Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[Slingers]

The AI should not do invalid attacks, but human players should be allowed to do mistakes and to shoot at immune units. If both melee and ranged attacks are possible, I would like option 5 best - ranged as a default and holding Shift to switch to melee occasionally.

[Cruel100]

Regarding combat attacks.

I'd like to get rid of the problem that units with no legal attack types end up attacking to deal no damage and receive a counterattack. This happens when you try to shoot at a target that has missile (or magic) immunity but is flying and you can't hit flying units either.
An obvious solution is to simply mark invalid attacks as invalid : basically if the unit can't shoot at the target due to immunity, the cursor switches to the red X and clicking does nothing.
However, this is not functionally equivalent. Shooting at the target will add suppression, even if it deals no damage, so shooting at the missile immune unit before attacking is a valid strategy which would disappear.

So I see several possible ways to resolve the problem :

1. We can change the rule to "Invalid ranged attacks (Missile or Magic immunity only) add no suppression". If the attack cannot reach or hurt the target, they won't get distracted by it so their ability to retaliate to melee attacks stays unaffected is a valid justification. In this case, marking the unit as an invalid target is the correct solution and no further action is necessary and obvious downside is losing an existing - but somewhat counter-intuitive and human player only - strategy.

2. Keep everything as is, but mark ranged attacks invalid when invalid melee would be available as the replacement. So you can shoot if you are at least 1 tile away from the enemy, otherwise you can't use either type of attack.

3. Get rid of the "pick melee instead" feature entirely. If ranged attacks are available, always use them, no matter how useless they are.

4. If both melee and ranged are available, open a menu where the player can select which one to use. Otherwise use whatever is available. Ranged on units with immunity count as available. The advantage here is the player also gets control of which attack to use if they otherwise would not, for example on a hero that has both a high melee and ranged attack. The downside is, player has to select what to do so it's slower and opens up a window for mistake (for example an enemy chaos spawn is already next to your row of archers. You'd never want to click "melee" by accident and clicking ranged for each archer is a pain.)

5. Always default to using the ranged attack if available, like 3, but holding Shift can force it to default to melee instead.

Door number 1, please.

[Seravy]

One more thing : Wall Crusher.

In the current game, Wall Crusher allows the unit to attack walls as though they were a unit, in addition to a chance of destroying a wall when the tile is being attacked (regardless of whether is also contains an enemy unit or not).

This is hard to deal with for the AI - in the current CoM the AI simple considers wall tiles with enemies on them as a "reachable" tile they can attack, but tiles without enemies cannot be handled that way, as "reachable" means you can walk into that tile, not that you can attack it.
While it can most likely be implemented with source code, it'd require a lot of special casing and exceptions, in other words, a lot of time and added risk for error. This game mechanic is also not very intuitive for human players.

So to simplify things, how about changing wall crusher do have this effect?

"This unit can walk through wall tiles or attack enemies behind them. When it does, the wall is destroyed."

This means the following improvements :
-No luck factor. You have wall crusher, then walls don't stop you. No "my army died to ranged attacks before the catapult was able to open the wall..." which doesn't really make much sense anyway. Obviously, this is a major buff to the ability in general, especially on ranged units.
-Intuitive. You can click on the other side of the wall and the unit will go there as if the wall never existed. It won't go around trying to enter through the gate or assume the tile is unreachable.
-Easy on the AI. It can pretend the wall doesn't exist, the exact same way as Noncorporeal, except this destroys the wall in the process which is something the AI does not have to care about.
- ...this by the way made me wonder. Does Wall Crusher work on my own walls, if I send the unit outside? If yes, that "feature" should probably be gone otherwise accidentally destroying your own walks when moving the unit becomes trivial.

[Seravy]

Next one : City wall defense.

Currently, they add defense after illusion or armor piercing was already applied, so those abilities have no effect on this bonus defense. It will be now possible to change the order and apply those abilities to city wall defense.
(Doom damage already ignored walls because it does not zero the defense stat, it skips the entire calculation.)

[Misiulo]

So I've got this idea; a building like a Mercenaries guild, a building which increases chances of getting an offer of mercenaries to hire; perhaps more than that. Decrease the cost? Allow you to select which type of unit you looking for?


And IMHO it would be really interesting to experiment with more faction-specific buildings overall.

[Misiulo]

Forgive me for replying myself, Seravy but you 've got a way of answering so fast I am afraid that if I edit my previous post, you might overlook it

Maybe THIS could be the solution to the big Halfling dilemma in COM II. They don't like war and soldiering. So thy have no barracks. but they hire mercenaries from other races instead!

[Seravy]

Colosseum adds fame and fame increases the chance for mercenaries, so this feature already exists.
Other than that if you want more or cheaper mercenaries, pick Charismatic and/or Famous.

[mercy]

One more thing : Wall Crusher.

In the current game, Wall Crusher allows the unit to attack walls as though they were a unit, in addition to a chance of destroying a wall when the tile is being attacked (regardless of whether is also contains an enemy unit or not).

[..]

So to simplify things, how about changing wall crusher do have this effect?

"This unit can walk through wall tiles or attack enemies behind them. When it does, the wall is destroyed."

Walls are fun, because units must go around or wait at the gate to attack. Flying units also should receive minuses if they attack or overcome defender bonuses if they are attacking units that are high on the wall and have height advantage.

Wall crushers can attack the wall. Other units cannot. Simple. No walking through. The entire wall crushing experience is based on the fun of demolition. The player should have the fun to SMASH the wall with a wall-crusher unit, not automatically walk into the wall and demolish it: what the heck use is a wall, when even a wall-crusher unit can walk right into it?

If you wanna walk into walls, then we should be able to select the command: RAM THE WALL

Ramming walls is even more fun, than just to stand there and slam - do repeated hits on the wall.

Also WALLs in COM2 should be of more than stone materials. Like Mithril, Adamantium, Iron reinforced walls, so a wall crusher should have problems with smashing advanced walls.

Wall crushing is fun, where the unit begins to BANG the wall and we are watching inside as the wall begins to crack and partially caves in, but the monster is still outside = like in a movie.   This  wall crushing  should be FUN.

Not some BTW: verbose text log message from the game in the spam folder: "Oh, by the way, you just walked thru the wall, but don't mind this message, its completely redundant. No one cared."

[MrBiscuits]

With wall crusher, ideally each piece of wall has a health that is gradually whittled away, so if you don't manage to destroy it on the first try then it's more likely to happen on the second go. The strongest units could do this faster than others (maybe have wall crusher 1,2,3 ability?).

Also walls should not regenerate in between multiple attacks on a city in the same turn.

Can catapults damage walls with their ranged attack? I'd never actually considered this.


It might be cool if giant units have an ability of "giant" that allows them to attack units over the top of the walls and ignore the wall defence (as well as crushing the wall, as they are trampling the wall as they attack). Also give them the ability to hit flying units.

Also unrelated is there any chance of increasing the walking speed of engineers to 2 or even 3? It's painful to get them from one side of the map to the other (or the other plane) when you've only got one city of a race that can produce them. Maybe it's necessary to limit them to 1 movement in the current version as they can build twice per turn, but that can be fixed in the new version.

My ideal solution would be to get rid of them and a city "buys" a road tile its production, with the cost increasing as you get further from the city. I realise that is probably not realistic though.

[Seravy]

Also unrelated is there any chance of increasing the walking speed of engineers to 2 or even 3?

Definitely not. That allows them to build multiple tiles of road per turn if the road is finished in a single turn - as building does not consume movement points, if it did, the engineers couldn't leave the tile and would waste a turn moving so each tile of road would take 1 turn longer to build.
We'd need to completely redesign road building if we want faster engineers, but I don't see why it's worth doing. Boats move them at a speed of 3 and I don't see the case of having to move them inside the continent over large distances with no shore nearby. Continents aren't that large, if you need to move a lot, you're on already the shore.

Cities buying roads would be nice but I think having to protect the engineer units from enemy attacks is an important part of the game so it's not good for this particular game.
In games with well defined borders where enemies cannot possibly be inside your territory, it would be the best.