Raiders

[Seravy]

Is everyone satisfied with the amount of raiders, its scaling based on difficulty, the frequency of the spawns and the effect of Revolting Raiders?
I'm currently editing these for CoM and think they might be worth changing for 1.50 too.

This is the current behavior :
-Each turn, add random(Difficulty level+1) to a variable. If it reaches 30, reset to zero and generate a raider.
This will, on average, yield a raider in this many turns : Easy = 30, Normal = 20, Hard = 15, Extreme = 12, Imposs = 10
There is no turn based limit, Impossible may generate the raider as early as turn 6 if all turns roll max on the RND.
-First, find a neutral town to send the raiders from, and count the units in it.
-Multiply the units by Difficulty (0-4) and divide by 6.
-If there is an AI fortress on the continent, reduce it by 1/3. Skip this step is Revolting Raiders.
-If it's before turn 200 and it's the Myrror plane, halve the number of units. Skip this step is Revolting Raiders.
-If the number of units would be fewer than 1, set it to 1.
-Send out this many units of any type present in the town (can be mixed). Remove 1/3 of this many units from the town (do not need to be the same type sent out).

I'm not too happy with this, because, according to my understanding it
-means Revolting Raiders has no effect unless there would be a penalty to stack size on your plane or continent, in which case it merely removes this penalty but does not increase the amount of raiders beyond that.
-means scaling on difficulty is very poor, on Easy and Normal, the max stack size possible is 1. On Myrror this extends to hard as well prior to turn 200. 1 unit stacks are a joke for anything but Easy I think.
-There is no scaling based on turn count whatsoever. If a large neutral town is near, you might get the max amount of raiders on turn 10...

For CoM I'm planning to make Revolting Raiders actually add to the stack size and spawn frequency, remove the Myrran penalty, make the difficulty scaling better, and add a turn based scaling on top to make sure early turns aren't unreasonable.

[Tiltowait]

It's supposed to be halved, not thirded, if it is on a continent with a fortress. That's what the OSG said and that's how I think it should be.

Revolting Raiders consistently resulted in 4-stacks of raiders attacking my stuff. When I unset the option they turned into 2-stacks.

I think raiders are mostly fine, they provide a bit of chaos in the game and give you a reason to garrison your cities as well as go and conquer neutral towns, even though you might not want the town.

[Seravy]

First of all, this is all about Raiders, monsters are a different procedure and are fine the way they are I think, just saying to make sure no one misunderstands.

It's supposed to be halved, not thirded, if it is on a continent with a fortress. That's what the OSG said and that's how I think it should be.

The multiplier is *2/3 and only for AI fortresses. The player's fortress has no effect whatsoever. I believe the goal here is either to make sure the AI won't get eliminated early (that kinda ruins the game) or to reduce the burden on the player if they have to already deal with the AI on their continent on top of the neutrals. I think this part is fine without changing.

Monsters are different though, there the multiplier is *1/2 if there is an AI fortress present, only if there is NO player fortress. If both are present there is no change in the amount. Monsters can't eliminate a player though, unless that patch is added (I think I left it as optional, not sure).

Revolting Raiders consistently resulted in 4-stacks of raiders attacking my stuff. When I unset the option they turned into 2-stacks.

I assume that happened on Myrror. It doesn't do anything like that on Arcanus, you would get stacks of 4 either way. (unless the AI is also there in which case it would be 3s if the option is off, 4s otherwise)

I think raiders are mostly fine, they provide a bit of chaos in the game and give you a reason to garrison your cities as well as go and conquer neutral towns, even though you might not want the town.

That's certainly what I have in mind and I think the current system fails at this.
Stacks of only 1 on below hard difficulty is a joke, you can stop that with a single speamen and some spellcasting. In general, lower difficulties yield too few units, which wasn't noticeable pre 1.50 as everyone played impossible or extreme anyway, but the better AI means people will start playing hard and even normal now, at least I think they will.
At the same time, stacks of 6 are possible on turn 10 on impossible which is..well, gg, try again.
I don't think either of these are what raiders are supposed to be for.

Monsters don't have these problems, the amount spawned there is scaled by turn count. In case of raiders however, they are not. The only limit is no more than 2/3 of the number of units in the neutral town. So a large neutral town with 9 swordmen = 6 of those coming your way before you finish your builder's hall. They might even be halberdiers, or cavalry.

[Anthony]

There's a bit of scaling for turn count, in that towns don't actually start the game with a max garrison, but with the very slow growth of NPC towns, it's certainly not very dramatic. It does make sense that the raiders would scale with the source (and getting a giant ghoul-zombie stack off of a lair with a single skeleton doesn't make much sense anyway), but it doesn't make very compelling game play.

[Seravy]

There's a bit of scaling for turn count, in that towns don't actually start the game with a max garrison, but with the very slow growth of NPC towns, it's certainly not very dramatic. It does make sense that the raiders would scale with the source (and getting a giant ghoul-zombie stack off of a lair with a single skeleton doesn't make much sense anyway), but it doesn't make very compelling game play.

While the towns themselves grow slowly (and growth is capped at pop 8 I believe), up to population 10 is available as the starting value when the map is generated.
Garrison is produced easily (spearmen, swordsmen etc are cheap) but is capped at the actual population, so there is nothing stopping a size 10 town to go to max garrison quite early. I'm pretty sure I saw Hadriex lose a game to raiders in the early turns, and it was a stack of 6 or something around that. He had a nice start, too.

[Tiltowait]

[Seravy]

This actually matches game code except
-Normal is now difficulty 1, not 2, other levels shifted likewise, Intro is gone. (code isn't changed to reflect this, in most other formulas it was changed, but this one got left out.)
-"any players fortress -> 1/3 less." The number is correct, but "any player" does not include the human player. I think this is more of an inaccuracy in the guide than in game code.
Everything else is 100% accurate.

If we want to keep it official, at the very least we should make that multiplier (Difficulty+1)/6 to reflect insecticide changes.
Based on Kyrub's comment in the idb file, he was considering (Difficulty/5) but it isn't in the released insecticide file yet.

I can also confirm that Life realm zones don't produce monsters, I didn't even realize that until I saw the game code.
"If your enchanted fortress is on myrror..." this part is somewhat inaccurate too, there simply is a greater chance to have the monsters spawn on the plane of the player, regardless of which plane it is, there is a 2/3 chance to reroll if not the player's plane is selected. Like in case of Raiders, the guide omits the fact that the player's fortress does not reduce monsters, only the AI's does, and in fact, the player's fortress can override the AI's effect.

[Anthony]

Garrison is produced easily (spearmen, swordsmen etc are cheap) but is capped at the actual population.

It actually isn't. It's capped by the amount of food the town can produce, so the cap will be higher with a granary and lower if it's in the middle of a desert or something else with low food.

[Tiltowait]

I think this whole thing gets into modding instead of just bugfixing. If raiders weren't generated properly, that would be one thing. Or if they never moved from their starting space, like in v1.1. But I've never heard anyone complain about raiders so I think this is a solution in search of a problem. Maybe make raiders a BIT stronger, like add "+1" to the end of the formula. But raiders can be quite fearsome in the right circumstances.

One time, my neighbor on the next island was that bastard Tauron. His fortress was too well-defended for me to take, but he had a bunch of other cities that were doable. I didn't have any other method than frontal assault. I started preparing tons of stacks for the inevitable casualties that were going to occur. I was about to declare war when...out of nowhere...Tauron was defeated by one of the other computer wizards! All of his cities went to neutral. I was somewhat let down, I was looking forward to a titanic battle. But whatever, I start taking the neutral cities. But they put up a fight! Not only are they churning out Paladins and Magicians as garrison troops, but these are being split off into strong raider stacks that are threatening the entire continent. It was a real challenge to win against them, even with my full strength. In other games, I've had to abandon small islands before due to strong attacks and it simply not being worth it to take them. Take 1 city on the island and the other 2 cities start spawning raiders to take the city back.

I think Revolting Raiders and Monsters Gone Wild were good ideas to make the game more challenging. Kyrub properly put them as options. They can be expanded upon or changed, but keep them as options. In general, I like raiders and rampaging monsters as features because they put life into the world and make it clear that everything isn't just about the player. At their best, these features can make MoM into a kind of PvE game instead of just rushing to crush the CPs. But make them too strong and they become a distraction from casting the Spell of Mastery, which after all is what the game is all about.

[Tiltowait]

Do rampaging monsters attack enemy cities? There were two stacks of them on my continent but they were cut off by a line of ruins. They never moved (that I saw) and never attacked despite having a clear line to a computer city. I'm red, CP is yellow. I even ended my magic spirit's turn next to both of them, hoping for an attack, but none came.