Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[Seravy]

...wait a min, high elves don't have shamans or priests? is that working as intended? just checking.

That's correct, that race never had those units.

[Domon]

didn't remember that!

yet another thing: AI often raises a volcano on top of an already raised (by the same AI) volcano. on rare occasions it does this several times. this must be a bug!

[Seravy]

didn't remember that!

yet another thing: AI often raises a volcano on top of an already raised (by the same AI) volcano. on rare occasions it does this several times. this must be a bug!

No, this is intentional. There is a 20% chance for a new Volcano to produce a new mineral. This is not an effect you want to happen if you use the spell for hostile purposes. However by casting it again on the same tile, the mineral is destroyed. The AI won't do it in any other case, only if there is a mineral on the first volcano.

[Nelphine]

I do that too in my own land in order to try to get new minerals.

[Seravy]

Diplomacy update, see http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=8584 !
Please try the new system and share your opinion about it in that thread, especially about the following :
-Are the AI players having the right amount of alliances and wars with each other, or too much/few?
-Is the diplomacy playable on high difficulties? (losing to the AI's resource advantage is a different story, I'll need to play a lot more to be able to tell if it needs adjusting and how much)
-Forming new treaties with the AI is balanced, too hard, or too easy to abuse? (especially considering the easier gold tribute option)
-Same for Peace Treaties?
-Do you get dragged into too many (3 or more) simultaneous wars too often?

As this system is very different and untested for balance, the previous version will remain available for download for a while until we can be sure this is an improvement.

3.03

-Fixed bug : Swamps produce no food despite surveyor and manual saying it produces 1/2.

-Changed the Militarist/Expansionist war declaration formula. If Military Modifier*(Current turn/150) + Visible Relation + Hidden Relation + Personality Modifier <= -65 then move towards war.

What this means is, the difficulty modifier is gone, the formula works as it used to on Normal difficulty, plus the military part is scaled by time. On turn 150 it works the same as it used to. Earlier, the effect of military power is lower, later, it is higher. This gives the player time to build up military or relations before war breaks out, but also allows the AI to break out of an Alliance with a weaker player in the very late game. It also reduces the chance of AI players fighting each other in the early game, further reducing random factors that have high impact on game difficulty.

-Changed the amount of gold needed to offer a gold tribute to AI wizards. The new formula is (Turn*8)*(1+Max(0,0.25*(Target's Gold in treasury/(Turn*8))) for the highest offer. The amount is no longer rounded to the nearest 25. This should allow the human player to tribute gold and improve relation on higher difficulties, where the AI has too much gold for the old system to allow it.

-The highest amount of visible relation without an Alliance is now 79 instead of 65.

-The Difficulty modifier is removed from the human player to AI “Propose Treaty” formulas, and replaced by a constant -15 (halfway between Normal and Hard). This formula considers relative military strength where the AI has a large advantage on higher difficulties, so a difficulty modifier is redundant and unnecessary.

-The minimal amount of relation required for the AI to even consider a Wizard's Pact instead of refusing outright is reduced from +10 to 0. This allows the player to know for sure when they can try, as +0 shows Neutral, while -1 shows Unease. There is no such threshold at +10.

-The minimal amount of relation required for the AI to even consider an Alliance instead of refusing outright is reduced from +50 to +40. This allows the player to know for sure when they can try, as +40 shows Calm, while +39 shows Relaxed. There is no such threshold at +50.

-The formula for the AI to offer a treaty or trade now has “-Difficulty*10” added to it, but checks for a 20 lower value. This means on hard, everything is unchanged. On Easy and Normal, the AI makes slightly more offers. On Extreme and Impossible they make slightly less. The minimal relation needed for this check to even happen is not reduced unlike at the human player's offers. the primary intention is to make it more desirable for the human player to make the offer on high difficulties, instead of merely waiting for it to come from the AI.

-Changed the end-of-turn Peace Interest change rules. Peace Interest now changes by +Personality+15-10*Average Own and Allied army strength/Average everyone else Army strength, where “everyone else” includes all other players who are not allies, but players at war with the player whose variable is being adjusted are considered three times. “Personality” is 0 for Maniacal and 5 for Peaceful, with other personalities being in between in increasing order of peacefulness. This should make it easier to get a peace treaty in high difficulty games, as the high military power of other AI players will have an effect comparable to the player's own strength. Furthermore, as all people in an Alliance consider the same numbers (only if every member is an ally of every other member) it should be easier to make peace with them as their peace interest raises at a similar rate (tho this is still affected by personality and the player's hostile actions.)

-In the AI to AI diplomacy formula, the part random(3-9)*Difficulty, is changed to random(2-5)*Difficulty. This reduces the difficulty level's influence from 0-36 points to 0-20 points. While lower difficulty levels worked as intended, on Hard/Extreme/Impossible, AI Alliances were more frequent than desired. This should reduce the problem somewhat.

-Losing a city in combat causes the attacker to lose 40 Peace Interest towards the defender. This ensures the AI won't stop fighting a war they are actually winning.

-Fixed bug : Successful attack against a city sets Peace Interest of the defender to -200.

[Seravy]

3.03a
-Fixed 3.03 bug : AI shows war declaration message every time their cities are taken during war.

[zitro1987]

3.03 looks on paper to be an outstanding update (and the swamp fix is also a big one). I'm kicking myself now for starting a 3.02b game but at least I didn't get a militarist opponent (nevertheless - two enemies declared war well before turn 100 anyways, one with lizardmen ... cranking out swordsmen everywhere and nagas+focus magic, soon to have warship+flight)

[sayke]

Seravy, this is awesome. Diplomacy makes way more sense now. You can actually tell when one of the other wizards is interested in making peace or an alliance with you! Little things like that make the game so much more comprehensible and logical... Well done!

[Seravy]

3.03b

-Fixed 2.6 bug : AI became unable to use Wall Crusher again due to feature : “If the unit is unreachable, it will not be selected as target.” which wasn't compatible with Wall Crusher's exception to allow attacking the tile.

[namad]

I've been watching hadriex's random mage generated games and I think the random generation gives too many retorts and too few books.

I think that there should be a natural distribution of picks spent on retorts so like say... 8% chance of 1 point on retorts 20% chance of 2 43% chance of 3 points on retorts 20% chance of 4 and 8% chance of 5 and maybe 1% chance of 6? I'm not sure the generator should ever generate a mage with less than 5 spellbooks, but if you want it to, maybe 0.1% chance?

Something like this is what normal difficulty opponent wizards have. However the random generator seems to assign like I dunno each book randomly? So that you have 4-6 books each time? despite the fact an "average" wizard build probably has 7-9 books total. A random wizard should in theory have more books than retorts. That's how the game was designed, retorts are supposed to compliment books.

Is seravy the one in charge of this program too? or is someone else? Basically I think that whatever method is used to generate a random enemy opponent on normal seems like it should be somehow similar to what you're forced to play if you're giving yourself a random wizard build?