Things I Miss from Master of Magic

[NathanMoM]

Loving Caster of Magic, and please don't get me wrong with this post - it is overall much better.

However I cannot avoid mentioning these real issues with CoM in my opinion. I have played it repeatedly on several difficulties, realms, combos, races, everything. I hope these things can be considered for CoM II (which I have never played).


These are causing me to burn out on CoM
1. The difficulty is too high. I wouldn't care except for #2 below.
2. You have tied attributes of the game to difficulty, such as Myrran choosing, and I'm not sure what else. This pressures me to play on "Fair" or higher, because I feel like I want to get the experience you envisioned for this game. The problem is even "Fair" is actually too difficult to enjoy. I get the feeling no one developing this is actually sitting there playing entire games anymore, because honestly this is extremely frustrating to play. It's just wave after wave of monsters, with AI magically knowing every single empty spot to settle. Alliance is broken and you are totally destroyed by them in 2 turns. Endless corruption and volcanoes. It just seems like no matter what you do, the AI has figured out how to counter you and does so. But not in a difficult, challenging way - instead, it's in a very annoying, frustrating way. Non-hostile wizards kill all your units again and again and again, take your nodes, conquer you completely. Then when they take a city suddenly they "hate" you. Never have I seen so many "reduced to ruins" or "has been completely destroyed" messages. It's actually not fun to play. It reminds me of the feeling of "Impossible" on older patches. Another reason I keep trying "Fair" is because #3 below.
3. When I play Normal, I get almost no rewards from conquering even the entirety of both planes. At most I may get one or 2 spell books or so. Because I can only occasionally managed to win on Fair, I no longer have a way to play this game and feel like I've maxed out my spell books and retorts. This was one of the best things about MoM and now it's simply gone for me. I miss it. So now I can play an extremely frustrating difficulty in which the AI simply covers the entire map with units and conquers everything, and hope to squeak out a win, or I can play Normal and feel like my fun potential is being capped.
4. I know I mentioned this elsewhere but honestly I would rather just remove all wizard conversations entirely then have to go through another
"please sign a wizard pact! hey you have some unit near me! hey you have some unit near me! hey you have some unit near me! I'm angry forget this wizard pact! please sign a wizard pact!" with multiple wizards over and over again. I actually miss when all wizards couldn't contact me. Honestly with them constantly trying to offer me "Summon Hero" for my "Armageddon" or whatever, and how they will just suddenly go from Alliance to all out war, I don't really care what they say anyway. Perhaps an option: "Ignore all wizards." Also I believe nearly all times I've managed to win on Fair were those times I took on this strategy: immediately attack all wizards with everything you have. Just ignore all diplomacy and kill everything you can asap.
5. Making AI select Myrran when I do means that there is never any strategic advantage to doing so, essentially. While this may be the direction you continue to go, seems like it should just be a choice like flag color at this point, rather than a retort. It's not an advantage, just a change of terrain and races essentially. I only choose it when I play "Normal," but then it's a bit too powerful with cost 1. When I play "Fair" there simply is very little reason to choose it, because there will always be one lucky AI player skyrocketing to power on Arcanus.
6. This is more MoM's fault than CoM's but I have to mention it. CoM is much more about casting spells. With dispel waves, it's frustrating to figure out which units need which spells. City spells are annoying to track, etc. I just hope there can be some improvement in CoM II, because I spend way too much time clicking around trying to figure out which units need which spells in CoM (again, I am aware this is MoM's fault).


It's strange to feel these two things at the same time:
1. This game is in so many ways way better than MoM.
2. For the first time since MoM has come out, I quite often get the feeling I don't want to play this game anymore. The AI, difficulty settings and restrictions are at times just too annoying. I just want to play a moderate difficulty and be able to experience all the benefits of the game, like maxing out my wizard and conquering both planes. That really feels missing to me. I'm stuck between a crippled version of the game that's I can win or lose, and a version that offers more rewards that I can win about 10% of the time, and the AI plays so annoyingly that it's like playing a computer in chess mode that's way too high a setting.

I know I'm rambling but anyway those are my biggest complaints about this current version. I am considering going back to MoM at this point because I simply cannot feel fulfilled in CoM 6.07. Hope to see CoM II soon because I think having the source is really going to be great for the project. Thanks again.

[Seravy]

1. That might be an issue, yes. Unfortunately I can only rely on user feedback for this as being the developer I consistently play on Advanced and Expert and usually win. I did notice that difficulty levels higher than that are too hard for me and I don't like playing them anymore so I know that feeling, but there are people out there consistently beating those so I can't conclude it's a meaningless level of difficulty either.
I would like to avoid giving the AI resource penalties on Normal/Fair difficulty though and they are already getting no advantage so I'm out of options. At best I can make them play worse intentionally but not a fan of doing that for Fair difficulty either, and without source code it's more difficult to achieve.

2. That originates from the base game. I kept it because having a wizard on Myrror vastly ramps up difficulty and I don't think a player playing Easy or Normal is ready to fight an enemy that had an entire plane to themselves for the full duration of the game uncontested.
I don't think any other features are tied to difficulty, and even Myrran enemy is a feature that's basically related to AI.
You, as a player, can pick Myrran on Easy or Normal if you wish to, although the enemy will still start on the Arcanus plane.

At the moment this feature still exist in CoM II.
For the generic increase of difficulty, see 1, it's also worth noting the diplomacy system is one of the harder things to learn to use to your advantage and unfortunately, it's slightly prone to luck. In general, going heavy into one alignment - good or evil - will make your diplomacy worse, but it really mostly depends on what books and personality traits your opponents rolled. Chaotic in particular is the worst because they are entirely random and can do things like breaking alliances without a reason, so CoM II will has the option to disable Chaotic enemies entirely. There will also be an option for disabling diplomacy and being in permanent war for a higher score. However as CoM II supports up to 13 opponents, the relevance of diplomacy will likely increase. I did do several smaller adjustments to various diplomacy formulas to make CoM II diplomacy a lot more forgiving than CoM I, whether it'll be enough, only time (and beta playtesters) will tell.

Normal and Fair are almost identical except this change to Myrran starts, and the AI intentionally playing worse on Normal in a few ways, like not moving archers before shooting (or was that for easy? I don't remember. Anyway, a few details like that.). The numbers behind the two settings (AI gold, mana, etc) are the same, the AI gets no advantage or penalty on either in the main resource categories. Literally, the reason Fair difficult exist is because people wanted to play Normal but have an AI on Myrror, so I copied the Normal difficulty stats to Fair and removed the other restrictions.

3. The amount of books/retorts you can get from one game is between 3 and 10. You can still find lots of books, but not in every game played, to put more emphasis on character creation choices.

5. The largest chunk of difficulty in the game is the final opponent who comes from the other plane. If they are from Arcanus, the game is a quite a lot easier than if they are Myrran due to the difference of power level between races. It also opens up the possibility to invade the other plane early and win that way which is much more difficult if the enemy is on Myrror. I believe the current amount of strategic advantage is fair for the cost of 1 picks. The original system went way beyond an advantage, and was so powerful that even the original cost of 3 picks (which in my opinion made the retort very undesirable to pick) didn't balance the benefit.
In CoM II however there will be an option, "Plane Equalizer" which makes both planes have the same amount of opponents, which will also be available as a Myrran player.

6. Yes, there are improvements in CoM II. The targeting cursor changes to X when you mouse over a unit or city that already has the enchantment and for city spells there are hotkeys to target the next city that's a valid target automatically. Dispelling Wave is also split into two spells, one that only removes units spells, and one higher tier spell to only remove city enchantments, as doing both is way too powerful.

[NathanMoM]

Just tried very hard at "Fair" against only 1 computer on "tiny" setting and was dead by 1408. Computer was massively advantaged; knew exactly where I was. Blocked my expansion immediately, immediately took a city which was guarded by 9 units. As soon as I moved main army out of main city to try to retake, roaming monsters suddenly arrived and took capital. The end. No chance to explore, no chance even to check what was in nodes. Just massive, quick stomping.

Played another game, same settings. I have corrupted and volcanoed every single tile the computer owns. As usual, computer magically knew exactly where I was on the map immediately, and immediately blocked me from expansion. Every one of their cities are guarded by extremely expensive units, and he is still saturating my entire little island with his units, and sending massive waves of armies after me, when in fact he should barely be able to maintain his own defenses at this point. He has more units on my island than all of my units combined. There seem to be advantages here on Fair. And a few turns later, as typing this out, my entire island is totally saturated in dozens of his units and I can no longer even move my armies practically. Even though he has no terrain at all, he can support huge swaths of armies. And now I'm dead again. Never got a chance to explore anything or do anything but build up defenses as quickly as I possibly could, and slowly die, basically.

I'm interested to see a video of someone beating this game (6.07) on anything harder than Fair. I don't know how it could be done with any settings, with any combination of retorts and spell books, so it would be interesting to see how it's done.

[pnye71]

Any chance of offering a setting to make rampaging monsters weaker? Or maybe delaying them from running about until a bit later in the game. I am also hitting that frustration wall that kinda saps my will to play. Chaos wizards really spam corruption and volcanos which can make things not very fun.

[Sapher]

I'm interested to see a video of someone beating this game (6.07) on anything harder than Fair. I don't know how it could be done with any settings, with any combination of retorts and spell books, so it would be interesting to see how it's done.

6.03 is pretty much the same as 6.07 so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWHsQF0n...bY&index=1

[NathanMoM]

In patch notes, looks like monsters were changed here at 6.06
" -Changed rampaging monster stack budget formula :
(Difficulty+1)*(Difficulty+Turn-16) => (Difficulty+1)*(Difficulty+Turn-24)+16

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

I don't know what it was before, but that might be relevant. I will watch more of the video to take a look. There's definitely a lot of luck involved, as you happened to find same-race neutral city with garbage guarding it, for example, or the hell hounds zone being in nature node influence. Still, I will take a look and see how it goes. Thanks!

[Seravy]

The previous formula is there in the quote, the part before => is the previous formula, after is the new one.



Unfortunately I only have a table for the second formula, which looks like this :

   

The first block is the new formula, the second block is the old one.

In general the change was supposed to make early game, especially on low difficulty produce less and weaker rampaging monsters. (This does not affect raiders or enemy players)

immediately took a city which was guarded by 9 units.

I would like some details. What were your 9 units? What did the enemy use to attack you? What was the date / turn count?

What race/spellbooks did your opponent play? What about you? How did you lose the battle?



"Extremely expensive units", means what units? At which year?



Overall, what you describe can be pretty much one of these :

-A new, serious bug

-The enemy playing an early game rush race, possibly with retorts that support it somehow and/or Militarist objective for extra unit production priorities

-You playing an extremely slow race/magic realm that is at a disadvantage in the early game.
-Random bad luck (like AI starting on double gold or snowballing into vast armies of undead through ghouls conquering convenient targets, that sort of thing)



I cannot even guess which one without more information. If you have the save file for any of these games where you believe the AI has unreasonable amounts of units for the difficulty, post them and I'll look at it.

As usual, computer magically knew exactly where I was on the map immediately

I'm pretty sure I already mentioned this but AI map/unit/lair scouting is not a feature that exist in the game. Never was and I have no way of adding it, nor the required knowledge and skill to do so.

[zitro1987]

1. Not having to deal with cowardly benny hill tactics of neutrals in lairs
2. Not worrying about focus magic cockatrices
3. Fewer late game battles and fewer reliance on battles of attrition, usually against remaining wizard in opposite plane
4. Faster spell of mastery research to finish games quicker
I have mixed feelings with the late game vision of COM. While it succeeds on giving you a challenge and not feel like u immediately ‘win’ from early game and getting to enjoy the late game spells, the battle micromanagement combined with extreme battle skill points and seemingly limitless units can slow game to a crawl. I was disappointed to hear we won’t have a ‘auto battle with spells’ option to mimic AI combat to speed this game aspect a bit, but maybe the issue is the sheer number of units and cities. This problem may partially resolve with the map size option of CoM2 or equal planes ... but in the end i wish we had additional victory paths like in some modern 4x games

[Seravy]

1 : CoM II will have the option to disable that.
3 : I think the greatest difference for that in CoM II will be the change of the AI. As it is smarter to notice and avoid fighting lost battles, there should be less battles overall. Even if the AI has hundreds of units, if all your cities are adequately garrisoned, they won't attack them.
While this does apply in CoM I to some extent, the AI is much less able to tell apart winnable battles from impossible ones, so a lot of time in late game is spent on fighting meaningless battles you're unable to lose.
But for the time being, this is only something I expect to happen, I haven't reached late game in CoM II enough times yet to be sure.

[zitro1987]

I am excited about your instant battle algorithms improvements in CoMII if it ever becomes an issue (too many battles of minor impact) because i think the player not the AI is more likely to engage in those for attrition reasons (zombie mastery is great example) and speeding it up with more reliable calculated strength will cut through the possible tedium (if it exists). So that i play the more impactful battles