Very Rares seem to drop too easily / often above Expert

[jhsidi]

In my past 3-4 games I've been paying attention to when and how Very Rare spells drop in Master level games.

According to the formula they unlock as treasure in 1408 for Expert and 1407 for Master. "Unlocked" is equal to "in the game, actively being used by wizards" since that's also around the time that both the player and (in higher level games) the AI can reliably take ruins / nodes that are strong enough to drop Very Rares.

Here are a few of the things I've seen:

• Game 1: I got Life Force in early 1407 and immediately ballooned in power. I noticed that another wizard had a capital packed full of Great Drakes by 1408. After Life Force I also got Supreme Light and Ruler of Heaven from treasure, around 1408.
  
• Game 2: Four (!) separate AIs cast Planetary Mastery between 1408 and 1410. I doubt this happened through trading as two were on Arcanus and two on Myrror, and there wasn't traffic between planes yet. This is the only time I've ever seen multiple AIs all get the same Very Rare global, even in longer games, so I doubt I'll see it again anytime soon, but it can happen. (Side note, I'm not sure all the duplicate copies were even working together since the world didn't suddenly become all forest.)
  
• Game 3: In 1509 I've got Great Drake, Blazing Eyes, and Call the Void, all from treasure. The first one dropped in 1407 from a not-particularly-hard ruin. Also, I got two of those spells before my first Rare was even available to research. Even now I still only have / have completed research on 1 Rare spell.
  

I see two problems with this:

• Rare spells, in my experience, rarely (heh) drop in treasure. In my most recent game for instance, game 3 mentioned above, I've gotten 0 rare spells in treasure. Meanwhile, 3 Very Rare. I am destroying all but the very hardest ruins, towers etc, so the problem isn't that I'm somehow skipping the less difficult ruins that would drop Rares. Maybe there's actually a bug here.
  
• Research is slooooooow. Even if you were an Omniscient Sage Sorcery wizard playing halflings, you wouldn't be researching Very Rare spells by the same point you could pull multiple from treasure. It feels wrong that there's not a strategy that could compete with treasure hunting.
  

So I have a few potential suggestions:

• Add 1 or 2 to the formula, moving the first drop date for VR to 1409 or 1410 for Expert. I actually think this is less than optimal as a solution because treasure-oriented players (and sometimes AI, depending on whether a given wizard becomes very powerful) will take out a lot of ruins already by then.
  
• Increase the power of ruins in Expert+ and similarly increase the budget required to drop the best treasure.
  
• Increase the likelihood and priority of getting Rare spells. I didn't try to calculate how likely it is to get a Rare vs a VR in treasure, but it's my experience in more than the 3 games mentioned above that I just don't get many Rares as treasure.
  
• Maybe increase research speed -- just a bit, maybe 10% -- for all players in Expert+, to allow for research oriented strategies? Again, this isn't just a "crazy human gets all the treasure" problem, I'm seeing AIs also get Very Rares that they probably shouldn't have yet.
  

tl;dr it's not a huge problem but something just feels wonky here.

[Seravy]

According to the script file :

Very rares :
Advanced : 1516, Expert : 1514, Master : 1513, Lunatic : 1512, Phantasm : 1511.
Rares : Subtract 6 years from the above.

...based on your experience I suspect the rare and very rare spell triggers are mixed up....except I see nothing in the code that would do that.

I opened a lair in my ongoing test game and it worked as intended and removed the spell in 1507. (it was lower difficulty though)
Do you have a save file for one of those cases when you got the spell early?

[jhsidi]

Oh, so it's a just me issue? I managed to track down the save file for the first Very Rare dropped in my most recent game. Take Yamrag's stack north into the Arch Angel ruin (was originally 2 AA and a couple unicorns if I recall correctly), web and murder the angel, a Very Rare will drop as treasure. This is actually earlier than I remembered, in Nov 1506: https://ufile.io/owpbldoc

As far as I can remember I haven't modded anything, I use GOG and just update whenever it offers. My build is marked as 1.04.01, updated on 2022-03-01. As far as I could understand, Treaspell.cas controls when Rare/VR spells unlock; here's what mine says:

K=16;
if DIFFICULTY()>=DiffExpert then { k=k-(Difficulty()-3); }

if OVERLANDTURN()<(K*12) THEN {VERYRAREALLOWED=1; }
if OVERLANDTURN()<((K*12)-72) THEN {RAREALLOWED=1; }

Let me know if you need any other files.

[Seravy]

I got a Life book. Seems to work as intended.
There were no changes to this part of the code either.

...your script file is wrong. This is the correct one :

:
Output
RAREALLOWED = 1 if rare spells can be found, 0 otherwise.
VERYRAREALLOWED = 1 if very rare spells can be found
:

RAREALLOWED=1;
VERYRAREALLOWED=1;

K=16;
if DIFFICULTY()>=DiffExpert then { k=k-(Difficulty()-3); }

if OVERLANDTURN()<(K*12) THEN {VERYRAREALLOWED=0; }
if OVERLANDTURN()<((K*12)-72) THEN {RAREALLOWED=0; }

There used to be a bug where these variables had the opposite effect than intended in an earlier version, maybe you changed the script as a workaround and forgot to restore after the bug was fixed?

[jhsidi]

Oh, that's very likely. The only reason I would have modified anything is if you suggested a workaround, and I'm definitely the type to forget about it afterward.

Sorry for the misposted thread, this should have been in bugs. Thanks for the help.