Mid and late game

[mhek]

First of all I want to thank you, Seravy, for your great job in improving such an old and amazing game and all the effort you put in it. I really like my nostalgic childhood game even more now and I keep playing it all the time instead of more modern games that I would also like to try, haha. I might give more feedback in the appropriate sub-threads, but for the moment I just want to start a discussion about mid to late game:

The problem:
As the game progresses, you get more and more cities that you need to micro-manage. Even if you use the grand vizier, you get a pop-up for every finished building in maybe several cities – so in the beginning of your turn you need to click a lot, maybe change buildings to build and so forth. That gets kind of tedious. The situation is getting worse and worse, as you conquer new cities and build new ones on your own. Usually when I build new cities in the later game I gold rush a few buildings, which makes the situation even more precarious (because for those cities I get the “building finished” message every turn). If you don't do it, they are catching up way to slowly (if at all).

Suggestions:
1) Could you make a game setting at the start of the game (like land size, minerals etc.) that would set the minimum allowed space between two cities? By default a new settlement needs to be more than 3 tiles away from another city. If we could increase this to 4 or 5, it would mean less cities overall. That would be especially useful on bigger land masses (I usually play “fair” or “small” to decrease the overall amount of cities. With this option I would like to play bigger land masses as well).

2) Would it be possible that after a certain year, newly found cities would already contain some buildings (a least sawmill?) and/or start at a bigger size (like 3-5 instead of one)? It could be the same year as mercenaries gain magic weapons. Alternatively, there could be a certain fame threshold. This would make also sense lore-wise: if you have more fame, it attracts more people to new settlements.

3) Can you make an in-game option to disable the “new building finished” message? Than the grand vizier would make more sense, as you were not brought to the city screen several times at the start of a new round. As it is now you still need to click a lot even if using the grand vizier.

4) Could the grand vizier be further optimized? For instance, when I set a city to produce gold, he would sometime change it to a building. He should not do that, because often you don’t want to have certain buildings in a city (especially military buildings, as you don’t need them in every city). Also, can you exclude certain buildings completely, so that he would never automatically build them? If yes, we could think of which buildings that should be. Can you program him to make a certain standard order (like sawmill first, than granary… etc.), or can it just be random?

5) Unrelated to cities: I think it might not be possible, as ruins, towers etc. are generated at the beginning of the game, but could it be made that some of them re-spawn or that there are new ones spawning after some time?
As I guess the answer is no, how about, if there was a higher chance of neutral settlers as raiders? Could they form new neutral cities? I think this would make the later game also more interesting.

Thanks again for all your effort!

[Tiltowait]

Play on a smaller land size and you won't have to micromanage so many cities. It's the only solution.

[Seravy]

1. No, this would be a lot of work. Playing on smaller landmass does the same thing. (well, almost, the number of tiles you need to move between two battles isn't affected by landmass)
2. Don't think so. You have the BUY button if you want your buildings already built, and assuming it's mid/late game you should have gold for it.
3. Instead of an option I believe this should just check for the Grand Vizier. If it is on, it should not display those messages at all. Space for altering the code might be a problem here, I have to check.
4a. The problem is the Grand Vizier can also set a city to produce gold. If it does but cannot then change it to a building, that means cities will eventually all get stuck on producing gold (or housing etc). Disabling the gold and/or housing cannot be done because it has to select something if every building is already done...and it still needs to be able to start building again later, if anything gets destroyed.
4b. Excluding buildings is a bad idea. What if the player wants those to be built? By the time Grand Vizier is enabled, paying a few extra gold on maintenance should not affect the outcome of the game. If it does, you enabled it way too early and/or underestimated your enemies.
4c. I considered making the grand vizier smarter but I decided against it. The game should not play itself better than the AI or the human player can play manually. If it does, manual playing becomes obsolete and that's not fun. There is a non-strict order though. The Grand Vizier uses the exact same formulas and weights as the AI if it has a Pragmatist personality. Which means that : Sawmill will always be the first. Buildings in the "essential" group will be before everything that's not in it 99% of the time, and finally, the rest also has some weights, like power producing buildings will be chosen more often than ship buildings.
5. For towers and nodes, no. For lairs and ruins, yes but let's just say it's extremely difficult to do that. I don't think it would be a good idea either, running out of these helps the AI focus on fighting wars and have a stronger endgame instead of wasting troops in these places.
5b. Neutrals cannot use settlers, they don't have that feature implemented at all. Even if they somehow end up with any, it'll just be used to attack. Changing this would be an unreasonable amount of work and would probably risk game stability.

[mhek]

1. No, this would be a lot of work. Playing on smaller landmass does the same thing. (well, almost, the number of tiles you need to move between two battles isn't affected by landmass)

Ok, I see. If it is too much of an effort, it's not worth it.

2. Don't think so. You have the BUY button if you want your buildings already built, and assuming it's mid/late game you should have gold for it.

If it's not possible, nevermind.

3. Instead of an option I believe this should just check for the Grand Vizier. If it is on, it should not display those messages at all. Space for altering the code might be a problem here, I have to check.

Good idea, would be nice!

4a. The problem is the Grand Vizier can also set a city to produce gold. If it does but cannot then change it to a building, that means cities will eventually all get stuck on producing gold (or housing etc). Disabling the gold and/or housing cannot be done because it has to select something if every building is already done...and it still needs to be able to start building again later, if anything gets destroyed.

Maybe it would be possible to disable housing and produce gold only once there is nothing to build anymore? If anything got destroyed, the player could still manually rebuild stuff, so I think that would not be a big deal (and the player would always realize when buildings get destroyed by a fight or spell).

4b. Excluding buildings is a bad idea. What if the player wants those to be built? By the time Grand Vizier is enabled, paying a few extra gold on maintenance should not affect the outcome of the game. If it does, you enabled it way too early and/or underestimated your enemies.

If the Grand Vizier would not build certain buildings, the player could do it manually - so there should be no problem if you want to have those buildings. I for instance prefer to build military buildings in cities that have access to mithril or adamantium, to build my troops only there. In other cities I usually don't want those buildings. If the Grand Vizier is now putting those buildings there, it's extra maintenance. I think it's more than a few extra gold, depending on race. Smitty, war college, fighter's guild, armorer's guild, stable and fantastic stable together is 19 gold per turn. If you have this in 10 cities it's 190 per turn - a lot even for late game. Sure, not all races have these buildings, but I was not considering the ship buildings and you might have more than 10 cities to take into account.
That's why I don't like to use the Grand Vizier. If it would spare those buildings, I would use him and build those manually only in the cities I want to have them. But maybe that's all just related to my play style ;-)

4c. I considered making the grand vizier smarter but I decided against it. The game should not play itself better than the AI or the human player can play manually. If it does, manual playing becomes obsolete and that's not fun. There is a non-strict order though. The Grand Vizier uses the exact same formulas and weights as the AI if it has a Pragmatist personality. Which means that : Sawmill will always be the first. Buildings in the "essential" group will be before everything that's not in it 99% of the time, and finally, the rest also has some weights, like power producing buildings will be chosen more often than ship buildings.

Even if you made the Grand Vizier smarter, being well aware of your outstanding coding skills, I think the human player could still do it better manually ;-) Maybe I am wrong though, haha. Ideally I think the Grand Vizier should be useful to build a few standard buildings and leave the more advanced decisions to the player. I would never just only use the Grand Vizier alone.

5. For towers and nodes, no. For lairs and ruins, yes but let's just say it's extremely difficult to do that. I don't think it would be a good idea either, running out of these helps the AI focus on fighting wars and have a stronger endgame instead of wasting troops in these places.

Hm, I see. But it's cool that it would be possible. Maybe a spell could do it? "Infest ruins" could summon a ruin to train troops and hunt for treasures. Just a stupid idea.

5b. Neutrals cannot use settlers, they don't have that feature implemented at all. Even if they somehow end up with any, it'll just be used to attack. Changing this would be an unreasonable amount of work and would probably risk game stability.

Ok, thanks for clarifying.


Does anyone use the Grand Vizier in it's current state? I would like to use him, because I play the game mostly on my tablet and everything takes more time than using a computer with a mouse (the game also runs a bit slow). Still I don't like to activate him, for the reasons I stated above.

[Seravy]

Maybe it would be possible to disable housing and produce gold only once there is nothing to build anymore? If anything got destroyed, the player could still manually rebuild stuff, so I think that would not be a big deal (and the player would always realize when buildings get destroyed by a fight or spell).

As far as I remember the Vizier never builds Housing in cities with more than 5 (or something like that, maybe 7?) people.

That's why I don't like to use the Grand Vizier. If it would spare those buildings, I would use him and build those manually only in the cities I want to have them. But maybe that's all just related to my play style ;-)

The grand vizier is meant to be used when you already clearly won the game but still need a lot of time killing all the enemy cities (or researching spell of mastery), especially on large maps. It isn't meant to optimize your income at all, it's meant to save your time in real life in games where you victory is guaranteed - or at least you assume it is. At least this is what I'm using it for.
When the game isn't yet decided and decisions matter, you are supposed to play, not let the computer do it. Where is the fun in that?
I mean I could most likely make a grand vizier that will make better building decisions than myself (since the computer can do all the math behind a question like "which gives you more resources, a granary or a marketplace" while I won't bother because it's not fun, I just build what looks better but without doing the math) - military buildings not included of course, since the computer has no way of knowing what kind of units and how many I plan to use.

I remember Final Fantasy 12, it had a system where you could set up rules for your characters what to do in combat. Stuff like "if low on health use heal, otherwise attack" but up to like 8 rules per character. Once I got the "rule" items to actually be able to set up rules that work, I no longer had a game to play. I just walked into a boss battle, waited 20 minutes while the characters finished it off and...after 2-3 of those I forgot about the game and never finished playing it. I could literally put a rock on the "left" button to run in circles and the characters would level themselves up on the respawning monsters...

[namad]

This is probably impossible, but I think what mhek and everyone else wants... is a queue.

Is there anyway to make the game queue a building after another building?
I assume this is impossible, although it is the one useful feature of more modern games in the genre.

[Tiltowait]

Kyrub tried to implement a queue in v1.4o, but it was buggy. Maybe Seravy can salvage some code.

What MoM really needs is someone to take the Real-Time Tweaker and make a modern front-end to the game. It's already most of the way there. Then we can have our queues and sharp graphics and whatnot. But, not likely to happen anytime soon.

[Seravy]

I see three problems with adding a queue :
1. It needs a ton of space to store the data. Like, if it's a queue of 10 buildings max, then 10 bytes per city. And this data has to be in a place that gets saved, too, can't just be anywhere at random. If anyone can point we at an array of 1000+ bytes that is in the save games but not used for anything, we can start thinking about this.
2. Lack of interface. How would you know what's in the queue? What order? How do you delete something from the queue? How do you change the build order without queueing? etc...all of these need to be coded in, and probably at a tight space.
3. It would need to unlock buildings that are getting enabled by others without them having been built. But if it does that and the prerequisite is cleared from the queue (or worse, built but destroyed or sold meanwhile) then you get the building anyway without being able to build it!

[mhek]

The grand vizier is meant to be used when you already clearly won the game but still need a lot of time killing all the enemy cities (or researching spell of mastery), especially on large maps. It isn't meant to optimize your income at all, it's meant to save your time in real life in games where you victory is guaranteed - or at least you assume it is. At least this is what I'm using it for.

To save your time in real life in games where you victory is guaranteed, it would be more effective to just put all cities to produce gold and not use the grand vizier at all (as you would not get the production finished pop-ups then). Why do you prefer to use the grand vizier in that case?

When the game isn't yet decided and decisions matter, you are supposed to play, not let the computer do it. Where is the fun in that?

I think you did not get my point - I would not want the computer to do all my descisions. Usually in the later game I have some strategic important cities (with special resources or a good location so that they are lucrative), where I care about what is being produced - so I do it manually. On the other hand, I have many cities where I don't care that much, like filler cities that are at suboptimal locations or cities that I don't really need. There I would not mind the grand vizier just choosing something - but it should not just build all buildings (a max pop 6 city does not generate enough taxes for the expensive military buildings - in the end the city would cost more money than it generates). So for me, ideally, I would manage the important cities myself and have the grand vizier just automatically manage the uninteresting filler cities, but it would just build buildings that are always useful (library, granery etc.) and after that set it to produce gold and never change it. Of course that would mean that you could not rely only on the grand vizier (but who would want that anyways?), but would need to manually interfere with your cities if you wanted to have more sophisticated buildings. For me that would increase the fun, as I would manage just cities where I care and would spend more time for the other aspects of the game (what to summon next, moving armies, conquering stuff etc.).

I mean I could most likely make a grand vizier that will make better building decisions than myself (since the computer can do all the math behind a question like "which gives you more resources, a granary or a marketplace" while I won't bother because it's not fun, I just build what looks better but without doing the math) - military buildings not included of course, since the computer has no way of knowing what kind of units and how many I plan to use.

I fully agree to that. It should not calculate optimal decisions since it would tempt the player to not think about what to build at all and just activate the optimized grand vizier. That, as you said, would just remove the fun of one important aspect of the game.


Generally I was just brainstorming how to take out some of the accumulating micromanagement in the later stages of the game. Changing how the grand vizier works seemed reasonable to do - but as I said, I would never want to only rely on him, but activate him to safe some time and then choose to manage some cities on my own instead of all of my cities. For me at least it's getting a bit boring if I am promted to several different cities at the start of each turn just to put something new to build. Generally it's fun to do, but for me there is a treshold where it gets too much.

To have a queue would be very nice of course - but I was not thinking about it because I thought it would not be possible to do (or at least much harder than changing the grand vizier).

[Seravy]

Why do you prefer to use the grand vizier in that case?

Because not building anything is a way worse strategy and if anything unexpected happens and I need new troops...then it's convenient to have military buildings everywhere already built.
But mainly for the research and power buildings because that speeds up winning.

On the other hand, I have many cities where I don't care that much, like filler cities that are at suboptimal locations or cities that I don't really need.

Oh, those. In those I just set whichever resource producing buildings I need most (or a random one if it doesn't matter), and don't give it any serious thought so it isn't taking up too much time. If the city is that bad I might even consider razing it.
I agree it's annoying if you have 30 of these but by then you can usually safely enable the vizier (unless you are playing something like extreme or impossible - high difficulty means you have to put more effort into everything, even this unfortunately).