Zitro 'Balspeed' / 'one' / 'mod of mod' Removed

[MrBiscuits]

Had a bit of a play with the mod yesterday and enjoyed it. A few things I noticed:

An AI opponents had invincible berserkers, they had nothing for their health bar and the entry for hearts wasn't there when you right-click on them. One berserker killed my entire end game stack of doom.

I conquered a halfling capital with everything built and yet I couldn't build halflings.

There's a difficulty level called "be" and choosing that causes the game to hang when generating the worlds.

On normal difficulty some opponents don't seem to build any settlers at all.

The tiny size is great, is there any chance of an even smaller amount of land? I like very small and quick games with limited trudging about.

Have the summons all been changed? Most seem more useful, but I'd say some are still underpowered (eg. nagas) with the standard units being the better options (especially when you can buff them easier).

Is there a list of all the changes anywhere? It plays well but it is hard to know what all the changes are.

Alchemy is still overpowered, perhaps you might change it to two picks. Others seem underpowered.

Also do you need to install Insecticide first before this mod?

Edit: Reading the changes I don't think I have installed the mod properly. You need to upzip it in the root directory? I get some changes like the lightning bolt for your capital, but not others like needing 4 spaces between cities. Also I still get the fame penalty for razing cities.

[zitro1987]

Invincible berserkers? that's really bizarre and I hope it's a one-time thing (I've never encountered this problem in all the times I tested the game, and it's been a lot)

Confused about the halfling situation too, unless you mean you conquered the city with 9 units and there's no room for more halfling units until you clear 1 space over (this is a Master of Magic bug that Seravy managed to fix)

I'm aware of the 'easy' difficulty somehow being renamed 'be' and crashing. It's on my to do list, but seems like it will be a difficult task and so far I have not been successful.

I'll trouble shoot 'normal' and lack of settler expansion. I don't think I ever tried playing on 'normal'

I think even smaller than tiny is likely to cause various land problems (see Seravy's explanation for not making smaller worlds)

I buffed 'nagas' a bit in my latest version 1.30c. Thanks for validating something I was suspecting myself. A list of 'these may be underpowered / these may be overpowered' would help me a lot!

I highly doubt you'd need to install insecticide first before this mod as this mod (which comes from insecticide) overwrites such files. It still doesn't hurt to try, as it may be what caused the invisible berserkers?

The '4 spaces between cities' may have already took place, but I haven't fixed the F1 surveyer warning until 1.30c. I think the fame penalty for razing cities only shows as a window popup, but not where it matters (I may try to see if I can fix the window pop up text about lost fame)

[Seravy]

I'm aware of the 'easy' difficulty somehow being renamed 'be' and crashing. It's on my to do list, but seems like it will be a difficult task and so far I have not been successful.

This bug is caused by the Tiny land patch, I had to fix it when I added it too. Basically, the "ge" from Huge appears there because the text constant was longer than the room available for it. The only way to fix it was to change the length of all land related texts to 1 shorter, which is why I have "Fair" instead of "Medium", 6*5 letters don't fit, but 5*5 do.

Just find a 06->05 change (or was it 07->06 i don't remember) in magic.exe and the new text constants and copy them over.

My Tiny is 150 cells, not sure about Kryub's but even Small does not work without crashing 90% of the time so yeah, those restrictions are a problem.

I think the fame penalty for razing cities only shows as a window popup, but not where it matters (I may try to see if I can fix the window pop up text about lost fame)

Yes, you have to fix the displayed fame separately, the hex code on the forum only changes the amount gained. (look around in my wizards.exe near the address for the other change)

[MrBiscuits]

Invincible berserkers? that's really bizarre and I hope it's a one-time thing (I've never encountered this problem in all the times I tested the game, and it's been a lot)

It happened to me again with catapaults. The only file from Insecticide that Zitro doesn't overwrite is MESSAGE.LBX, I quit the game and copied that across and the catapault was no longer invincible, so it could have been reloading or that change.

Confused about the halfling situation too, unless you mean you conquered the city with 9 units and there's no room for more halfling units until you clear 1 space over (this is a Master of Magic bug that Seravy managed to fix)

I think it might be related to the maximum of 10 things problem you mentioned before. There were 10 other troop types that could be selected instead.

I'm aware of the 'easy' difficulty somehow being renamed 'be' and crashing. It's on my to do list, but seems like it will be a difficult task and so far I have not been successful.

Cool. No worries for me as I'm on normal now anyway.

I'll trouble shoot 'normal' and lack of settler expansion. I don't think I ever tried playing on 'normal'

I'm relatively new to playing the game (had it for years) so that's my excuse. I don't understand how anyone wins on impossible, just don't seem to be able to crank out the units in time. I find it hard to find uses for a lot of the spells.

I think even smaller than tiny is likely to cause various land problems (see Seravy's explanation for not making smaller worlds)

Ah that's a shame. Might it be possible if you selected less than 4 opponents? It would be totally awesome if it were because I much prefer smaller maps with say 2 other wizards. Nothing worse for me than having to deal with 30 cities and 50 troops each turn in the end game.

I buffed 'nagas' a bit in my latest version 1.30c. Thanks for validating something I was suspecting myself. A list of 'these may be underpowered / these may be overpowered' would help me a lot!

Well I'm pretty new to the game so I could be way off, but summons just don't really seem all that worth it to me in general. They cost loads of mana to make and cast (seems too much for both), you have to wait for them to appear after casting, they all require loads of research, they are harder to buff so are no where near as effective and they don't collect experience points. For those drawbacks they should be much more powerful than the equivalent standard units, but it seems the reverse is true. My 3 nagas got owned by a few standard troops so I never bothered with them again. What is the thinking behind not being able to use all the buffs on them? Mind you that would make life even more overpowered.

The '4 spaces between cities' may have already took place, but I haven't fixed the F1 surveyer warning until 1.30c. I think the fame penalty for razing cities only shows as a window popup, but not where it matters (I may try to see if I can fix the window pop up text about lost fame)

I checked the fame thing and it seemed to work ok despite telling you that you lose fame. Pretty sure you can build cities with just 3 spaces in between though.

In the middle of a long game at the moment and despite having 3000+ gold and 36 fame I'm coming towards the end game with only one hero and one artifact having been offered to me altogether. I tried summoning heroes, but they were all lower tier ones.

[Seravy]

Might it be possible if you selected less than 4 opponents? It would be totally awesome if it were because I much prefer smaller maps with say 2 other wizards.

Wizard capitals are the small part of the problem, there are only 4 of them at most.
The big part is encounter zones (lairs, nodes etc). Adding up all the types, there are ~100 total and the default is they can't be next to each other. So place one, it takes up anywhere from 1 (single cell island) to 9 cells(middle of land, no sea). As the game does have a minimum continent size, the 1 cell option isn't going to happen much, only for nodes and towers (those can be placed on sea and probably ignore land as they generate their own land type under them, so they are frequent as solitary islands). In the end, most of these will take up 4-9 cells of land at random. Tiny (my version) has 150 cells, on two worlds that's 300. It's easy to see that 300 < 100* (4 to 9) so it's impossible to place them no matter what.

Well I'm pretty new to the game so I could be way off, but summons just don't really seem all that worth it to me in general. They cost loads of mana to make and cast (seems too much for both), you have to wait for them to appear after casting, they all require loads of research, they are harder to buff so are no where near as effective and they don't collect experience points.

You are right, I also believe summoned units have to be stronger than normal units in the same cost tier. Nagas in particular were one of the most underpowered units by default and for a pretty high cost of 100, too. Not sure how much Zitro powered them up, in my mod they have +1 figure and higher stats to go with it.

I tried summoning heroes, but they were all lower tier ones.

You need Summon Champion to get the better ones.

[MrBiscuits]

Wizard capitals are the small part of the problem, there are only 4 of them at most.
The big part is encounter zones (lairs, nodes etc). Adding up all the types, there are ~100 total and the default is they can't be next to each other. So place one, it takes up anywhere from 1 (single cell island) to 9 cells(middle of land, no sea). As the game does have a minimum continent size, the 1 cell option isn't going to happen much, only for nodes and towers (those can be placed on sea and probably ignore land as they generate their own land type under them, so they are frequent as solitary islands). In the end, most of these will take up 4-9 cells of land at random. Tiny (my version) has 150 cells, on two worlds that's 300. It's easy to see that 300 < 100* (4 to 9) so it's impossible to place them no matter what.

Ah thanks for the information. Could it be possible to reduce the number of map features like nodes and towers as well to fit in a smaller land mass? In my current game I've just cleared Arcanus with a stack of doom and now have to do the same to Myrror despite being pretty much guaranteed victory at this point. I'm not sure I can be bothered to spend 2 hours trudging through another plane.

You are right, I also believe summoned units have to be stronger than normal units in the same cost tier. Nagas in particular were one of the most underpowered units by default and for a pretty high cost of 100, too. Not sure how much Zitro powered them up, in my mod they have +1 figure and higher stats to go with it.

When you start playing the game you assume you'll be casting spells most turns on summons, cities and units, but for most of the game you spend most time on building up your cities and units. Especially early on where (apart from maybe for life buffs) there aren't really many spell options at all. Near the end when you have many cities and units there are many more spells to choose from, but then you're limited in casting time overland for the better spells, so you still don't cast spells very often.

I'd say summons should be roughly twice as strong across the board. If you go to all the trouble to learning a summon spell, getting the mana to cast and upkeep it (bear in mind that mana is much harder to get than gold or food) then it is disheartening to see it lose to say an elite spearman. Summons should be able to turn the tide of battle, especially the more expensive ones. Also improving them would help make life less dominant in comparison.

I tried summoning heroes, but they were all lower tier ones.
You need Summon Champion to get the better ones.

Do champions ever become available for hire? What would I need to do to attract one?

[Seravy]

Do champions ever become available for hire? What would I need to do to attract one?

Yes, their default fame requirement is 40. Normal heroes are 0-20 fame depending on which one.
Chance to find heroes is based on fame and the number of heroes you already own. The default formula is quite unforgiving, only improving chances once every 25 fame.

[zitro1987]

I'm considering an additional small across-the-board improvement to summoning units with the next update in a couple of days (and a few other unit balances).

While tier-1 summoning units are much stronger than in original game (with added cost), normal units start much stronger as well and despite the higher costs (and lower building costs), food is much less of an issue in my mod. Later on, I find myself recruiting a bunch of halberdiers or cavalry at ease compared to a similar-sized stack of tier-2 summoning units (like fire giants).

[MrBiscuits]

I'm considering an additional small across-the-board improvement to summoning units with the next update in a couple of days (and a few other unit balances).

Excellent, I'm really enjoying your mod but the summons are still quite underwhelming in general for the cost of getting them. Perhaps a lot of them could do with more than just a small improvement.

While tier-1 summoning units are much stronger than in original game (with added cost), normal units start much stronger as well and despite the higher costs (and lower building costs), food is much less of an issue in my mod. Later on, I find myself recruiting a bunch of halberdiers or cavalry at ease compared to a similar-sized stack of tier-2 summoning units (like fire giants).

I think the role of summons should be as high value accompaniments to your standard army, since the cost of researching, producing, casting and maintaining them is so high in comparison to units you can build. With the boost to normal units I think summons need a lot of extra help.

I really enjoy the pacing and gameplay changes of your mod.

[zitro1987]

New version is up, with subtle but generally impactful improvements to overland summoning units. A few (e.g. gorgons) were left mostly unchanged

edit: and another version is up, changing halfling unit concept to make them less damaging yet less fragile while keeping concept of 'david and goliath' (armor piercing). Cavalry were given +1 armor and other tweaks were made to units.