Huh. I can't imagine around year 5 to 8 having such a specific income that I NEED that 1 extra skill. Nor are my mana pools so low that I have to worry if I am going to miss 10 mana because I overestimated skill production.
And I still subscribe to max skill production at all times anyway (the only time I don't is if I need a minimal amount of mana as my mana production until 1410 or so is 80% through treasure.)
And my point about being lost is that if you only make 99 mana but you need 100, you still have 99. Same with skill production although you lose that 1 skill point for one turn.
But with hero overland skill if they give you 35, and you cast a spell that only needs 20, that 15 is gone. You don't get to use it the next turn.
Isn't that exactly the same as losing wizard skill? And, again: if the distinction is important to you just un-P your hero, step out of the city, look at the magic screen, and move the hero back?
It's not about 1 extra skill. It's about the decision of investing into skill at all, versus mana, when you already have a bunch of towers but you need to judge the mana income and skill expenditure of the incoming period. I seem to eat up all treasure mana much earlier than you. So for you the equivalent example would be after 1410, when mana becomes a necessity.
Except my rule is always: max skill, except for some amount for research and mana.
In the very early game (pre 1403) mana concerns can be specific enough to care about 1 or 2 mana; and going from 19 to 20 skill can actually matter depending what spells you know. So that early it's important to know exactly how much skill or mana you need.
In the late game, going from 173 to 174 mana will have absolutely no impact on my combats; therefore it will only affect my overland. And, it will only ever be a difference of 1 skill if I misjudge how much to spend on skill. Whereas, with your heroes, you can misjudge by the entire amount. (Yes I could move my heroes out of my capital. For me, it's MUCH easier to open the 'cities' window and count the number of cities with towers, which I can see by race and location, all shown on the cities tab. Sure I might be off by a tower or 2, but that only means I misjudge skill allocation by 14 or 28 which will never be enough to affect more than 1 skill point).
I don't understand what scenario there is where you'd need to make decisions further than that. Do you at some point just completely stop investing in skill, and that's why you want to know? Are you calculating whether to make mana to alchemize to buy more towers rather than spending on skill? I guess you could but then why not just find the required skill and never build towers at all before then; then stop at that skill until all your cities have towers; then max skill again. Each time you get a new city, stop skill until you have enough gold for the tower. No calculations are needed.
Total overland casting skill, including everything
and
Amount of the same that has not yet been spent this turn.
I suppose tapping into the dynamical number cannot actually be done, or can it? But if it could, the amount left after nothing can be instantly cast is important. Also at the beginning of turn it would tell you how much of this turn's skill was used to cast the spell that was completed at start of turn.
I could agree with that, although I wouldn't do the beginning of the turn thing - you can't look at it until after the spell is cast, unless you can't finish the spell this turn anyway in which case all your skill is going to it, or none if you cancel.
I'm getting a repeatable crash on 5.26b (well I unpacked 5.26b into the game directory, but the settings screen still says 5.26).
Just hit end turn which takes a while then wait for the first battle when you get attacked. Then click done on your units so the AI gets a turn and then it crashes every time.
Quote:Total overland casting skill, including everything
and
Amount of the same that has not yet been spent this turn.
Then you won't know your combat skill, nor how much of the skill is unavailable for instant casting.
But I agree, skill left for the turn should be visible somewhere too.
On the possibilities of implementation :
-"Skill left for the turn" is available information. It's actual data stored for the wizard, and can be accessed.
-"Skill from towers" or "Skill from nontower sources" or "SP cost of next skill" aren't. These would need to be calculated. As the former two are hard to calculate, and are already calculated inside the skill procedure so it would even introduce redundancy, going for the "SP cost" option would be best.
-There is no room on the Magic screen to display new info. I checked and I can't see a way to fit that in, unless we are ok with an ugly hack : displaying it in a red "error" type popup window if the player presses a key. This is possible because there is a cheat code that does absolutely nothing except displays a message. If the message is hacked to contain the information we want, it can work. (Note that in this case the cheat code would be change to a single unused key.)
-There is most definitely no room to add the coding for displaying new messages, and it's quite doubtful there is enough for the above hack, but not entirely impossible. The hard part is, we'd have a number and we'd need to convert it to string, then insert that string into the middle of the message. These are difficult and take up quite a bit of additional space.
Overall, the possibility to implement any of these is low, and it would be ugly.
Or, we can consider cutting the "casting:x", "researching:x" and "summon to:x" lines, or some of them to free up space both in code and on the screen. These are not important information.
Confirmed the crash happens. I'll investigate either now or tomorrow morning.
Edit : It's caused by the recent change of the AI on Wave of Despair. Weird, I made sure there is no division by zero.
...oh, a word to dw conversion is missing before a division. Probably that was the problem, if yes, I'll be able to upload the fix in 10 minutes.
I use researching: a fair bit. Not super important though. I think if those 3 lines casting: x is the least nportsnt. (I could see people forgetting what city their summoning circle was in, so I'd rather not cut summoning to: if possible. Of the 3 I'd say it's most important, even if I don't find it useful.)
Is "summoning to" really relevant when Summoning Circle costs zero?
If you can cast a summoning spell, you can also move the circle, if you can't, then, well, does it matter?
In worst case, you can still scroll through your cities, as it's a visible object in the city.
Speaking of researching, it would be so much nicer if instead of a spell name, it showed the necessary RP to complete the spell...
Quote:5.26c
-Arcane spells now follow the intended rules on when they appear for research.
-Fixed 5.23 bug : Game is crashing when an AI calculates Wave of Despair casting priority.
