New year, New Master of Magic! v1.5 fan patch

[Tiltowait]

Whenever I look at an enemy group, or cast a spell on my own group, I get a nice popup with a summary of what's in the stack. Is there a way for me to see this? I find this view very informative and can't seem to figure out how to see it.

[rgp151]

I find the Extreme and Impossible levels on this to be... well Impossible. Just because it's called impossible doesn't mean that it should be impossible or else there is no point to play it at all.

It seems like the AI advantages are too heavily front loaded. I think it would be better if the AIs had less of an initial advantage and got more advantages over time.

After trying several games on Extreme (which I assume is not as hard as Impossible) I've given up on that entirely.

In basically every game by the time I'm building my first Marketplace I'm getting invaded by huge stacks of higher level units. It's truly impossible. When all I have is a Swordsman and Spearman, fighting off a 9 unit stack of Hell Hounds or Gouls can't be done. Even if all I did was pump spearmen starting on turn 1 and summon as many of my own Hell Hounds as possible it couldn't be done, so I see no point.

Being invaded with 4 units Gorgons while building my first Farmer's Market with only a Spearman and Sworsdman, again, impossible.

It seems like the only way to have any chance on these levels is to get super lucky on your starting position to be on a large island all alone or with just neutrals, and unless you have that start then there is no way to even begin the game. And unfortunately it takes several turns to figure out if you have that start, so even just starting and restarting doesn't work.

I had one game with Halflings that I thought was going to be perfect. My starting city had Gold, Mithril, and a Deer. On turn 1 I set to build a Granary, I converted all gold to mana, put all magic power to mana, and cast 2 Magic Spirits. Explored and found a close Phantom Warriors Node and a close Hell Hounds Node. Found several easy to mid level encounters nearby. Found a neutral Nomad city that would be easy to conquer. I was playing Life Halflings to try and get one of the easiest starts going. Thought, okay, this should work.

By the time I was building my Marketplace waves of Hell Hounds starting showing up. Tauron greeted me. Within a few turns he got angry, even though I brought my Magic Spirits in and stopped scouting. He took over both nodes before I had built my first unit and starting building settlers right on top of me, then declared war and crushed me before my Farmer's Market was finished. I think when the game ended he had 5 or 6 cities that I could see and multiple 9 stacks of Swordsmen, Shamen, and Hell Hounds.

All I did was try to build straight Granary, Marketplace, Farmer's Market. Before I could even do that, without building a single troop, he had completely taken over my area, done all the encounters, taken all the nodes and attacked my capital. He had even taken a node that had "many Air Elementals". Seriously, Rare summons being killed before I can even build a Farmer's Market with one of the best starts possible with one of the best races possible?

That's just crazy.

[Seravy]

I find the Extreme and Impossible levels on this to be... well Impossible. Just because it's called impossible doesn't mean that it should be impossible or else there is no point to play it at all.

Balancing was not the goal of the 1.5 patch. I have no idea how much and what kind of impact fixing all the bugs on the AI has outside of Caster of Magic environment. I didn't change the default AI advantages, this is what the game came with. I expect this to be even worse in 1.51 where the major AI resource bugfixes get added. Those who are playing the patch are welcome to suggest new numbers for the AI resource tables for the 1.51 patch, and then those will be used.
As is, the tables pretty much contain 100% (or 150?) of everything for normal, 200% for hard, 300% for extreme and 400% for impossible (don't remember easy, maybe that's the 100?), needless to say 300%+ is crazy, and it only worked in the original game because the AI was pretty much nonexistent. It doesn't matter how much of everything they get if they can't even do a simple task like collecting 9 units in a stack and attacking a city, or...moving them across water.
For reference, Caster of Magic now uses 200 to 250% for impossible, 150-200 for extreme, around 150 for hard and about 130 for normal and it's hard enough, but it has a lot of AI improvements that are not compatible with the base game so I think the numbers in 1.51 should be higher. On the other hand in the base game the building tree is very strict and there isn't much room for the player to play much better than the AI does by selecting at random, so that makes it even harder to catch up to the AI's advantages.
Until the 1.51 patch (and even after if I don't get a good suggestion on the AI numbers to use), just play a lower difficulty level, or use the tweaker to adjust the AI's resource advantage bonus.

Being invaded with 4 units Gorgons while building my first Farmer's Market with only a Spearman and Sworsdman, again, impossible.

That's what happens if someone is allowed to start the game with rare spells. Human players have been abusing this for eternity, but it isn't any less broken if the AI gets it. 11 book starts have been removed from CoM for a reason. 1.51 will most likely contain an optional patch to disable 11 books.

[rgp151]

All, good info. Thanks Seravy. Now I don't feel so bad about having to play only Hard.

I don't know about the AI advantages work for the different level exactly, but again, maybe for CoM, my suggestion would be something that, instead of simply starting off the AIs with more resources, would give the AIs additional boosts over time, maybe even sets times or possibly semi-random.

For example, instead of something like the AIs starting with 200% more resources, have them start with 125% more resources, and then every 25 turns they get a "gift" of X amount (not a % as that can get crazy or be ineffective depending).

So, like on "Impossible", one thing could be to do something like give them only 125% more resources, but every 25 turns they get +500 gold and +500 mana. (These may not be good numbers, just throwing out the idea). Or maybe the "gifts" should scale with the turn count up to a capped max. Or maybe the formula could be that each AI roll a number between 10 and 30 at the start and they get a gift on that turn, then roll a new number that is the X number of turns until the next gift, etc.

Anyway, just an idea on how to still give the AI an advantage, but not make it so heavily front loaded. I'm sure there are many other ways as well.

Edit:
Another idea would be to actually turn certain AI functions off and on based on the difficulty setting. This may be more complicated and less clear, but this is really more how things like difficulty level work in stuff like Chess programs. In a Chess program the computer only looks X number of moves ahead or checks X number of possible combinations based on the difficulty setting. So in a chess game on the harder setting the AI is "smarter".

I guess in MoM and CoM the AI is the same all the time, and the difficulty is simply determined by the amount of starting resources. Is that correct?

[Tiltowait]

Just because it's called impossible doesn't mean that it should be impossible

I disagree. It's exactly what it says, why is anyone surprised?

The computer players get 4x advantage and at the time the game was made the designers didn't think anyone could beat it. Today, players regularly beat v1.31 on Impossible. Amazing.

At the time, "Impossible" mode was added to give the game additional life for expert players. And that it did. If MoM didn't have Impossible, the game would have long ago been discarded like so many other forgotten strategy games. But, with the extra challenge, it lasted long enough to attract Seravy's attention and he modded it and fixed a ton of bugs and greatly improved the computer players. So, Impossible has been reset to be even further out of reach. Outstanding! Nobody will ever get bored, there will always be another challenge.

So, I have to ask, if you haven't even mastered Hard yet and gotten bored with it, why are you playing on Impossible? Heck, one of the great joys of v1.5 for me was ratcheting down my level to Normal. Wow, playing the game fairly for once! No CP advantages of any kind! Just a straight fight! I heartily enjoyed these games. Now, I'm playing on Hard and it is indeed hard.

[rgp151]

Just because it's called impossible doesn't mean that it should be impossible

I disagree. It's exactly what it says, why is anyone surprised?

The computer players get 4x advantage and at the time the game was made the designers didn't think anyone could beat it. Today, players regularly beat v1.31 on Impossible. Amazing.

At the time, "Impossible" mode was added to give the game additional life for expert players. And that it did. If MoM didn't have Impossible, the game would have long ago been discarded like so many other forgotten strategy games. But, with the extra challenge, it lasted long enough to attract Seravy's attention and he modded it and fixed a ton of bugs and greatly improved the computer players. So, Impossible has been reset to be even further out of reach. Outstanding! Nobody will ever get bored, there will always be another challenge.

So, I have to ask, if you haven't even mastered Hard yet and gotten bored with it, why are you playing on Impossible? Heck, one of the great joys of v1.5 for me was ratcheting down my level to Normal. Wow, playing the game fairly for once! No CP advantages of any kind! Just a straight fight! I heartily enjoyed these games. Now, I'm playing on Hard and it is indeed hard.

As you say, I think I just got used to always playing 1.31 on Impossible, but then when moving on to 1.4 and 1.5 those settings become truly impossible. In 1.31 I could regularly beat Impossible. In 1.41 I could beat Extreme, but never beat Impossible. IN 1.5 even Extreme is insane and Hard is in many ways harder than Impossible in 1.31.

I kind of agree with your point, but not entirely. I think that before Impossible was obviously not impossible, but I think now it is.

Having said that, I do now feel better about playing on "only" Hard, but it seems silly to me to have levels that are unplayable.

And I never really liked the old Impossible that much, and think the game still suffers from basically the same problem, which is that the way the difficulty settings work it puts the entire challenge at the start of the game. Playing on the harder levels has basically become a startup challenge, not a whole game challenge. The challenge is, can you survive the first 50 turns. Once you've gotten on your feet it's a whole different game, and much less challenging (though I will say that with 1.5 it *IS* more consistently challenging throughout the game).

But yeah, in the old version it was just all about getting on your feet, and then once that was done the game was essentially over, you just had to play for another hour to actually end it if you wanted to. I quit many games once it became clear I was in a dominant position. It is defiantly less like that now, and that's good.

I think my main point is that I prefer that the difficulty level create a challenge that is less about just making it past the first 50 turns and more about on-going difficulty throughout the game. I think that in 1.5 now, with the old difficulty advantages still in place, the game is basically unplayable on Impossible and even Extreme unless you happen to get some ideal start (which I have never gotten). The starting advantage is so strong that there really no way to possibly deal with it. (Maybe you could do it with an 11 book Death start...maybe...).

So if those levels are indeed unplayable (except maybe restarting like 20 times until you get an ideal setup) then there is really no point to them and they should be toned down a little.

[Tiltowait]

it seems silly to me to have levels that are unplayable.

In 1995, Impossible was unplayable. It took years for people to beat it. Who knows what the future holds? If you had already beat the hardest level you'd have quit playing. So instead of complaining about how it's too hard, try some radical strategies. That's what Impossible level is all about. Maybe it's only viable with a Myrran start due to fewer neighbors. Maybe you always need Warlord. Maybe playing on Huge world is a non-starter because the CPs will always find you quickly with scouts. Figure it out!

It's too hard? So why not use the 11 book start to try to beat it? I think that's the entire point of Impossible, to throw the kitchen sink at you and get you to really go all-out. One of my pet peeves of MoM is having to intentionally tone down my starts. I want to really hit the game with everything I've got without feeling like I cheated or broke the game.

[Seravy]

All, good info. Thanks Seravy. Now I don't feel so bad about having to play only Hard.

I don't know about the AI advantages work for the different level exactly, but again, maybe for CoM, my suggestion would be something that, instead of simply starting off the AIs with more resources, would give the AIs additional boosts over time, maybe even sets times or possibly semi-random.

The AI gets +X% to their gold, mana, food income, population growth and -X% reduction in maintenance costs (although this one doesn't actually work in 1.50 yet) so if they have a city that produces 5 gold then they get 10 out of it on hard, 15 on extreme and 20 on impossible.

Another idea would be to actually turn certain AI functions off and on based on the difficulty setting.

1.5x only has the bare minimal AI required for the game to be worth called a "game". There isn't much to turn off.
Caster now has some AI features that are only enabled on hard, specifically ranged units moving before shooting is hard and above only.


Oh, and this :

Just because it's called impossible doesn't mean that it should be impossible

I disagree. It's exactly what it says, why is anyone surprised?

Well, I'd say impossible should be possible to beat by a very experienced player if they also get luck on their side (good minerals, enemies at war with each other, that kind of stuff), it should only be impossible about 50-75% of the time...but 100% for inexperienced players :D

The challenge is, can you survive the first 50 turns. Once you've gotten on your feet it's a whole different game, and much less challenging (though I will say that with 1.5 it *IS* more consistently challenging throughout the game).

1.51 will be a massive improvement in this regard since it includes stuff like
-AI not collapsing completely on too large continents due to unit overflow
-AI not collapsing due to being stuck on 0 gold for the entire game as it's paying more maintenance than has income due to maintenance bug/inconsistency
-AI being able to raise tax rates

The starting advantage is so strong that there really no way to possibly deal with it.

There is no such thing. +400% production and population just does that, no need for starting gold or anything like that. They build 5 times faster than you and that is a lot more obvious in the early game where you see 1 of your cities vs 5 of theirs. It's also exponential, 5 cities building at a 500% rate makes 25 times more units.

[Nelphine]

Just played a game where both my remaining opponents spent the whole game (latest CoM) offering a wizards pact, 2 turns getting mad at the 2 guys sitting next to their city defending a node, 3rd turn break pact, 2-5 turns later, re-offer the wizards pact.

I don't know if anything could be done about that (MAYBE have troops in a node cause slightly less hostility, but that would be abusable; maybe not have them offer a pact while troops are adjacent to their city, but that would suck in other situations.)

Mostly just stating it happened, and it was a lot of pop ups, that eventually became (very slightly) annoying. Don't think it needs to change, just wanted to mention it.

[Tiltowait]

Please report CoM issues in its subforum. This thread is for v1.5 only, thanks!