Bonjour mes amis français (and Europeans as well)

I’ll be spending a month in France, more specifically in Paris, between February and March 2023. The main reason for the trip is to improve my French as much as possible, but I’ll also be enjoying a vacation.

So, if anyone has any suggestions about how to best enjoy Paris, France and neighboring European countries, I would appreciate them. And if some of our European friends want to have a beer (or wine, or coffee and croissants) together, here’s your chance. Unfortunately, I can’t go to England, because I wouldn’t be able to go back to Schengen area due to immigration rules    .

Is there any interest in trying out a later-era start? I have enough on my plate with two active games, but I'll volunteer to make the map for it if there's interest.

For reference, here's the in-game changes to the various starts (in addition to having all previous tech)
Classical: 1 settler, 1 scout, 1 worker, 1 archer; Cities have no free buildings
Medieval: 2 settler, 1 explorer, 1 worker, 2 archer; Cities have free granary & lighthouse
Renaissance: 2 settler, 1 explorer, 1 worker, 2 longbow; Cites start at 2 and have free granary, lighthouse, aqueduct & forge
Industrial: 3 settler, 2 explorer, 2 worker, 3 rifles; Cites start at 3 and have free granary, lighthouse, aqueduct, forge, harbor & market
Modern: 3 settler, 2 explorer, 2 worker, 3 marines; Cites start at 4 and have free granary, lighthouse, aqueduct, forge, harbor, market, library, courthouse & jail
Future: 3 settler, 2 explorer, 3 worker, 3 mech inf; Cites start at 5 and have free granary, lighthouse, aqueduct, forge, harbor, market, library, courthouse, jail & factory; world map revealed due to Satellites

I started this game a couple of days ago. I took the screen shot several turns in. Not only did I have 3 sorcery nodes nearby, each of which only had Phantom Warriors or Nagas in them, but I started as pure Sorcery with Conjuration and Sorcery Mastery, so it was easy to take them. On top of that, very early on, like 5 turns in, I got Suri the hero. Also, don't know if you noticed, but there is Silver in the mountains as well. So it was +6 gold and Wild Game.

   

The first blue dot to the west of the capital was a natural Nomad town with a default max pop of 22. Oh, also I was High Men to start. The second blue dot to the west was Rajak's capital (Klackons). I was able to take him out before he even established a single settlement. I actually conquered him with a Magic Spirit. I think that when I had gotten all three nodes I put most of my power into increasing Casting Skill, so I was able to drop like 6 or 7 Phantom Warriors on Rajak with a Magic Spirit. 

Needless to say I quickly ran away with this game. It was on 1.5 Hard only, though I wish I could have played this start out on Extreme.

Hi Seravy,

Are you going to release a Caster of Magic mod/addition to the Master of Magic that Slitherine are about to release in a few weeks?
and if so, is it going to be identical to the current Caster of Magic for windows?

Been playing on advanced difficulty, which is very hard to land a win on. I would say out of every 25 games I can win one time, and about 5 times I leave because I feel I might be able to win but it would be such a tedious, long experience that it wouldn't be worth the effort. Mostly the issues here are legacy. Anyway here is my most recent list of notes, suggestions and bugs.

Suggested changes
- z-x city cycling - don't include cities being razed
- warning about all your cities already have city spell - don't include cities being razed
- AI removes spell lock and instantly removes dozens of spells, often in the same turn - I suggest spell lock disables removal of other spells on same turn it was removed.
- Uranus' blessing does nothing at all for some races, and I think it's the only one like this. Maybe reduce magic bonus and add another effect(?). This is already a very boring spell anyway. How about random change to cast stasis in battle, like fate mastery but stasis? Something.
- Selecting a unit to see where it's pathed to, resets its path orders. Maybe require clicking self instead?

Suggested additions
- z-x cycling for eligible disenchant area tiles

Bugs
- Please make switch plane at same position on both planes like it used to be. Confusing as it is now, and I believe this must be a bug.
- Have mentioned before but please fix the bug complaining unit cannot travel on that plane.

Auto-combat mode stuff
- When you have no units, it still asks you to cast spells
- When you are attacked, it should allow you flee attempt rather than just yes/no use spells

I'm not sure if we had a discussion on this before or not but pretty much the problem is this :

While there are many things a player can do to prevent city curses - diplomacy, denial of enemy scouting, etc - there isn't much they can do after the fact. In general nothing short of completely eliminating the enemy player works efficiently and this can be more of a problem now with higher enemy counts and due to map distances, a much higher opportunity cost of these kinds of wars.

I'm posting this now because I have a new idea how to solve this so I'll make a list of all the ideas gathered the past months and what I think of them.

1. Pay a bribe (gold) for dispelling city curses while in a peace treaty.
This is a reasonably good solution that still comes with a cost for the player as a punishment for not preventing the city curses in the first place.
While gold in general isn't as valuable as casting skill the city curse already did damage to your cities so from the AI's perspective, that damage + the profits make it a fair deal in exchange for the casting opportunity cost.
The main issue I see is how the curses attack player economy in the first place so in the case you need it most, it's already too late and it won't save you...but that might be for the best.

2. AI cancels the curses for free during the peace treaty.
This was what the original game did.
Not a fan, it's easy to abuse and there is no compensation for the AI for all the casting skill used.
Still it might be worth considering to make this possible as a modding.ini feature even if it's off by default.

3. AI cancels the curses gradually during peace/wizard's pact/alliance.
This is a softer version of the above. While the AI still gives up the curses for free, it also encourages the player to maintain the good relations with the wizard instead of backstabbing them after the curses are gone. It also punishes the players who let things escalate too far as it's only a good solution while there aren't too many curses yet.
I currently think this is the best possible solution but only for wizard's pact and alliance relations, as normal peace treaties are too easy to get.
I also think the rate of curse removal should be in modding.ini, and different for each treaty status, maybe around 0.75 curses removed per turn for pacts and much more (3-5) for alliances.

4. AI spells are easier to dispel while they are banished.
While the others are diplomatic solutions, this would be the military one. Conquering every single city to eliminate curses is too much to ask for, and conquering the fortress only to remove them automatically for free is too powerful considering how the game's systems make multi-stage attacks almost impossible to defend against, even in the fortress city. However if banishing a wizard would make all their spells easier to dispel, pushing Disenchant Area into the economically viable solution area, that's good enough.
The best way to implement this is probably a DispelResistance.CAS modding file with a default of 1/3 resistance for city spells and 75% resistance for everything else for banished wizards.

Hi,

I would like to raise a few issues for discussion please.

1. I am aware of the very rare spell and invisibility/invulnerability spell appearing only after a certain year, the problem is that I am playing in Lunatic and at date march 1509 only 5-7% of all lairs/nodes have remained unexplored on the map. so the chance of getting a very rare spell or an invisibility/invulnerability goes down to zero, because if the computer will not take the remaining 5-7% lairs in the next year, I will take it. so maybe we should reduce the year a little bit?

2. will it be possible to play and activate on option that the computer will play it's battles vs the lair monster for real, not through a calculation? I know it might make the turns longer, but I am willing to wait if I know it's fair.

Thanks.

Introduction: What is This?

Rise of Prussia is a strategy game by AGEOD recreating the Seven Year's War. AGEOD is a French company and has published many wargames using their proprietary engine, covering various historical periods. Off the top of my head:

• Wars in America, covering, er, wars in the Americas from the late 17th century through the early 19th. Flagship campaigns include the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812.
  
• Rise of Prussia, our current material, which includes all of Frederick the Great's campaigns from the two Silesian wars through the Seven Year's War.
  
• Revolution Under Siege - the Russian Revolution and civil wars that followed.
  
• Pride of Nations - a Victoria-style economic and imperialism simulation, awkwardly shoehorned into their engine. Not actually a bad game.
  
• Civil War II - er, a successor to their first Civil War game, probably my favorite Civil War strategy game on the market.
  
• Wars of Napoleon - Napoleon's campaigns
  
• To End All Wars - the First World War
  

So, for a long time I played 1.5 Hard without 11 books. On a level playing field, 11 books is clearly a "cheap" strategy and gives a massive advantage. However, I recently started trying 1.5 Extreme and Impossible using 11 books. I still haven't found a totally satisfying approach yet.

Here what I've tried:

Nature : Basilisk, Water Walking, Gia's Blessing > High Elves
Life: Prayer, Raise Dead, Stream of Life > High Elves, Nomads
Death: Black Prayer, Night Stalker, Wraiths > Halflings
Sorcery: Phantom Beast, Flight, Mind Storm > High Men

Haven't tried Chaos.

The issues I've run into are these:

Nature seems like the best overall most balanced start, because you get a nice city buff that can put your development on turbo AND you get a powerful summon that you can use for early conquest. The problem is, Nature is just so darn weak overall. The Basilisk seems great on paper, but inevitably I constantly run up against Black Prayer and Confusion, which just wrecks them. It's also difficult to maintain momentum with Nature, and it offers little to help you hold on to conquered towns other than trying to cheese a Sprite into key towns with walls and use them to block entry.

Life is generally good, and yes I know about Invulnerable Guardian Spirits, but those don't really work so well. And on Impossible you just can't take out enough capitals fast enough with Guardian Spirits to really make that strategy worthwhile. So I think it works better to take Stream of Life. But you run into the typical Life problems how to garrison towns you have conquered and how to move over water. I also almost always play Life with Warlord, so not having Warlord really slows things down when garrisoning newly conquered towns.

Death has a lot going for it, sort of, but as usual, Death doesn't really have that much that can help you in a fight if you don't have Undead units on hand. Berserk can be quite useful, but other than that its just Black Prayer mostly. I my last game I was able to wipe out most of the wizards pretty quickly, but I didn't take out the Myrran wizard quickly enough while I was wiping up Arcanus. Then Horus, who was mostly Blue with a little White and 2 Red, got really powerful and obtained Spell Ward, which really shut me down hard. He had Banish and Doom Bolt and Psionic Blast, along with Invisibility and Mind Blast. Plus he had a vast empire of Dwarves and Dark Elves. Many of the Dark Elf towns got Warlocks and the Dwarven towns were Golems and Cannons.

I wasn't getting any heroes, even with over 100 fame, so I had to summon own, which worked ok, but I couldn't use then against Horus due to his direct damage. When he started putting Death Wards up I just gave up. 

The problem with Sorcery is that it doesn't really have a power spell to get you going, like Gia's Blessing, Stream of Life or Wraiths. Yet, Sorcery of source has the best overall late game power. I'm not really sure what to start with using Sorcery. Mind Storm was ok. I took it because at 35 base cost it is at least castable out of the gate. Storm Giants are lackluster and pretty expensive for what you get. I considered Wind Walking, but meh.  Invisibility maybe? Of course the key here is the Flying Paladins, but it takes some time to get those. Still, being able to just crack Paladins and Word of Recall them to new towns does make it possible to keep the conquest train rolling once you get going.

For Nature you could take Gorgons, but then you have the problem of how to garrison and support conquered towns. At least with Gia's Blessing you can boost your economy to try and keep up with the AIs.

Anyone have successful strats for 11 books on 1.5 Extreme+?

I just watched this video about Valve and found it worth sharing especially because we have some parents here too:




Basically there exists a growing casino business around Valve's CS:GO skins, which is open to minors and Valve like other companies isn't doing anything against that.