There were a few updates in CoM II that make sense to include in CoM I.
1. Fire Elemental cost
As Chaos is generally better early in CoM I (Fire Storm is still an uncommon), I think it's best to buff it slightly less than in CoM II, so I have set the cost to 16, not 14.
2. Swapping Efreet and Doom Bat resistance.
Efreet is definitely the better creature because it attacks at range. Move 6 does allow the Doom Bat to hit enemies on turn one, but it's ultimately still a melee creature and takes damage while fighting units, and Efreet does not. Efreet is also more versatile due to the casting ability. This logic applies just the same in CoM I so I'm including this change.
3. Perfectionist AI unit priority reduction cannot reduce unit priority below default.
This basically means even Perfectionist AI's won't leave their cities poorly garrisoned in the early game, and the reduced chance to build units only applies to cities later on when they'd already have more than the default chance to build a unit. While this does remove the obvious weakness against attacks for Perfectionist wizards at the beginning of the game unfortunately, having cities with many high cost economy buildings guarded by only 3-4 swordsmen is not acceptable. As unit production is still lower beyond the default, and the default is only enough to fill garrisons up to 7-8 units and not to produce extras, the perfectionist AI will still have much less 'extra' armies to attack players or lairs then other wizards, and they'll be much slower to upgrade their garrisons to higher quality units.
4. We changed the starting power and starting skill formulas to be less rewarding on picking low amounts of books in many realms. I'm not sure if we want this included. In CoM I we don't have Monuments for extra casting skill in battle, but such 'low books in everything' strategies being way more powerful in the early game is definitely a thing.
5. Darkness cost
This was reduced to 20 and there isn't really any big difference that would warrant having it set to a different amount than CoM II. I do wonder if there was a reason I have chosen 25 initially though, maybe to force picking a higher amount of books to be able to cast the spell at the beginning of the game on skeletons or ghouls? That's a somewhat obsolete strategy now that 8 books allow early werewolves though, so letting lower Death book players access it makes sense.
+1
It might be a good idea to reduce the amount of "strong lairs" by 1, 2 or 3 per plane and add the same amount of "easy lairs". It's not newbie friendly to have that many hard lairs and ever since we overhauled the treasure generation system to generate a constant amount of "high quality" stuff, I don't think the "hard lairs" actually get filled with treasure really worth the effort often enough.
As a downside, sprites and other early treasure strategies might get a little bit stronger and more reliable, although now that gold and mana rewards are only half the budget, this is probably not a problem and might even be necessary to put those a few percentage closer to their former glory.
Tower budgets were also raised a lot as well as their amounts on the map so they effectively function as an extra 3-6 "hard lairs" compared to the more ancient versions of the mod. (although they can't contain extra pick treasure which is why most people want to clear out the high end places.)
Edit : finished looking over the monster budgets, might as well copy my post on Steam, here :
1. Fire Elemental cost
As Chaos is generally better early in CoM I (Fire Storm is still an uncommon), I think it's best to buff it slightly less than in CoM II, so I have set the cost to 16, not 14.
2. Swapping Efreet and Doom Bat resistance.
Efreet is definitely the better creature because it attacks at range. Move 6 does allow the Doom Bat to hit enemies on turn one, but it's ultimately still a melee creature and takes damage while fighting units, and Efreet does not. Efreet is also more versatile due to the casting ability. This logic applies just the same in CoM I so I'm including this change.
3. Perfectionist AI unit priority reduction cannot reduce unit priority below default.
This basically means even Perfectionist AI's won't leave their cities poorly garrisoned in the early game, and the reduced chance to build units only applies to cities later on when they'd already have more than the default chance to build a unit. While this does remove the obvious weakness against attacks for Perfectionist wizards at the beginning of the game unfortunately, having cities with many high cost economy buildings guarded by only 3-4 swordsmen is not acceptable. As unit production is still lower beyond the default, and the default is only enough to fill garrisons up to 7-8 units and not to produce extras, the perfectionist AI will still have much less 'extra' armies to attack players or lairs then other wizards, and they'll be much slower to upgrade their garrisons to higher quality units.
4. We changed the starting power and starting skill formulas to be less rewarding on picking low amounts of books in many realms. I'm not sure if we want this included. In CoM I we don't have Monuments for extra casting skill in battle, but such 'low books in everything' strategies being way more powerful in the early game is definitely a thing.
5. Darkness cost
This was reduced to 20 and there isn't really any big difference that would warrant having it set to a different amount than CoM II. I do wonder if there was a reason I have chosen 25 initially though, maybe to force picking a higher amount of books to be able to cast the spell at the beginning of the game on skeletons or ghouls? That's a somewhat obsolete strategy now that 8 books allow early werewolves though, so letting lower Death book players access it makes sense.
+1
It might be a good idea to reduce the amount of "strong lairs" by 1, 2 or 3 per plane and add the same amount of "easy lairs". It's not newbie friendly to have that many hard lairs and ever since we overhauled the treasure generation system to generate a constant amount of "high quality" stuff, I don't think the "hard lairs" actually get filled with treasure really worth the effort often enough.
As a downside, sprites and other early treasure strategies might get a little bit stronger and more reliable, although now that gold and mana rewards are only half the budget, this is probably not a problem and might even be necessary to put those a few percentage closer to their former glory.
Tower budgets were also raised a lot as well as their amounts on the map so they effectively function as an extra 3-6 "hard lairs" compared to the more ancient versions of the mod. (although they can't contain extra pick treasure which is why most people want to clear out the high end places.)
Edit : finished looking over the monster budgets, might as well copy my post on Steam, here :
Quote:I've added a section about monster and treasure generation to the documentation (coming in the next update probably in a few weeks) which allowed me to review the various point budgets the game uses for them, and realized there is a fairly large oversight and people complaining the monsters are too hard are right.
The early versions of the mod went in the direction of "more treasure is more fun" and increased monster budgets quite drastically to allow more of those late game locations containing cool treasure and challenging monsters. However that was almost 5 years ago and since then the treasure generation mechanisms have been altered and refined a lot - the treasure output is more stable and doesn't rely on having lots of difficult locations to randomly roll high quality treasure, as well as the quantity of high quality treasure being toned down to somewhere between the original game and the earlier mod versions- more treasure is more fun but not beyond the point where hunting treasure makes all other strategies unnecessary.
This means the higher monster budgets became unnecessary leftovers from an old system the mod got rid of already, and can be safely reduced without losing any treasure. I wish I realized that earlier, but I was too used to seeing the difficult encounter zones and the changes were gradual in treasure generation so there was no obvious time to notice they are no longer in sync.
So I've reduced the amount of "hard" and increased the amount of "easy" locations and tweaked the ranges of budgets for each for the next update which should also result in overall much more places with medium difficulty monsters. I still need to fix some more bugs and play a test game then Slitherine needs to process the patch as well so it's probably coming in another 2-4 weeks the earliest.
That said this might result in the AI clearing out these zones earlier due to the weaker monsters, but as it's also much easier for players to do so, overall I think it should be an improvement.
