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New year, New Master of Magic! v1.5 fan patch

(January 21st, 2016, 21:37)Tiltowait Wrote: The problem really isn't the stats of Triremes. They don't need any "balancing". The problem is the excessive number of ships built.

Honestly, I don't think 10, 20 or even 30 ships is excessive on a map where sea combat is supposed to be the primary deciding factor of victory. Of course flying units can fill in for that role but not all race has them so I can't make the AI rely on that.
Consider it this way, an AI player generally has an average of 200 units, out of those, having 10-50 ships on small land is not all that much.
A trireme being worth less than a spearmen though...really defeats the purpose. I mean, seriously 6 swords on a single figure unit? That's a joke.
Of course, I might be wrong. Remember that all AI changes are optimized to CoM and copied over. I don't have the capacity to do it all over for another game version, at best I can leave out the obviously incompatible parts like higher priority to spells that are worthless without the mod (Call Chaos being one such example). At the very least it should work better than originally.
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Quote: The correct action when you can't beat your opponent should be to retreat, not to wait out the fight. This is especially true when the ones doing the waiting are defending a lair, node, or city. If they won't fight, the attackers ought to be able to walk right past them and get the objective.

In theory yes, but fleeing does not take flight into account. They would risk getting killed by doing that, when they have a 100% chance to survive if they do not. The greater problem is, I have no idea what would happen if the neutral player fled a battle from inside a ruin. In worst case, the units might leave the area and start rampaging. Another problem is, it is not done or a per unit basis but globally, although flight is a unit ability. So this would be harder to implement. I did try enabling the AI to flee without having a hero in battle (regardless of flight) and it produced horrible results, they still lost the units most of the time, but didn't even do damage and lost their opportunity to cast spells in the battle and turn it around.

Quote:Any chance you'd consider doing the same for unit stats? I'd also potentially be interested in seeing numeric remaining/total hit points for units in combat rather than the life bar.

Aside from health, you can see the rest during combat in numbers when you select the unit. I have no intention to do this at the moment.
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Quote:They would risk getting killed by doing that, when they have a 100% chance to survive if they do not.

Maybe that's another way to address this problem - impose a consequence for "all units retreat exhausted." As is, I feel like it's an exploit. Before your changes, the human player would exploit it against the AI, and now it goes both ways. Maybe deal damage to all units in the combat? Maybe cause both sides to "retreat?"

Quote:The greater problem is, I have no idea what would happen if the neutral player fled a battle from inside a ruin. In worst case, the units might leave the area and start rampaging.

That actually sounds pretty awesome to me.
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(January 22nd, 2016, 13:28)spottedshroom Wrote: Maybe that's another way to address this problem - impose a consequence for "all units retreat exhausted." As is, I feel like it's an exploit. Before your changes, the human player would exploit it against the AI, and now it goes both ways. Maybe deal damage to all units in the combat? Maybe cause both sides to "retreat?"
I don't see what's an exploit in continuing the battle in the next overland turn if it cannot be won in one turn. That's how war works in real life, too. Especially in medieval times, the siege of a well defended castle could take months, years even!
It deepens strategy as well, it's a feature not an exploit.
Honestly why do people keep calling features exploits? Taking advantage of game rules to win is called strategy, it's the whole point of playing this type of game!
It only becomes an exploit if you take advantage of a bug or missing part of the game design , like if you summon in a cell the AI cannot reach and then pass turns to not lose a battle.
Being able to actually use my brains is what makes this game different from all the others, and dragging a combat into the next overland turn is one of the most valuable strategies.

Besides, with the AI randomly moving around, the only actual exploit related to this (aside from the summons on the edge of the map) : using invisible ranged units is gone, there is an actual risk to be found! What made it an exploit was the inability of the AI to move if they didn't see a unit to attack, even though invisibility was not supposed to make it impossible to get attacked. Contrary to this, flying units are not an exploit, because they cannot be attacked. It's what the ability is supposed to do. It's not poor AI coding, it's just impossible to attack them, and you can (are supposed to) take advantage of that.

btw if both sides retreated, that would be a huge exploit. Fly into an enemy city with sprites. Pass 50 turns. Now the city is void of defenders, take it with a spearmen!
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(January 22nd, 2016, 14:02)Seravy Wrote: It deepens strategy as well, it's a feature not an exploit.
Honestly why do people keep calling features exploits? Taking advantage of game rules to win is called strategy, it's the whole point of playing this type of game!

Hey, you're the one who suggested limiting to 10 books in patch 7 wink

Quote:I don't see what's an exploit in continuing the battle in the next overland turn if it cannot be won in one turn. That's how war works in real life, too. Especially in medieval times, the siege of a well defended castle could take months, years even!

If you're ostensibly defending a location but refuse to fight to keep it, haven't you already lost? I know a "correct" implementation of this would be next to impossible, but if you're talking realism it shouldn't be possible for city/node/whatever defenders to force a retreat by refusing to fight. For cities this is somewhat mitigated by being able to do a lot of damage, but you still can't destroy or capture it.
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(January 22nd, 2016, 14:53)spottedshroom Wrote: Hey, you're the one who suggested limiting to 10 books in patch 7
11 books is far too unbeatable. Unlike flying units which can be attacked by anything ranged, thrown, breath, spells, etc, 11 books has no counter. And changing the game rules to not allow something does not mean doing so while it was still allowed was an exploit. 11 books was never an exploit but it was bad game design.

Quote:If you're ostensibly defending a location but refuse to fight to keep it, haven't you already lost?
The battle? Yes, definitely. The war? Not at all. In fact, the enemy army can't advance and you are buying precious time for your entire empire to produce reinforcements and eventually crush the attackers without them getting to kill people in the defended city. But this isn't about refusing to fight here. They can't. The enemy is flying. Also, while defending there is the def bonus of city walls to consider. Going outside is only a good idea if the enemy has ranged attacks and the defenders do not (and the AI will do this if needed)

Anyway, while the game does use the text "all units retreat exhausted" because that's how the game works, what this is supposed to actually simulate is "the siege is still ongoing but meanwhile it's the next overland turn so we need to give the control back to the players to order their other armies, so the combat is suspended". And yes, in theory that would mean the attacking army still stays in on the map cell they are attacking continuing the siege, but since the game would crash from that, they have to temporarily be moved back where they need to receive orders to continue fighting the next turn. On the plus side, this allows both participants of the battle to reinforce their armies (which is more realistic than not being able to) and allows units that the enemy cannot attack or reach to just walk/fly away and abandon the battle (which they should be able to through the flee button as well, but it's again not possible to implement that, but this is a reasonable replacement)
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Found a pretty serious bug in RC7 with AI naval movement, units on transports sometimes walked off the ship into the ocean while the ship didn't go with them. In theory such movement should not be possible even if the wrong orders are given to the unit, but for some weird reason they actually managed to do so. I haven't been able to figure out why an invalid movement can be done (I couldn't reproduce such an action myself), but I did manage to fix the problem that caused the units to receive different orders and split up.
The bug only affected certain races and units, in particular I observed it with orcs and hell hounds.
I'll upload RC8 as soon as I complete my current game. I want to make sure it properly works now.
It'll also contain strategic combat undead, and fixes the bug of the AI not noticing obstacles on the shore when disembarking, like attacking cities or nodes by accident, even with settlers. Additionally it'll fix a whole bunch of minor diplomacy bugs I found while writing the diplomacy sections of the wiki. It'll also fix the problem of the AI plane shifting out units from the fortress and leaving it poorly defended.
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RC8 is up!
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I managed to make all units check for drowning before the start of the new turn, every turn. I thought about it, and even if it does make dispelling and unsummoning more powerful, it's just not right to have units survive a turn on sea without anything carrying them.
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RC9 is up!
fixes various movement stacking problems, some problems in diplomacy, and implements proper end of turn drowning.
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