Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[mercy]

Garrison could be a new building in a city:
Then you would have extra helpers above the 9 fielded during city defense. When everybody falls, the garrisoned units come out with a top message informing the player  like when a spell was cast: "Garrisoned units entered the battle.."

[mercy]

City Names List Expanded?

Can the current city names list be put into a text file, so we can expand it with new proposals?

Like Shrike Abyssal, Shyba, Canrum, Therum, Sharjila, Shangri La, Sytau, Attican, Zaotus, etc..

Some of the amazing Mass Effect I-III. system names are just too good to be forgotten!

[Seravy]

City names will be in an INI file in CoM II. Players will be able to edit it to add their own names.

[prokolyo]

That's awesome. Always wanted to have different names... Would it be possible to change names in-game? Say you conquer a city and want to rename it?

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[massone]

Exactly. AIs always max the number of units in garrisons and players except them to, which means AIs will always have a weaker field army and that army gets deployed later. As AIs generally win through "strength in numbers" especially on medium difficulty levels, that actually matters even if the units aren't so great.

How about adjusting the AI garrison algorithm by difficulty? On medium to lower difficulties, the AI doesn't have enough bonuses to sustain huge quantities, so they just don't fill up past where they are now, and they only fill to "reinforcement available" levels at higher difficulty levels where they have sufficient bonuses to crank out massive armies regardless.

Alternatively, it could be conditional on cities reaching a certain threshold of pop/building value. Something like 1500 production worth of buildings, 15 pop, etc, with a special focus on the Fortress. (This is probably preferable. It's how I would do it as a player.)

That is a good idea. Unfortunately, it doesn't help melee garrisons at all, so I think the towers shooting the enemy would work better, although that has the downside of improving defenses without having units.

I'd say that any solution would ideally scale with improving units and number of units rather than a fixed boost. The walls right now work because they add a straight +3 shield, so they're always relevant. Unlimited ammo makes higher end ranged troops stronger. If you go with defensive towers, then perhaps they shoot at the attack power of the strongest available ranged unit in the city, with each tower requiring a unit, the second tower uses the second strongest unit's attack, and so on. So 3 towers would need 3 living ranged units to man. If there's no ranged unit available, it can default to a relatively weak ranged arrow attack that becomes irrelevant by late-game (something like 3-5 attack, 6-figure equivalent +1 to Hit for shooting from height).

Another possibility for helping out melee units is battle healing within city squares. Have a medic building that provides Regen 1 to all normal units in the city squares, or gives a free "Heal" spell every turn (Regen 1 is probably better as it scales with number of units, Heal is too powerful on a single unit). This regen doesn't necessarily have to revive the units at the end of battle. That could be another super-expensive 800 production building.

The premise is correct, the conclusion is not. If city fortrifications are destroyed, the player has to keep their stack in the city until they are rebuilt, slowing down the expansion. Or they can keep going in which case, "might as well be not yours" which isn't the same as razing it : it's the same as if it was still an enemy city. Big difference. Razing everything wins the game. Enemies reclaiming the cities loses it.
If fortifications are not destroyed, the stack can keep going : the fortrifications will defend the city along the minimal 1-2 units you bought and spells you cast in battle. So then the "raze and go" strategy will still work except without the razing part.

If the fortifications are powerful enough to make minimal units that effective, then that's true. But if they were designed to give a big boost only to full garrisons, and only a small one to small garrisons, then that wouldn't work, and destroying the city economy and adding rebellions would be more effective for forcing the conqueror to maintain a garrison/re-invest in the city.

[Seravy]

That's awesome. Always wanted to have different names... Would it be possible to change names in-game? Say you conquer a city and want to rename it?

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Yes, that feature is already included.

How about adjusting the AI garrison algorithm by difficulty? On medium to lower difficulties, the AI doesn't have enough bonuses to sustain huge quantities, so they just don't fill up past where they are now, and they only fill to "reinforcement available" levels at higher difficulty levels where they have sufficient bonuses to crank out massive armies regardless.

Then we are giving the player an advantage for defending their own cities that the AI cannot use and that's the last thing we want - the human player can already kill multiple AI stacks while defending easily (although I have no idea how that will or will not change with smarter AI in CoM II but we can worry about it when it does change and the AI starts to have a better than 10-30% win rate in their battles against well defended human cities.)

Anyway, stopping for a moment to think about it, I believe we are trying to fix something that works well enough. In almost all of my recent games I never even attacked the AI fortress because it wasn't worth it. Yes, I can defeat 1 stack of their best summons with 2 stacks of mine but those 2 stacks could otherwise do a lot more and do it without losing the entire first stack. Banishing a wizard isn't such a great advantage anymore to be worth the additional cost of attacking the most well defended enemy city in the game first.
"normal" cities are almost never worth sacrificing an entire stack of good units then sending another for the human player, so again, not an issue - on the contrary, it's how the AI wins 90% of city battles so it's a valuable feature. The AI can afford throwing away several stacks of units to conquer one city, not necessarily because that wins the game for them all the time, more because it stalls the player long enough that other AI can reach the levels of advantage where spending 3 stacks for a city is actually good enough to win as they have 6-8 stacks for each one of the human player. This effect will be even stronger with higher player counts, too.
I have almost never seen the AI attack my fortress with 2 or more powerful stack the same turn and even if I see something like that coming, I can stop those stacks by attacking them or blocking the way. So that also is a non-issue.

[massone]

How about adjusting the AI garrison algorithm by difficulty? On medium to lower difficulties, the AI doesn't have enough bonuses to sustain huge quantities, so they just don't fill up past where they are now, and they only fill to "reinforcement available" levels at higher difficulty levels where they have sufficient bonuses to crank out massive armies regardless.

Then we are giving the player an advantage for defending their own cities that the AI cannot use and that's the last thing we want - the human player can already kill multiple AI stacks while defending easily (although I have no idea how that will or will not change with smarter AI in CoM II but we can worry about it when it does change and the AI starts to have a better than 10-30% win rate in their battles against well defended human cities.)

Anyway, stopping for a moment to think about it, I believe we are trying to fix something that works well enough. In almost all of my recent games I never even attacked the AI fortress because it wasn't worth it. Yes, I can defeat 1 stack of their best summons with 2 stacks of mine but those 2 stacks could otherwise do a lot more and do it without losing the entire first stack. Banishing a wizard isn't such a great advantage anymore to be worth the additional cost of attacking the most well defended enemy city in the game first.
"normal" cities are almost never worth sacrificing an entire stack of good units then sending another for the human player, so again, not an issue - on the contrary, it's how the AI wins 90% of city battles so it's a valuable feature. The AI can afford throwing away several stacks of units to conquer one city, not necessarily because that wins the game for them all the time, more because it stalls the player long enough that other AI can reach the levels of advantage where spending 3 stacks for a city is actually good enough to win as they have 6-8 stacks for each one of the human player. This effect will be even stronger with higher player counts, too.
I have almost never seen the AI attack my fortress with 2 or more powerful stack the same turn and even if I see something like that coming, I can stop those stacks by attacking them or blocking the way. So that also is a non-issue.

Sniping fortresses is not a big problem in the game these days. I still do it to stop enemy Wizards' from overland casting and take their hero gear, though truthfully, I don't normally need to send multiple stacks either, one invincible stack is enough. It was more of a side comment I made, since it's theoretically still possible (I mean, I'd probably actually use it if I couldn't build sufficiently strong invincible stacks, in combination with the flying ship trick for moving 9-10 squares in one turn).

However, I believe the main discussion has been around more of a feature request to have more units deployable in battle, and more town fortifications. I think that's something worth considering on its own, if it can be done in a balanced way. Seems like a fair number of players would find some form of this appealing.

[Seravy]

True, but a new feature needs a reason to exist or at the very least shouldn't make the game worse.
I don't really see that reason, towns are already easy enough to defend for human players and while they are not that hard to take from AI players, holding them is the bottleneck. Fortrifications wouldn't make it harder to conquer AI cities - as it is typically done by a near-invincible doomstack (or solo hero) - but would make it easier to defend afterwards, the exact opposite of the intended effects.
It also is redundant with existing features and inferior to them. The defender has the advantage of the first turn, which is very significant thanks to ranged attacks and spellcasting. City defense spells exist and provide exactly the "fortification" effect we were disucussing - it is useless without units but becomes more and more useful the stronger the garrison. It also has has the advantage that it isn't trivial to pay for them - overland casting cost means it reduces the amount of casting power you can spend on producing additional doomstacks, while gold costs of buildings have no such effect.
...I feel this discussion already happened recently (maybe a year ago?) but I can't remember the details. Anyway, at the moment, I think fortrifications would have the opposite of the intended effect of helping out AI players.

However it does connect to another discussion from this thread - if we value city defense enchantments as a good feature helpful for the AI, then we should consider removing the ability to dispel those from Dispelling Wave and either add it to another realm as a new spell possibly in a higher tier (Life and Nature seems the best as they can't take advantage of it by enabling city curses as Sorcery but even keeping in Sorcery works if it's less accessible) or get rid of it entirely.

[massone]

True, but a new feature needs a reason to exist or at the very least shouldn't make the game worse.
I don't really see that reason, towns are already easy enough to defend for human players and while they are not that hard to take from AI players, holding them is the bottleneck. Fortrifications wouldn't make it harder to conquer AI cities - as it is typically done by a near-invincible doomstack (or solo hero) - but would make it easier to defend afterwards, the exact opposite of the intended effects.
It also is redundant with existing features and inferior to them. The defender has the advantage of the first turn, which is very significant thanks to ranged attacks and spellcasting. City defense spells exist and provide exactly the "fortification" effect we were disucussing - it is useless without units but becomes more and more useful the stronger the garrison. It also has has the advantage that it isn't trivial to pay for them - overland casting cost means it reduces the amount of casting power you can spend on producing additional doomstacks, while gold costs of buildings have no such effect.
...I feel this discussion already happened recently (maybe a year ago?) but I can't remember the details. Anyway, at the moment, I think fortrifications would have the opposite of the intended effect of helping out AI players.

However it does connect to another discussion from this thread - if we value city defense enchantments as a good feature helpful for the AI, then we should consider removing the ability to dispel those from Dispelling Wave and either add it to another realm as a new spell possibly in a higher tier (Life and Nature seems the best as they can't take advantage of it by enabling city curses as Sorcery but even keeping in Sorcery works if it's less accessible) or get rid of it entirely.

If the production cost of a building fortification is high enough, I think it is a serious trade off. I normally don't have enough excess gold (1800) to buy Amplifying Towers outright until late in the game when investing in Casting Skill has a worse return and I convert Power to gold to buy the Towers, and it takes like 15+ turns to build otherwise. If a fortification cost more than just 600 production, there's a real question of whether it's worth building at all, or sinking 1200 gold on it. Comparatively speaking, a spell with less than 500 casting cost is not really much of a trade off. You're losing out on only 1 Very Rare summon, and in fact, most defensive city enchantments cost way less than that (like <200). Personally, I find that defensive enchantments are easily spammable--and I do spam them everywhere when I have them. I would not spam a 600-prod building everywhere, when I typically only produce 500-800 gold profit a turn total by the mid-Rare stage of the game, and I need about half (or sometimes even 90% of it) to pay for mana upkeep which is around 200-400 by then.

Buildings also have the added benefit of being immune to Dispelling Wave in general. So we wouldn't have to make defense enchantments immune to Dispelling Wave to compensate. Conversely, the buildings are vulnerable to Chaos/Nature building-destruction spells and just walking over the city squares, so there's already existing counters to them.

Because of AI resource and prod. bonuses on higher difficulties, I think it would probably benefit them more than human players.

I also want to mention again that allowing for bigger reinforcement garrisons, the version which the AI assigns based on city value being over a certain threshold, doesn't seem to have any major drawback that I can think of. That's still an alternative option for fortifying high value towns.

For adding a city defense enchantment, I'm not particularly opposed to this either, since it does work. But do we really want to keep it limited to a specific realm? I think it would be better to add an option for all players. If not a building, then Arcane.

Also, an idea that sort of combines these. What about an enchantment that lets the wizard bring in reinforcements from another city mid-battle? Then garrisons don't need to get bigger, and using the reinforcements risks weakening the other city. We could even add a range limit on it so you can't just use reinforcements from anywhere.

[Seravy]

For adding a city defense enchantment, I'm not particularly opposed to this either, since it does work. But do we really want to keep it limited to a specific realm? I think it would be better to add an option for all players. If not a building, then Arcane.

I wasn't talking about adding anything. I was trying to imply the existing city defense spells do a good enough job and we are trying to fix a non-issue. Every realm except Life and Nature have strong city defense spells, and those two realms can build the best and most importantly, earliest unstoppable doomstacks (with buffs or regeneration) in which case not having good city defense options is better for game balance.

I also want to mention again that allowing for bigger reinforcement garrisons, the version which the AI assigns based on city value being over a certain threshold, doesn't seem to have any major drawback that I can think of. That's still an alternative option for fortifying high value towns.

Not having a drawback doesn't equal having a benefit. Unless there is a clear and significant benefit, there is always the drawback of having to spend time implementing the feature and this one isn't even trivial. It needs a major UI rework to be able to store the and show the garrison units.
As you suggested the AI not filling the spots on medium and below difficulty, there is no benefit there.
Which leaves high difficulty but on high difficulty, strategies that lose no units in battle dominate already. Those strategies will not be slowed down by additional AI garrisons, but will need to commit less forces on self-defense as those units will not be coming to attack them.

I really see nothing that would make this worth the extra work and risk of possibly making the game worse in a way we didn't think of.