Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!

[Nelphine]

I think the biggest thing I would add is that Mass production completely replaces regeneration and heroes. It negates doombolts, lightning bolts, and all the other high damage abilities like cracks call and wave of despair, and doombats or other such powerful turn 1 units.

This is actually what led me to strategic strength; I kept finding that if I relied to heavily on some super unit that any of the nasty damage spells could crush it. That is by design. And the solution? Throw huge amounts of cheap units at it. (I originally started with beastmen halberdiers and lizardmen javelineers as my ultimate gamewinning units).

Don't try to win the combat, try to win the war. My strategic strategy on lunatic is based on this; it also relies on strategic strength shenanigans, but the idea is that if I am building an entire stack worth of bezerkers every turn, then I can lose 1, or 2, or 4, or 8, every single battle, and it won't matter.

Ghoul strategies also rely on this - you're creating absolutely bucket loads of undead. The more units your enemy has, actually means.. the more units you have. You just roll straight through, and you keep summoning, summoning, summoning. But every battle, you may lose 1-3 ghouls; and you gain 9 undead units.

At higher tiers? Same thing. Summon like mad. This is why I consider overland casting skill to be king. If my enemy is strong enough that they can actually kill iron skin survival instinct gorgons, well, I need more then; and very few enemies can kill 9 iron skin survival instinct gorgons, so I'd better be sending replacements even before the first battle so that stack doesn't have to slow down.

Note that Mass Production to me isn't actually linked to any strategy - it led to Strategic Strength bezerkers, not the other way around. No matter what strategy I'm playing (all 5 realms, any combination, any race), I plan for mass production.

So for me the TWO strategies are:

Unstoppable units (which might include the ones you've listed, although there are others)

Mass units

And these are just so absolutely general strategies, that they literally cover the whole game.




The other comments: Air Elementals die fairly easily against things like bezerkers and gorgons - anything speed 3 with strong melee, and the ability to hit air; they don't even need some form of first strike, as most strong melee have plenty of health to absorb the air elemental attack. Draconian Halberdiers can do it (although speed 2 makes things trickier, but since I learned to do it with Beastmen Halberdiers, speed 2 is possible, just not recommended). Bring 9 in, air elementals run away to the ends of the earth, put a unit near all 4 corners, and have the other 5 fan out. Kill them. Even if you lose up to 4 units to spells because you're fighting a wizard, 5 of those units are plenty to kill air elementals (You can actually do it with less than 5, I think 3 is the minimum, although you MIGHT be able to do it with 2.. but anything less than 5 isn't recommended)

Encounter Zone Balance: As much as ranged units can chew up some things really easily, consider the flip side - you're hunting with 8 bowmen. I'm hunting with 4 bezerkers. Those sprites get completely mauled by my units, but the earth elementals are a lot trickier.

While the more common approach (particularly at first) is to use ranged units, melee units absolutely have their place in this game, including in treasure hunting. Their ability to counter almost all of the abilities you listed makes them incredibly useful.

[Impy]

Thank you for the quick and detailed replies Seravy and Nelphine.
I've got to give some of your strategies a try. There's a few there that I have't tried at all.

A lot of the workaround solutions listed are production related, which never really worked out for me. I always found that logistically I couldn't get enough units to a target area fast enough. Say I have five cities that can produce something big like Dragon Turtles. Each one is built in 2-5 turns depending on the city and it takes another 25 turns to get them all together and heading towards a target enemy city. During the siege I'd lose 7 of them to Crack Calls and Doom Bolts and other nastiness, sometimes I would lose all 9. In the meantime the AI has been moving around the map with a stack of 9 gargoyles taking out my smaller cities one by one which supported the production of Dragon Turtles. Now my food and gold supplies are shot and it takes me 6 turns to build Dragon Turtles because everyone is farming. I end up taking one city for every three that I lose and can't keep my nodes from being taken because I no longer have cities near them. I called those spells game stopping, because I could never finish a game where one of those had appeared, unless I had the specific answer to the problem in question.

Crack's Call - Merging also counters it.

Didn't know that one. Merging is a fairly late game effect to get however.

Spell Blast - I suggest reading the related posts on AI behavior. This spell is balanced by the AI having special rules on when and how they are allowed to use it, so you can get around that with some effort.

I understand that it's possible to play around, I just don't think it adds anything constructive to the game. It's also a very one sided spell where it's a powerful and disruptive effect for AI players but for human players it just means that you're getting a spell you'll never want to cast or even trade away instead of something powerful like Flight or Spell Lock.

Heal- the current beta has Arcane heal in it already, for heroes only. Summoned units are replaceable, they don't need it.

Awesome, that's a really welcome change. Caster54Beta3?

Lightning Bolt, Mystic Surge - yes, these are what Chaos is meant to use to have some sort of answer to high armor early units. Works as intended. (In general, chaos has the theme of "can't defend against it", so you need to rely on other ways to prevent losses : Regeneration or Raise Dead/Resurrection.)

I completely agree about having unblockable damage as the identity of Chaos. I just want to see the variance of the effect decreased somewhat. I play without saving or reloading, so high variance effects are the sorts of things that end up costing me entire games. I've had to abandon quite a few game sessions many hours in because I lost an irreplaceable hero to a lucky roll.

Life - Agreed it's the strongest for human (albeit I'm really bad at using early nowadays) and weakest for AI (but Altar of Peace and Sanctify should help there as well as the uncommon Stream of Life). However we definitely do not want to make it play the exact same as other realms, so no direct damage, no strong summons, and absolutely no resist or die. (Yes, I know in Magic the Gathering, white was the color that had by far the best destruction spells of all types, but I rather not duplicate that here. Let Chaos and Death do the slaughter and destruction...)

I think there might be something we can come up with that is both thematic to what Life magic in Caster of Magic does and disruptive to human players. Maybe a spell that prevents units from attacking or a reversed Word of Recall that targets enemy troops and sends them back to the owner's Summoning Circle. City buffs are certainly strong for AI players, but right clicking over a city and seeing three buffs on it just doesn't have the same psychological impact as having a Volcano ruin your only source of Mithril or having your Griffins get possessed and eat half your army, or even having your sprites get Webbed.

Encounter zone balance - Earth Elementals in particular are worth 200 each, while sprites are 80, I think the elementals are fine (the game does need something easy to hunt to make exploration a rewarding experience and 200 isn't that much) but sprites might work better as 100 or 120?

I think all ranged and caster enemies should be ranked higher. This includes the very powerful monsters like Storm Giants and Efreet also. I don't know how they're ranked currently, but to clear something like Dragons or Death Knights all you need is a hero with Merging or teleport and enough damage to kill one of them a turn. To clear Storm Giants you need an insane army and really big Sorcery spells or Astrologer. For me at least Earth Elementals are the second easiest thing to clear after Zombies, Skeletons have two moves and missile immunity so they're actually third.


Anyways, that's just my thoughts on potential changes. It's the game experience of one player, so it's quite possible that others do not have the same problems that I do since their approach to the game is radically different from my own. Nelphine's post and explanation of an alternative way to win does put a lot of my worries into perspective. I might just have to give mass Berserkers a try and then realize that I was worried over nothing.

[Nelphine]

Interestingly, I've used Sprites with Resist Elements/Focus Magic to clear Storm Giant nodes. It's not particularly efficient, so it was literally the last thing my sprites did and I lost most of them, but, everything can be overcome - and the human can choose the units to make that work. More on that, yes, ranged units are generally accounted for in their cost; but they also often have lower health (which is why sprites are cheaper than earth elementals; but consider the health difference, and the fact that sprites are only ~1/2 the cost of earth elementals is kind of crazy - thats how good the ranged attack is); and the AI also considers ranged units as being extra strong when it tries to decide whether it can attack something. So it's accounted for their too.

Also, recall that mass bezerkers has a lot of other foibles to it - it leads directly to strategic shenanigans (which we've had numerous large discussions on but basically comes down to, we can't really solve it, although there may be limited improvements we can still make but we haven't been able to agree on any more) AND it needs very particular play due to the low defense and resistance.

Instead, I would suggest mass in general. In your description you've stated 2-5 cities building dragon turtles. First off, I dislike dragon turtles - I would almost always use javelineers and halberdiers and never get an armorers guild, specifically for the mass production - always consider cost of the unit. Top tier is often not actually worth the extra cost. This applies to any race by the way; there's only two races I will regularly build armorer's guilds for, and I never use fantastic stables. Second, 2-5 cities is often not enough.


My bezerker games, I will generally always lose if I don't have at least 6 cities (I've done fewer, but not for many patches, so I'm not sure it's possible anymore), and I aim for 9-12 cities. And they never, ever stop building bezerkers (not true - I have to build a shrine and a colosseum at some point, but, I don't build those until i can buy them, and I never buy them in too many cities on the same turn, specifically so that I don't slow down bezerker production). Plus, my bezerker games are life, so I have inspirations on top of that. In general, by late-mid game (1410 or so? maybe 1412?) if I can't build a full stack in 2 turns, I wouldn't call it mass production. (Whether it's city built troops, or summons. Summons is a lot harder to get that level, but, I've always argued that overland skill is KING. Seravy has often stated my my casting skill levels aren't reasonable; any game where I've gone near a spell of mastery completion has usually had near 1000 overland casting skill; and I aim for 500+ casting overland casting skill regardless of the game - but casting skill is mass production. The AI wins by mass production, so, outproduce them. They can't choose effective things, you can. But they produce so many that they still randomly choose good things a LOT.)

[Seravy]

It's also a very one sided spell where it's a powerful and disruptive effect for AI players but for human players it just means that you're getting a spell you'll never want to cast

So you don't want to prevent the AI from casting Armageddon, Doomsday, Crusade, Suppress Magic, Time Stop, Spell of Mastery, all at once for the cost of having an uncommon and destroy half their very rare creatures before they even get summoned?
I...can't comprehend this, Spell Blast is probably in the top 5 spells for a human player to have.

Awesome, that's a really welcome change. Caster54Beta3?

Yes, that one.

I completely agree about having unblockable damage as the identity of Chaos. I just want to see the variance of the effect decreased somewhat. I play without saving or reloading, so high variance effects are the sorts of things that end up costing me entire games. I've had to abandon quite a few game sessions many hours in because I lost an irreplaceable hero to a lucky roll.

Raise Dead or Resurrection? As long as you win the battle you keep the items... I honestly don't think a common unit can survive a hero stack's attacks even if it rolls all the buffs in the entire game. It might be able to deal enough damage to kill a hero but the entire stack, I doubt. But I'll need to play more to be sure about this one, the spell is still kinda new, like a year old at best? So maybe I was just lucky. At the very least I don't remember losing important heroes to it.
Of course now that non-Life is more encouraged to use heroes, and they have no raise dead, it is a bit different, but I'd say non-Life heroes shouldn't really go near Chaos wizards already at the second half of their uncommons, as Heroic Heart doesn't have strong enough healing power to survive their better spells anyway. Unless, said heroes have Regeneration, of course.

I think there might be something we can come up with that is both thematic to what Life magic in Caster of Magic does and disruptive to human players.

We tried. We had a long brainstorming about designing a new Life spell for the empty spell slot recently, the thread should still be on the first page. I do remember your ideas from not the last but an older similar situation, and they were no good. Sending units home is just overpowered (it basically means you win the battle and conquer the city, or that the doomstack the AI spent half the game building is now garbage because it lost 3 units) and preventing attack is well, even more overpowered and also not AI friendly. The AI would still try to attack and fail, so their army would just get stuck. Which is why Spell Ward no longer does that sort of effect. There might have been more and better reasons why we didn't want to do these but this is what I can think of right now.

I don't know how they're ranked currently,

There should be a Magicedt.exe in the tools.zip file, if you start it, you'll see all the numbers. Just be sure you don't actually change them, as it saves automatically and instantly.

Or even better, here is the screenshot :
   
Do note while the high value monsters generally can be changed any way we want, the low value ones have special considerations for Sprites strategies and also special generating rules we added (like cost X being a threshold between strong and weak lair types.) so we need to be extra careful on changing those. (Earth Elementals in particular are a primary target for sprites, nerfing them is nerfing the whole strategy)
We agreed it's better if there are some good (easy) targets for human player as exploration needs to be a rewarding experience and also this ensures different types of strategies are all considered. (read, Earth Elementals are strong against melee. Or Sprites are weak against resist Elements. So every unit can be easy or hard to beat depending on what you have available. Even Storm giants can be easy if you have, for example, Shadow Demons or Magic Immunity or Invisible units, while normally they are absolutely hard to beat.)

If there is one thing I'd change it's probably Efreets, since then we added Mystic Surge and with that they can actually detect invisible units at a fairly high chance. So they are even harder now.

[Impy]

Tried playing the Beta today. Heroic Heart is a fantastic addition. I've made a build with 5 Chaos books and Heroes as my win condition, which would have been an impossible combination in 5.31. Heroic Heart works reasonably well as a crutch though I think it could be a couple points cheaper or scale with hero levels without becoming overpowered. Overall though, I think Heroic Heart is great even if it remains unchanged. It's a very build enabling spell. I feel as if I've got an extra 1-2 picks available for my Hero based strategies. 

I also got to make some Pandora's Box items which I haven't had a chance to do before since I always ran out of picks if I went with both Chaos and Artificer. Very fun and powerful, should probably not be available until Create Artifact, but as an Enchant Item mod I think there may be a strategy where you rush a Pandora's Box item and use it to clear neighboring neutrals.

Love the new magic menus too. The little orichalcum icons are also a nice touch.

Thanks for pointing me to the Beta. The new version's shaping up to be the best yet!

[Bahgtru]

Found a reproduceable crash. Propose peace to Tlaloc, and it crashes out of dosbox.
Tlaloc just came back (previous turn) from banishment, in case that matters.
Oh and I'm still in 5.3, wanted to finish the game before the swap. I don't recall any crash fix though.

[myk002]

Impy: yeah, Shin-bo (invisibility) with Pandora's box could be a killer combo.

I haven't tried it yet, but do you get twice the number of summons if you have two items with Pandora's Box? Will it summon monsters over the 9 unit limit?

[Bahgtru]

Found a reproduceable crash. Propose peace to Tlaloc, and it crashes out of dosbox.
Tlaloc just came back (previous turn) from banishment, in case that matters.
Oh and I'm still in 5.3, wanted to finish the game before the swap. I don't recall any crash fix though.

In the same game I've noticed that on arcanus, merlin has settled a continent with a single city. The continent has then been ignored. As the pesonalities are perfectionist and expansionist, I'm wondering whether the settling algorithm is working properly...

[Seravy]

It's the zero army strength bug, caused by division by zero. Was fixed in the newer versions already.

[Seravy]

Time to turn the beta into not beta!
Major changes this time so it's definitely not compatible with previous saves!

5.4
-Removed spell : Move Fortress
-New/Returning spell : Plane Shift. Arcane Rare, has the same effect as old Life Uncommon.
-The AI will use Plane Shift more often on higher difficulty levels.
-Planar Travel is removed from the game.
-Heroic Shout is removed from the game.
-New Arcane spell : Heroic Heart. Costs 18 MP, 440 RP. Heals 3 damage on a hero.
This spell aims at making heroes more playable for non-Life wizards. It's strictly worse than Healing but everyone gets it.
-Heroic Heart shows up as a common, Disenchant Area as an Uncommon, Plane Shift as a Rare in research order.
-Heroic Heart shows up as a common in treasure. Disjunction shows up in treasure as a Rare.
-Plane Shift, Summon Champion, do not show up in treasure. (Create Artifact was already disabled)
-AI prioritizes targeting heroes with healing spells over other units more.
-Fixed bug : Hostility reevaluation timer was broken
-Fixed bug : Hostility reevaluation timer resetting to 0 when Spell of Mastery was broken for nonhuman wizards casting it
-Offering a tribute to a wizard will result in hostility reevaluation at the start of their next turn, if the wizard was hostile.
-Slightly moved up Blood Lust on the AI research order.
-The Plane Shift ability on units (Shadow Demons) can only be used if the other plane has been discovered by opening a tower or researching the Plane Shift spell.
-Removed item power : Planar Travel
-New item power : Necromancy. Cost 1000, requires 5 Death books. At end of battle, dead nonhero friendly units raise as undead, up to 140 total cost per hero level. Note that already undead units cannot be raised again.
-Fixed Bug : Plane Shift allows movement onto a tile that contains an uncleared lair, node, or an ungarrisoned city.
-Evil Presence no longer disables power generated by religious buildings, instead it disables barracks, war college and alchemist's guild's ability to equip units with magic/mithril/adamantium/orihalcon equipment. Casting cost is raised to 180. RP cost lowered to 2500.
-Famine is renamed to Drought and now reduces maximum population by 6 and removes all production bonus effects instead of its old effect. Cities exceeding their maximum population this way lose 120 people per turn. Casting cost is raised to 150. RP cost lowered to 3000.
-Warp Node now halves power produced by the warped node, and the other half is transferred to the power income of the caster of Warp Node. Casting Cost is raised to 120. RP cost Raised to 4000.
-Cloud of Shadow RP cost lowered to 3500.
-The AI will now send spirits to meld warped nodes, and it's possible to meld warped nodes for the human player as well.
-Updated the AI research priorities for the 3 death curses that were changed.
-Updated AI overland spellcasting priorities for the 3 spells and Disenchant Area.
-The AI has a reduced chance to produce units in cities affected by Evil Presence.
-Bless no longer adds +5 defense against magical ranged attacks (but still applies against spells!)
-Rampaging monsters and raiders will not try to stall/hide/run if they are the attacker.
-Overland BGM chosen to be played no longer includes uncontacted wizards in the decision.
-The AI will not dispel their own Warp Node one their own node (Since it doesn't actually reduce power, they get both halves)
-Random generated items now use a weighted chance to pick the random item powers. It also adds a mechanism that guarantees high budget items alway get some useful abilities on them.
-The second and later copy of Divine Order now has halved effect.
-The AI will now be slightly more patient when assembling doomstacks and will keep going at it unless it has 7+ units with the last two being more than 12 tiles away. (Was 6 units and 8 tiles)
-When there are 3+1 wizards on planes, the plane having 1 wizard is not 20% smaller anymore, but the other is still 20% bigger. This might be subject to further change as necessary.
-Exorcise now costs 640 to research.
-New Life Uncommon spell : Sanctify. Unit enchantment for normal units. 960RP, Costs 70 MP. Enchanted unit has no gold maintenance and produces 3 power.
-The AI will prioritize targeting magical ranged units with Sanctify (magicans, shaman, etc)
-Heavenly Light now adds +1 to the unit's ranged/thrown/breath attack as well.
-Updated the unit tables in magic.exe so units should now have correct movement/scouting on turn 1.
-Updated hero MP levels and formulas.
-When a stack containing ships moves, the nonship units don't spend movement points even if they are not set to patrol.
-AI priority to cast Disenchant Area is now depending on personality and objective as well. Some wizards will not care about curses until they reach a certain amount, others might be trigger-happy to dispel even a single one.
Maniacal, Aggressive -20, Ruthless -70, Chaotic +40 or -40 changing periodically, Lawful +30, Peaceful 0
Pragmatist -20, Militarist and Theurgist 0, Perfectionist +40 and Expansionist -50.
Chaos Rift 12, Evil presence 10, Pestilence 30, Drought 15, Warp Node 8
Multiplier for Runemaster and AEther Binding applies before personality and objective
-Blur is now a 20% chance of blocking damage instead of 25%.