That was it - thanks for pointing it out.
Another thing:
Could you post the stats for Gaia Lords (lesser and greater).
And: I have tried out if I can consistently beat Lords with 9 armorers guild units and the best common spells.
Let us rule out 9 warlocks (which wont work against aether either way and in practice, not against nature either bc of entangle)
I am not sure if it works, though. Here is how it might work:
Chaos: seems vulnerable to shooters, how about webbing him and 9 Elven Lords, ultra elite, resist elements, holy armor.
Aether: much the same, I would think, but maybe cast resist magic also. Of course if he runs then it is hard, but with dumb neutral elven lords or maybe legionaries will do the trick (alternatively, pick War Mammoths or Huskarls).
Gaia: I failed with 9 legionaries bc of entangle and his brutal first strike. Since he also has negate first strike, you will suffer casualties. However, he will kill elven lords or huskarls with his first strike, so maybe cast web as often as possible?
Those 3 lords are sum of creatures of their realm plus insane casting skill. Chaos lord weak to shooter of all kind but it would be bad idea to go into melee against it unless you are fully prepared. Greater Aether lord has missile and magic immunity and it's magic could not be counter, so it only weak to heavy melee attacker with breath and thrown, luckily ai is dumb and foolhardy when using it, so you could even able to win by just using stag beetle. Gaia Lord weakness is just that it could be stopped by mundane web and foolhardy, so if you prepared, you could and should kill it first. Pretty sure that you need unit with regeneration to win against it cleanly. And if you want some kind of trophies, you could created undead from chaos and Gaia lords with unit that deal undead creating damage and they are great asset for wizard who own them.
When I use Auto in combat (when I have won it already, just to mop it up), could you make the AI in that situation as smart as the enemy AI? Auto combat is especially dumb, it does everything wrong (shoot from 9 squares away even though you can safely approach, not use first strike/thrown, sacrifice damaged units by dumb approach, throw spells that are outright unworkable).
Moreover, how about an option that allows outpost to become towns immediately? Some people find the outpost growth obnoxious. Of course that benefits some races over others, but it is optional; so is Tree Mastery.
(November 5th, 2022, 01:15)occasionalplayer Wrote: Two more suggestions:
When I use Auto in combat (when I have won it already, just to mop it up), could you make the AI in that situation as smart as the enemy AI? Auto combat is especially dumb, it does everything wrong (shoot from 9 squares away even though you can safely approach, not use first strike/thrown, sacrifice damaged units by dumb approach, throw spells that are outright unworkable).
Moreover, how about an option that allows outpost to become towns immediately? Some people find the outpost growth obnoxious. Of course that benefits some races over others, but it is optional; so is Tree Mastery.
Sorry that both are impossible for me, auto-combat code still not yet open for edit by Seravy. To eliminate outpost phase is impossible as well, I could make it shorter or less likely to fail under some rule setting but still impossible to eliminate it completely.
(November 3rd, 2022, 08:59)occasionalplayer Wrote: Lizards, I am afraid, are underwhelming. Low production seems crippling. Javelineers are weak hitters, it seems. Dragon Turtle is ok, better than beetle.
But they are so good at dominating in population growth (what this table is - I'm blue lizardmen)
I tend to agree about Lizardmen - especially Cult Leader/Heavenly Light works well.
Dragon Turtles are cool and less prone to losses than steam tanks or golems.
A few more suggestions:
Casting Chaos Channels on a Dragon Turtle should not give them a weak fire breath since they already have a lightning breath which is functionally the same.
Golems do not appear to have Resist Elements - is that correct?
Could you do something about the speed when waiting for the next turn? It gets borderline unplayable the more opponents you have (FPS drop to 5-10; with Caster, it stays at 55, much better end of turn wait). Other than that, your mod almost created an entirely new game. Congrats!
It would help to know which scripts consume most of the time. That way we can edit the files to remove slow features we don't care about. My games never last long enough for the rare and VR spells to be used, so there's no point in checking each unit for modifiers for those spells.
Hmm, here's an idea for speeding up the scripts: add some code so that those checks aren't done until someone actually casts the spell. If done the right way, it shouldn't add too much extra decision-checking later in the game. At least I hope the script language allows that sort of minimizing of decisions. At worst, you have have multiple copies of portions of the script, and switch between them at different points in the game.
Maybe there are some other ways to avoid the 'checking every flag on each unit' script. If it's for the AIs to compare their military strength vs someone else's, update one value every x turns or when a major modifier happens (casting a global spell, a major battle where many units are lost). I expect that there's quite a lot of time calculating precise values where/when it doesn't make a significant difference. The AI doesn't need to know your precise total military strength to decide whether to to declare war on you if you're on relatively good terms and it's already at war with two other AIs.
I do like the extra units, spells, focus on normal units, etc, of Warlords, but the last update I did (many months ago) ran so slowly that I wasn't having fun. I haven't played since. Next time I have the urge to play, I may go back to vanilla COM, and maybe even weed out any script functions that slow rather than add to the game fun.
The biggest culprit of speed down is in unitcalc.cas and unitcalcpre.cas. I did some code steamlining on it for sometimes but time spending still high, I need to look into detail what I should trim down
