5.61 Brainstorming

[Nelphine]

I agree with all of what you said in terms of what actually happens. I disagree on the perception of getting books and retorts. Those are treasures that do things nothing else in the game can, regardless of whether that actually helps you win or not. And whether it's subtle or not, the difference between 1-7 with advanced arcanus ai and (not including life barbarians) 1-3 with advanced myrran AI, is about +200%. That's 3 times as many books. That's noticeable enough to be confusing and discouraging.

I don't think the problem you're trying to solve is worth any discouragement. I think at worst the problem you're trying to solve results in what, one extra loss per 20 games, against people who are playing slightly above their level? Most of the time it's a lose  more problem not an actual problem, not enough to be a problem worth any discouragement or unclear game distribution.

[Seravy]

Wait what?


+200%?
The average for Arcanus is 4, and for Myrror it's 2. So the difference is +2 books, or you can say, +100% if you prefer it that way.

About the perception thing, idk. If the player is paying attention to where the books come from, maybe. If they look at it on the whole, not so much. I'd probably think "If I play on Arcanus I'm not finding much books because Myrror will be cleared out by the time I get there and my plane is swarming with players and the lairs have weak garrisons so the AI takes most of them here too. But if I play as Myrran there will be quite a few lairs remaining on Arcanus, while on my own plane...there are stronger monsters so the AI will be slower to get them and I get more there as well." Especially because my perception is biased : being Myrran I break towers earlier on average simply because my units are capable of doing it that much better and I have more resources to do so. Meaning I reach the other plane earlier so obviously there will be more remaining lairs. And this also applies to getting ahead of the AI in hunting lairs on my own plane btw. the AI takes most lairs by their summons, but human players do it by normal units or heroes. Being Myrran benefits on the latter.
Other players might just remember "yeah I found this many books when I was playing Myrran" without really noticing they came from the Arcanus lairs. Or just blame that on weird luck.  Yes, your logic was perfect but people won't think it through to that extent. "Myrran lets me find more books". They won't notice they are actually from Arcanus or from the fact they beat the lairs faster with Myrran units. They just notice they are, indeed, finding more books as expected. (Or maybe they do notice it's because of the better Myrran units. In fact they probably do and picked the retort for that reason in the first place. Probably not connecting it with the AI also being slower, but "draconians are good at hunting lairs" or "steam cannons kick ass" or "war trolls never die in lairs" is easy to understand.)

I'm not trying to encourage or discourage anything. I'm trying to make sure the Myrran player does not automatically result in a massively weaker "final boss" enemy, and thus, a huge perceived difference in difficulty.
The Myrran last boss is too powerful. The Arcanus last boss is too weak. So we take stuff from one and give stuff to the other.
I'm not doing this because I want to discourage Myrran. I'm doing it because I don't want to outright encourage picking it by letting it stay worth more than it costs.

You say double chance of books is too noticeable.
I say double chance to win the games is way more noticeable than that so it takes priority.

Or am I overrating Myrran? Maybe, but the community consensus was Myrran is worth more than what it costs so probably not. Or at least I'm not the only one. Unless I remember this wrong.

Ultimately, this is about perception but in a different area. "I don't need to fight the final boss or he is much easier" is a way bigger deal than books and whatnot. It's literally the single most relevant thing to winning the game. I think it far outweights anything else the Myrran retort does to your game currently.

Anyway, if, on the long term, lack of myrran books becomes an issue (how will we know?), altering the numbers so the difference is +1 and not +2 books is an option. That would mean rolling 1-6 on Arcanus and 1-4 on Myrror for example. Same if we notice the "Arcanus last boss" becomes too hard to beat. Although I can't imagine that happening, I mean, you can use draconian and dark elf units against crappy Arcanus races, how could that not be a win?

[Nelphine]

Honestly, I don't understand the entire argument about myrran military units mattering in the end game. By the time uncommon units are around, arcanud units (outside of heavy buffing) make literally no impact on the game, and the same thing for most myrran units (but a few stillmatter until certain uncommons or rares).

Military units are all about early game.

But you've always disagreed with me on that, so I accept it.


And it's +200% because advanced difficulty means the AI is so much slower, that the better military units of myrran races do matter for the AI for treasure hunting. So while none of the arcanus AI get anything, the myrran AI do get at least some, making it 4 vs somewhere between 1 and 2, so I rounded to the nearest number it's probably closer to +225% but that seemed more absurd to say than +200%.


You keep talking about breaking towers early. For the players were talking about, they've already been taught (when playing arcanus) not to break towers early. This change won't unteach that. They aren't going to break the towers early enough to get significant treasure. Anyone who does break the towers early as part of their strategy (especially to use military units effectively on arcanus before rares) is already good enough that this change won't stop them from winning. They're already correctly using the myrran retort. So this doesn't impact the arcanus final boss in any meaningful way.

Therefore, this only affects the myrran last boss. The myrran last boss gets most of its overpoweredness from being alone and building up units, and it gets the rest from having an empire that is as large as the human so the human can't use diplomacy to take on only half the other plane at one time. This change does nothing for either of those things. Therefore this change, while being a potential trap for new players as I've already described, does nothing for the problem (difficulty of 'final boss' when using myrran retort compared to without). 

Changing books to roughly be based on players on that plane makes sense. I don't think it's needed but at least it doesn't result in trap game design. Changing books to artificially favor arcanus, while it has balance implications, is so low on the snowball rating (which is what actually changes difficulty in this game), that it won't actually change victory conditions, while in the worst scenarios still has trap game design.


I don't think that trap will come up very often. I think the trap, despite being rare, will come up far far more often than it changing the victory conditions, particularly those based on an overly strong myrran last boss.

[Seravy]

In my experience, race matters a lot. Not so much on the human player's side, but on the AI's.

You need to conquer the AI's cities, and they're full of magicians, slingers, or stag beetles? easy.
Full of Warlocks, Nightmares, cannons and Golems? Expensive, slow and difficult.

You need to defend against the AI's 1000 stacks of units incoming in the final war?
If those are Arcanus units, it's often trivial, your garrisons can clear them up with a spell from you on turn 1 or two.
If Myrran? They are more durable, they'll live 4-5 turns so the AI gets to cast 5 spells on your city. Your defenses crumble, you lose buildings and the next combat you lose your city if you don't have spare troops.


And it's not just the units. Myrran races mean better economy in most cases. (Troll excluded)

Either way I believe despite the placement of books, a Myrran player will find more of them. Yes, Myrran AI has better units. Those better units are still not as good as the summons they have so it has minimal relevance. Only the AI's best stack or two will be relevant to clearing nodes, because only the stack's total value determines if it can or can't clear a lair. Meanwhile Myrran races excel at clearing lairs in ways only the human can use : Draconians fly, Trolls regenerate, Dwarves can kill most everything with enough cannons and so on. Yes, there are only half as much total on the plane. But the player will get most of them, which is not the case for an Arcanus start where the AI will get those. 
I rather be the first person to find those 1-3 books on my plane than the last who finds nothing left of the 1-7.

Obviously, this argument doesn't apply to games where you clear all lairs before the AI regardless of your plane but that's something only Sapher level players can do. And much less effectively than before due to all the nerfing, the days when you could use 3 wraithformed boats or 5 horsebowmen to clear the entire plane are gone.

...but in the end, these are just assumptions. We have to see it in practice and if necessary we can tweak the numbers.

[blackout]

Every six months or so I get the itch to play a game of MoM, but the problem always remains the same—save scumming.  Although I dislike doing it, it isn’t practical to play through any game of Master of Magic without reloading sometimes. 

You all know what I am talking about.  You load into a “few death knights” get your army slaughtered, (or maybe even barely win), and then reload the game to either try a few more times or decide to come back later with better units.

Part of this problem stems from heroes, which are one of my favorite parts of MoM.  I don’t mind as much losing a 9 stack of fully pumped slingers, or paladins, (maybe I mind losing most of my drakes), but I sure hate losing my good heroes (or heroes that *WILL* be good after a bit of exp and items). 

Think about even having a solid victory over a node, but losing that one champion that you were hoping to nurture up.  It stings, and at least for me, warrants a reload and either a retry or different strategic decision (like not attacking that particular foothold at that time). 

The problem comes to light when its only a matter of retrying things without consequence, and makes subsequent victories feel less like having achieved or conquered than just (for lack of a better word), brute forced my way to victory.  Of course the AI can still win, but neither outcome feels good.

 I will offer a few suggestions, and I am not saying these are the ‘right’ answers, but they are more in-line with what I as a player would like to see.

1.  Some sort of permanency or hardcore mode.  This would require the game difficulty to be neutered a lot.  No reloads and only 1 save (and auto saving over that 1 save after every battle).  But, with this comes the permanency of decisions.  Obviously, Caster of Magic is a bit overtuned for something like this—and if it isn’t then you know the game a little too well. 

2.  An easier way to bring back dead heroes.  Maybe it can be a cheaper, globally available spell that is resource light—so the main hinderance is a few turns and a very small amount of MP.  I still think this will result in a good deal of save-scumming, but a hard fought victory over a node with a few losses that can be recovered somewhat reasonably will mean SLIGHTLY less reloading.  I do think that even if there were a way to bring back dead heroes easier though that it might just result in more reloading for normal army losses…

I’m not a masochist.   I just like my games to feel rewarding, not like I can eventually plug my way through it.  I generally despise reloading, but as MoM goes, there is little reason not to do so.  If you guys can think of a better way to implement this great, this is just what I thought of after Mexican and a few beers. 

I rarely play MoM these days, but when I do I have a lot of fun until it comes to grind gears and then I feel that it turns into a reload fest.  Hey, maybe you all are better than me, and that’s fine, but this is where I would like to see the game go, and something that would really bring me to the table to play it as a full time game, instead of something that I just want to play because of nostalgia every 6 months.

Big shout to Seravy for the expansion and patches.  Love the work so far and without you we can safely say the game would be pretty dead at this point, so thank you.

[Seravy]

Thank you!

First of all, Caster of Magic was designed and balanced with the idea of "no reloads". You can beat it if you play on a difficulty level suitable for your knowledge of the game. (there is no such thing as "you know the game a bit too well", that means you should raise the difficulty.)
That ofc doesn't mean much by itself, maybe you could have won without reloading, or maybe not, but your problem seems to be that you're unwilling to accept losing certain units, mainly heroes. This isn't really a game problem, more like a self-control issue. Which brings us to the first answer :

1. Yes, a mode like that could be done but isn't practical. For two reasons. One, if you don't want to reload, you simply don't. There isn't really a need to tick a checkbox that says "I can't reload". You are basically the Game Master of your own game, if you make the rule "I'm not allowed to reload", then so shall it be. But enforcing it means you also can't reload for legitimate reasons, like curiosity - I sometimes reload and replay a battle to learn from it but still keep the FIRST outcome, not the best one. If you disallow reloading even outside of your main gameflow, you can't do that. And the second problem,  which mainly affects me : bugs. This is ultimately software that's still in development, and sometimes you need to reload and replay a turn or battle because an unexpected bug happens. Ofc, like I said, this mostly affects me, being the developer who tests the updates first before releasing them. But sometimes some bugs do slip through and then people might need to reload. Even more important, if there is no save file from prior the buggy turn, people who find a new bug can't upload that save file and then I can't find or fix the bug by reproducing the turn. (In fact the game creates a numbered autosave file for every turn played, unless you disable that option, so if anything happens, previous turns are available.)
...by the way, no matter what, players can reload if they really want to. All they need to do is make a copy of that "one save file allowed" and restore it when needed. It's their computer, their files, their authority.

2. Heroes are a high risk high reward strategy BY DESIGN. They are one of the most powerful ways to play, but also the most difficult.
You can play Life magic to get your heroes back, or keep them alive better, but even then there are ways that can kill heroes permanently, and that's intentional. There are also ways to counter pretty much everything that can kill heroes. Keeping valuable heroes away from any battle that might kill them is the first thing to learn.

Unfortunately the alternate option to this would be disappointingly weak heroes who never die but don't really do much either. I probably don't need to explain why it becomes a problem when the most powerful units in the game are also immortal. Especially if those units happen to be the kind the human player uses very well and the AI not so much. But weak heroes make no sense - not only does the word "hero" mean a really special, outstanding unit, but being the only unit type in the game with very limited availability, if they aren't even good, there is no point.

[blackout]

I understand about the debugging, makes total sense, especially now that we are a small player base.

But the “One, if you don't want to reload, you simply don't.”  This lacks the permanency or feeling of it. 

The best example I can give is playing Path of Exile or Diablo on Hardcore vs regular (non-hardcore).  Sure, a player can just play by his own set of rules, and not reload if he dies on regular game-mode, but there is a greater sense of danger and urgency when there is no reload.  It is something that is palpable physiologically.  When a player experiences the permanent loss (or almost) of a character, it changes the game.

Master of Magic will never have that with its limited game modes.  It is very much a different feel to gaming, one that just controlling an urge to reload will never satisfy.  I understand if it won’t be done—just wanted to toss my 2cents into an apparently decade long conversation and add  why I don’t play more than a few games a year (and what would make me play a lot more).

[Seravy]

It's still only a switch in the player's mind.
There is literally nothing preventing you from enabling the hardcore feature then make a backup of the game's save file and restore it whenever you want to anyway. (And you better make that backup because if the save file breaks for some reason, you'll need it. Like a power outage while saving or an unexpected game bug. I would never trust a game to overwrite my save files without my permission. That's a recipe for disaster.)
It's fine if the save isn't that valuable, but for a game as long as Diablo, or even MoM when it can still take 20-30 hours to win, no. I'm not going to risk losing tens or hundreds of hours of progress on an accident.

...and then there are misclicks. It's rare but I do reload if I didn't mean to do something and it caused me a loss I can't afford happening. This is a strategy game, not a real time action game where clicking wrong is part of the game and a legitimate reason for losing. For example, unintentionally clicking on an enemy city when you weren't trying to start a war with that player is something I wouldn't hesitate to reload. Same for hitting the auto button when I didn't want to, and the list could go on. Maybe it only happens once in 5 games total played, but losing 20 hours of progress on that, even once, is too much.
(btw it's a problem even in action games. Okay, so you're going to fight that big boss monster but a bee appears and stings your nose from the inside. Or your mouse stops working. Or windows decides it's a good time to update something and there is too much lag to control the game properly. Either way you lose in the game without actually being able to control your character properly or pause the game. Losing for that is sad but fair in a PVP or tournament setting but in long, time consuming single player games it's unacceptable.)

[Seravy]

Completed the troll test game.

Overall, I think they're fine. They worked really well in the mid and late game due to the decent, mass produced regenerating units, but they weren't that good early on - I lost entire stacks to overestimating the earlier units. But their strong mid and late game comes with medicore economy, their magic is not that bad but not great either (you get the amplifying tower and wizards' guild both) but their gold production is weak and you'll be using a lot of it. You need to focus a lot on military so your research also suffers. Conquering can keep you ahead anyway, but getting stalled likely means rapidly falling behind. I will still play a game using Life trolls next, but that's for after this version.

The AI did better on clearing out Myrran treasure than I expected - or maybe I didn't do it as well as expected. So I think I'm ok with allowing more Myrran books if the human is Myrran, but the Arcanus wizard needs to have their "extras". They were no match to my and my ally's superior Myrran units. So I think something like 3-5 picks on Arcanus and 1-(2+AI count) on Myrror might be fair. This does put the overall average pick amount at 7, 1 higher than otherwise, but considering all but one player "lost" a pick on Myrran at the beginning of the game, and we want the one person who did not to end up with more extra picks than normal, that much is acceptable, maybe even too few. This would be a separate branch in the code, if the human player is on Arcanus we get 1-(3+AI count) and 1-3, otherwise we get 3-5 and 1+(2+AI count) instead.
The Arcanus AI also did a very good job at clearing out lairs - it seems the weaker lair strength overall plays an even larger role than the human's ability to reach the plane earlier. So my assumptions of how the picks end up getting found were both wrong. Ofc this might just be caused by the race choices : The Myrran AI had dwarves and the Arcanus one had Barbarians. Both are the best on their plane for AI treasure hunting. Still I believe the summoned stacks play a major role in treasure, and had they started with a more magical race, they could have had a 9 doombat stack going through the lairs already.

I conclude the Arcanus final boss is indeed much weaker, even with extra books - not only could I reach them first, and even afford to declare war on them, but my troll units had an easy time conquering and holding AI territory, at least a lot easier than any Arcanus race could do. Again this might be slightly different with other races, I don't expect Beastmen and Draconian to do it so effectively.
However at least one thing was completely different, and that's diplomacy. When on Arcanus, making an Ally made minimal difference : You and your ally together wasn't any better than you, conquering all of Arcanus when facing the final boss. The ally ofc helps but they are more of a liability, as cities they will lose make the Myrran enemy more powerful. So it's more of an initial boost to your capacity to start the war and take advantage of their presence for gaining more during the first few turns, and if that's not enough you have a problem. When making a Myrran ally, this is completely different - the Arcanus player has no hope of stopping the hordes of powerful units from two players it seems so this becomes a "who conquers and holds more cities" race with your ally instead. One the AI is minimal or zero chance of winning, as the human player will ALWAYS be better at picking and prioritizing targets in a war. Not to mention the AI will likely raze half the cities they actually beat. This doesn't mean it's easy for the human player - holding Arcanus cities using spells with a 3x range isn't easy and if you lose them your ally will probably conquer those and not lose them again, but defending what you conquer is the basics of any war anyway.

Next up, I tested Counter Magic. It's hard to be objective about it but it indeed does feel a bit too powerful for its cost and rarity. Not only will it counter 5-6 enemy spells wasting that many of their turns, but the chance of countering is very high unless the enemy has a high casting skill and high rarity spells to use it on. If you're both still on uncommons, you can expect to counter their first 2-3 spells most of the time. Pair that with Sorcery's generic "no, you need one more spell to do something" effects like "flight means you need web to attack" or "invisibility forces you to use true sight" or "resist magic says you need to dispel first" and it becomes very powerful, you can be 100% sure the enemy will never be able to hurt your army with magic. Counter Magic was the spell I used on turn 1 in all of my major battles, no questions asked.
The question is how do we want to change it? We can either reduce the initial counter pool (back to the old 70 for example) or make successful counters cost more (20 instead of 10). I think the former is a better solution.

[Nelphine]

I'm glad your tests agreed with my thoughts on books on myrror.

For counter magic, what about base 50, but only -5 per success?

I'm thinking that damage over time spells are really designed to be weak, but last forever, so counter magic should be the same. Or, current base but -40, because it's meant to be a one shot ability.