general feedback =)

[letsdance]

i didn't want to jump the (different) discussion in the other general feedback thread, so i think it's better to start a new one.

let me start by saying that CoM is awesome (which, of course, merely means that it meets the expectations  )

i do like that the game feels faster. the pace of the game is the great thing about CoM. i'm not quite sure about the sawmill and marketplace, because they favor even more spamming many small towns, but it fits the concept. same goes for the cheaper building buy costs in combination with higher gold income in general. it's now very easy to quickly build up a productive city as soon as you get mithril or adamantium. maybe it should at least be more expensive in the first turn. i do like that i have enough mana to cast lots of spells, which was never the case in vanilla.

call centaurs seems a bit too powerful. they are much more versatile than phantom warriors. in general, you tried to balance the realms by removing or mitigating their weaknesses. black got a nuke, green got a good combat summon and so on. that's a bad change in my oppinion. it was the beauty of the game that each strategy has serious weaknesses. for example playing black absolutely sucks when you encounter death immune units. now you can use heroic shout. i would prefer to have more weaknesses rather than less.

enchanting items should be a bit cheaper, like 75%
i like alot the reduced food upkeep
casting cost and research bonus for spellbooks could be higher, currently its negligible
heavenly light... is there any reason not to cast it on every city? a bit boring
divine order seems very weak. remove its upkeep?
water walking has no upkeep? same reason as ships?
one benefit of being myrran was less enemies on your side. you should keep that also for higher difficulties. i liked the "always on myrran AI" in vanilla.

enemy wizards are very annoying. i guess that makes them play better, but i doubt it makes the game more fun, at least not for me. on normal the game was boring, on hard or higher they declared war on me pretty much as soon as they found me (playing low land mass with islands). i guess i have to spam unit summons just to show enough military strength? they declared war because of my weakness, though not any one of them could kill me, or even conquer anything. i had more ships killing all theirs that shipped units towards me. of course in the long run i couldn't defend against all 4 of them, and some of my best spaces were always corrupted again as soon as i purified them. it seems it's even more important now to have a good (lucky) start.

[Nelphine]

Military strength is based on strategic combat strength. This has a lot of issues (which aren't solvable - Seravy and I have discussed this a lot). But it means spamming halberdiers gets you a strong army. Since the AI does that, they end up thinking they have a very strong army regardless of its in combat effectiveness.

[Seravy]

you tried to balance the realms by removing or mitigating their weaknesses.

Not really. Life and Sorcery still suck at overland summoning for the first half of the game. Chaos and Death still have no reliable ways to heal or protect units or heroes. Sorcery and Chaos is still below average in the early game. Life still has no direct damage, unit curses, or overland economy attacks. Nature is...still the generalist realm that has everything but less efficient at them than others, aside from its own themes.
I consider summoning a global theme of Nature and that includes combat summoning. Nature only has one "theme" in combat in the original, slowing down enemy units which is a nice combo with ranged units and entirely useless otherwise. Giving them summoned ranged units is buffing their strong point, not their weakness.
Death, well, let's just say if you only have resistance based effect in a realm, that is unplayable. No other realm is that one-sided. The nuke it got, Reaper Slash has no effect on units with Poison Immunity, which means you still can't damage anything that is from the death realm. Heroic Shout is not strictly a Death realm spell, and while it is direct damage, it's only effective against low tier multi figure units. It also requires heroes, something Death absolutely sucks at protecting from harm.

heavenly light... is there any reason not to cast it on every city?

Very much like all other overland spells, none at all, except having limited casting skill and too many spells to cast. I think the only reason I can think of is, needing to buff up my armies for an early attack. I think it's not a problem since most stuff on the overland map are like this, you don't have a reason not to build a Granary or Cathedral either.

divine order seems very weak. remove its upkeep?

I fail to see how a 25% discount on most of your spells is weak and not worth the upkeep. Especially considering it even makes stuff more expensive for everyone else. Of course this is if you play mainly Life (or Sorcery) books, otherwise you have to more carefully weight the advantages and disadvantages before using it.

water walking has no upkeep? same reason as ships?

The effect is nowhere near powerful enough to be worth an entire mana of upkeep and I can't make it cost half.

one benefit of being myrran was less enemies on your side.

You still get fewer, only 2 instead of 3.
Only 1 instead of 3 is too gamebreaking, and the fair price of that would be something like 20 picks :D
Especially if that one happens to be peaceful or stuck on an island, then it's like a free win.

they declared war because of my weakness,

This depends on the objective. Only 40% of the wizards will do that, Militarists and Expansionists. Produce more units, or kill some of theirs and eventually they'll stop the war. Of course on very high difficulty this isn't always an option but that's why it's very high difficulty.

enchanting items should be a bit cheaper, like 75%

I was thinking about that but haven't decided on it yet. Items definitely take way too long to create. If I do this, treasure has to be lowered because it also depends on item cost. Also, I'm a bit worried about this, items are one of the things that makes the player unstoppable, a hero with good items is almost invincible. I rather change the cost of individual abilities, keeping the best stuff the same and only lowering what cannot win the game outright. (But I already did that once, low-mid tier items should be much easier to make now)

[letsdance]

i'm currently playing a game on normal difficulty. that's a bit strange since i consider myself a MoM expert and can beat the original (or kyrubs) game at highest difficulty if i want. AI is still extremely annoying. what i don't understand is how powerful the AI is even at this low difficulty level. jafar casts a magic spirit every round, which gets instantly killed by my 2 sprites, which are parked next to his capital. is is his only city and has 6 population and about 4 buildings. besides casting a magic spirit every round he manages to also increase the number of nagas in his city (by now to 6).

the AI also seems to be able to spam alot more settlers than i can, while also building an army. considering that some people might want to play this, who are less skilled in the game, maybe it would be better to rebalance the lower difficulty levels.

of course i have by far the weakest army again. spamming halberdiers might be a good idea, but it's impossible that early in the game. since i play halflings it will still be impossible later

[Nelphine]

Halflings do have weak army strength. I don't think I could consider that a problem though - they're halflings. And in terms of actual combat effectiveness, they aren't that weak. In fact, I think the fact that the game manages to capture a very classic trope 'oh halflings are weak let's declare war and conquer them! Wait.. how are they not losing? ?' is actually a very good thing.

[letsdance]

well, if all enemy wizards declare war on you before you even have 4 cities, it is a problem. i fail to see how it can ever be an advantage to be at war.

as a side note, i liked that fantastic creatures needed a turn until they got their bonus when summoned on a node of their color in the original game.

it looks like i cannot kill floating islands. i enter a square with a floating island (and nothing else) with 2 sprites and i win the combat, but the island is not destroyed, it just moves to an adjacent water space.

[Nelphine]

I didn't mean it's an advantage to the halflings player that people declare war in them. I meant it's neat that the game manages to keep that stereotype. It certainly is difficult to play - that's one of the halflings races weakness (even if it's vastly different to the original halflings ovetpoweredness).

[Seravy]

considering that some people might want to play this, who are less skilled in the game, maybe it would be better to rebalance the lower difficulty levels.

I think the Easy difficulty level is more appropriate for people who can't handle 6 Nagas
(there is a simple explanation to that, a wizard's fortress produces a lot of power. Well, not that much but enough to summon a Naga every once in a while...but that's about all they'll be doing.)

I recently tested Easy and honestly it's a joke. I mean I was ahead of everyone while repeatedly sending stacks to nodes where they were guaranteed to die, and raising volcanoes over my own cities and that kind of crap.

Normal is not like that, if you are weak at this kind of game you might even lose until you get used to it at least somewhat. It's pretty easy if you know the basics (Build units. Don't get them killed by attacking obviously superior enemies. Don't leave cities undefended during war.)...and if you don't there are still two options for you, play easy and win anyway, or stay on normal, lose some, and become better at the game at a faster rate.

I don't like how in the gaming industry normal tends to be "you always win no matter how badly you play" and easy means the enemy intentionally kills itself even if you don't touch the keyboard, while only 1-2 levels above normal is where the real game starts. I also don't like the opposite where you can't beat even Easy after practicing a long time like Touhou shooters but that's another problem.

[letsdance]

i agree with you concerning modern games. i won that normal game by the way and no the nagas are not a problem, they just stayed inside the city anyways. i was just embarrased by how much casting skill and mana income that AI must have had without any nodes or mana giving buildings.

but i disagree that the basics are sufficient to win normal. the only way to win this game was spamming sprites (playing halflings with 10 nature books). otherwise i'd have been reduced to my capital very quickly. there was no way to have higher military strength without losing all my city spots to enemy settlers, and there was obviously no way to avoid being declared war without higher military strength. both would lead to losing the game unless you have a special plan. again, needing a dedicated strategy like that is not a problem, but it's not what i'd expect form normal or even hard difficulty. it's what you usually need only for the highest difficulty levels.

by the way, guardian seems a bit weak for 2 picks. i don't think i'd even take it for 1 - the game is usually decided outside my cities - but at 1 it's at least worth a consideration.

[letsdance]

by the way, since 2 gold (g) = 1 production (p) and 1 food = 1g without any exceptions(?) we can easily compare different building efficiencies. yes it's only true in the beginning of city development before you hit the food cap or have many production % boni (you have some from terrain in any case) - but the relative values shouldn't change much with that. i also ignore that gold is more versatile, but for a rough estimate it's good enough. i'll add a ROI, which is the amount of rounds until the building has produced as much as it costs. i'll calculate a population as +4g (assuming farmer 2f - 1f eaten, +0.5p, +2g taxes)

sawmill: cost 200, gives 12g (8p = 16g - 4g upkeep), ROI 17 - does it benefit from production boni?
marketplace: cost 200, gives 7g, ROI 29
granary: cost 160, gives 1g (worker instead of farmer - 2g) and 1 additional population (+4g) every 50 rounds. ROI about 70
foresters guild: cost 200, gives 5.5g (1.5 workers instead of farmer - 3g + assumed +1p from the 10%), ROI 36
farmers market: cost 200, gives 1.5g (1.5 workers instead of farmer - 3g) and 1 additional population every 33 rounds, ROI about 67

it also means that for halfings, farmers produce the same amount of production as workers (except that you can use it anywhere!), as long as you don't have any modifiers. other races usually have modifiers by the time they build an animists guild, otherwise the same applies.

if we assume 1 mana (m) = 2g (conversions usually happen this direction) and 1 research = 1g (mana slider is rarely on research), we can extend that to other buildings:
shrine: cost 240, gives 7g (2m - 1g upkeep, +2p +2g for one taxed worker instead of rebel), ROI 34
parthenon: cost 400, gives 10g, ROI 40
library: cost 80, gives 1g, ROI 80
sages guild: cost 600, gives 5g, ROI 120

as expected, sawmill is king followed by marketplace. it takes a long time until granary and farmers market are better than foresters guild. even then i'm not sure because the +10% bonus gets better later. even if shrine and parthenon avoid a rebel they're not really better than foresters guild. the usefulness of library and sages guild depends alot on how much you value research compared to gold (obviously), but they're quite weak in any case.

later buildings can't sensefully be compared in a general way because of the % boni, unless we assume a city size of 25 and a fully developed city, but then the compare is pointless.

since 1f = 1g, but producing trade goods only gives 1g for 2p, it's better to use farmers for producing gold until you hit the food cap, even with high production boni (assuming you have an animists guild)