I'm out for now

[Nelphine]

This is about what I expected.

[m59gar]

Grr just started another promising game and oh look, Maniacal Militarist and Maniacal Theurgist. One of them is Seravy and keeps declaring war on me immediately.
 LOL

ok maybe what I'm looking for is something else. Is there a text file or something I can edit to simply remove Maniacal from the game? I am honestly astounded that 95% of all wizards are Maniacal.

[Seravy]

lol
You seem to have like, ultra bad luck or something. I had two peaceful 1 chaotic and 1 ruthless in my game.
If you download the tweaker you can change enemy personalities with it.

But if it's war declarations and not random attacks, there should be more to it than just the personality. I suggest reading http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Need_for_War ,then you can tell apart the various reasons for declaring war, and can try to avoid some of them. (note that CoM generally uses formulas that are the same but have numbers more favorable to the human player than what's in the wiki since a few recent updates.)

Also, at least Seravy is...usually Nature/Life, so no volcanoes or corruptions. Usually.

[zitro1987]

In the old system:
3 MP for 1 SP and 1 RP. This is how you spend your income if you are actively using your spells instead of ignoring them. If you aren't, you can switch over to 0 MP, 0 SP, 5 RP. So you can raise your research speed to 500% the "normal". That's wrong.

However, if it's 3 MP, 1 SP, 4 RP then you can do 0 MP, 0 SP, 8 RP which raises your research speed to 200%. That is fair.

The game isn't slower, UNLESS you have been abusing the 500% research in most of your games to begin with. That's not what the research slider is meant for, but it ended up working that way unfortunately. We've raised power income from the vanilla game to roughly the triple. But we didn't raise research cost and research producing buildings along with that so the balance broke over time.


In the vanilla game you had
Library 2, Sage's Guild 3, University 5, Wizard's Guild 8 RP for a total of 18/city.
Shrine 1, Temple 2, Parthenon 3, Cathedral 4 for 10 power/city.

In the mod you had (before change)
Library 2, Sage's Guild 9, University 5 RP, Wizard's Guild 3 RP for a total of 19 RP.
Shrine 2, Parthenon 4, Cathedral 6, Wizard's Guild 10 power for a total of 22 power. (and roughly twice as good nodes, etc)

So power to research ratios broke, the players had 2-3 times as much free power for the same amount of base research and research costs. But players need the free power to be able to have enough to use their spells. This isn't the vanilla game where "and now I summon 1 creature and that wins" was the norm of using overland spells. You need many. Even though the cost of spells is the same, the design goal on how many the player is supposed to be using increased greatly. But if the cost of that, and the cost of research is not evenly matched, then research is vastly superior to using the spells. So the research has to be higher along with it.

I see, it increases the overall effectiveness of 'skill' and reduces the effectiveness of depending entirely on gold and treasure, requiring a bit more usage of using power for mana. It may accidentally make alchemist less overpowered, unless planned. Maybe I've been playing your game wrong the whole time - I didn't emphasize research THAT much.
*It'd be really cool if some of the treasure is not just gold or mana, but some kind of 1-turn 'power' boost, impacting SP or RP (or mana).

Thanks for in-depth the explanation, I can now start seeing the reasoning behind it, even if it feels so drastic in one update and clearly depends on more powerful early buildings and possibly a +2 power boost to wizard's guild.

[Seravy]

but some kind of 1-turn 'power' boost, impacting SP or RP (or mana)

Finding spells is a perfectly good replacement of finding RP I think.
Finding SP would be nice but close to impossible to implement.

[crusader.mike]

Yea but then people will come with "Chaos sucks, full of useless spells, look at Corruption, Raise Volcano etc"...had that for Death and Chaos both. It's that people want to always be on the good end of the di...errr spells.

I think biggest problem people have is that you cannot retaliate to AI in the same kind and volume -- simply because it is usually ahead of player in casting capacity (that is casting skill multiplied by whatever bonus AI has) and mana reserves. 

Imho, there is no time to "dispel that nasty enchantment" -- time and resources you spent doing won't put you back to square one, it'll put you back to square -5. Because AI produces faster than you. On anything above Normal you can get ahead of AI only by actively harming him, which means some sort of blitzkrieg strategy is a must (identify city to build out, build it out using other cities as cash cows, pump units as fast as you can, get max benefit from them asap). you simply can't "turtle up and develop". And on normal and below AI's stupidity sticks out so much game stops being fun too.

This is very different from what vanilla MoM was and people end up with dissonance in expectations.

[Seravy]

Well, vanilla MoM AI has even more resources, but even the most curse trigger happy wizards used them like once in a blue moon so it didn't matter.

If you consider the AI is required to use all types of spells while the human can go "all I want is to use this city curse every turn", the human still has a greater output of city curses overall, if they really want to go for it. (Unless the AI is far ahead in territory as well, like being the lone Myrran wizard)

[Suriname]

Whatever the reason, playing against more aggressive personality AIs is more difficult: you have a worse chance to enter in pacts and alliances and therefore a higher one to be at war when you can't afford it - multiple, too early, etc.

Why not make this a feature - by making the aggressivity rolls depend on difficulty level? And to balance this, lowering AI bonus across the difficulties somewhat. More aggressivity makes the game more difficult already.

[Seravy]

Most diplomacy rolls (treaties, war, AI alliances and peace etc) already have a difficulty based component.

[Suriname]

I'm speaking of the wizard generation before the match.