Ore generation rebalancing

[Seravy]

Finally it works!

Generated some test maps... Rich Huge.
- Orihalcon seems to be a bit more frequent than I'd like, most maps have 3-4 of them on an average plane.
-Adamantium is ultra rare - the most i've seen on a plane was 3 but some maps had none at all. I think I'm fine with that though - it's supposed to be a bonus, not something you encounter every single game.
-Mithril is reasonably frequent on both planes, about the same as Orihalcon but for it, that seems appropriate.
-which doesn't mean good starts are gone, one of the rolls had gems, gold, 2 silver, mithril and wild game on my capital.

-on Fair/Fair maps, even having any mithril or adamantium at all seems to be lucky - considering they have about half as many land tiles and each has...I don't remember, 1/3 less? chance of being an ore, overall, also considering the small difference in the table, it means these are 1/3 as frequent as on Huge/Rich. So ultimately the settings still have a huge impact on the presence and quantity of these resources.

-one thing we haven't considered before : The massive lack of adamantium will make Myrran wizards significantly less of a threat. While they used to have at least 4-5 production centers with it, and a dozen on richer settings, now they can be happy if they have any at all.

I think some small tweaking to the numbers in the table will be necessary, but that's for tomorrow, feel free to suggest improvements meanwhile.

[Nelphine]

Yeah I think i'd want to have a refresher on how many ores are showing up before i judge that table.

I know we get more ores on myrror than arcanus; so to me, the myrror numbers still seem to high. I'd want to base it around having 2 adamantium show up on fair land/fair minerals/fair ecology on arcanus (which I would like to result in 3 adamantium on myrror on the same map); 0 adamantium on fair land/poor minerals/fair ecology on arcanus (and 1 on myrror); and 3 adamantium on fair land/rich minerals/fair ecology on arcanus (and 5 on myrror).

But without the exact numbers for how many ores per square on each plane, I can't say what the numbers on this table should be.

Other things that stand out; i'd like silver to be the standard ore on arcanus, not iron. Economy is always more important than troop cost, and with the extra ores on myrror + the higher gold chance (I'd definitely reduce this) when there is an ore, economy on myrror is going to be sky high compared to arcanus.

[Seravy]

Arcanus Fair minerals never had and won't have adamantium though, I assume that's a typo.

The exact number of ores for each plane and mineral setting should be posted somewhere in whichever thread we used to discuss that update....or better, here they are in this asm file, it's 50,125,200 / 75,187,300 for each 25 tiles, in 1% increments. So Fair Arcanus would be exactly 1.25 ore each 25 tiles, which is 5%.

Anyway, I uploaded CasterMX.zip with this update, experiment with it and see for yourself what the results are with the posted table.

The standard ore on hills is silver and gold, on mountains it's iron and coal, but being on Arcanus weights it towards the worse options (so towards silver and iron, and towards iron and coal), or something like that, I tried to make it similar to the old table but I might have done it wrong.

Do note if you have 3 admantium on Fair, that means you have 6 on huge, which is a very high number that almost guarantees starting close to one and pretty much is the same as the old system. We can't do that.

[Nelphine]

No, I think it's a problem that arcanus fair minerals never had adamantium. It means city troop based strategies don't play arcanus, unless they choose rich. That's not good for choices to players.

Right, so myrror has 50% more ore. So if you want the total military ores to only be 50% more on myrror than on arcanus, then you have to drop the percent of any given ore being military to be the same on myrror as on arcanus.

Otherwise, in your table, you have 50% more ore, and of those ores, a further 50% more of them are military. That still puts too many more military ores on myrror, making the myrran pick better for your troops than tactician or warlord.


I don't have any particular attachment to what ores existed previously. We're discussing the problem of ores, which comes up periodically over the years. This is a completely new take on the problem, and that means we can treat the whole thing from ground up and actually come up with the ores we want.

Similar to too many military ores making myrror a better pick for your troops than tactician/warlord, if myrror has too much gold compared to the other pure economy ores (like silver, but not including iron/coal as not all human cities need those) on arcanus, then choosing myrran again is a bigger boost to your economy than taking a corresponding retort such as astrologer or cult leader. I haven't done the numbers for that one as i have for the military ores, but you need to keep the variance between the two planes down, and with arcanus boosted towards iron and myrror towards gold, that variance is just crazy high.

[Nelphine]

Incidentally.. I don't think we can try to account for huge specifically. It's too far removed from fair, so if we want fair to be reasonable, we're going to have to accept that huge has issues.

That being said, on my rich fair land current game, on myrror, i've got 7 adamantium (might technically be 8, but I doubt the unexplored spot has another). So, if it's only 6 on huge land, that's still a huge improvement over current.

[Seravy]

...I thought we wanted to get rid of the plague that is adamantium, not add more of it. I strongly oppose enabling it for Arcanus. Although I'm not really happy with the AI getting less of it on Myrror either.

[Nelphine]

Eh, there's two things.

There's variance between city troops without adamantium and city troops with adamantium.  For this we need to mostly get rid of adamantium.

There's also variance between the two planes. We need to make sure that the difference in military ores on the two planes is small enough that it isn't worth more than tactician. (Given you're also getting a better race and better economy ores, we probably actually need the difference to be fairly low.

So, backing up.

Myrran let's you choose a better race. This means you go from having a worse race than 1/4 of the enemy, to having a better race than 1/4 of the enemy. Given this is the 'final boss', I'd say that's worth, what, half a pick?

Myrran gives you better military ores. Tactician is worth 1 pick, so we want military ores on myrran to be worth roughly 1/4 of a pick; this for me means we should have the total bonus of those military ores around 50% better than arcanus.

Similarly, for economic ores, I'd think we want the total bonus to be around 50% more.

Since we've already got 50% more ores for being myrran, we strictly should just have exactly the same ores on both planes. So we could just remove adanantium entirely from both planes, and get rid of yellow crystals entirely (except on rich, where we would make myrran the same as arcanus), and the myrran pick would still be worth it.

I'd like to see somewhat better ores on myrran though, but to do that, we need to reduce the number of ores on myrran.


"But" you might ask "that makes the myrran AI weaker!".

We already have discussions about myrran AI being too strong. Variance in ores definitely adds to this, in a way that's very hard to 'see' in an individual game.

"But" you might ask "when the human picks myrran they don't get most of those ores!"

Not true. The human still plans better. If there are lots of military ores on myrran, the human will choose more city troops. The ai will not, and all of thier summons are correspondingly weaker. Additionally, treasure hunting is easier and so the myrran human gets stronger faster than the arcanus human.

"But" you might ask "surely that must mean economy ores are ok"?

No. The human can still plan around them, and do things like rich omniscient chaos dwarves to rush chimera faster than most ai rush gargoyles. The human still can take advantage of the difference, whereas the AI has no idea they have more than usual economy.



That being said, I'd be open to arguments as to why 50% more bonuses from military ores is worth less than 1/4 of a pick - or why 50% more bonuses from economy ores is worth less than 1/4 of a pick (although honestly, that one might actually be undervalued. Consider the value of cult leader, I'd say the increase power is worth 1/2 the retort, and per city, it's giving you 0-6 power. Since minerals are front loaded, I'd say if the average economy bonus per city is worth 2.5-3.5 more power then the economy ores are just as good as cult leader. But we want it to be half as good as cult leader, so 1.25-1.75 more power. Right now, each city on fair gets 0.52 more ores on myrran, so if the average ore is worth 3 power or 6 gold on arcanus, then that extra 0.52 ore already meets the 1/4 pick value. Getting better ore on top of that makes it excessive.)

Finally, you could argue the race isn't worth half a pick. In which case, that would give you slightly more room to increase the value of the military and economy ores.

"But what about chaos ai destroying ores?"

Doesn't matter, they destroy them at the same rate on arcanus too, so since everything is percentage based, that applies to both planes equally.

[Seravy]

Okay, so I have thought about it a little.

Assuming the adamantium is in your territory or the first AI's territory, it most likely helps the human. If it's in the second or third, it hinders the human - you have to fight against adamantium troops by then and even if you conquer the city, normal troops will be less relevant by then (yes this part doesn't apply to buff stacking strategies, too bad but we have to generalize).

So it's a 50-50 shot, probably closer to 40-60 (last two AIs get to expand more than the first and the human, usually, again we have to generalize here), and yes I am assuming you didn't scout the entire plane before the first war and cherry picked the player who had the adamantium (draconians and earth lore can do that. Others, not so much, and draconians aren't all that good for adamantium that's not obtained on the first cities).

Then we have 4 cases depending on the map rolled.

No one gets adamantium - this is neutral.
Only the human or first AI gets adamantium - this makes the start better for him
Only the last two AI get adamantium - this makes it worse for him
Both get adamantium - this makes it good for the human too - they benefit more from the adamantium than the AIs.

So we need an amount of adamantium that makes it neutral or unfavorable for the human with that chart of results. Each adamantium has about 50% to land in either area, slightly more for the AIs but not by much.
If there is no adamantium, the result is neutral, so that's fine.
If there is exactly 1 adamantium, it's a 50-50 shot of helping or hindering the human, also fine.
If there are 2 or more adamantiums, the "both" result starts to appear and the odds become favorable for the human.

So the conclusion is, if we do not want Myrror to be desirable for adamantium specifically, then we need to set the numbers so the average amount of adamantium generated is about 1 on the plane at most. (that still sometimes makes 2 but that much bias for the human will be cancelled out by the AI territory being slightly larger so we are still neutral. Also on Rich Arcanus can have adamantium once in a blue moon, further pushing the scale towards Myrror being a neutral choice instead of desired.)

The current numbers do pretty much that. Even on Huge Rich the average adamantium seems to be around 1-2, and on lower settings it's 1 or less. So if this is our goal, then this table is good for it.

A different approach - if we want adamantium chances to not weight into the human's decision, adamantium in their starting cities should be rare enough that they don't expect any and thus ignore it for the decision. I'd say 2 or fewer adamantium achieves this, more probably does not.

So both approaches point towards adamantium being a very rare resource. Since Arcanus by default has none and that's the default plane for starting the game, adamantium already isn't supposed to play a large role in the majority of games as is, making Myrror the same seems logical - we have to adapt the "special" plane to play like the normal one, not the other way around.

Mithril is a different story - Arcanus can have it. So it's literally chance on Arcanus vs chance on Myrror. Myrror has 50% mroe ores but the same number in their mithril columns, so they get 50% more mithril. But wait, the Arcanus plane is 20% larger. So in reality it's 1.2 mithril vs 1.5 mithril which is only a 25% increase. I don't think a 25% higher chance of mithril is enough to warrant spending the pick since that still means it's rare. (Instead of 1 out of 5, you get 1 out of 4 games... I wouldn't spend a pick on that, it's still a wasted pick 80%? of the time.)

Gold, Iron, Coal and Silver and the like are definitely things - but the AI gets those things and unlike adamantium, these don't require any special smarts to use, and they are frequent enough that the human stealing cities with them early specifically or picking their first war for them isn't something to worry about.

Dwarves do benefit more - but let's not get a race marked as "broken, needs adjustments" involved until we somehow fix them.

Finally, an idea for the Myrran wizard : Since it's the final boss, we should simply help them out. We should add a rule that says if the human starts on Arcanus, Myrror gets a higher chance of adamantium. This would still make it less frequent than currently, so it's not buffing the Myrran wizard, but tries to preserve their status quo. With current planar travel rules, there is no risk of unintended players, human or AI, exploiting that extra adamantium, and even if someone does that, breaking towers early is the harder strategy to play due to the Myrran AI peaking their relative strength early so I'm fine with it having some additional benefits.

So overall, I think the current adamantium and mithril chances in the table are fine. Orihalcon is a bit too high. Other ores I don't know but having 5% more coal vs gold hardly changes game balance so I think we are free to set up those numbers in any way we find flavorful and fun.

[Nelphine]

Arcanus doesn't have larger land size. The plane with the most players - so the one the human picks has the larger land size.

I'd forgotten that. But it doesn't matter, we're comparing the plane the human is on against the plane the human is on. We're concerned about the pick cost. So from there, it is a full 50% more.

[Nelphine]

Ok, having actually ran the numbers for the economy ores, I think you're right. They jumped out at me, but doing the math it isn't that far off. My worry has been mollified.