Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[zitro1987]

Minor game text (help.lbx) bug - it states nature's cures costs 40 to cast, but it looks like it's in fact 50.

[Seravy]

Minor game text (help.lbx) bug - it states nature's cures costs 40 to cast, but it looks like it's in fact 50.

Thx, will be fixed in the next version.

[lechium]

-Mechanician's Guild production bonus raised to 35%

The description still says 25%.

[Seravy]

-Mechanician's Guild production bonus raised to 35%

The description still says 25%.

Thx!
By the way, my worst wizard game is up on Youtube, was still recorded in 1.4x (I think between 42 and 43).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...LtApkGMW5z

Also, I forgot to say but do not load older games in 2.0. They work but your buildings will be messed up because there are 2 new buildings replacing 2 obsolete ones.

[zitro1987]

Wow, the AI is somewhat intimidating just playing on 'hard', distracting me with constant usage of 'corruption', creating stacks of units against cities and sending lone nagas against my 'purifying' shamans. I also lost an outpost against a sneak attack of hell hounds that were protecting a node. There's simply a lot to like in this current version of your mod - it keeps me on my toes and mana is very very important.

minor terrain dislike - I see that ocean tiles remain as useless as tundra, negatively affecting cities in island corners with many of these ocean tiles. Would it be possible to provide food and/or gold terrain bonuses? Ocean would theoretically translate to fishing and food.

[Seravy]

minor AI flaw - enemy is casting a few volcanoes around my cities which can sometimes help me (a tundra, a forest replaced by a volcano with a gold mine). Not sure if it's worth spending time on - the ideal would be prioritizing rivers and grasslands.

The AI always targets ores first, and if none are available, any valid tile adjacent to the most valuable city.
Rivers are invalid for Volcanoes (valid for Corruption though). However, if I disabled Tundras and Deserts (those produce
0 food so destroying them is useless) then it would not be able to target ores on that type of terrain either.
I think this isn't worth changing as it was very hard just to let them target the ores.
If they create an ore by accident, they'll erase it with the next corruption (or volcano if it reverts to mountain, at least I think I enabled that), and if they don't they'll eventually hit every possible tile anyway, while the order is not ideal, the end result will be eventually the same.

minor terrain issue - I see that ocean tiles remain as useless as tundra, negatively affecting cities in island corners with many of these ocean tiles. Would it be possible to provide food and/or gold terrain bonuses?

I prefer to keep it that way, the terrain system in MoM is good because terrains are not identical, some are better while others are worse.
If Oceans produced more food, putting cities on the north/south pole would be a working tactic and that would be very, very bad both because it's not intended and it is a large amount of terrain (the largest available on Tiny maps), but also because those tiles are somewhat special and I expect them to be potential sources of bugs (due to edge of map and having no continent ID, so they count as half-land half-ocean). Aside from that, the North/South pole providing enough food for a city of 10+ is just wrong.

[zitro1987]

Sounds fair. I removed the comment about volcanoes because they started spamming them in a much more logical way right after I wrote that post.

Year 9 - I'm the worst player based on your charts and graphs. That's just playing on 'hard'. I used to be a player beating games in 'impossible', so you're doing a really good job with this mod. I keep getting attacked and forced to be on the defensive side of things.

[zitro1987]

Wow!! 'Hard' is no longer an easy difficulty in this mod. One of my best defended cities under attack (luckily, my flying units blocking the city wall saved me, though I lost one due to black sleep)



note: 'number of figures' unit discrepancies is my change ... your mod is fine.

[Drax]

Had a run on the worst wizard "standard" yesterday. Got kind of lucky and the game was won. So it's winnable at extreme even with "worst wizard" setup. Basically you need some space to breathe in the beginning and neutral cities to conquer early. Then you just need to outproduce your competitors. Neutral minotaurs wiped half of one of my opponents cities and one mine. Those are nasty. Especially if there are 2-3 such neutral cities. Also you need to find books relatively fast. I found a life book relatively quickly, but then nearly had spell of mastery started before I could get another book.

Have a few questions:
1) About spell saves do they affect weapon buffs? For example does Yuyuko Fan make a death check at -7?

2) About damage spells do spell saves lower the effective resistance of the target(or all for global) with the value of spell save thus possibly increasing damage?

Other things I have noticed:
3) Shadow weapon buff seems vastly overpowered. See second attachment. It's 21 thrown attack and this hero has potential for at least 10 more damage thus 25-26 thrown attack due to a single weapon buff. At the worst case it would be 5thrown for a novice hero which is also a lot.

4) Generally all fantastic creatures are pretty powerful now. Doom bats's new stats were a nasty surprise.
5) Nodes/dungeons forces can vary way too much. On my continent there was only one "weak" node with Begemoth+2*Basilisks. All others were 8-9 top tier fantastic units buffed by the node. I basically banished 2 of my opponents twice and had 430 power base, before I could win in any of those and had to sacrifice up to 3 stacks to weaken them first. This was on mirror, but there were similar power nodes on arcanus too. On the other hand there were nodes with just 3-5 tiles(power) right next to one of my opponents.... So I'm thinking about limiting this full stack top tier to 6 top tier value maybe total value. It's not of much use otherwise too late game. And also there should not be so weak nodes(less than 10 tiles) at Extreme difficulty even on arcanus.

Other than that I think that all of the things we've been discussing lately fit better than before and the game. Bowmen rule if properly buffer can kill sky drake in single shot.

P.S. this is with CoM v2.0.

[Seravy]

Have a few questions:
1) About spell saves do they affect weapon buffs? For example does Yuyuko Fan make a death check at -7?

No, it doesn't. Only spells cast by the hero.

2) About damage spells do spell saves lower the effective resistance of the target(or all for global) with the value of spell save thus possibly increasing damage?

Yes, but only two damage spells check resistance, Life Drain and Syphon Life.
Wrack is unaffected because it is an enchantment, independently doing damage every turn instead of the caster directly doing it.

Other things I have noticed:
3) Shadow weapon buff seems vastly overpowered. See second attachment. It's 21 thrown attack and this hero has potential for at least 10 more damage thus 25-26 thrown attack due to a single weapon buff. At the worst case it would be 5thrown for a novice hero which is also a lot.

as far as I remember, I made Shadow only consider base melee attack.
This includes
-The attack the hero starts with
-The attack gained for levels
-The attack from Might and Super Might
-I believe any attack gained from the weapon itself as well
but does not include buffs like Flame Blade or Lionheart and the bonus from your shield and accessory. I will need to check to make sure. On the other hand, a simple berserk or haste buffs the damage output by 100% while this can at most do 50% (less if some of the melee attack is the type that does not count), so I'm not entirely sure it's overpowered. Heroes tend to do unreasonable amounts of damage to begin with, due to easy access to bonus hit and melee at the same time.

5) Nodes/dungeons forces can vary way too much. On my continent there was only one "weak" node with Begemoth+2*Basilisks. All others were 8-9 top tier fantastic units buffed by the node. I basically banished 2 of my opponents twice and had 430 power base, before I could win in any of those and had to sacrifice up to 3 stacks to weaken them first. This was on mirror, but there were similar power nodes on arcanus too. On the other hand there were nodes with just 3-5 tiles(power) right next to one of my opponents.... So I'm thinking about limiting this full stack top tier to 6 top tier value maybe total value. It's not of much use otherwise too late game. And also there should not be so weak nodes(less than 10 tiles) at Extreme difficulty even on arcanus.

Did you play on high magic power settings?
Node guardian points increase quadratically based on the amount of power produced by the node. At 2x power, there are 4 times more monsters and so on. This might need a change. Was it ONLY nodes that were too strong, or normal lairs too?
(also, Myrran nodes have more tiles so they produce more power to being with as you have noticed)