Strategic Combat in CoM

[Seravy]

After fixing the bug :

Attacker
DEF :5741
RAN :2248
ATK: 4837
These seem correct.

Defender
DEF: 10380
RAN : 0
ATK : 15713
These are also correct, yay!

and the result ...losing the battle every time, yay!

Uploaded the fixed version, download "stratfix.zip" from the usual folder and test it.
I had to make strategic combat run a normal combat memory allocation routine, as city enchantments were not just uninitialized variables but not even allocated for this type of battle - which is bad as the stat calculation still attempts to use it (as CoM has several city enchants that affect unit stats). As I don't know much about how this type of allocation works, I can't guarantee stability. It most likely should work (as it's the same thing normal combat already uses), but please test it.

So, shouldn't the enemy units have had fairy touch too, not just my units?

They did, except those units had no ranged attacks in the first place to apply to modifier on. And it was a ranged only ability, so melee was not affected.

Edit : Darkness is gone. I assume it was caused by a similar bug, probably a "virtual" Cloud of Shadow city enchantment.

Also, I still have to test and see if the wards are applied correctly in cities where they should.

...Darkness is on this battle again. But the test was successful - Heavenly Light was copied over properly.

[Nelphine]

Can you also confirm my casting skill question from 3 posts back?

Edit: the fairy touch glitch explains why there seemed to be such a heavy ranged bias. Thank you.

[Seravy]

Can you also confirm my casting skill question from 3 posts back?

Edit: the fairy touch glitch explains why there seemed to be such a heavy ranged bias. Thank you.

Yes, it's using the 150. I didn't notice you had spellweaver and heroes so I assumed it's 268 because I saw that first.
Wait...no, it's using the full amount.
60E0 - casting skill instead of 60EA - casting skill left for combat. (heroes are not included though, at least that is correct.)
More bugs, yay!

...meh, strategic combat doesn't even calculate the combat skill. Wait, this also means banished wizards can cast spells in strategic combat!
I have to copy the combat skill calculation and insert it somehow.

[Nelphine]

I thought banished wizards were using spells! Its just blasted hard to tell.

[Seravy]

File reuploaded, this time includes the fix for casting skill as well.

[Nelphine]

What happened with the darkness spell?

[Seravy]

Nothing, I assume it was caused by the city effect copying too many bytes. Not 100% sure though but the only other possibility is an Eternal Night spell and...those are in wizard data which is not affected by strategic combat so there can't possibly be a bug with it.
Cloud of Shadow is also out, as that one adds 3 other enchantments along with it.

At the very least it wasn't there in the last two battles I tested.

[Nelphine]

Started a game with Stratfix. Cast Heavenly light. Selected the city. Graphic comes up, beautiful light shows up. Game freezes - can't go past this screen. Confirmed with a new game, casting nature's eye on my capital also freezes the game. My GUESS is that any city enchantment will freeze the game.

[Seravy]

Fixed and reuploaded.

[Nelphine]

Tum te tum.. OK back to ye ol' drawing board. Sorted out some issues with strategic combat - hooray! Other problems still persist. (Generally the idea that the tiers of unit power that exist in tactical are completely different in strategic). This is simply a post explaining the problems as I see them.

One of the biggest problems right now is that number of units is all important in strategic. Specifically, garrisons for the AI are designed around 9 units, that are as strong as the AI can get. All AI follow the same rules for what is 'strong', so while there are inconsistencies, and some AI have advantage over others, its not a huge advantage, and the game largely works despite that.
However, lairs/nodes do NOT follow those rules. They often have one or both of the following flaws:
A) They don't have a full nine units. This means an attacking stack can get a huge advantage in strategic combat, simply by attacking with a full 9 units, even if individually the attacking units are much weaker.

B) They have two types of units of vastly different tiers (sky drakes + naga). In tactical combat, this means the difficulty is as hard as killing the stronger units, with some cannon fodder to make things interesting. In strategic combat this means the combat is really only as hard as the harder units plus a little bit. Effectively it results in the same problem as A) above, just not so obviously.

This effect is what allows AI to so easily tromp many lairs/nodes the human might avoid.

However this has one very major side effect that I think is very core to the difference between our (Seravy and I) playstyle.

The AI considers strategic combat strength when deciding what targets are valid. During peacetime, the AI doesn't have a lot to do, and so builds up enormous armies that naturally form into stacks of 9, just as seravy intends. Very good.
During wartime though, the AI will send stacks to attack as soon as it thinks they have an effective target.

Since I garrison my cities with 8 spearmen, strategically, that means an effective attacking force is 1-4 units, depending on what exactly the enemy has available.

This makes oncoming attacks super easy to crush with my mobile defense forces.

Obviously the start of the war can be diffucult, but if I declare war early enough, the AI wont have those huge armies lying around, and so it will constantly throw tiny little piecemeal attacks against me. My main defensive stacks are never threatened in this way, even if I have to play take back with my cities sometimes.

Basically: I can use stupid weak garrisons to trick the AI into thinking his stacks are stronger than they really are, and save enormously on garrison costs. And, keeping the AI at war with me is a huge benefit to me.

I didn't originally do this on purpose - I did it because of my philosophy of 'as few steps as possible to win'. But that meant seeong how weak my garrisons coild be (and therefore how early i could consider myself effective). And Seravy kept going 'this might work but it seems ridiculous' and talking about the advantages of diplomacy, where I rarely saw any.

Similarly, I never saw the lizardman carpet of doom tactic as an issue - it was a strength, since the AI never sent strong stacks too.


A further problem comes up with the inherent difference in strength of starting races. Barbarians are the biggest culprit. AI that play barbarians are far far stronger strategically than many other races. This let's them clear nodes/lairs with ease, very early. Which of course barbarians are supposed to have an advantage in, but my impression is that advantage is meant against other cities, not against very rare nodes.