Is it possible to make the Guardian Spirit's node bonuses moddable? Ideally expose them in some script, if possible.
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Caster of Magic II Brainstorming Megathread
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I haven't started a new game in many months. One reason is the increase in tedious micromanagement as the game progresses. Growing the first few cities is fun, but monitoring and needing multiple clicks per turn isn't fun for village 38 which exists only to add to your gold, mana, and research totals. The other main reason can be described as either the snowball effect or the teeter-totter effect: as soon as you get even a little bit ahead of your rivals, the game is decided and it's just tedious cleanup.
I had an idea that might offer a different style of play: tall empires. It might require only a few minor changes to city growth/production to make empires of only a few cities viable, with any cities beyond that being detrimental. Changing the AI to handle such changes would probably be a lot of work, so think of this as a human-player-only option, allowing tall empire playstyle vs the sprawling AI rivals. City growth rate could use an alternative formula to provide competitive empire strength over time. Likewise, production, gold, mana, and research could have formulas to provide competitive levels from one or a few cities. The "one item per turn" construction limit could be changed to a simple "build queue items until no hammers left" loop, so if you queue up 12 archers and a cathedral, you might get 5 archers or all 12 and 12% of a cathedral, depending on hammers. Playtesting might show a need for some limits on how many units per turn. There would be penalties for having more than just a few cities, so if you did capture another city, you'd want to raze it (or sell it to another wizard who hates the wizard you took it from?). An option to pillage without taking and razing would be interesting. Another option is to "Free the city from its evil overlord!" leaving it as a neutral city, with a suitable rebel garrison to prevent its previous owner from easily reclaiming it. For a tall empire, the game would be more focused on lair hunting and hindering the AI cities. This solves the "take a few enemy cities and the game is decided" problem. Instead it's about growing your couple of cities, researching spells, securing nodes, building up your heroes, and crippling your rivals. The limited cities solves the tedium of checking/clicking an ever-increasing number of cities, and moving an ever-increasing number of units around for garrisons. Restrictions on the number of units or stacks for a tall empire might be needed too, for game balance. Reduced garrison requirements would free up production/buffing for lair hunting, so some limits would be needed. There'd have to be some changes to city defense too, since each city would be so much more valuable. It probably couldn't be limited to just 9 units. Tiered defenses maybe, with invaders having to fight multiple 9-unit stacks to reach the inner city? Garrison stacks surrounding the city are an obvious solution, so there might need to be restrictions on how many of your stacks can be near your cities. There would probably need to be a limit on how far away your extra cities can be. The limitations of distance to your rivals and lairs would be a challenge to overcome. The penalties for extra cities could probably be used for that: you could build your third city 30 tiles away on that nice Coal/Mithril spot, but there would be income penalties and defense penalties, and maybe chance of revolt so it's a challenging decision to make, rather than a boring "Always build 3 cities 6 tiles apart" type of system. I think this offers a dramatic change in gameplay with hopefully a minimal amount of programming effort: just a few "If wizard = human, then use this formula" additions. If the gameplay is popular, other people will create extra graphics (impressive megacities), new units (superior garrison units and superior siege engines), new spells, etc. If other people like the concept, perhaps discussion should be split off into a separate thread.
A unit ability that prevents terraforming spells being cast on that unit's tile. It can be fairly rare, require a spell or item, or whatever, but something. "Bored chaos wizard ruins my day" is sooooo frustrating and so common that I'd be willing to invest significant effort in a work-around. If the AI really wants to volcano my adamantium it can kill the unit like it does when it wants my nodes.
November 9th, 2023, 02:55
(This post was last modified: November 9th, 2023, 04:47 by MrBiscuits.)
Can we make Holy Arms compatible with chaos channels? I think it's quite a weak rare at the moment.
Also if you have doom mastery it's actually a hindrance, since you can't even manually cast holy weapon on your units in battle because as soon as you try and cast it it says you can't because you have Holy Arms cast globally. Edit: You can't cast it overland either.
Is it possible to make scoring rule page able to split into different page without fully use all 15 slots of each page? I try to organized scoring rules into different categories for easier to access.
Another thing is question. Is there any method to detect type of lair in script?
November 11th, 2023, 08:22
(This post was last modified: November 11th, 2023, 08:27 by Slingers.)
(November 11th, 2023, 06:49)Suppanut Wrote: Is it possible to make scoring rule page able to split into different page without fully use all 15 slots of each page? I try to organized scoring rules into different categories for easier to access. You could use placeholders on the scoring pages and find out much about a node or a city on a tile, but not about lairs or towers afaik. Edit: It should be possible to check, if there are neutral fantastic units on the tile. |
