Thoughts on aggression and resources

[jhsidi]

I have a few thoughts that relate to playing at high difficulty levels with multiple wizards.

The summary: resources (gold, mithril, etc) cannot be kept and are either irrelevant or actively harmful, beyond the first few turns of the game. I would rather not have resources at all, in fact, because their targeting priority is so high that they will, with 100% certainty, be destroyed early game AND that then ruins the tile underneath as well. The current balance is not fun and is intensely discouraging if you want to have any kind of resource.

More detailed examples from my current game:

• The targeting priority is just ridiculously high. Example: Freya has 3 chaos books in my game and got raise volcano. She is at war with 4 wizards, not including me. My lands are extremely far away from her (I actually don't even know where she is). Despite all of that, Freya has spent her entire casting budget over the past several turns raising volcanoes all over my land, because at some point she flipped to aggressive.
  
• Aggressiveness has no management. I can't ask for peace or negotiate an end to it. She silently flipped to aggressive -- there's no kind of message, either -- then just started spam casting at full tilt. And I have no recourse at all.
  
• Going back to the distance involved, there is absolutely no reason for Freya to be interacting with me at ALL. She's an ungodly distance away.
  
• Regarding prioritization, I'm sure Freya would be better served by summoning more creatures, considering she's at war with everyone. Switching to another example, I've also been watching Tauron raise volcanoes on Ariel's lands as they've been at war. Tauron was losing their war very badly but somehow, the targeting prioritization has him trying to ruin her capitol lands instead of summoning or casting buffs that would keep him from getting utterly steamrolled.
  
• There are no counters. Corruption has a fix... sort of, although it takes shaman / priests a very long time to clear it and not all races get them. Volcanoes are only countered by change terrain. And while volcanoes do occasionally create resources, the targeting priority for resources ensures that the created resource will be immediately destroyed; in other words, that mechanic is useless.
  

It's not a HUGE deal in my game, in that if I see resources, I just shrug and ignore them. With 13 wizards and chaos books spread across a third or more of those wizards, it's pointless to consider them. But again, that's not fun in any way, and I do think the intention of resources is to be fun, and something you seek out and fight for.

Here are some suggestions:

• Engineers -- give engineers a way to fortify land against volcanoes. Rivers already block volcanoes, so the base idea is already there. Let me spend resources to preemptively counter it. The problem here is lack of a button; they'd end up building roads instead. Not sure how to solve that.
  
• Priests / shamans -- similarly, for uncorrupted land, let priests or shamans consecrate it against corruption. The alternative is that you have a shaman permanently stationed on whatever valuable land in an endless loop of purification which, again, is just intensely annoying and not fun at all.
  
• Nightshade -- for some reason, nightshade is highly prioritized for destruction even while it's completely useless, since it is only activated by cathedrals and only used against rare and higher tier spells, which are not being built / available to cast at the stage of the game that wizards are already spamming destructive spells. The resource itself is not that common, and considering its priority for destruction, I can't think of any game where I was able to actually use it, nor where the AI was able to use it (since they suffer from spam destruction as well). So; make nightshade permanent. It's supposed to prevent curses, so make it prevent corruption and volcanoes from being used on itself.
  
• Arcane spell? -- Maybe at uncommon or rare tier, it would be neat to have an arcane spell that somehow counters or rewinds destruction. Something like "Recover Resource" would make sense to me. Since most resources are minerals of some kind, I don't know why volcanoes would completely destroy it anyway.
  
• Raise volcano change -- Disallow raise volcano from being used on a volcano, to stop this silly loop of repeatedly casting raise volcano until all resources are gone. It's just an annoying mechanic and I doubt it's helpful to the AI either, since they're not gaining power. They can still use corruption to block the resource if they want, or cast raise volcano on the tile when the original volcano converts to mountain.
  
  

Just to summarize once more -- my complaint here is NOT about the use of corruption / raise volcano; they're good spells and deserve to be used frequently. My complaint is that the current design, in a high difficulty level game with a lot of wizards, is not fun, makes resources completely irrelevant, and completely lacks useful counters or proactive measures the player can include in their overall strategy.

[Suppanut]

Agree with you that resources and their destruction is a great disappointment. Even if you are absolute pacifist lacky like me (keep everyone relation above neutral and have alliance with almost everyone, it still not that much guerentee that resource you procure so hard early game would survive beyond mid game, especially if there are a lot of chaos realm chaotic wizards into mix.

I think solution for this is that some realm should have some method for resource protection so resource that well-protected up to lated game would be survive and useful. Here are some of my idea.

- Nature's Gaia's Blessing should prevent resource from destroy by volcano (but it does not prevent volcano from raise in its area)
- Sorcery's Philosopher's Stone would attempt to counter corruption, raise volcano, and transmute cast by other wizards on tile with resource in city's area (effect is not 100% but may need to cast several times for spell to cast properly)
- Life's Steam of Life should prevent corruption and volcanic eruption from target non-mineral resource (game, etc) tile.
- Life's Consecration should prevent casting of corruption and raise volcano in city's area.
- Death's Cloud of Shadow should hide resource exist in city's area on overland map, AI would not know that resource is there even with city location explored as long as Cloud of Shadow still active on city. But this would not prevent resource from corruption or destroy as it could occur by Armageddon and Doomsday.
- Chaos's Fate Mastery add 50% chance for already exist resource in city area own by the wizard to survive volcano eruption and double chance resource spawning rate all volcano raise in wizard's city area.
- Uncorrupted nightshade should randomly counter Raise volcano, Corruption, and Transmute target tile inside vicinity area nearby nightshade tile unless that tile is inside vicinity of city own by casting wizard.
- Uncorrupted nature Node could randomly counter Raise Volcano and Corruption in its node Aura unless casted by wizard who own that node.
- Uncorrupted sorcery Node could randomly counter Raise Volcano, Corruption, and Transmute in its node Aura unless casted by wizard who own that node.
- Uncorrupted chaos Node could randomly counter Transmute in its node Aura unless casted by wizard who own that node.
- Armageddon's volcano and Doomsday's corruption would not spawn in area of uncorrupted node's aura (to make them begin to destroy the area, corruption must be done on node tile by any wizard directly)

So wizards could protect their precious resources if they have mean to and not completely prevent any wizard who determine enough to destroy those resources.

[Seravy]

Unfortunately, while the destruction chance was fairly balanced with 4 wizards, I can see how 13 can turn it into a problem. While the old solutions still exist and work, they are also more difficult to use in such a game. (Wizard's Pact, prevent scouting of your cities)
We will have to consider some sort of a different way to solve this.
A few things that might work :
-Change AI so they only target with warlike or higher hostility level
-Change AI so that they only cast it during actual war
-Change AI so that they only target players they have "adjacency" with. This means AIs whose name appears as (Tauron) on the F4 screen will be unable to cast these spells, or curses in general, at you.
-Any of the above with the added rule that it only applies while there are 7 or more wizards on the plane and the plane being targeted is their own.

As the issue here is the probability of it happening and the difficulty to use the intended ways of prevention (diplomacy=wizard's pact, and denial of scouting) due to high player count, I don't think we should change/disable the destruction effect. Instead, we should focus on how to reduce the probability and make intended ways to counter it work more effectively.

[jhsidi]

What's still missing there is any form of strategy or thought for me as a player.

I don't hate that curses get cast at me a lot, and it's not necessarily bad that in a game with a lot of wizards, even more curses are being thrown around. I hate that there's nothing I can do about it. The existing solutions of preventing scouting and doing diplomacy are both highly situational and, honestly, aggravating if their entire purpose is just preventing resource loss.

[zitro1987]

I disagree with a rule about number of players in same plane (especially a high number like 7)

Having land destruction cast when AI aggressive against you, in war, or adjacent might be better determining factors, regardless of how many players exist in the game.

I also think nature needs a corruption counter like sprites earning ‘purify’. It is strange and against immersion seeing a nature realm unable to purify their lands. Gaia’s promise could then protect from having minerals targeted

[MrBiscuits]

Maybe volcanoes can stop a resource being used, but it still exists "under" it. Then change terrain would counter a volcano destroying a resource.

But I agree that the whole mechanic is unfun. Perhaps an AI should have current line of sight through units or nature's eye before they can cast corruption or volcano on enemy territory. 

The whole idea that you can stop an enemy AI scouting a resource is flawed I think. That means any conquered territory will always be vulnerable and there's no way to prevent it.

For a game about magic, having certain spells only countered by diplomacy and geographical logistics seems wrong.

[Seravy]

Considering there are currently zero ways to protect these resources with magic, adjusting a spell to do so might not be a bad idea, as long as it's uncommon (higher is too late to be relevant and unlikely to be obtainable, lower is too easy to get) and isn't in Nature magic (as it can create these resources with Transmute and that would be far too powerful if it also came with an automatic solution to make them indestructible - better keep these separate for combo potential).

A few possible candidates :
Philosopher's Stone (chance to counter incoming hostile spells similar to Nightshade? But wouldn't that be way too powerful? We have this effect at very Rare for a reason. The spell also already does 3 different things which is plenty.)
...I don't really see any other spell that could have such a side effect. Sanctify maybe? It's a unit spell though so that would require the unit to be placed on the resource where it can get attacked and this game mechanic would not be AI friendly at all.

If we are willing to extend this to common spells then Guardian Spirit melding with any tile could protect that particular tile from Corruption and Volcano specifically, but that would make that spell do far too many different things and would be quite confusing for players. (extra node power, buff unit resistance, defensive buffs when in combat on the tile, and also protect resources and in general melding without a node while normal spirits can only do it on nodes)

[Dragonfabri]

I actually really like the idea of guardian spirit protecting any tile from disruption like volcanoes and corruption. It could also increase the strategic possibilities on the map, since you could build "borders" wherever you wish to defend. Of course power generation could be too much, so either removing it or substantially increasing the cost of the spell would be required (and this would even give a reason for Life to pick summoning retorts, even if the realm has little in that regard)

If Guardian spirit changed this way proves too problematic for the AI to handle, a City Uncommon spell is the easiest solution, which protects all city tiles from enemy corruption and volcanoes, nothing more nothing less. Either Life or Sorcery could work if Nature would be too OP.

[Dragonfabri]

For names, the city spell could be called Pax Tellurica (if Life) or Tectonic Stabilizer (if Sorcery)

[Seravy]

We can't just randomly add one new uncommon spell to one realm, we either need to replace one which we shouldn't, or add one for all 5 realms which we likely can't. It's also way too weak as an effect on its own without being part of another spell.