Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[mshih]

Flying ship was not same as windwalking in the past...

It did not allow the land passengers to participate in overseas combat.

[Anskiy]

Again, version 1.1.2

This is not crash but something weird as I'm completely dominate the game and no one  else has spell of mastery apart from me but domination rate is only "2.3%" and don't have my "win" button. What happens?

How I assume that none of them has spell of Mastery?
Rjak, I  test by save and declare  war on him and test with counter magic, his spell could be countered.
Jafar, His mana is 0 so I could not test his casting but he fall behind everyone for very long time in both power generation and research after he lost to me badly mid-game, he still yet to cast any of very rare spell.

BTW this post hasn't been responded to yet, I think it should be since it highlights a serious issue. Especially if you play long term games.

[Seravy]

It's difficult for me to load save files from pre 1.2 versions and considering the number of changes, there is a good chance the bug is no longer relevant. If you can reproduce in it 1.2, let me know.

[enna]

...at times like these I start to have serious doubts about my work. Do people who buy it even play the game? How come something as basic and major as this wasn't reported when the game had like 9 months of testing before release and we're another 5 months past that?

Can't speak to anyone else, but I'm basically never going to notice if a cost or something is wrong. The numbers just don't stick in my head, though I've logged over 100 hours of playing so far on your version of the game.

My appreciation runs deep!

[Beorn]

B47. Confirmed. The loop to apply the effect always looped zero times. 

...at times like these I start to have serious doubts about my work. Do people who buy it even play the game? How come something as basic and major as this wasn't reported when the game had like 9 months of testing before release and we're another 5 months past that?

...anyway, fixed for the next update. If no one even noticed this for over a year, there is no reason to rush the update now.

Really, really sorry to hear you sound so discouraged.  In my opinion, you have created one of the best games ever made. 

As others have pointed out, there are many explanations for why this bug did not come to light for so long.  But one thing is that the game is so immersive, the player is so far into their wizard's situation, that you don't really stop to check the game's inner arithmetic.  But even more than that, I wonder what percentage of players use 10 books of a color.  I never have, and Steam says I am over 1,000 hours at this point.  (With apologies to Henry Ford, I would tell any new player they can pick any colors of magic in this game as long as they include blue and green.  Playing without Web amounts to raising the difficulty level two notches, and only a masochist would play without Sorcery magic.  So ten of a color?  Not likely.)

Anyway, my point is that Caster is an incredible accomplishment and a whole lot of us appreciate it.

[Anskiy]

Yeah being able to reliably hit flying creatures is basically a requirement on the higher difficulties, one of the big reasons why I want to be able to turn off the "flee when overwhelmed" routine.

[WhiteMage]

I agree that this is one of the top 2 best games ever made. Nevertheless, there is a lot more work to do. So here is the next batch of bugs and suggestions:

B56. My unit fled from battle and deserted due to lack of space. But it could have fled to one of my Triremes or to my town all around the tile. FleeDesert.sav. See single Red gnoll on my North Island. This is after the event.

B57. I have a priest doing purify and some skeletons patrolling on the same tile. When this passive (gray) stack is selected I clicked Wait. That ended the purify act. This is not supposed to end it. Wait it not to cancel an existing order. That is not user friendly. Currently there is no button to push on them to do nothing. So I need to look for another unit to click. PurifyWait.sav

B58. I consider this a conceptual bug. My Fortress tile was corrupted and was being Purified by 2 priests. They completed the task after my turn but before the AI’s turn. The AI cast corruption on it again and I never seen it being clean. I think purify act should complete at the beginning of my turn before I get to act. Currently they spend a fraction of a turn that is not intuitive. At least the tile should be clean for a single turn. Same logic for all players. BeforeCorruption.sav, AfterCorruption.sav

B59. Battled on Tundra should have most tiles as tundra. That takes 2 moves for walkers, not 1.

B60. Housing output is the same regardless if my citizen is farmer or worker. It should not be. Housing.sav

B61. I gave build road order to Engineers from Forest to neighbor forest tile. It would be 2 turns to finish the job on the tile they stood and 4 to build it to the neighbor forest tile from here. But they moved in next turn to the neighbor tile. So they finished the 2 turns job in 1 turn on the original tile and moved to next tile. They also lost the B letter to show they are building by next turn and stopped working on the project in 1 more turn. I had to give them the order again. BeforeRoadBuild.sav, AfterRoadBuild.sav

B62. Builder can’t stop the work in the same turn. BuilderCantStop.sav. Either this turn or next turn they will build and can’t stop it and move.

S69. Something should be done about the placement of my own units in battle. It should be predictable and the user’s choice. I don’t want my hero die in the first row to incoming Doom Bats before it can act. I want my troll Halberdiers to be in the first row, not behind my hero. It is currently inconsistent. Sometimes my Troll Magicians start front of my Illusionist, sometimes they start behind it.
Proposed solution: when a user selects a single unit on the overland map it moves it to the front of that stack of 1. If a second unit is added to it to create a group of 2, it becomes the 2nd unit in the stack and so on. Other existing stack on that tile are dissolved when a new stack of 2 is created. New stack orders are immediately updated in overland map display. In battle they start in that exact same order 1-4 in first row from left to right. 5-8 in second row left to right. 9 in third row.
This would be huge and is critical for a deep thinking strategy game like this.

S70. Conjurer should also increase the chance to research summoning spells, similar to Runemaster.

S71. 2 times +7% Mountain bonus is rounded down to 3%+3%=6% if another city uses it too. So instead of +14, I get +12 total.
Proposed solution: change Mountains to +8% prod, Hills to 1/2 food +4% prod, Forests to 1 food +2% prod, Deserts to +4% prod. Those are currently underwhelming anyway.

S72. In long road building planning don’t apply the pathfinding if I trace it out 1 tile at a tile. Simply extend it from the previous plan. This way I can build the roads I want and not what the pathfinder finds.

S73. Turn 1 Autosave is always missing. Add it so it will be complete.

[Seravy]

B56. A fleeing bug was already fixed for the next update. I assume this is the same problem.
B57. Fixed. I'm not sure if having to click the unit to stop Purify while Wait cancels other orders is any more intuitive but whatever.
B58. Works as intended. I see nothing here that isn't intuitive.
B59. This is a feature request, not a bug report. I believe there are enough combat tiles that cost 2 to move on and adding more would be bad for game balance. Swamps and Forests are already mostly made from tiles that cost 2.
B60. Population 1 cities are handled as a special case when calculating worker/farmer ratios. This is a leftover solution from old versions to guarantee you don't get 0 housing even if your only unit of population is a mandatory farmer you cannot change. It doesn't seem to be necessary anymore. I tried removing the line and it produces the expected result : 0 Housing if it's a farmer and 100% housing if it's a worker. So it'll be that way in the next version.
B61. Maybe the tile already had a partially built road - did you interrupt building on a previous turn? Work already done that way counts but isn't shown in the total turns displayed.
Fixed the last tile not becoming built for the next update.
B62. Building roads is part of the movement process and is treated as movement. You stop it the same way as movement orders : by clicking on the unit to select it. I was able to cancel the build order.

S69. Selected stack display order is not stored anywhere. To begin with, a "stack of units" is only a concept the player sees, on the side of code, they are 9 completely unrelated units with the same P,X,Y coordinates. This is very time consuming to implement. It also requires a save data format change since the order has to be stored somewhere. Also, not clear what you mean by "selects a single unit". The selection click is used to pick which units are being given orders, not where they appear in the combat. Having double functionality is extremely confusing and even more so if it shuffles the display order of units around while I'm in the process of selecting them.
Being able to select combat starting position would be nice but it's unrealistic and adds an absurd amount of micromanagement to the game (stacks are split up and units killed/replaced all the time).

S70. Disagree, Conjurer is powerful enough and unlike the other retorts that do that, Conjurer does not cost 2 picks. Additionally, knowing multiple summoning spells in the same tier is not that useful and can even be detrimental.

S71. I'm not going to calculate fractional production bonus.

S72. Applying pathfinding is a feature that helps your engineers go around unexpected obstacles, such as an enemy unit or rampaging monster. This is a feature that reduces the need to micromanage.

S73. Added for next update.

[enna]

I'm not sure if this is an actual bug, or just something about how it displays, but I've noticed that if you hover over a city with surveyor, it displays the summed production bonus from things such as forests/mountains, but the gold bonus seems to be capped at +10%, no matter how many rivers/coasts you have.

[Seravy]

It's because that's how gold bonus from those tiles work. It get 10% from being near any shore, and 20% from being on a river. Multiple shores don't add 10% each, only one.