Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[Seravy]

In this game, Kali has a stack (Draconian hero + 8 demons) surrounded by 9 of my warships, to the northeast of Craagpool. I surrounded the stack before we were at war but we've been at war for several turns now. While I'm happy I don't have to deal with that stack rampaging around, it doesn't seem right that it just sits there doing nothing. What do you think?

Edit: version 1.02.01

That looks like a bug, yes.
...surprisingly it's not an attack decision bug. The battle simulation shows a result of Kali losing without killing your warship so she doesn't attack them. That's correct as a decision but the battle simulation is at least suspicious. You do have high skill and very rare spells but even with that...

...army stats look correct, the demon stack is much more powerful.
...the simulation assumes you will be spending most of your casting skill on "summoning" type spells due to not having enough units. Summon Demon and Animate Dead basically. With 391 combat skill, you can keep doing that until you wipe out Kali's entire army. Of course this ignores details like being unable to revive the boat more than once or even its stats but even if you were casting only Summon Demon, summoning 9 of them then Animate Dead once should kill the attacking stack, so this is reasonably accurate and the decision to not attack isn't really a bad one, it's just not really serving the purpose of playing a game. The AI shouldn't be this scared of the human player, they won't always play optimally with spells and even if they do, spending a lot of mana hurts, not to mention many spells are luck based.
...maybe the AI shouldn't assume the human player plays perfectly and should instead assume the player spends their MP on all types of combat spells equally. That also helps removing any extreme results from one spell or spell type being overly effective in simulations. Or maybe summoning magic is still over-represented in the system.
...after changing both the above and how summon spells scale up with spell tiers, Kali now attacks the warships.

So this problem should be fixed in the next update.

[WhiteMage]

“That's not a bug. I explained that already. Planes are not equal size.”
OK. Then it is a very surprising construct of the 2 planes. Not intuitive and it was not like this in the original MOM. Why not make the width of the 2 planes the same and make their height different? That would solve this.

“B103. Tested and it worked as intended. 3 petrified figures from the cockatrice and last figure had 1 damage on it. Casting Life Drain healed the 1 damage then added 4 gold hp to the single figure still alive without restoring figures.
I assume in your case none of the figures were petrified, they simply died to the ranged attack damage. Cockatrices attack at strength 3 which is not much but it's 4 figures attacking and with 50% chance to hit. Taking 4 damage to kill figures is a reasonable result.”
Sorry, I mean AI wizard cast Petrify spell on 4 figure unit, which I recovered from with Drain Life.

[Seravy]

OK. Then it is a very surprising construct of the 2 planes. Not intuitive and it was not like this in the original MOM. Why not make the width of the 2 planes the same and make their height different? That would solve this.

That only solves it for the X axis, while Y will still be different size. Not a solution.
It also makes the size difference larger.
In the current system a 4x larger plane is only 2x as wide and 2x as tall.
In that system, it would be the same width and 4x taller. Which leaves 75% of the map in the "cannot shift planes" area OR makes it possible to jump 3 tiles vertically with plane shift instead of 1 in either direction.
The current version is most likely the best we can do.

B103. The AI didn't use petrify in that battle so I can't reproduce it. It makes little sense to petrify a magician with 10 resistance anyway. How many times did you see this happen? How to reproduce?

[Fringe]

...
So this problem should be fixed in the next update.

Thank you, Seravy. Always appreciate your explanations. And it is true -- I play far from perfectly!

[WhiteMage]

OK. Then let’s make Shadow Demon’s Plane Shift a 1-time spell casting skill. They each use it up and can’t use it again. The grid not matching up calls for a host of serious exploitations and time waste. Currently, I change planes before and after almost every single move to scout. And hop in and out to pull them with boats on the other plane. Changing plane twice either brings them back to place they started or not, which is bad in the planning phase needing to write my own map of the grid in each game to know where I can do it, where to place my boats based on the skewed grid, etc. These are not user friendly for expert game play. Sure, casual game players don’t care, I know. But for the deepest strategy game ever made, expert players are also a target to design a game for, right?

“B103. The AI didn't use petrify in that battle so I can't reproduce it. It makes little sense to petrify a magician with 10 resistance anyway. How many times did you see this happen? How to reproduce?”
The Petrify and Life Drain combo happened twice in my regular game play without even trying to trigger it.
I was able to reproduce the AI wizard Petrify.
Attack with 8 magicians. Hopefully AI casts Blur. I cast Black Prayer, walk back with my magicians. 1 Fireball into the Cockatrices from a full figure magicians, then the others shoot it to bring it down to 1 figure. After that Fireball into the closest enemy units then keep shooting them. AI often chooses Petrify in turn 2. But I have difficulty reproducing Life Drain figure recovery. It does not give me the figures now. Now it works fine. I will look for additional conditions what may be the trigger.

[Seravy]

I don't see how making it one time changes anything.
You still need to shift, then reload as if it moved you to the wrong tile while scouting. Except now you always have to do it instead of only sometimes.

The only acceptable solution I can think of is removing the Plane Shift ability from the game. Only one unit has it anyway and it's already locked to requiring a different way of access to the other plane making it less interesting for gameplay.
However I see no reason to force that on other players. If you don't like it, you can remove it yourself in Units.INI. That's what modding support exists for.

[WhiteMage]

1 time Plane Shift would:
1) get rid off the required micromanagement for optimal game play keep doing it.
2) remove the pull with boats on the other plane exploit
3) streamline the currently very long games making them shorter and more fun
4) lower the abuse of sneaking up on the AI 
5) prompt for hard decision of using it or not and where and when and with how many units, having commitment to change plane and can’t sneak out if it gets hot
6) the misaligned grid would matter a lot less, since there would be no expectation to come back

In my opinion, in expert game plays, reload is not allowed, especially not for having bad luck. I never use it. Not even when I lose my best hero with Wraith Form to Earthquake bug, not if my mouse repeat slips due to suspected game bug that causes me to lose units, not if my child pushed my hand to cause me a wrong move, etc. I only reload latest game if there is a crash and strictly must repeat the exact same move, but accept different outcome (better or worse). This is how a deep-thinking strategy game is intended to be played, IMO. There is no reload in Chess, Go, Bridge, Poker, etc. There is no reload in competitive multiplayer games. There should be no reload in the deepest strategy game ever created for those who play seriously. This is how it is fun to play a game like this. Otherwise it is boring, since I can always reload to get my desired outcome. Time moves forward and not back in real life. Learn from the past and plan for the future better.

Game testing is different. For that, I reload once a while to nail down the bugs as best as I can.

I think Plane Shift is a niche, just like hundreds of other things in the game. I don’t recommend removing it. I recommend nerfing it. One time use only seems to be right. It is a huge advantage to be able to do it. It should be limited.

Thanks for the modding option. It is very important and will do it as a last resort if everything else failed. Nevertheless, I speak for the entire game design and I specifically try to represent perfection and the expert game player class.


IMO, Plane Shift in MOM where Shadow Demons moved with speed 1 and the grid was perfectly aligned was better than the current version. At least that was predictable and less of an abuse due to being slow.

[Seravy]

IMO, Plane Shift in MOM where Shadow Demons moved with speed 1 and the grid was perfectly aligned was better than the current version. At least that was predictable and less of an abuse due to being slow.

Certainly but we need to adjust the plane shift ability to the existing grid and shadow demons, not the other way around.

From that list, 2 and 4 are not exploits and abuse but valid strategies. I see no problem with them.
A minor detail like this won't change the length of games for anyone except you. So disagree on 3.
Disagree on 6 as well. With no way to come back, appearing on an unexpected tile can have way worse consequences.

"write my own map of the grid in each game to know where I can do it"
This literally has the same result as reloading after pressing Plane twice just in a million times more tedious way. Ok, you don't NEED to actually reload to do it but most players would because it's functionally equivalent to calculating/mapping the tiles where rounding happens but faster.
Limiting the ability to one use means you now NEED to do this with reloading or with mapping or with calculating the tile coordinates because once you moved you can't come back so you NEED to know where you go to beforehand.
Otherwise you can shift and if it's the wrong tile, come back.
So it actually extends the problem that's only affecting you to other people instead of fixing it for anyone.

[WhiteMage]

“From that list, 2 and 4 are not exploits and abuse but valid strategies. I see no problem with them.”
Yes, 2 and 4 are valid strategies for the current version of the game. But when I proposed to also code the AI to do the same, you declined. So with that it remains a 1-sided exploit only the player can do.

“A minor detail like this won't change the length of games for anyone except you. So disagree on 3.”
I think we probably have other slow and serious players out there. Not only me. They are just not posting on RB that much. But if not, then it is because we don’t have enough players (yet). I had similar issues when I played Heroes 3 being called a slow player, but then I met others who played even slower than me. Larger pool of players. Other expert players and they had very similar reasons why they did it. It simply feels bad to not squeeze out everything from their turn, especially in a competitive multiplayer game.

“Disagree on 6 as well. With no way to come back, appearing on an unexpected tile can have way worse consequences.”
Like what? Losing an army? That is less of a problem than the exploit and the heavy micro. You could chose not to Plane Shift, Shift in with only 1 unit to explore and risk less, Shift with 9 to defend yourself, or Shift in near a Tower where they can come back or Shift near your town where you can send reinforcements. That’s a lot of strategic depth, IMO.

“This literally has the same result as reloading after pressing Plane twice just in a million times more tedious way.”
Reloading feels like cheating. A game where the optimal game play requires cheating is less fun to play.

“Ok, you don't NEED to actually reload to do it but most players would because it's functionally equivalent to calculating/mapping the tiles where rounding happens but faster.”
And you see no problem with the game design where reloading is done just to support map exploration by most players?

We should not just develop games for most players. The experts were ignored every single time. All TBS game development in the past were for “most players” only, experts specifically and semi-intentionally ignored. So the quality and depth was always capped by design philosophy. This is why I don’t play the other games now and I give your game a serious try. It is that good already, so I salute you. Since you are a self-declared perfectionist who codes alone, maybe there is something driving you to develop your own game and not just play one of those existing games out there…

Can you please put this Plane Shift thing up for a vote? Maybe there are people out there who would agree with limiting the Plane Shift to 1, since the grid is decided to remain skewed both horizontally and vertically.

[Seravy]

I did tell you NO NEW FEATURES.

Why make a poll about something I'm not going to do anyway?

Your persistence just knows no limits. I think I'm done.