Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread

[MrBiscuits]

I vote to stop the player casting the spell if it's not going to work (0% chance), when learning the game there are so many rules to first and this would help massively.
Even now I sometimes forget which effects resist magic helps with. Also on enemy heroes I sometimes miss a page of their enchantments, so waste spells targeting them.

Also have a mouse over box or side panel that gives you the % chance of success would be useful too.

[Cruel100]

I vote to stop the player casting the spell if it's not going to work (0% chance), when learning the game there are so many rules to first and this would help massively.
Even now I sometimes forget which effects resist magic helps with. Also on enemy heroes I sometimes miss a page of their enchantments, so waste spells targeting them.

Also have a mouse over box or side panel that gives you the % chance of success would be useful too.

Same here.

[Seravy]

Next : Wave of Despair. This currently ignores conditional "resistance against" effects (like Bless). This was a necessity as applying those would have been difficult in the original. It also does not make a defense roll and simply subtracts the resistance from the attack strength.

We can make this work "properly" in CoM II, and apply those effects and the defense roll, but do we want to?

I think it's a good idea to keep the "ignores conditional resistance bonus effects" part as they add up and 5 units with both spells (Bless, resist magic) is a massive 50 reduction, 20% of the damage potential of Wave by itself. As resistance isn't actually used for a resistance roll, conditional resistance not triggering can be justified.
Applying the defense roll instead of subtracting the amount directly is a trickier question. Doing so will increase the already fairly large spread of the damage output further. However, we can also argue that the intended protection method against the spell, using a full 9 units, reduces the damage well enough that this isn't very relevant - even poor rolls only result in a few points of damage taken in typical cases and on the other side, it makes the spell slightly less reliable, and thus less powerful, for death wizards. Whether that's necessary or not, hard to say, I think the spell has been nerfed enough that it's already fairly balanced.

[Seravy]

Made a summary of ideas already discussed and the current state of decisions about them to help keeping track of what's decided and what isn't : https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid724540

[MrBiscuits]

For race specific buildings, instead of each race having a completely new building, they could have a better version of the same building.
eg. For Dark Elves the Wizards Guild gives extra power and Barbarians version of barracks gives extra XP

I am against slowing down movement on certain terrains even more than it is currently, getting from A to B is currently the most time consuming part of the game.

[massone]

Next : Wave of Despair. This currently ignores conditional "resistance against" effects (like Bless). This was a necessity as applying those would have been difficult in the original. It also does not make a defense roll and simply subtracts the resistance from the attack strength.

We can make this work "properly" in CoM II, and apply those effects and the defense roll, but do we want to?

I think it's a good idea to keep the "ignores conditional resistance bonus effects" part as they add up and 5 units with both spells (Bless, resist magic) is a massive 50 reduction, 20% of the damage potential of Wave by itself. As resistance isn't actually used for a resistance roll, conditional resistance not triggering can be justified.

I don't think it's a good idea to keep the ignoring conditional. Resist magic in particular is a Sorcery realm spell, and Death is already very strong against that Realm because of Illusion Immunity. I don't see any particular reason the spell should ignore conditional bonuses. Life is somewhat strong against Death, but Bless was already nerfed and of questionable value now in my opinion. I can't justify Blessing every single unit in my garrisons. For example, if I had a stack of similar normal units, and I could only buff half with Bless--the Death wizard can just target the ones that don't have Bless with other spells like Syphon Life and Possession. So what's the point? Buffing the whole 9-stack is 35 * 9 = 315 MP, or 585 MP if you add resist magic on top. Doing that on every town is insanely inefficient, so I never bless except heroes and doomstacks.

Wave of Despair serves its purpose countering single-unit armies just as well even if the single unit has 5 or 10 more resistance. The spell was never meant to deal with larger armies. In fact, it was supposed to encourage them to attach to lone heroes, wasn't it? So players who are willing to sink the extra 585 MP into blessing/resist magic on other weak units to counter Wave of Despair means that the spell is serving its purpose well. The trade-off of enough MP to summon almost any Very Rare is more than enough reason to block 20-50% of Wave of Despair's damage on each unit.

[Seravy]

One problem with not ignoring conditional bonuses is that it means units with Charmed will have an extra 100 defense against the spell as that too is part of the "effective resistance against the spell" value.
So then we probably also need to special case the spell to only look at bless and resist magic but ignore Charmed.

[massone]

One problem with not ignoring conditional bonuses is that it means units with Charmed will have an extra 100 defense against the spell as that too is part of the "effective resistance against the spell" value.
So then we probably also need to special case the spell to only look at bless and resist magic but ignore Charmed.

I think that makes sense, as Wave of Despair doesn't actually do any resistance "rolls". Does Disintegrate also use the resistance value instead of the Charmed value? If not, maybe it should ignore Charmed as well to be consistent.

[Seravy]

Yes, Disintegrate is blocked by Charmed and most likely should not be.

[Misiulo]

There is plenty of minerals in the game but only one magical plant so far. The minerals increase Attack, Defense, Magical attack or Resistance.
How about a new bonus plant; for example, Mandrake granting +1 HP bonus to all units built in that city.