A few people mentioned these buildings are too good so I'm trying to calculate them.

For the baseline, we'll compare LT to Wizard's Guild and Monument to Magic Market

Wizard's Guild : Cost 600, Upkeep 5, Produces 13 magic resources per turn.
Linking Tower : Cost 400, Upkeep 5, Produces 1500 magic resources once on completion basically.

Gold upkeep can be converted to magic resource production via alchemy, so 5 upkeep is worth 2.5 less resource production.
Wizard's Guild is more expensive so we want to convert it into an amount of resources for 400 production investment, so we have to multiply by 2/3.

This means Wizard's Guild produces (0+7*Turns) total magicial resources for each 400 production invested.
Linking Tower produces 1500-2.5*Turns for each 400 production instead.

It's easy to see that Wizard's Guild becomes better over time, while Linking Tower becomes worse, as intended. The question is, how many turns does it take for the two to break even?
1500-2.5*T = 7*T
1500 = 9.5*T
T= 157 Turns


However, there is a fatal flaw in this calculation, and that is, Linking Towers only generate combat SP, not overland SP.
Assuming combat SP is worth half as much as overland SP - you basically have to also build Amplifying Towers and pay their maintenance to make up for the missing overland SP,then we get 750 = 9.5*T, T= 78 turns.

What this means is, if your strategy greatly benefits from combat casting and doesn't need overland casting at all, then Linking Towers are more economic for you if you decide the game in your favor within 157 turns which is extremely generous.
In a more realistic case of requiring combat and overland skill equally, the Linking Tower will still be more valuable for you than the Wizard's Guild for the first 78 turns which is typically enough to win like two wars.

Needless to say the combat spells also earn you extra resources by winning battles, so the Linking Tower can give you an immediate benefit over the Wizard's Guild that is hard to quantify but you also need to invest mana to use any combat skill, so it's not strictly a resource by itself. If you don't actually use the extra skill, or not in a way that decides major battles in your favor within those 78 turns, the building does become an inferior choice. If you do however, it might be the difference of losing or not losing an entire city. I do feel that 78 turns is a bit too generous for this benefit.

Magic Market : Cost 72, upkeep 2, produces 6 magic resource/turn
Monument : Cost 72, upkeep 1, produces 150 SP.

150-0.5*T = 5*T
150 = 5.5*T

T=27, considering it's combat skill only, T=13

Much worse investment here, you actually need to fight a decisive battle that uses the extra skill within 13 turns of completing your Monument, otherwise your Magic Market would likely be better.
Of course, in the early game, the extra skill added has more snowballing potential and is of higher relevance as it basically unlocks using spells or strategies compared to the Linking Towers' "Yes, I can now cast a fourth Doom Bolt or third Flame strike per battle", so we do want this number to be much lower than Linking Tower's, but it's still probably too much.

Overall conclusion :
Maybe Monuments should produce 180 SP and Linking Towers only 1200? Maybe Linking Towers could go back to having a higher maintenance? For example 7?

Under Lizardmen, engineers are listed in the common units.
(that's in both the COM1 and COM2 help pages)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...n_US&gl=US

Suede and his civ3 community developed a new training app for civ 3 that has city settlement puzzles, worker micro puzzles, and a never-ending combat odds game, which lets you guess what the odds of a combat are and then given those odds, whether it is a favorable hammer trade. It's surprising to see how active the civ3 multiplayer community has become again.

It would be really interesting if RB could collectively make something like this for civ 4, especially since we have just so many more interesting mechanics in 4.

Is there any file in COM2 that allows to change scaler settings? And other settings, the same way you can use dosboxmom.conf for COM1?

A problem I've run into in 14 player games is that as the game goes on you just get constantly bombarded with curses - Chaos Rift and Earthquake are the big ones, but Corruption, Raise Volcano, and various Death spells are a pain too. Fortunately, these spells all have a counter, but unfortunately, they aren't very accessible counters - Rare or VR spells. The other option is diplomacy, of course, but that's not always a solution either - maybe your spellbooks are too different, maybe cozying up to one of them makes the other mad at you, etc.

Part of the issue is that the spells themselves are fine - it's a number of players problem. If Raise Volcano didn't remove a tiles resources, it'd be too weak - but in games with a lot of opponents, it also means that you'll only be able to squeeze out a couple of Mirthril, Adamantium, or Orichalc troops before it's gone forever.

So I've proposed a couple of solutions, because right now it can be a little frustrating for non-Life and/or Sorcery wizards.

1. Unscouting. I see two options here:

a) Gradual deterioration: If the AI discovers a city but then goes X turns (varying by difficulty) without "seeing" it, the city is removed from the AI's list of scouted cities and they won't target it or its workable tiles with curses until they "discover" it again.

b) Magic: An instant spell, possibly Arcane, that removes the targeted city from the scouted listed of all AI players.

In either case, it should have little to no impact on wizards the player is actively at war with, but will prevent or limit a wizard three continents away from throwing random curses on you just to be a dick.

2. Personality limits: An optional setting that limits the amount of AI wizards that roll the Narcissist personality (e.g. at most 1 Narcissist for every 6 AI).

3. Targeting limits: Make the AI less likely to target the same player twice in a row with curses (ironically, this could sometimes result in *more* curses coming the player's way, but on balance should result in less).

4. Nuclear option: An optional game setting that prevents the AI from casting curses on the player's cities at all. Personally not interested in this one at all (they're part of the game!), but someone will want it.

I'd love to hear any ideas or feedback.

I thought that any extra research points would overflow to the next spell being researched, however it seems this is not the case.

Can anyone confirm? I guess it should be this way, to avoid micro-managing the final research turn for every spell.

I don't think any of these is in the Changelogs for Ver 1.1 or 1.2.

Item 1: The diplomacy message after Surprise Attacking an Ally has a typo. It currently says, "  I' shocked to see..."  Which is clearly missing the letter M for "I'm".

Item 2: After taking the enemy capital... Shin Bo the enemy Ninja hero was still inside with my new garrison. He currently lives in the basement(?) of my new city full of mages I guess. He did not participate in the defense of the Capital itself. Perhaps Summon Hero was just finishing casting on my enemy wizard's turn and he had no summoning circle so it defaulted to what was the capital? Dunno. Hopefully that's enough to figure it out.

Item 3: I don't think Gaia's Blessing provides unrest reduction currently, but the description says it does. Either that or the unrest reduction doesn't take place until the following turn and I didn't go back and check I suppose. Definitely didn't help those Dwarves calm down upon casting.

All in all pretty bug free, except for the 1.1 / 1.2 patch note stuff. Some of which was pretty huge, but as always you crushed it quickly.

The enemy managed to corrupt a tile in my city, despite I have Alchemist Guild and Nightshade.
Is this a bug?

https://imgur.com/a/2hWA2n3

Time to make a playthrough thread for the sequel! This time around, I was playing around to see which settings would let me play with builder strategies. I ended up going with this:





Turn 2 save: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/7.../TURN2.SAV

My wizard was Merlin, 10 Life with Warlord. He picked Bless, Holy Armor, Heroism, Heavenly Light and Healing as his commons, the important True Sight and Prayer as his early uncommons, and Crusade, High Prayer and Destiny. I picked High Men as my race since they have the reputation of being a good builder race.

I started out in a freezing spot not far off from the South Pole itself. I had to rush my settlers out to form cities in more habitable spots. As usual, I made a few magic spirits to scout out the land. They reported various lairs, roughly four nodes, and a Gnoll and Klackon city on my continent. My settlers got into good spots in a reasonable time, and there were luckily not many early rampaging stacks or raiders to play spoilsport. Soon I got upto 2 swordsmen and 4 archers in those towns, then I quickly set up a Fighter's Guild to churn out Crusaders, while getting the other towns focused on economy buildings.

My magic spirits reported various lands far away, including other wizards and their kingdoms. A few of them got attacked on the way unfortunately, but it was no big loss. I noticed that Horus was my nearest neighbor, and was directly northwest of me. As of now, I had no plans to get into fights with other wizards; my entire intention was to test a builder strategy not get embroiled in early game wars. Thankfully Horus stayed away from my continent and offered a Wizard's Pact, which I gladly accepted.

I got an army of four Crusaders ready. I enchanted them with Heroism, Discipline, and Hoiy Armor. This was enough to make them utter monstrosities, and they were so tough even Unicorns ran at their very sight! They cleared out several lairs and then laid claim to the Gnoll city.

This in turn made me tech up to Wizard's Guild, as I wanted good ranged damage to clean out all those pesky Sorcery nodes with Phantom Beasts, Air Elementals etc. It was around this time that I got to research True Sight too. This definitely would help a lot against not only Sorcery nodes but enemy wizards attempting to stall with invisible units. I got six wizards up and buffed them all with Heroism, Holy Armor and Discipline again, adding True Sight to the mix since they were going to fight in Sorcery lairs. This paid off when the very first Sorcery node I checked had Air Elementals! Of course, these things were but mere gusts of wind against mighty High Men magicians. Once again, lair and node fell alarmingly fast in front of them, though at times I had to set my mana bar to max to get enough MP for lair clearing.

While all this was going on, my cities were developing wonderfully. The Gnoll city was never going to make useful units for me, so I just built what could benefit the empire economically there. On the other cities however, I developed Sage Guilds, Maritime Guilds, Linking Towers, Wizard's Guilds and other fancy buildings. I even got Cathedrals up even though I had no intention of using Paladins soon. My northernmost city got attacked a bunch by rampaging monsters, but my garrison was able to easily push them back, helped by a Heavenly Light. Prayer later made these encounters even more one sided.

My magicians finished clearing the continent. They hadn't found much interesting in terms of spells, however I had acquired a Life book and Malleus. At this point, Horus decided that I was "too weak" and broke the Wizard's Pact. He declared war one turn later. 

At first, I was a little concerned that my troops were mostly magicians. However, their performance in battle reassured me. Not only were they effective at melting Horus' hordes of halberdiers at range, they could melee them effectively while suffering few losses. The only serious thing Horus could do to threaten them was Possession, and Bless or a Unicorn blocked that completely. It took me little time to wipe out all the armies he deployed to my continent, then snatch his cities nearby. As of now, I'm close to taking another city from him, after which point his capital will be within striking range. I hope he signs a peace treaty so that I can keep lair hunting, but if not, the extra cities are more than welcome!

Civ for sale, as cheap as nothing.

You are  in the midlle of pack still can have fun.