Caster of Magic II Game balance brainstorming.

[roarmalf]

 I dare say Stone Giant isn't much worse than Gorgons considering Gorgons are slow and easy to kite but the giants can shoot and have better armor and resistance.

Stone Giant is arguably the best summon (for its cost) in the game, it's relatively cheap, versatile, hardy, and has low maintenance. I often end up with with only a few very rare summon creatures actually summoned with Nature because mass Stone Giants is usually good enough, comes online much earlier, and costs less. 


I think Volcano at +3 makes it a worthwhile spell for the human player, which is a good thing. I haven't had a city terrorized with it by the AI yet, but that would certainly make the game less enjoyable, but that's an AI issue rather than a balancing issue of raise volcano IMHO.

[massone]

In theory the AI formulas for casting curses and targeting volcanoes should be the same. The only change is, the AI knows the difference between different types of ores and targets the better one first. They shouldn't concentrate the spell on one city, if they do that's either a bug or a special circumstance, like it being the only city they scouted so there is nothing else to target. If it is a bug, I will fix it but for that I need more information.

They had seen 4 of my cities. It happened in the same file I provided before for the Chaos Spawns. There are 5 volcanos on my klackon city tiles, and 2 volcanos + 2 corruption on the barbarian town south of it. For the Barbarian town, that actually already covered all the available tiles because it's in an awkward coastal spot. The AI did these using 1 turn each. There's volcanos in the two other cities south of those two as well, and the only reason they haven't fully bombed them is that there's a lot of rivers there, and it looks like they're using a strategy similar to what I would be using, targeting just the grasslands, except I wouldn't bother with 25 pop cities, I'd target only the lower cap ones because the impact on cities with rivers is negligible.

Considering that they've bombed all the visible grasslands tile, it could be argued that it isn't really targeting, just spamming it everywhere. The reason I feel that they could be targeting is that each turn seems to focus on one city with several consecutive casts before moving on to the next.

-The economy effect on Volcanoes is fairly balanced. It's definitely not bad but not great either, and generally only worth it if you are not fighting anyone, otherwise you'll need to cast summoning spells, walls of fire, or unit buffs instead. 

It certainly makes Sanctify look worthless. Though I'd say Sanctify is worthless anyways, I've never casted it, so that may be discussed as a separate issue.

-The "curse" effect is bottom tier. You need to cast the spell 21 times to cover a city entirely which costs 1050 mana AND it doesn't work on a whole lot of terrain types that produce high food. Add that to the fact curses are rarely a good strategy for the human player and the AI is restricted in their usage by their personality, diplomacy, and scouting, none of which applies to the majority of non-curse spells in the game.

I fully agree that curses are bad in the hands of player in general, but don't think that volcanos are bottom tier. There is no reason to cover an entire city when Drought only reduces max pop by 6. You can easily bring down 15 pop cities to under 10 with 4 volcanos targeting grasslands, which is already just as good as Drought. There's no need to volcano mountains, or usually not even swamps, hills, and maybe not even forests unless the city is of particular strategic significance.

-Reducing maximal population does nothing to a city that already reached that population. You need either Doomsday or Drought in play for the population to naturally shrink, otherwise the city needs to be unable to feed itself which almost never happens. (buildings produce enough food for 8 units of population and then you get overfarming which allows you 1 food per farmer even if there is no actual food on the map.)

But natural shrinking doesn't mean much either at the rates they go at when they're so easily dispelled. You have an 80% chance to dispel them with Aether Binding for the same mana cost, and 60% without it, by spamming 50 MP casts. Without Aether Binding, the curser might win in a casting skill contest, but that's still a bad strategy because unless they're the only opponent left, the curser and victim are literally wasting mana accomplishing nothing while competitors get stronger. Worse yet, it's slow enough that if you have Consecration or Spell Ward in the spellbook, you could just rush research those and ignore the curses until you have the permanent counter. Volcanos are irreversible/unblockable except for Nature Wizards.

-It's powerful at countering ores which is intentional. It reduces the luck factor of starting near good ores and raises the relevance of diplomacy and scouting denial which are the two main ways to prevent Raise Volcano.

Maybe so but it's just not fun losing the only Adamantium or Orihalcon on Arcanus, especially if you had to fight hard to conquer it instead of starting with it, or if you planned specific racial settlers/settlement squares based on it and then invested 30+ turns on that city or two hoping for the payout and they destroy it so easily. Nobody wants to be forced to pay tribute, scouting denial is hard unless you have a big movement or quantity advantage, and banishing them just because of this is backwards because your cities are already hit long before you can do that.

Edit : If you still believe Volcanos are too powerful, prove it by playing an at least Expert difficulty game that you win by spamming volcanoes.

I don't believe they're too strong, certainly not enough to be game-winning on its own. I believe they're unbalanced compared to other spells particularly at the time when they become available, and have no positive impact on gameplay, only negative ones. It could be argued that the problem is that Sanctify and the other curses are too weak. In general, I believe curses are bad, and only usable by AI to irritate the player, but when used by AI, volcanos are by far the most unfun mechanic because there is nothing you can do about it.

[Seravy]

They had seen 4 of my cities. It happened in the same file I provided before for the Chaos Spawns. There are 5 volcanos on my klackon city tiles, and 2 volcanos + 2 corruption on the barbarian town south of it. For the Barbarian town, that actually already covered all the available tiles because it's in an awkward coastal spot. The AI did these using 1 turn each. There's volcanos in the two other cities south of those two as well, and the only reason they haven't fully bombed them is that there's a lot of rivers there, and it looks like they're using a strategy similar to what I would be using, targeting just the grasslands, except I wouldn't bother with 25 pop cities, I'd target only the lower cap ones because the impact on cities with rivers is negligible.

Well, both wizards you're at war with are Ruthless Narcissists. Both that personality and objective makes them move likely to use curses. They don't seem to have the books to make other curses available so naturally, they end up using Volcanoes.

(in fact we moved every other uncommon curse to rare : Drain Power, Spell Blast, and Fire Storm. So while on the upside this means less bonus curse priority for knowing multiple different curse types, it also means if they do want to cast a curse, it can only be the volcano or corruption.)

So that explains why they use the spell this often.
As for why those tiles, I looked at the code and the city value is added to the total priority. I'm not sure if that was the same in CoM I or not for this particular spell, but curses in general pick your most valuable city first, if all other factors of priority are equal.
For Raise Volcano specifically, it's 8 priority for each 1/4 units of terrain food, and 1 priority for each 1000 population or 1 building.
So basically, unless there is a huge difference between city sizes, it'll always target the higher food tile, as 1 food = 32 buildings + population, but if the food values are equal then it picks the city with higher buildings+population.

It's a bit questionable to use city value as volcano is actually less useful on larger population cities that already reached or exceeded their population cap, but those cities tend to be worth more for military production so I'm leaning towards it being the correct strategy.

If we can agree that Volcano is not too powerful then we can start focusing on the real complaint, that it's not fun and/or a bad strategy for the AI. For "Not fun", I believe that's what a Chaos spell that bring destruction to your land should be. And that's exactly what a Maniacal or Ruthless enemy should be doing as well. Unfortunately, enemy players will do things to you that are not fun if they are evil people. There is a game option for those who don't like that which makes the AI ignore the player entirely until provoked but that's the most I can think of to avoid this issue. I don't remember the last time a volcano annoyed me. The damage to my city economy is a joke compared to the rare tier curses and is generally much less than what I gain by conquering new cities so Volcanoes are only a pain if I'm stalled and already on the path of losing the game. As for the ores, losing them does hurt but only if you invested into the strategy heavily which is a mistake against a potentially hostile Chaos wizard. I usually get away with "This mithril will be destroyed within the next 12 turns so let's ignore it." - that said this only applies to 4 AI games. It's too early to tell how that works in 14 player games, it might be far too difficulty to ever use any ore because there always are Chaos wizards among that many players. But that really depends on how the diplomacy works with high player counts, which we need to test anyway. If it's so likely to get into wars with enough AI players that the ores are inevitable destroyed every single game then we have a much greater problem because the AI shouldn't spam war on the human player, it's not possible to win when fighting 4+ opponents at the same time.
Either way, if you get your ores regularly destroyed in a way that hurts, that is no different from losing your armies to Great Unsummoning or Final Wave. It just means you based your strategy around the wrong thing.

As the AI almost entirely bases their Raise Volcano spellcasting on the roleplaying and diplomacy aspect, whether it's a good or bad strategy for them is not relevant - the AI does not use the spell as part of a strategy and unlike other curses, Volcano pays for itself thanks to the AI difficulty modifiers so at the very least it can't be bad for them. (Other curses definitely can though, but at least those are rare and by then the player counts should, in theory, get reduced making it somewhat less bad than if there were still many players. This is one of the many reasons why we do want the AI players to start killing each other at late uncommon.)

[massone]

Well, both wizards you're at war with are Ruthless Narcissists. Both that personality and objective makes them move likely to use curses. They don't seem to have the books to make other curses available so naturally, they end up using Volcanoes.

Either way, if you get your ores regularly destroyed in a way that hurts, that is no different from losing your armies to Great Unsummoning or Final Wave. It just means you based your strategy around the wrong thing.

Only one wizard, Sss'ra has seen my cities or sent any units to me. He is the one that cast all of those volcanos, so it's much more frequent than it looks like with 2 wizards. The other one I've been at war with for like 30 turns and we haven't had a single battle for the whole war except when he killed 1 magic spirit in his territory. That reminds me, I was going to bring that up as an AI issue, there isn't any reason for them to refuse peace when we're so far and neither is attacking the other, and my ally who dragged me into the war already peaced out a year ago. We should consider something like a alliance negotiation to avoid these separate peaces, because if I were an AI, I'd drag my ally back into a neverending war.

That second part misses the point. Mithril doesn't matter much, most other ores don't. It's specifically adamantium and orihalcon that is really bad. The actual impact on strategy can be large but doesn't really damage the player as much as it stops a potentially big advantage. It's more a psychological problem, because adamantium and orihalcon are quite rare on Arcanus, so when you see it, it looks like something that could make the game go quite differently, adding variety, except it doesn't. I also mentioned that it reduces strategy to numbers. It takes away from the need to attack and hold strategic positions and resources, which is already very limited in the game.

[Anskiy]

I do agree with Massone that Sanctify is unfortunately worthless, which is a little disappointing since the idea is pretty cool.

[Seravy]

Adamantium doesn't even exist on Arcanus unless you play on Rich minerals. Orihalcon can hurt considering the rarity but as far as I remember it has the exact same spawn rate on both planes.
If it's only about that one particular city though, scouting denial might become that much more viable although it definitely isn't an easy thing to do when the city is at the edge of your empire.
If anything, requiring scouting denial steers it towards holding an area instead of just the single tile of the city but considering how the game mechanics works, it's not easy to achieve.
Unfortunately scouting denial doesn't work so well before you're at war with the Chaos wizard either because it's not a good idea to attack them while there is still a chance they won't attack you but in that case you still have the diplomacy approach open in most cases.

[roarmalf]

I played a game where I started on a small island with Orihalcon, and ended up with a wall of boats to keep it safe. I think it added to the tension and was interesting. I do agree that losing it is crushing, it's like losing a champion you've invested in. It does feel really bad when an AI does kill it, especially when they came out of nowhere to do it.


Sanctify does need a buff. It's only been worth casting for me in Sorcery/Life peacemonger games, and then it's still only a "I don't have anything better to do" play. It's not horrible, but it's a very situational spell that is just average in the right situation. It's below average to poor in other games. I never cast it most games and it's still a low priority in the games where we hit best case scenario.

[jhsidi]

There's a particular situation where corruption and volcanoes are annoying for me, which is exactly what Massone is describing: a wizard that you have no interaction with and can't really reach spam-casts curses. (Can't reach isn't just about raw distance, there can be barriers like Wizard Pact lands or a load of mountains, or they may just have one outpost near you.) Often enough they've got a personality and spellbook selection that makes diplomacy useless.

Also, unless it has changed, you don't even see who's casting corruption / volcano, right? So you might retaliate against the wrong wizard, especially if you're in a game with multiple Chaos users.

It's not that bad, usually, but in some games it is. In one of my last games, I had some unknown wizard repeatedly casting corruption everywhere. Out of the three suspects, they were in three different directions on the map. Nobody attacked me so I really couldn't tell who was casting it. Ugh.

Detect Magic can solve this... when you get it, which may be long after some troll has cast corruption on you twenty times. But it's not a spell I really want to cast. I haven't tried in CoM2, actually, because I'm still traumatized from how awful the endturn casting spam was in MoM. Maybe it works differently now. Anyway, I think it's just better for QoL to see who cast it.

[Seravy]

You see who casts it if you pay attention. The turn player's name and color replaces the "end turn" button so when you see the spell animation, the player whose turn it is used the spell.

[jhsidi]

You see who casts it if you pay attention. The turn player's name and color replaces the "end turn" button so when you see the spell animation, the player whose turn it is used the spell.

True, but pretty easy to miss. I tend to stop concentrating as much over the endturn and it flicks through turns quickly.