of AI takes a LOT of time (repair feature X, test, new trouble in feature Y, repair Y, trouble in X again...). I am not prepared to do it unless it improves the game experience in a massive way.
2) I will not reveal and describe the AI routines, unless really necessary. I believe a game should conserve its AI secret, because one of main goal of playing single player games is "to beat the code", to find the AI weaknesses. If they're revealed, the game gets ultra-boring.


TO PONDER list
--------------------

Major
- AI would aggressively use flyers, floaters and ships against ships of a wizard (AI or player) [b0rsuk]
- move floating islands to island towers
-

Minor
- Floating Island usage (earlier plus some extra conditions?) [b0rsuk]
- base continent expansion on personnality [SDragon]
-

This thread is dedicated to MoM bugs you have seen / found in the latest PATCHED version of Master of Magic.
(Note, that the AI problems have other thread.)

1) Please, try to describe the occurence of the bug as good as possible, it saves a lot of time. When, how it happens - and when it does not.
2) If possible (if necessary), attach one SAVE#.gam with the pre-occurence state of the bug. Thus, I don't have to simmulate the bug situation to see if it was corrected. I cannot stress enough how helpful such a save is for me. (If you don't have it, try to simmulate the situation for me, please.)


I will update this first post with your bug suggestions into a TO DO list and I will classify them into three groups of problems: MAJOR (game breaking or game mechanichs threatening), MINOR (bad thing but it can be sidestepped or has minor consequences), TINY (anything else; tiny problems may be never corrected). MYSTERIES is a name of a section with long-time problems that are somehow impossible to find/correct.


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


TO DO list (* indicates solved issues)
---------------

Mysteries
- casting Call lightning still makes a mess of game data
- the "Star Fires" mystery: a direct damage spell (only Star Fires? - more info needed) refuses to kill off severely wounded units


Major
- moving a unit on top of one that has no movement points left zeroes the movement of the second unit [mom faq]
- AI does not attack a unit inside city walls [ILSe]
- AI to AI diplomacy must be remodelled
- "Jollyville" crash [WhiteMage]

Minor
- Counter Magic block at nodes gives message about Node Aura instead [b0rsuk, Psyringe]
- "I've seen AI cast Enchant Road. On Myrror !" [b0rsuk]
- I've seen Black Channeled Werewolves [b0rsuk]
- I've seen Rakir the Beastmaster with Fire Breath, Wings and Demon Skin (1.40f) [b0rsuk]
- not all player units participate at Tower battles [b0rsuk]
- Fog of War does not function for AI anti-city spells near CAPITAL [robinh3213]
- stack movement points [robinh3213] - the quickest Windwalker, shadow demons oddity
- Warp creature x4 hangs the game [borsuk]
- Magic.exe and Wizards.exe generate different default settings. [Ickus]
- more stack movement points [robinh3213] - Demon Lords + quick walking results in slow movement [b0rsuk]

Tiny
- Armsmaster heroes can give undead experience [b0rsuk]
- if a town with sum_circle is destroyed, the circle is not moved back to fortress [robinh3123]
-

Thanks...

One of our goals is to provide an extensive database of MoM resources across the web, including both links to web sites (even dead ones, which can be resurrected with archive sites) and downloadable stuff. You will be able to find it all in this thread, as soon as we manage to put it up

I'll be keeping this thread clean, but please put any requests and suggestions here and I'll delete them after they've been carried out.

This project will require quite a bit of manpower, and I'd be happy to let go of a whole bunch of it. Implementing the changes takes a lot of time, and deciding on all the little details also takes a lot of time. I'm looking to take on at least 3 helpers, and here are some examples of stuff I'd like to delegate:
1) Basic units (including racial modifications)
2) Racial units
3) Heroes (doesn't include any hacks to abilities and stuff, just number tweaking)
4) Buildings
5) Spells
6) Races

I've mostly been working on basic units, racial units and buildings myself and will have more of an opinion on what to change there, but all is up for debate. Please PM me if you're interested in taking on a small part of the project, assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Project overview and progress

This is merely a skeleton for now, illustrating all areas of the game that Catnip will affect. I will be fleshing this out soon to better explain what I'm seeking to do. More threads will be set up to discuss these topics separately, please PM me if there's a topic you think I've forgotten or would like to suggest for inclusion.

1) Units - faster movement and more hearts for all units
- Basic: Higher costs of cheap units, small balance tweaks to most stats, higher offense across the board
- Racial: Slight weakening of the most powerful units (especially ranged) and fewer figures for most units, addition and removal of a few units
- Summoned
- Heroes: Big changes to skills and item slots, minor stat tweaks, possibly 3 moves

2) Spells
- Costs
- Effects
- New spells

3) Buildings
- Costs
- Tech tree
- Effects
- City walls (given special consideration): Higher defense bonus, ammo bonus for defenders, AI improvements

4) Races - major rebalancing to bring races closer to the same strength level
- Basic units: Availability mostly unchanged, cost structure changed considerably, big stat changes, many abilities added across the board
- Growth rates: Thinking about increasing growth rates across the board
- Building availability: Major rebalancing
- Special abilities: Might tinker with stuff like mana, gold and production bonuses

5) Wizards
- Number of picks, costs and effects of retorts
- Spell selection: Reverting to the 1.0 system if possible (only guaranteed spells), or possibly a hybrid system

6) Miscellaneous
- Terrain
- Unrest: Tax table, police effect, racism table
- Combat rules: Retreating, no shooting after moving, mana cost in combat
- Lair strength and treasure: No weak lairs
- XP tables: Revamping XP brackets and tweaking level bonuses considerably
- Events
- Alchemy
- Casting skill
- Production: Cost of rushing production, closing loophole, letting production carry over to next project
- Lairs and nodes: Changing monster strength and reward allocation
- Capturing cities: Money rewards (higher if you raze)

Previously I started a new thread on dragonsword.com (before it was unexpectedly discontinued) for my ideas of an application that monitors and changes a MoM game in progress.

In this thread I keep track of methods of hacking a MoM game and of developing a Real-Time Game Tweaker program.


DOWNLOADS

The current version of the Tweaker is in the following folder (for Windows and for Linux):
http://momrtgt.sourceforge.net/
I could describe all the features, but for now I'll leave that up to you to discover.
The Linux tar-file contains MoMTweaker.sh that gets you up and running regardless of your Linux distribution, as long as it supports 32 bits.

Furthermore, here is the update I made on Eljay's SaveGam.html file describing the SAVEn.GAM format.
SaveGam2.html
This version covers the savegame almost completely, although I still have a couple of blank spots. Feel free to tell us what those blank spots are!

Here's an analysis (excel) how the layout of the MoM memory works.
MoMMemoryLayout.xls


IDEAS

Thanks to Jtm for recovering the original thread.
Let me repost my original ideas.

1. Change e.g. a hero in every way possible (in the game in progress).
This includes the changes related to memory addresses in WIZARDS.EXE, changes related to memory addresses defined by the SaveGame layout, and possibly changes to related LBX files.
I've already tested it and it works! You can change e.g. Torin to have a Ranged magical attack, Arcane Power, boost his XP, give him a new item, etcetera. ALL WHILE YOU'RE PLAYING!!! .

2. Randomly reseed lairs (in different locations) while the game progresses. Or perhaps simply to repop all lairs, perhaps with more challenging creatures!

3. Create a new savegame format that includes changes to WIZARDS.EXE and SAVEn.GAM, which you can interactively save and load.

4. "All units are heroes".
Whenever you build a unit, detect the completion and change the unit to a hero (using a mapping from regular units to heroes). It turns out that you can have more than 6 heroes, although you can not show them all in the Hired-Heroes display (which shows only 6 heroes).
All your opponents can have this feature too, to make the game balanced.

5. Boost the heroes of your opponents.
As it is, the heroes of our opponents are sadly lacking.
They're not properly trained, they hardly create or collect items, and they hardly bunch together.
This could be changed! For instance by letting them gain experience more quickly, and by randomly creating and assigning new artifacts!
This would give YOU the opportunity to conquer your opponent's heroes in a satisfying way, and gain artifacts in the process ;D! (Or lose them ;-((().

6. Manage Build queues for your cities.
You might manage a number of custom-made build-queue-types and assign them to your cities.



COMPLETED REQUESTS

1. Repeat search for "dosbox" application until MoM is found [Jtm].
   
2. Adjust the number of units in battle when for instance a unit is summoned [Jtm].
   
3. Make the fortress location editable [Question].
   
4. Show ds:offset or relative memory addresses of any data point [Jtm].
   
5. Change research bonus with number of books [letsdance].
   
6. Edit number of common/uncommon/rare spells [Pax Empyrean].
   
7. Editable unrest table [letsdance].
   
8. Add a graphical interface rendering the map and displaying cities, and units and the battle map (the momem project has GPLv2+ Java source that can load LBXs and draw the main MoM screen and game creation screen) [Ayu].
   
9. Add combat/herostats/node-owner fields and no-icons checkbox [Asfex].
   
10. Combat advisor which will show you how much damage you should expect to  inflict and suffer if you were to attack the unit you mouse over [Catwalk].
    
11. Save/restore battle [FrancoK]
    
12. Change the level-up bonuses [Anthony]
    
13. Repop lairs only if unoccupied [Question]
    

Master of Magic has always had a special place in my heart. I was 15 when I started playing it, and back then it was pure magic. There was just so much to explore! And the unit/XP systems appealed massively to me, it was almost like an RPG experience. But as I started learning how to analyze stuff it quickly became obvious that the game balance was completely shot. Couple that with a horrible AI and the magic started dissipating over the years. I'd keep whipping it out now and then, but it just wasn't the same. I'd lost my childhood innocense, and with it my joy and sense of purpose in life.

Fast forward to Catnip, a mod project which aims to rebalance MoM for greater strategic diversity. Early last year I learned that MoM still has a sizable following and that it's quite easy to mod the game to your liking. What's better, a mysterious guy named kyrub was knee-deep in a project to fix the bugs and repair the AI. And he actually seemed to be making progress! This warranted another go, and I plunged myself into a project to recreate the game that I held so dearly.

Catnip is a mod project which aims to rebalance Master of Magic for greater strategic diversity. It will do so mainly by lots of tweaking of numbers. Units first and foremost because they're such a dominant part of the game. To a lesser extent also heroes, races, buildings and spells. There will also be hacking of features to either change effects or create new ones. For example, the unrest and XP tables can be edited quite easily.

I will be needing quite a bit of help with this project, and I'm willing to go with democratic decisions on many issues. Much of the help will concern implementation of changes and little decisions. Like going through all heroes and making them more fun one at a time with little changes. While I do want to have a big say in the general plan for it, I'm fine with leaving the details up to whoever is in charge of it.

I'm hoping for this mod to gain general approval and plan on hosting tournaments with it. There will also be tournaments with vanilla MoM, and if any competing mods come out we can do those as well.

I'll be posting more about this later today, keeping this thread locked for now as I want it to be an intro message to the project once the subforum is in place.

My wife is getting on my case about not being romantic enough. I insist that I'm a blind man grasping for straws as long as she won't give me any hints, but she insists that I'm on my own.

So I turn to the expertise. What should I do? Bonus points for romance suggestions that my financial advisor approves of.