I would like for allies to stop stealing my nodes. Stealing a node (by melding a spirit) should be considered an act of aggression, prevented by pacts and alliances. It is frustrating when an ally and I are in a mutual war with a third party, my node is attacked by our enemy, and then my ally comes in and defeats the attacker. This leaves them on top of my node, and it is just a matter of time before they steal it.
Well, if they are not melding it then they shouldn't attack it in the first place in which case the enemy gets to keep it and meld it instead.
And then they can then attack and meld it anyway because it's no longer yours and fully belongs to the enemy.
That's pointless and only helps the enemy so doing it right now is better for both you and your ally. Once you lost the fight for the node, it's not yours. It's only a matter of time.
Compare it to cities. You lose a fight in the city, it's no longer your city. Then your ally can attack the city and it's theirs now. No melding involved. This is the same thing. Having troops on the tile is what makes it yours. Melding it is only a necessity to gain resources.
On the coding side there isn't anything that would make this impossible but there is a need to adjust the AI to actually avoid sending armies and spirits at nodes melded by a friendly player, even if enemy troops are on the node or it's empty. There is also a need to implement a new diplomacy message and penalty group type and write texts for all AI personalities for the case when you meld their nodes. So it does take quite some work but nothing too unreasonable.
On the subject of pacts... can we remove the distance check for player units during wizard pacts? End up always accepting a wizard pact, only to have it broken a few turns later because I have units sitting on a node to protect it while the AI puts a small town right next to it and tells me I'm violating something. Plus there's no auto-cancellation for their units within 3 squares of my cities either (nor does the AI even attempt to keep distance, anyway.)
(May 18th, 2021, 17:41)aedorn Wrote: On the subject of pacts... can we remove the distance check for player units during wizard pacts? End up always accepting a wizard pact, only to have it broken a few turns later because I have units sitting on a node to protect it while the AI puts a small town right next to it and tells me I'm violating something. Plus there's no auto-cancellation for their units within 3 squares of my cities either (nor does the AI even attempt to keep distance, anyway.)
We have discussed this before, but I think it's worth revisiting now that stealth exists as an ability.
Adding a new weak unit with stealth to every race (you could exclude some races for power/flavor reasons). This opens up some fun design space with unique options for some races. I think you could also/alternatively give the Magic Spirit stealth. Then you can always hold a node in friendly territory without angering your allies, but it's a weak defense if an enemy comes by.
Currently it's worth noting that you can already do this with engineers or settlers with a much higher cost. It's also counterintuitive so new players might not pick up that it's an option.
Yes, it makes no sense that the AI sees magic spirits as a threat to a pact when engineers can be made far more dangerous with buffs, despite being "civilians". Ideally the AI would allow small token stacks to be in their territories during a pact, only recognizing actual armies as a threat. But I know Seravy doesn't want to implement that.
drake178 wrote:
“I think it's the figures that are the issue here not the numbers. The little icons you use to set farmers/workers? They may be condensed / overlapped to a degree ... I honestly didn't see the numbers. Even after your second post, it took me a few minutes of staring to find them. Maybe a more outstanding color would be better? I also think that overlaps would be preferable over having to click the same figure multiple times to be able to set an exact amount of farmers. As for the resources, I can think of two easy solutions right off the bat: either use icons + numbers, or create 100s icons for the resources that would need them (e.g. a cow or roast turkey for food, a furnace or cogwheels for production, a bar or sack for gold - but you'll probably have better ideas for this than me; I don't know if power or research could reach levels that can't be displayed with the current system).”
>>>>>Well, I meant you could flip the 2, 3, and 4K population figures like the current ones. The graphics almost wouldn´t change, but the human wizard couldn´t always be accurate to a thousand. But there is probably no need to reinvent the wheel, especially one with hidden numbers.)) I would like cows and roast turkeys, but they are probably not needed either. The resource display on the City screen in COM4W can have overlaps until “Well … it´s a lot!” One could squeeze the current icons until “Wow … it´s even more than a lot!” and everything would be fine, I guess.
The population display in MOM´s closest relative - MOO2 - can show very overlapping population figures on the colony screen and even works multicultural! It has a cap of 35 instead of 25. With 5 pixels apart I squeezed in pop 97 - still more than the theoretically possible maximum of around 92.
Is a cap needed for reasons other than the width of the City screen?
Aha. Extremely large cities would probably be rare. Perhaps one big city is no better than several small ones apart from the use of space? More than one unit per turn cannot be produced, there is overfarming ...
Question about Modding.ini.
Basically, what we can mod with it and what - can't?
Afair, we can mod the difficulty of encounters (nodes, lairs, towers, etc). But what else? Can we limit the amount of cities wizard can settle, for example? or total max amount of cities for any wizard?
