Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[GermanJoey]

Sevary, the diplomacy changes in this version are awesome. Seriously. They're fantastic. It's subtle but logical.

I wanted to raise the Enchanted Roads thing, though. What do you think about making Enchanted Road create just one tile, instead of a whole bunch, and reducing the cost proportionally? Even if it cost 10 for one tile that would still be worth it IMHO. As it stands I never use Enchanted Roads because it's just so messy, weird-looking, and doesn't make sense. Why would powerful wizards just build random roads to nowhere, along with the ones they actually want? It also greatly distorts the look and feel of the terrain, making it harder to keep track of what is where... And it's ugly. It's hideous. Seriously =D 

Regardless, thank you again for all your brilliant work on this!

I was done that way for convenience. The original spell, Enchant Road affected that area. So far I haven't changed it in case I might want to allow the AI to use it - A single tile road isn't very useful, but 5x5 can be. However at the moment it seems very unlikely I'll ever allow the AI to use the spell...I even used the space in the spell targeting procedure to other purposes.
Single tile might be easy to abuse though, if you need to reach a certain destination in time, but are 1 move short, cast it once and you're there. Unless we actually want that as a feature...I guess it could make it more useful.

Be careful about making it too cheap... remember that on Myrror roads give half-movement for flyers, land-linkers, and wind-walkers, and so with, for example, a 5 mana ER, we would see the return of Nelphine's "Lightning Brigade" - a stack that can easily cross whole continents in a single turn, every turn.

[Nelphine]

Yay lightning brigades named after me!

Jaer op. They should be named after him.

[zitro1987]

I personally do not have a problem with the look of conjuring 5X5 blocks of roads and I recall roads-everywhere being a normal feature in Civilization 3 and 4. 

*The idea of conjuring one road at a time is more time-consuming and can be easily abused by a player on enemy territory
*I do have a problem with the 400 research / 100mana cost. It's too steep to be a good spell.


As I continue amassing 'skill' with ease, especially with amplifying powers and arch-mage, I still feel the late game dynamic and need for mana would benefit more if it the skill becomes more 'overland-centric' later in the game and less 'I can cast 15 spells per combat'. It might make power spending on skill more useful than before.
*What if each Amplifying Tower give add 15-20% to your base skill for overland-only, meaning 6-7 of them would mean twice the overland skill?
*What if once you reach 150-200 base skill, it takes half as much skill points to increase total skill by 1, but only applies to overland? (amplifying tower can still add +7 to both overland/combat)
This could result in a dire need for mana and gold as your expenditures would be ridiculously high, and spellcasting would better parallel the sheer 'production' level of all your cities combined.

[Seravy]

Overland and Combat casting skill are the same number, except for "Hero" skill which can only be used between turns. Limiting the Amplifying Towers to that would be a horrible choice, so having separate amounts for combat and overland would be bad.
If you think the ratio of overland to combat skill is wrong, it can be fixed by halving the cost of all overland spells, although I don't think it's necessary. The intended design is to have overland spells that are always beneficial, forcing the player what to spend their limited skill on, while in combat some spell choices are clearly superior to others and the real limiting factor is using the right spells and making a correct decision on how much to spend each combat. While 300+ combat skill sounds excessive, actually spending that much in every battle results in empty mana reserves and losing the game.

About Conjure Road, I think the first we want to decide is whether we even want this spell. It has 3 uses :
-Allows faster and move effective movement on own territory for better defenses. This is the intended use of the spell.
-Significantly boosts economy by connecting cities with roads, even for races that can't build them. Sorcery isn't a realm for gold boosting spells. It's nice to have but it's off-color.
-Allows faster travel through enemy territory. Effectively doubles the speed of your windwalking doomstack if you bothered to spend 4-500 mana to place some of these on the enemy continent. The downside? None if you are doing raze-rush and otherwise you don't need to be faster. I see large abuse potential. we didn't even consider before because having a hero with wind walk and 14 moves was normal.

[GermanJoey]

I can see an argument for replacing it; the gold-effect is kinda off-color, as you say, and the spell is pretty situational as-is... in that its either game-changingly awesome or completely ignorable, depending on what races you have access to, what heroes you have access to, which plane you're on, what other realms you have, the geography of your own land and the enemies' land, etc. But, its a pretty interesting spell as is, because while it does give you these benefits it also comes with the tricky bit that the enemy can use your roads too. For example, connecting your Myrror cities with roads helps you reinforce weak points faster, but also means that the enemy can fork multiple cities with their doomstack rather than attacking some obvious target, as well as advancing faster than they otherwise could. Likewise, dropping some roads in the middle of enemy territory means that maybe you can hit a target this turn that perhaps you otherwise couldn't, but also that the enemy will have a much easier time retaliating. So there's some interesting tradeoffs there.

What were you thinking of replacing it with?

[zitro1987]

I wouldn't want to lose the spell. It's a 'fun' twist on an existing spell, fits well with the realm, and can accommodate the races without engineers - including Nomads.

I think it'd be more appreciated if it has half the research cost. Otherwise, it's too easy to pass up for more urgent uncommon spells like flight (warships), aura of majesty (survival), vertigo (devastating on normal units), phantom beast (devastating on single-figure enemy units), all the many useful uncommon in other realms and so forth.

[Nelphine]

I definitely think enchant roads should stay in. To me its one of the iconic spells. Its already had a large speed Nerf compared to original, for good reason. However, the faster speed on offense is largely countered by the sheer amount of units AI get. I would much rather leave that difference in - humans have better units and faster units. But AI have units everywhere.

I'd reduce research cost, but leave casting cost. Actually, you could get super complicated. Double casting cost as well, and then reduce cost by, oh, 25 (maybe as high as 40) for every one of your cities on an affected square (NOT a connected square). This would specifically reduce a lot of the abuse potential, And generally make it hard to use efficiently, which would bring it back to your stated goal of primarily defensive, and even make it cheaper for people who do get it in a densely populated area and complain about the high cost.

[Seravy]

What were you thinking of replacing it with?

I have nothing specific in my mind.
Oh, I forgot one more thing, it's one of the two remaining spells in the game the AI cannot use at all...not that it needs to, Sorcery AI is already the most dangerous.
Reducing the research cost might be a good idea.

[sayke]

What were you thinking of replacing it with?

I have nothing specific in my mind.
Oh, I forgot one more thing, it's one of the two remaining spells in the game the AI cannot use at all...not that it needs to, Sorcery AI is already the most dangerous.
Reducing the research cost might be a good idea.

I say make it single-tile, costing 25 mana per tile! That's more expensive but still useful, and worth it just for avoiding the hassle of engineers...

[Nelphine]

Any thoughts on variable casting cost based on cities per my last post? Or is that undosblu code wise.