I'm out for now

[Seravy]

Ouch.

Meanwhile I lost because everyone was peaceful. (my chaos wizard didn't use a single corruption even though I had one in my game) But I had no way to fight the troops 4 people produced all by myself and being peaceful they didn't lose a single unit to fighting each other so I had to...the only person being Maniacal was also charismatic so in the end they also were friends with everyone... (you can actually watch the game on youtube, here : http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=9065)

Albeit what made me give up in the end was the abnormal growth of the Myrran wizard (and them dumping units on me through astral gates), I could have otherwise still won.

[m59gar]

You know what, I think I've figured out the root of what's really wrong with all this nonsense: a total lack of borders or territory defense.

1: Allied and enemy units swarm all around the player's cities. There's nothing you can do to stop this.

2: Chaos wizards can corrupt / raise volcano without even having vision of the location with an actual unit. Once they've explored the square, you're screwed.

3: Because you can't stop units from swarming all over and seeing your empire, there's nothing you can do to stop Corruption spam.

4: Because you have no borders, any one of your cities could be attacked at any time with zero warning, meaning every single city must be fully 9stacked at all times.

I would really like it if negative spells required current vision by a nearby unit. Then I could actually do something about it over the long term.

Or, (i know this would probably be hard) if AIs did not go within 2 squares of a city unless they intended to attack it / were at war with you.

[Seravy]

I would really like it if negative spells required current vision by a nearby unit. Then I could actually do something about it over the long term.

That's against the game's rules though. Not even the human is required to have a unit there to cast raise volcano or famine. This actually IS the only part of the game where the AI is required to do scouting roughly the same way as a human would.

Or, (i know this would probably be hard) if AIs did not go within 2 squares of a city unless they intended to attack it / were at war with you.

This is impossible but the AI won't cast curses on you unless they are hostile = willing to attack once an opportunity arises.

1. True. Well for enemy units you can at least kill them if you are able to, but for allied you can't do anything.
2. This is the normal game rules for any city curse or terrain changing spell, it's not AI specific
3. Not true, you can banish the wizard or form a Wizard's Pact or Peace Treaty (you can get the latter by threatening a wizard successfully if you aren't actually at war)
4. Again, that's what Wizard's Pact and Peace Treaty are for.

I sort of regret making peaceful and lawful wizards unable to be hostile without a war declaration as some people seem to think that's normal. It's not, getting attacked or corruptioned if you do not have a treaty is normal. In the vanilla game there were no exceptions, even the peaceful would have done the same. (not that it mattered with all the war declaration bugs - you were at war with everyone all the time anyway.)

[crusader.mike]

Aggressive is fine. All you need to do is to have stronger military than them :-) Which means you need to grab lair/nodes as early as possible, pour resources into 1-2 cities to build even stronger army asap, take stronger lairs/nodes/etc. Think about it -- 1000 gold is 500 hammers in your prod city. How many turns your 10-pop city will take to produce these?

Now, if you have alchemy, 1000 gold and 600 mana reward for mid-tier dungeon is equal to 800 hammers (1000 hammers if your city has coal). This game (just like Civ) is smoke-and-mirroring you into "growing an empire", while in reality it is a road to a loss. All these investments (turns and hammers) you make to build some building will pay out only in distant future -- all this time (while waiting for this) you'll be weaker than if you simply traded and poured gold into 2 prod cities (that produce units that literally bring money/mana/artefacts and harm to AI). Also, don't forget that while you are waiting for investments to pay for themselves -- AI runs away because of all discounts he has (to compensate for it's stupidity).

One more (very important) thing -- taking a node:
- denies it to AI
- gives you huge bonus upfront: money + mana + artefact + expensive (often otherwise unobtainable) spell (saving on research cost and turn count)
- brings you from 20 power/turn to almost 200 (depending on combination of factors) -- this is 20-200 gold per turn, irrelevant of tax rate
- ... i.e. you could keep taxes at minimum and save on time and investment to deal with unrest

Now compare this to building a city from scratch -- how long you need to wait (and how many cities you need to build and develop) just to catch up with a node?

I am going to mention my spreadsheet again -- it shows true cost of some of these investments.

P.S. the difference from Civ is that in Civ you investments eventually pay themselves out (after many many turns) and you "catch up" with AI and have a satisfaction of crushing him with resources of your developed empire. In CoM this doesn't happen because AI has many bonuses -- it runs away. And if you remove these bonuses -- early game is too easy (and later part just doesn't happen because you'll wipe AI out).

[jsb]

What Mike says is unfortunately true from my experience as well. My question is if this is the current intention however. I know personally that I would prefer more of a economical game, balancing the cost of keeping armies and parties capable of taking out nodes with a necessity to invest in economy.

I simply don't enjoy cheesing the AI by node-hopping and razing their cities instead of capturing. I want to build an empire and have it go to war as an empire should with large armies of normal units backed up with summons and a hero here and there.

It's really difficult to build a balanced game with all the natural imbalances and components available in MoM, but lairs and nodes are for sure one of the main issues with pacing and changing the nature of the economy.

[Seravy]

I'd say an even greater reason for the above is territory.
If you are going to invest in economy, that will win you the game, if, and only if, your total amount of cities >= your enemy total amount of cities + the AI bonus - the AI stupidity.

The AI stupidity is hard to measure - I've tried to give them rules that make sense but it's not very detailed and ultimately the personality shines through - even if it's the most optimal to always start with production buildings, only perfectionist cares about doing that. I cannot even guesstimate how much resources building things in the wrong order wastes, but on the long them it probably isn't that significant - once you do have everything, it no longer matters which order you got them, the output is the same afterwards. So the AI bonus is more to compensate for their stupidity on actually using the troops they built and picking which ones to produce then for poor building order choices.

..I got sidetracked. So my point is, you need cities. Unlike civ where the building tree is near endless, in CoM you can reasonably expect to max out all your (early) cities by second half of midgame. At which point the only thing that matters is, how many of them you have. So to win through economy, you need to outsmart the AI at the settler game and build more outposts than they can (either by lucky starts or consistently blocking the path of AI settlers), then you need to ensure you don't get into war for a while (which largely depends on AI personality, so luck, unless you have Aura of Majesty, charismatic or can afford giving out a lot of tributes).
So it's not entirely impossible but it's the harder way to win. (and it's impossible on Master or Lunatic due to AI bonus. Also it only works if you are Myrran, or play Life books for Myrran access - otherwise there is one person who is guaranteed to have a larger territory, thus economy than you - but you can still beat the other three through economy.)

To use more classic terms, in this game playing Wide always wins - the building tree isn't long enough for playing Tall to have any meaning whatsoever. This is a consequence of having a faster paced game. T

Oh and one more thing. The person who does not spend on military wins the economy game because they can reinvest every hammer/gold while the others lose them through dead units in battles. Ultimately, staying at peace will win you the game if the others fight each other - even if you don't do economy better than the AI. But you need to be a master of diplomacy to get away with doing that (and you can't have a Chaotic wizard in your game. Everything else works, even Maniacal, but Chaotic is impossible).

It wasn't in this latest version but I have won games through peace...a year ago or two on high difficulty settings. It works but you need to grab lots of land through settlers, and it's recommended to have Charismatic or Aura of Majesty, or Life books for Planar Travel/Astral Gate. Shadow Demons can also help you get on the other plane but you need to find an untaken neutral for that.

Do note that even if playing a peaceful game - and especially then - taking nodes and lairs is your top priority, due to what the above post says. It's your only way to deny resources to the AI.

[crusader.mike]

Imho, the root problem with MoM and CoM is stupid AI. And you can't address this properly without rewriting from scratch.

Edit: I am not saying Seravy's work was pointless -- he did an amazing job rejuvenating game from my youth. I already sunk god knows how many hours into it. :-) My point was that while all these fixes and tweaks improve the game -- they won't "fix" it.

[Seravy]

Imho, the root problem with MoM and CoM is stupid AI. And you can't address this properly without rewriting from scratch.

Even then you likely can't, the game rules are too complex for an AI to to handle. Unless you have one of those supercomputers you heard about in news like the one that learned how to play Go.

[jsb]

While I am not disputing (nor am I currently in a position to be able to dispute) that it IS possible to win economically, it does feel like very suboptimal play going for economy rather than early conquest/nodes. I think this is what crusader.mike and Nelphine have been pointing out. 

In my current game using legitimately OP Dwarves and going for economy first, I only began to snowball after capturing lairs. I crushed one Myrran wizard and am sieging the second wizards capitol with superior troop numbers, have close to 20 Myrran cities, lots of religious power with Cult Leader but still my graphs are only equal that of the Arcanus wizards who both share the same plane. All of us are Death/Chaos btw.

Now, I am sure that I will win against AI with only equal power, but if I hadn't switched to full-on aggression and taken out the Myrran wizards fairly early (first one died May 1405) I would at most had a sliver of the power of the opposing wizards even though I am abusing the Dwarven racial ability pretty hard.

Cracking the second Myrran AI is slow going since she is Life/Nature using high resistance Dwarven units for defence and I would almost certainly be better off having killed her while she was defending with only Sprites or some such. When I first invaded her in 1406 she already had a dozen hammerhands and was crapping them out every turn out of four or five cities like there was no tomorrow. 

My invasion was most likely in the very nick of time for me to be able to win, but I would have preferred a fair mid-game instead where more spells and diverse units could have made for more varied encounters (now it is four stacks of 9 Steam Cannons picking off stray Hammerhands and waiting for my own critical mass of Hammerhands to build.

I haven't gotten to the point where I am knowledgeable enough to say with any certainty, but it feels like some mechanic that rewards early economic expansion but then limits linear growth from too many cities would give the best chances for games staying relevant into the late mid-game. Now it feels like it is decided very much in the first 40-80 turns.

Also, the gold and mana income from dungeons might be too much not to break the economy. If rewards were more spells and items perhaps? Or maybe even earning more spells books and retorts is actually preferable, giving a great incentive to dungeon-crawl but not an immediate early boost that inevitably snowballs you into next tier units and thus - more conquered lairs and so forth.

I'm sure this has been discussed ad nauseam though.

And yes, Deepmind would probably figure out the optimal play style given an afternoon.

[crusader.mike]

... on the other hand making game too balanced makes it bland, not interesting. Takes element of adventure and luck out of it. One of the reasons why MoM and MoO are immortal is that (unlike many those that were eaten by Time) they are not fair in very interesting ways -- allows you to extract an advantage out of various events and use it to defeat stronger opponent.