5.58 Brainstorming thread

[Seravy]

Probably a move taken back because they are not at war.
If you upload the save file I'll take a look, in theory attacks like that shouldn't even be attempted.

[merlinp]

Ok so it is probably exactly that but it looks weird from a player's perspective when they move over each turn. The same save file has this situation.

[Seravy]

Found the stack.
Movement definitely looks weird, the main action continent they should be moving towards is in the opposite direction so it's an attempted attack. But that stack doesn't seem to be strong enough to attack that city, and the wizard isn't hostile towards you.

Okay, found the problem. Your city has neutral troops in it. You don't see them because the city and your units default the view to your troops and normally two players can't be on the same tile. But if I move the city and the troops with the tweaker, the city has a naga and 2 phantom warriors in it.
Probably units that rampaged then weren't removed. I should have realized this earlier but leaving the monsters on the map doesn't automatically mean they get sent back to the source tile. The only happens if the battle uses up the 25 turns and they retreat. Otherwise, not removing them simply leaves them inside the city where they no longer do anything because they'll try to move to the tile they're already standing on.
So monsters not being removed should be restricted to only when the neutrals lose (retreat).

..also this is a very serious issue so I have to release an update to fix it immediately.

[merlinp]

I didn't see any obvious bugs with ships in that game and AI was able to transport troops using ships. Several times before I was doing very good in a similar game early with nagas but in this game this certainly wasn't the case. Monsters quite seriously hampered my earlier working strategy of settlers spam and offensive naga rush.

[Bahgtru]

I've been playing 2 games of MoM recently (your latest RC) and the game has never blue-screened my pc so far. With CoM that happens somewhat regularly. Completely unreproducible so that might well be statistical ...

Anyway I wanted to ask if you could try to fit some of the latest additions into a RC there?  I particularly felt the lack of:
- Z for next city
- the city screen with unrest? (unless I'm confused)
- AI not doing much even at impossible

On the other hand I've noticed that engineers are hackable there too. I don't know if you ever noticed but they move at half per move, probably a leftover of MoM to make them start road-building immediately, so they can do 2 tiles per turn as long as you click on them again once they've moved. While it'd be easy I guess to make them move at 1/move, I honestly feel that you should revert the change that lets them do roads immediately, a minimum of one turn per tile even while they're on a flying transport makes humans more on par with AIs.
I remember that you did that because of when they fail road-building, but playing around with the building order should fix that. Otherwise you could make all road-building happen outside of turns, on some inter-turn phase that already happens for something else... 

The immediate disembarking uses a workaround - the AI marks the unit (in the byte also used to mark units that already battled and cannot move) and direction of disembarking, and the execution of movement, if the stack reaches a destination and has this flag set, initiates a new movement with the same units, minus any transports, to the tile in the marked direction.
This doesn't mean the AI is capable of consecutive movements - so unfortunately, loading units then moving the transport can't happen, however the time ships are usually killed by the human is when they reach their shore, not when they are loaded so that's less of a problem. 

If this update does work correctly, it should have a large impact as intercepting and killing transports will be vastly more difficult, as well as coastal cities with low garrison becoming massively more vulnerable - overall this should greatly improve the AI's ability to be a threat to players in the early game from a separate continent and should lead towards garrisoning becoming more important.

Hey that's really great. Can that get into the MoM RC too eventually?

The idea that aired recently about sea monsters - summonable transports that happen only in seashore nodes - would make these monsters a lot more fun now

[Bahgtru]

Proposal to nerf flight

* Flight loses scouting 2 in overland
* Fliying units in combat only stay up till their strength lets them. Meaning, at turn = their melee power they are walking.

Reduce costs of sprites and draconians as needed.

I see where the idea is coming from, but it may nerf multi-figure ranged too much and a similar proposal got rejected in the past because flying is a defining game feature and should remain as powerful in 90%+ of cases.

My own wish is "flying units in combat only stay flying for X + 15, where X is their melee power"
*Why? This will barely affect gameplay as most flying units are tough and would finish battle before turn 25. 
*Will not nerf 'flying spell' as it typically targets advanced units.
*Will not nerf advanced flying range units much or at all (efreet, shadow demons)
*Will not nerf flying heroes

Then the nerf is non-existent?
Not exactly. Flying ranged units with poor melee (meaning, common summons and draconian) may be vulnerable for the last 4-8 turns. That may be enough to lose them against agile melee units, thus the exploitable neutral strategy is toned down a bit. This allows us to balance such units against enemy AI. For example: 
*a 4-figure sprite with 5 ranged, 2hp, and +1 ammo will have good strategic rating, deal a bit more damage, and no longer drop like flies
*The draconian bowmen could get their figures and ammo back and could be a tremendous asset early on. 
*Flying ranged units are more formidable against enemy AI, thus increasing enjoyment.


Edit: if melee + 15 does not work, a '20' turn should suffice

I like zitros idea.

I agree, another variant could be to make it depend on ammo just for flyers.

The idea is to make warlord and alchemy matter for draconians. Currently they're somewhat pointless, they speed up a bit the conquest of easy nodes - that don't matter anyway - but for many phantom beasts you still need to press D a lot of times, which is anyway stupid gameplay and which gives humans a big advantage compared with strategic.

Fliying units in combat only stay up till their strength lets them. Meaning, at turn = their melee power they are walking.

Flying nerf is on the rejected suggestion list.

There seems to be quite a consensus here for it... Where's that list? I can't find it, looking for any conversation surrounding flight.

[Seravy]

Rejected suggestions is a pinned thread : https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...p?tid=9029

...surprisingly I don't see flight on that list. Better fix that right now, I don't know where (maybe in sprites discussions), but it was definitely rejected.

[Seravy]

Everything that's not already included in MoM RC is not copy-paste compatible. If someone puts in the extra effort to resolve the conflicts and makes the improvements work, I'm happy to add them, but for me, normal MoM is not high enough priority.

AI improvements however are entirely different - as CoM uses different game rules, spells and other stuff, the actual decision the AI needs to make is different so in most cases it needs completely new AI code. For the few cases that don't, those improvements were already comped to the RC where it was compatible.

The idea that aired recently about sea monsters - summonable transports that happen only in seashore nodes

Neutrals attack cities. Sea monsters can't. That both defeats the purpose of the monsters and isn't compatible with the current neutral movement system.

The emulated game can't cause a blue screen - it's not running directly on your computer. Blue screens can only be caused by programs you run directly, for example Dosbox itself, but it's way more likely to be an unrelated problem.

[merlinp]

The idea that aired recently about sea monsters - summonable transports that happen only in seashore nodes

Neutrals attack cities. Sea monsters can't. That both defeats the purpose of the monsters and isn't compatible with the current neutral movement system.

What I originally had in mind with the sea monsters idea was them attacking sea fearing units. Something to make it little riskier to send that lone settlers unit to the other end of the world or to pose some risk to that naga summoned on turn 0 that picks most of the neutral cities.

[Seravy]

Back to the thrown/first strike thing because eventually a decision will be necessary to be made.

How much it improves the AI is hard to determine so maybe we should try a different approach...

Which is more fun to play? The current system or the suggested new one?
On one side the current system provides an easy to use and highly rewarding strategy for the human player - anyone who bothers to read what the abilities do will realize it benefits them to be on offense with, or against these abilities. People enjoy being smarter than the AI and winning. This will generally make the game more enjoyable for the "average" player.
On the other side, one can argue this is far too easy to find out, detracting from the satisfaction (beating a dumb enemy is less fun), and in 90% of the cases people who don't know about it will still take the correct move because the AI plays into that by moving the units closer - if one almost always ends up taking the right move anyway, it's questionable whether that really contributes to the enjoyment of the game. In fact it might be the opposite, people who don't realize how this works but get used to winning these types of battles might get angry when for some reason the computer does get to be on the offense (like, terrain slowing combat movement) and wins the same thing the human is already used to win 100% of the time. Overall the new system might be more suitable to anyone who does not enjoy beating an obviously dumb enemy.

I feel the second is more appropriate for the goals of the mod (hard to beat, smart AI with low resource advantage) but might be an overkill. The game is already very hard for the "average" players and the AI resource advantage is low - there isn't really much room for reducing it further on the lower levels of difficulty.

Another different viewpoint : While we don't know exactly how much the change influences the AI (or human), we do know what gets stronger and what does not. Stronger Hell Hounds and Nagas mean stronger early game for the two realms that are supposed to be distinctly bad at that. Stronger Draconians and Barbarians, both races are more on the "above average" side already. Great Drakes and Hydras are not that amazing but still more than enough to be gamewinning monsters for at least human players, but often enough even for the AI. They are chaos creatures, they don't even need to win the battles themselves. If they buy enough time to cast combat spells, or on a larger scale, to cast global spells of mass destruction, that's plenty. Sky Drakes are obviously top tier due to their magic immunity. So overall, from a game balance perspective, making these units better is probably not a great move. The new system also improves halberdiers, cavalry and a few other units, but in their case the improvement is much smaller - being able to strike first instead of simultaneously isn't as big a deal as being able to use a thrown/breath attack that would otherwise not happen at all. The former "only" reduces retaliation damage but the latter also increases damage dealt at the same time.