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I've been pretty successful at draining the AI in Hard, but not so much in Extreme. Possibly because wars don't last that long, ~20 turns with an extreme AI and I'm in need of accepting their peace offer. And usually they're starting with a very high number, like 8k (I've seen 20k mana). Seems like high difficulty nodes / treasure combined w/ AI military growth create a big hump in their mana / gold stockpile at some point.
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I don't necessarily want to lower global cost. It's a very intricate problem, that combines costs (both for what it takes away from the human players mama reserves and casting skill AND what is used for dispel priority), AI cheating bonuses (the opportunity cost to disjunction, or even to cast their own global is far lower than for the human player), AI casting priority, balance (we don't simply want human globals to last forever), retorts and spells (aether binding, specialist, runemaster, all need to have an important role), diplomacy, and fun (we want globals to be accessible).
I certainly will include it in my spell priority analysis, but its the kind of topic I want to hear from multiple people about. And I think what the system has already is good in most respects, so I don't simply want to change it on my own experiences.
April 27th, 2017, 22:57
(This post was last modified: April 27th, 2017, 23:00 by Nelphine.)
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Ugh. Strategic combat is too biased towards ranged. I've been thinking this is the case for a while, so I've finally really tested it. Ranged simply outperforms melee. Then again, im still horrible at estimating how important casting skill is. I need to actually run a spreadsheet for strategic combat damage. Bleh. I need to pick a dozen classic battles and predict what should happen, then see what does happen.
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Interesting, originally melee vastly outperformed ranged. Could it be that ranged turns are too many now instead of too few? We can easily change that I just need a good number. (currently it's 10, used to be 3)
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Agreed, but its why I want to do a spreadsheet and get some actual numbers. I'm running around right now on extreme with halfling spearmen and killing everything in the game. I have a feeling I could win impossible with this.
I figure when you only need 2 spellbooks and spearmen to crush extreme, that's probably a bad sign. (Of course I've actually used all 12 picks, which is another reason I want to run the numbers.)
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Spearmen on extreme? How does that work o_O
April 28th, 2017, 05:47
(This post was last modified: April 28th, 2017, 05:50 by Nelphine.)
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Focus magic spam. 8 halflimg spearmen with focus magic (and holy weapon, and alchemy retort, which is why I want to check my numbers) and a flying trireme are crushing everything in strategic combat. Since I'm up to 5 stacks of them in 1408 I'm literally crushing every lair, node, tower, and AI city/fortress/army I meet. (At this point they all have endurance as well. Also, I started out using swordsmen not spearmen, so that slowed me down a huge amount, but when I try it on impossible I won't waste time with swordsmen.)
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Fact : Holy Weapon and Alchemy has no effect on magical ranged (strategic or other) attacks, only on melee...tho not entirely sure that is true for Focus Magic, depends on the order of effects.
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Interesting. Then that's completely wasted.
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Doesn't ranged stay at 3 with Focus Magic regardless of worried? I think I'd rather try that with halfling shamans and Warlord.
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