Caster of Magic II Game balance brainstorming.

[Seravy]

Opened a thread for AI alliance and elimination testing. Once we managed to balance those two, we can then move on to trade and other issues that depend on this.

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...?tid=10221

[Seravy]

Based on my current test game...

I feel war declaration from AI needs a bit more adjustments. I got unlucky with opponents so I was in 4-6 wars at all times during the game. Fortunately it was low difficulty so enemies rarely made it to my land which was also quite far from them and they were busy fighting wars with other people closer to them, and my cities were very well defended so any stacks that did land, couldn't attack cities. However on higher difficulties this probably makes it unplayable.
So I'll add a similar mechanic to the generic (equal army based) war declarations as the one on low relation wars, that if the player is already in a certain amount of wars, no more war of that type can be declared against them.

Making peace treaties on the other hand was fair, I was able to end most wars where I was supposed to be able to.

Garrisoning is a lot more effective now than in CoM I, as strong garrisons where the AI would lose the fights generally manage to deter the AI from attacking in the first place, saving lots of mana on battles. On the other hand, this also forces the player to attack into AI stacks to remove them from their territory, making AI ranged units quite a bit more dangerous. Overall, it's hard to tell if it made the game easier or harder, I'd say it's a bit easier and certainly more convenient but also much more punishing for player mistakes, like leaving a city temporarily poorly defended.

The monster spawn mechanic scaling punishes overexpansion very harshly - conquering a city but having only 2-3 units left to hold it almost guarantees the city will be razed by monsters unless you have high casting skill. That's probably a change for the better, although it makes battles vs neutrals a bit tedious but it also balances out the fewer attacks from AI players and makes the Linking Tower and Monument buildings more important - I have been neglecting those this game because I didn't need much casting in battles vs AI.

[drake178]

...
-Destroying Adamantium or Orihalcon on Arcanus is ridiculous and extremely unfun.
...
-Every other curse in the game can be dispelled, resisted with nightshade, or blocked somehow. Volcanos can't, and it's only Uncommon.

Can't you just build your city on the tile with the Adamantium / Orihalcon? Then either Spell Ward or Consecration should prevent the ore from being destroyed. Hell, even Nightshade might. Probably won't work against Armageddon (it doesn't in the original), but by then it probably won't matter. In any case, unless this was changed in CoM, Raise Volcano is not completely unblockable. Whether it's worth the economy hit of settling a likely sub-optimal location is different question.

EDIT: nevermind, I never got as far as considering that both Spell Ward and Consecration are Very Rares :P

[Sapher]

"Then either Spell Ward or Consecration should prevent the ore from being destroyed."
It's like offering to counter gargoyles with arch angels ^_^

[drake178]

"Then either Spell Ward or Consecration should prevent the ore from being destroyed."
It's like offering to counter gargoyles with arch angels ^_^

Yes, I realized that a few minutes later too

[Anskiy]

Volcano/Corruption is definitely unfun to play against. It's still manageable in Caster of Magic 1, but they may need a serious relook in Caster of Magic 2, especially since it supports astronomically more opponents than 1 and many of them can roll Chaos books.

[Seravy]

In the current test game I had Call the Wild in play.

It pretty much destroyed the Myrran wizards.
In the last 5 years, Myrran wizards kept losing territory instead of building new cities.
One of them "only" lost about 20% territory but the other lost a good 75% of their cities.

So this spell definitely needs adjustments.

I call the game a victory at this point because, yeah. Yellow has 7 cities left. Green has 19. White has 4.
60% of the plane is empty wasteland.

I have 27 cities, in the process of conquering more every second turn...

While the Myrran wizards obviously did fight each other, razing cities is not a thing so that had to be the monsters.

This is how much is left from Rjak's empire :
   

Advanced difficulty isn't high so the AI is kinda behind - they only started summoning rare creatures recently - but this is too much even then.

[massone]

I think rampaging monsters formula should be adjusted instead of the spell. Even since COM I, I've had the opinion that powerful monsters appear too early, and they can appear too frequently (as in, I've seen 3 consecutive spawns within 5 turns from the same lair, targeting the same city). This is especially a problem with the high defense types, and particularly when cities are inside node aura influences, or when the game randomly gets Nature Conjunction. Nature Conjunction is practically game breaking when it appears early. The AI is definitely getting hurt from rampaging monsters even on Arcanus, I consistently see dips in their pop graphs without war, and I often see their villages actually getting destroyed if I've explored that far. For the player too, I've found rampaging monsters to be as much or a bigger threat than AI wars up to turn 80, and I've ended two early games on COM II out of frustration in dealing with them, one of which involved Nature Conjunction plus aura node around turn 55 that was impossible to defend against. In my more recent games, I've resorted to using summons and powerful buffed units for garrisons that I'd normally only use for lair attacks and war.

The only thing that seems to have changed between COM I and II (this is mostly before Call the Wild is in play), is map size, and the amount of territory that remains unsettled or not cleared of lairs. For the latter, this is partially a targetting and map generation problem. I noted before that the AI is now capable of beelining for weak and attractive targets quite far away simply because there are more targets overall available when the map size is larger on higher player counts. They are able to capture more nodes much earlier, focusing on the easily taken ones first, ignoring the stronger lairs nearby that in the old 4-player games they would've attacked. They're spending more time just moving their units around on water tiles because there's so much ocean, and only clearing weaker lairs, resulting in stronger stacks being available to appear from the higher budget lairs. I used to see the AI on Lunatic capturing just 1-2 nodes each by 1406 on Huge maps in COM I, now I routinely see them capturing 3-5.

[Seravy]

They are able to capture more nodes much earlier, focusing on the easily taken ones first, ignoring the stronger lairs nearby that in the old 4-player games they would've attacked.

That doesn't work this way. The AI will ALWAYS attack the strongest target that's possible to defeat using their current stack.
What did change is the automatic combat rules, in particular flying things will be harder for the AI because their powerful melee units can't be used. In CoM I, 9 War Mammoths would destroy a lair with several Great Drakes. In CoM II, the Drakes fly so they can't do that.
In general, the strong units in the game tend to be nonflying melee units so that limits the AI's options. They can still use Berserkers, Stag Beetles, Dragon Turtles, but not War Trolls, Hammerhands, War Mammoths, etc, unless they have the Web spell and lots of casting skill.
The opposite is also true, the AI can use their flying stack to attack a lair full of powerful nonflying enemies like great wyrms, and kill them over multiple turns like the human players do using Sprites or Draconian Bowmen. So nodes with Nagas or Phantom Beasts will disappear very quickly as long as any Nature wizard discovers it. Even other realms might do it by sending in like a Gargoyle and using combat spellcasting to remove the monsters.

resulting in stronger stacks being available to appear from the higher budget lairs.

Again doesn't work this way. The generated monster stack does not depend on the lair budgets. A ruin with 1x Phantom Warrior can spawn 5 Sky Drakes if the formula allows it.
It depends on difficulty and turn count. This is the change from two months ago which resulted in the current formulas :

-Changed strongest rampaging monster formula :
60+(2+Turn)*Difficulty/2 => 60+(Turn*1.25-33)*Difficulty/2
This means difficulty has less infleuence at the beginning, but its influence grows faster as turns elapse.
-Changed rampaging monster stack budget formula :
(Difficulty+1)*(Difficulty+Turn-16) => (Difficulty+1)*(Difficulty+Turn-24)+16

[Seravy]

This is the monster budget table calculated from the formula :
   

For reference, most uncommon monsters are 130-250 budget, while rares start at 300, very rares around 450-500 or something like that.
Commons are 30-80.

Call the Wild uses the formula before the update which is similar but ramps up slightly faster on lower difficulties and slower at higher difficulties.
Each node has a 5% chance to spawn a stack per turn so there is one per node every 20 turns on average.

...what really surprises me though is that Arcanus wizards weren't affected in any noticeable way, only the Myrran ones got destroyed.