This is something that has occured to me too from time to time. It could be bit of a problem. It was originally meant as a sort of life mage perk, but it does limit choices in early game.

I wouldn't want to make an improvement producing just culture. How about faction-specific shrines at Chaos Magic II, Death Magic II, Life Magic II and Nature Magic II? That would get rid of Enchant Shrines spell as it could target only one of the four, but I don't think one wonder is as crucial as early game balance. Also, Shrines couldn't be prereqs for Temples.

I'll put my thinking hat on. ;)

Thanks for the quick feedback.

I have the same problem. It seems that you always have to build tons of military in the beginning, as you'll always be attacked by a chaos mage. :rolleyes:
now with beornings I can attack, but I have probably lost that goblin city forever as it was rebuilt by a third faction. :mad:

Should I go with the faction specific shrines? I've got an update adding them 90% done... :)

Edit: other changes of that update would be changing Tranquility and Enchant Shrines. Tranquility added Shrine in all cities and Enchant Shrine doubled happiness produced by Shrines. Their replacements would be:
- Spell of Healing - healing on enemy territory at Life Magic IV
- Enchant City Defenses - double city defenses at Life Magic I (should this one become obsolete? How effective is it in practice?)

If you are wondering about what Firewall does these days, it gives walls to all cities.

Is the Chaos mage behaviour a problem? It's probably because of the cheapish Fanatics and Beastmen that make them so cocky. However, being aggressive is pretty essential for Chaos mages. As a small adjustment, I just made Lo Pan a 3 aggressor. Tauron is 5 and Sss'ra 4.

I rather like the faction specific shrines idea.

Update 1 for Beta 9 (0.3 MB) (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/MoM_beta_patch9-update1.zip)

Extract to Civ3\Conquests\Scenarios\ after installing beta patch 9 successfully. Overwrite existing files.

Changelist:
- Each faction gets its own Shrine that comes at their own level 2 magic tech (Nature Shrine comes at Nature Magic II and so on). This makes racing the Life magic tech branch less essential.
- Enchant Shrines and Tranquility removed.
- Added Spell of Healing great spell. Comes at Life Magic IV and allows healing in enemy territory.
- Added Enchant City Defenses great spell. Comes at Life Magic I and doubles city defense ratios. Becomes obsolete at Life Magic VII.
- Halls of the Dead are a prerequisite building for Temples.
- Fixed some civilopedia entries.
- Lo Pan has aggression of 3 instead of 4.

Can't DL that, for some reason - get a "timed out" msg.

Originally posted by The Last Conformist
Can't DL that, for some reason - get a "timed out" msg.

civfanatics.net is down. :(

Edit: Servers are back up so I take this temporary download off.

:goodjob:

I think that the chaos units, at least the first one, is too good. :( That extra HP is important, and let's them kill off the poor nature mages.

Originally posted by mrtn
I think that the chaos units, at least the first one, is too good. :( That extra HP is important, and let's them kill off the poor nature mages.

Fanatics don't have extra HP. Beastmen do though. Which one is the problem? Or is it both?

Originally posted by Drift
Fanatics don't have extra HP. Beastmen do though. Which one is the problem? Or is it both? According to the pedia they do. Some of you are lying... ;)
Besides, the pedia text of the Beorning is highly irrelevant. :) Just as the tech advisor is.

Originally posted by mrtn
According to the pedia they do. Some of you are lying... ;)
Besides, the pedia text of the Beorning is highly irrelevant. :)

Gotta fix that for next patch. What's irrelevant with the Beorning pedia?

It's talking about the Enkidu warrior.

Originally posted by mrtn
It's talking about the Enkidu warrior.

Oh, who bothers to click "Description"? ;)

Seriously, there is no such line in the civilopedia.txt . Where does it come from? Conquests civilopedia.txt? I'll change it's entry to PRTO_Beorning. This is what you get when you try to cut corners. :mad:

If corners wanted to be cut, they'd attached to ovoids in the first place! :D

This game was started just before the latest small patch.

Basically, I am playing Freya and wound up on a large, but isolated island. Unfortunately for me while I did have 2 luxaries, I was missing a death node and also no special resources were there. The rest of the world looks like it has been in contact with each other and consequently, I am way behind tech wise, but appear to be catching up a bit. I have just recently been able to start trading and I have a good stock of resources to trade with the other positions. I can run down my support for my pop and put it into science.

I do have a good economic base built up, but I don't know if I can overcome the advantage the others have. I have like 7k something in VPs while the leaders have 39k. If this was a 50k game, I would be dead meat, but at least have a chance if I decide to play it out.

Looking over the other positions:

Vlad has 527 culture at 11/turn. Production is 14 per turn and the capital has 10 units in a 6 pop capital.

Talron has a 10 pop capital with 2105 culture at 18/trun. Production is 15/turn. 13 units there.

Tlaloc has a 12 pop capital with 19 production. 3489 culture at 11/turn. 16 units there.

SSra's capital is 14 pop with 13 production. 1425 culture at 15/turn. 11 Troop units.

I don't have the others (don't have the cash at the moment). Lo Pan was in the game earlier and was destroyed. Merlin is absolutely huge.

I have my capital producing 31 a turn and I think I have another city at 33 per turn, so I do have some good production values and am in a relatively secure position. It would take a major effort to get enough troops ashore to actually hurt and with the mobility of my units, I should do ok in crushing any invasion attempt.

*Edit* Drift, the save game file is too big to put on the board here. I can send it to you if you are interested. Let me know.

Here is a screenie. See the small map on how the world is laid out.

I hate those maps where I start on a lone island while others party on a big continent.

The balance between the factions seems to be relatively good in the game, right? You being behind in tech is probably just because of the starting location? (Too bad you didn't have a neighbouring chaos mage, would've been interesting to know if he had attacked you too right away.)

How have you find the changes you've come across? (Primarily being able to build mines and the somewhat reworked nature mage unit system.)

If you are going to be playing the game further, I would like the savegame at a later point. You already provided most of the information that could be gathered from it at this point. :)

You are providing amazing feedback. Thank you.

I really like the changes with this and the way it played. I am behind because I did not have contact for the very longest time with anyone at all. (My attemps to send out ships wound up having them being lost at sea). I am catching up tech wise and can now make some deals with my luxaries.

Nature mage units appear to be good so far with more of a hint on defense in most cases. Their corruption seems to be somewhat on a short leash (the cities on the south part of my island were at about 50%-60% production due to corruption).

The one tweak to look at would be nature summons. I don't know that there is enough value in the units you get from them to justify doing them. (I bypassed doing the first one). I think the unit was like a 2-3-2 and next up the line was a 3-4-2. Perhaps putting the "bird" line on the summons might make more sense although the centar unit is a bit better offensive unit at 5-2-2 over 4-1-2, although the ignore roads and such make the bird unit very effective. Bottom line is I think what you get for doing the Nature summons spell is a bit weak.

I should also note that in my first two games, I got run over by death mages, not chaos mages. One was really a crappy starting position (it happens) and the other I might have been able to slug it out, but it was not worth it as I had to retool my strategy of going straight for temples and should have gone for my second tier units instead.

It did occur to me that Nature Summons might offer too little, but I decided to go with this setup for now. I'll reconsider it - it does lack a little something. :)

Nature mages have the lowest corruption at minimal. Life and Chaos have nuisance and Death problematic.

Pterodactyls(4.1.2atar) and Centaurs are something I was interested in hearing about as well. I guess the birds have their uses, but when I was playing I found myself making primarily Centaurs. Let's see how it plays after a few games. :)

Having the Shrines in each mage's own tech branch should ease the early game problem with aggressive mages. There are still Wizard's Guilds though, Life Magic III is still probably the most raced tech in early tech tree.

One important question BTW: how do you feel about the new tech costs?

I think science costs are going in the right direction. There were a couple of times that I easily hit the cap of 8 turns playing catch up on some lower techs. I like the changes on the science so far.

Phew. Good to hear they are finally getting on a right track. There's still lots of tech tree to be covered though (you seem to be roughly at the end of first era), let's just hope they continue to be ok.

Minor bug: the Tlaloc city "High Top" is actually called "High Top " or something like that, with a bunch of annoying spaces at the end.
I'm playing a chaos game now as Sss'ra attacking Tlaloc, and it's somewhat tough going, which should be welcome news. :)

@mrtn

Fixed the city name. (BTW, since you are playing Sss'ra, have you already founded Rhashem - formerly known as Rashem? :lol: )

@all
There's one thing I forgot to mention about the new unit systems: I felt the starting units became obsolete too quickly as often the level 2 magic tech brought a new unit that replaced the original. This new unit was often too expensive to be the only military unit available for early game. Therefore early upgrade chains go like this:

Fanatic -> Chaos Warrior
Beastmen -> Chaos Warrior

Skeleton Warrior -> Shadowman
Zombie -> Shadowman

Acolyte -> Sorcerer
Cleric -> Sorcerer

Gnoll -> Gnoll Ranger
Half-Gnoll -> Gnoll Ranger

I hope all the upgrade chains work though. For some reason the civilopedia didn't show many of the "upgrades to:" parts, even though I was certain the chains were good. Keep an eye on it and tell me if some unit doesn't upgrade right. :)

We were playing a hotseat game with Raven and Vlad. At about turn 50 a Sylvanian city (first one) was taken over by Merlin which in turn destroyed the whole civilization. Vlad disappered from the game and ruins appeared for all his cities. This was using beta 8. I downloaded 9 and the patch and re-continued but it still happened.

Hopefully this helps someone.

Sounds like you had regicide on. I never play regicide, but I've understood that when you capture a king of an enemy civ, all their cities and units get wiped out.

Thanks for playing. Try how it goes without the regicide. :)

Look up Short Game Modes in the civilopedia, especially Elimination. This is a feature of the game, not a crash.

The Elimination 'bug' is clearly doomed to turn up in every scen or mod thread ...

Have tinkered a bit with the latest version and this was what happen:

Started up with Vlad. The world was a young one I think as there were a lot of trees and such around along with swamps. Had a life mage to my south, which I successfully contained on the large continent and also a chaos mage close by to the north and a nature mage a bit further to the west. I got off to a pretty good start, but the area was certainly lacking resources although I got control of the elves and dark elves. I had only 1 luxuary and also no death magic spot. (Only chaos and nature). This was in an area covered by 8 or 9 cities. Trading with the other three positions was good.. they seemed to have no problem trading techs.

The chaos mage dumped a city in a really crappy spot where my kingdom bottlenecked and basically cut it in half (or will). My choice is to go to war or try to deal with it. Considering my kingdom is "U" shaped with the top pointed at him, going to war would have put me in bad shape as the left side was not defended very well. I elected to end the game there after exploring and figuring out there was not really anything else to be done and I was in a very poor position. General thoughts were things were ok for the most part.

Next game, I tried a chaos mage. Very poor starting position with little food, so growth was slow. I got 4 cities down with access to life and nature nodes, but no chaos or death node in sight. The only luxaries I was close to were also close to a nature mage that had a much better spot than I did. The nature mage showed up with treants and beat me silly when I was still 23 turns away from my Chaos 3 units. End of game.

I want to play some more, but one thing that I am seeing is I am running science at a minimum early in the game simply because I can't get them any faster than the max time anyway or that I have to go up so much (like 10 to 70) before seeing a reduction in time and even then, it is not really worth it. I think this is something that might have to be watched closely and further tweaks might be in order.

there were no king units per regicide. It was a new city far removed from the capital... The elimination bug sounds like the most plausible thing as we've played a lot further before without any hitches...

thanks though.

@gonzozen

Elimination isn't a bug, it's a game mode chosen when starting your game. Any player that loses a single city to an enemy, is eliminated. It was new information for me too. :)

@Klyden

Lot's of bad starts there. :(

I'm starting to feel like the node requirements for units should come at a later stage. There would still be the wonders to keep the players hunting for nodes and they would know that eventually they need a node for their units too. This should make the early game a bit more relaxed and forgiving.

About the techs. What do you think is the problem? Simply too high costs or something else? When I've been playing, I've cranked tech high without thinking much of how wise it is. Should the minimum research time be lowered? I originally doubled it from 4 to 8 in order to make the tech progress a bit slower than in regular Civ, but now I feel I may have opened a can of worms there as raising the tech bar doesn't make enough difference.

Any suggestions on what I should try?

Lower the cost a bit, and try to lower the minimum to 6 turns... :hmm:

I played a game to end of first era today as a death mage. Had things going pretty easy, but it was probably because I should consider moving to Monarch from Warlord. I'm in the lead with Raven close behind. Vlad isn't doing bad either and Tauron seems to be ok. Oberic, Lo Pan and Sss'ra are weak. Mordja was doing ok as long as he messed with the wrong mage - death mages are the most untrustworthy neighbours I've ever had in a civ game. :lol:

Some observations:
- nodes are a bit too rare. There were again couple of mages without their own color nodes. Sss'ra was right next to me contained on a peninsula and I would've had a chaos node not too far away from his border, but he never made a move. Pity the AI doesn't fully understand their importance.
- as a test, I increased maximum research time to 75 and lowered the minimum to 6. I didn't touch the tech costs. I felt it worked ok. I did keep research pretty high throughout the game though and still waits for techs were pretty long in the beginning. I'm a little undecided whether it's such a bad thing. I've got only two eras and the intention always was that one era would take longer than a Civ3 era. However, I guess I could try lowering the tech costs a little bit more, but the maximum of 75 felt like a good idea as it forced investing into research

So what I'm considering for next patch is:
- making nodes more common
- reducing minimum research cost to 6 and increasing the maximum to 75
- making early techs a little bit cheaper.

Would like some feedback on this in case I'm forgetting/overlooking something.

I like the proposed changes on the science front and I think getting this right will be one of the keys to having the scenario be really successful.

You can see what I was mentioning on the nodes and why I was thinking about some upper units that are not dependent on them, but that are not as cost effective as those that use the nodes. Increasing nodes will help, but there will still be cases where AI positions (and player positions for that matter) won't have the node they need in their area. The nice thing about an increase is that it raises the possiblity they could trade for it from someone who does have an extra.

Something else I will toss out is currently I believe that there is only one of each type of race (dwarfs, elfs, etc). Perhaps doubling that, based on map size, might be something to consider. This would help in that it is possible a position could get a monopoly on them and could trade the "excess" to another position or at least have something to trade.

I will be trying a couple more games and see if I can get a good one going again. I have been playing on Monarch level. Higher and I seem to get dusted about every time because of the extra starting units the other positions have and also they get too big of a discount on everything.

I'll try to work out something about the node requirements for the units. I don't think there will be units that are less cost effective though, but rather make sure that the mages always have some basic unit availabe that compares reasonably with other units of its time. It's still a little sketchy though.

Doubling the race resources can be considered. It's difficult to balance them right though. I'll think about it and do some tests. :)

I can edit the difficulty levels if they don't suit the mod. Should I do away with / reduce the additional starting units? (I never even realized they get free units :blush: ) As I'm not experienced at all when it comes to difficulty levels, I could use a few pointers here. :)

I think you should keep the free AI units. Removing them would weaken the AI massively on the highest levels.

Bright day Drift:goodjob:
This feel much better. Price of technologies seems to me about right. As now I feel techs come soon enough and yet they have some value. One thing, aren't Life mages supposed to be bult Galleas (at least Grimoir Arcanorum says so)? And also, have you increade aggresivity?

Thanks for the compliments Gladi. :)

Life mages build Hawk Ships nowadays instead of Galleasses - chaos mages are the only ones who build them. Their pedia entry is erroneus, thank you for catching it. :) If you mean with aggressivity the aggressiveness of the mages, I haven't touched it apart from one or two minor tweaks.

About bad starts - this is something I'm noticing with my in-the-works fantasy mod, too. For some reason, the computer is assigning REALLY bad start locations to some civs. One I remember is a start location *on a mountain*. Another is one at the very edge of a tundra, with no luxury or strategic resources within a pretty wide area (which is saying something, since I have 10 luxuries and like 20 strategics). Lemme see if I can find pictures...

Here we go, perfect example. This is in the absolute center of a huge jungle... the closest non-jungle/marsh/hill/mountain tiles are at least 10 turns north. (Remember again this is from my own mod... but I'm beginning to suspect there's a bug in the start location generation that we're both running into, which is why I bring this up)

I finally have an interesting game going, although I had my doubts. I am playing Vlad and while my starting position was not that hot, I have managed to get 3 lux items, lizards, and elfs. I do not have access to a death node.

I am behind tech wise (I am working on the 3's and most of the others have level 4 techs done) and I am also behind in other areas, but have a pretty secure position.

The VP spread at the moment goes from Ariel with 12445 to Rjak with 6195. The order is Ariel, Freya, Merlin, Raven, Tauron, Lo Pan, Vlad, Rjak.

Power spread runs from Freya at 1987 to Vlad at 737. Order is Freya, Ariel, Merlin, Tauron, Raven, Lo Pan, Rjak and Vlad.

I started a war with Raven to kick him out of my sphere and captured 2 cities (one was tougher, other was pretty easy). After he landed a couple treant units and I killed them, I offered a peace, which he took. Raven violated my territory several turns later and declared war on me. After giving him another beating, he wished for peace. Raven has been duking it out with Rjak as well and I think he has a slight advantage, but it has been a slugging contest for both sides. Raven does have a unit advantage with the birds as 4 point attackers and with the 3-4-2 Gnoll unit. Rjak seems to be doing ok with his 3-3-1 units. Raven has been very agressive.

Ariel got one of my outer cities early on bribes and culture. not much I could do about it and she has threaten me at times if I don't make some payments, which I have been doing to keep her off me for now.

Tauron has not been doing any fighting that I can see and while he occupies a large area, it is sort of weak with most of the land being tundra. He does have Orcs and Trolls tho and I am his only land neighbor. He did trade me a death node resource, so I hope to stay on good terms with him until I can get some more of my own resources.

My science effort has been somewhat puny, but I think it will pick up a bit as I get the wizard guilds in. The only reason I am still in this game is because I have access to elves and lizards for additional units and I have been able to make deals with my resources to shave time off on research.

Looking things over, I think the skeleton spearman needs to go back to a 1-3-1 unit. The only reason to build it right now is because it is cheap, but other than that, it offers nothing new and I think the death mages need a 3 point defender in there. (They have Zombies and then go from that to the 1-4-1 unit). If they want more offensive units, then they have to do the Death Summons for the 3-3-1.

My ace in the hole is I have also finally gotten a leader, although I have yet to form an army. I am not at war with anyone right now and like to wait as long as possible to stick the best possible units in the army. As soon as I go to war, I will try to score a kill as quickly as possible, but one of my long term problems is that my top production town is 11 or 12 per turn.. not really that hot, but that is more of a function of my start position rather than any inherent issues with Vlad.

Here is a screenie of the current game. Lo Pan is in the lower right, Merlin upper right, Tauron upper left, Rjak to the south and Ariel to the right. Raven is to the south west.

@TLC

Additional starting units are problematic as the starting units of the mod are usually stronger than the warriors you start with in regular civ. I'm tempted to reduce their numbers a bit, but I won't get rid of them completely. :)

@Zurai

I've had a lot of bad starting positions, but I've never been assigned a start location on a mountain. I suspect you've made it possible to found cities there. :)

@Klyden

I'll think about the Skeleton Spearman. I meant it as a cheap unit that would replace the Skeleton Warrior as the cannon fodder unit once you get Shadowmen, but Necromancers come along rather quickly. I'll try to come up with something. :)

The game seems interesting. Again no node and not a very favorable starting location - ancient forests are rather nice actually, but the swamps are not so hot. :( The faction balance seems ok although I've yet to see Chaos mages leading in any game. Raven is the most aggressive of the nature mages with an aggressiveness of 4 so he should be treated with healthy distrust. ;) (BTW have you seen him using the birds or are you guessing it? Would be nice to hear they are being used.)

I might as well list the aggressiveness of each civ while the topic is current:
Mordja 4, Rjak 5, Vlad 3
Sss'ra 4, Tauron 5, Lo Pan 3
Raven 4, Freya 3, Tlaloc 4
Oberic 3, Merlin 3, Ariel 2

Seems I was wrong about Raven being the most aggressive. May need to rebalance the nature mages with Freya 2, Raven 3 and Tlaloc 4. (Master of Magic's Tlaloc had a warlord specialty so it should fit.)


The forums go offline today so I'm not sure if I can squeeze an update out before it. I'll try though, but it won't be an official patch - just a little something those interested may want to try out. :)

Originally posted by Drift

@Zurai

I've had a lot of bad starting positions, but I've never been assigned a start location on a mountain. I suspect you've made it possible to found cities there. :)

Nope. I did that once long ago in vanilla civ and quickly undid the change after the AI made dozens of useless ungrowable mountain cities that crippled it. That's why the start location surprised me so much - I'd never seen anything quite that horrid. I guess more research is in order... I'll make a bunch of random maps with a default conquests rules biq and see if there are as many bad starts there. Maybe I've just been lucky in my unmodded games.

Here's that small test patch I promised. Hopefully people interested in trying it out have time to do download it before the forums go offline.

Changes:
- Nodes and race resources are more common. It seems there are now usually two of each race resource in a map.
- Maximum research time 75 turns and minimum 6 turns.
- ~10% reduction in first era tech costs.
- More units free of node requirements. Only the most high end of units now requires a node.
- New aggressiveness for nature mages : Freya 2, Raven 3 and Tlaloc 4.
- Skeleton Spearman moved to Death Magic II (I'm not sure, but it being at Death Magic III may have been unintentional) Pterodactyls moved to Nature Summons.
- Additional offensive starting units removed from Monarch and Emperor difficulty levels.
- Maybe something else, but my eyes are telling me that I should go to sleep. :crazyeye: (actually, that's not what my eyes are doing)

Remember, if you install the patch, make sure you are using a fully patched version of the mod (Beta 9 with update 1) and make sure you backup the existing MoM.biq (or just extract the update 1 again if you want to revert back to normal). This is not an official patch.

Raven used the birds on me and they are quite the pain since they ignore movment terrain. (I like them btw). He has basically attacked with those and also with the treants. This is one of the reasons you see a line of units in the hills to the south next to Brunn. While he can defeat them with ease with a bird, it does make it stop that much sooner and also the chances that it might be damaged are higher.

Nice to hear they are being used. :) They were moved to Nature Summons BTW, forgot to mention it in the above post.

I was a little afraid they might be too annoying with their all terrain as roads, so I'm glad to hear at least you like them. They do have a pretty hefty price tag at 80 shields so taking one out is a considerable blow to the enemy.

Ok, some problems.

I built the Rune of mastery, or whatever it is called - the wonder that is supposed to start the space race. But I didn't get the option to build any of the 10 runes after that. I check the requirements - no requirements (well I checked air rune but it follows I should be able to at least build one of them if I have done the rune of mastery). So I don't know what is wrong there but the space race is not working for me.


A lot of the screens (Espionage and Victory status in particular) have tags that are one space off. I can provide a screenshot if you need it.. But for example the immediately / cautiously / safely tags in espionage, are instead spy / immediately / cautiously, and the options at the bottom are safely and cancel, instead of ok (or execute or whatever it normaly is) and cancel. Similar effect on the victory status, except the values are all in the right places, just the labels are off. Again if I am not being clear and you need a screenshot I can get you one. Its not unplayable, just a bit confusing if I am not sure what I am looking for. :)



Anyway I have played basically through as a nature faction, I guess now I will go back and play as someone else.. or maybe play a different mod. I don't want to burn myself out :P But it is a nice looking mod and I am impressed :)

Originally posted by Drift
About the techs. What do you think is the problem? Simply too high costs or something else? When I've been playing, I've cranked tech high without thinking much of how wise it is. Should the minimum research time be lowered? I originally doubled it from 4 to 8 in order to make the tech progress a bit slower than in regular Civ, but now I feel I may have opened a can of worms there as raising the tech bar doesn't make enough difference.

Any suggestions on what I should try? [/B]


I had a big problem with that the first couple games I played (and quit fairly early). The last one I tried wasn't too bad - once I got a decent number of cities at a worthwhile size my techs progressed pretty well. But 50 turns apeice for my first 3-4 techs WAS a long time. :/ On the other hand considering the relatively low number of techs overall, maybe not such a bad thing. (afterall if you have the right barbarian settings and explore a lot you get more techs that way anyway)

As for the minimum research time it is a bit long to me. I was at a state later in the game where I had tech turned down to 10% and was making over 1k gold per turn and still stuck waiting 8 turns for Nature Summons I which I skipped earlier as useless. Is it possible to make it longer in one era and then shorter in the next?

I'll look into the Rune Mastery. I have never played that far ( :blush: ), but the one time I tested it, I think it worked ok. I'm not sure though so I'll check it out.

As for the screens having text in the wrong place, my guess is that you don't have the latest patch for Conquests. They show up right with me. Either patch to 1.22 or if you wish to stay in your current version, delete labels.txt from Civ3\Conquests\Scenarios\MoM\Text\.

I can't make the minimum reseach time different for different eras. It's down to 6 in the latest test patch though.

Thanks for the feedback and nice to hear you like the mod. I'll look into the spacerace ASAP. :)

azzacanth, did you remember to allow the space race victory in the start up screen? I've done that error before (though not with MoM). The "start space race"-wonder is still buildable if you haven't, but none of the space ship parts...

@Drift: There's a bug in the F4 screen, there are 3 tabs now, but your background still show just two.

I'd just like to add a couple of comments. Firstly, excellent mod drift. I've been spending many a late night playing it. I've just resigned on a game playing as mordja. I normally play emperor on a standard or large map. I got of to a reasonable start but slowly was being beaten by merlin. I noticed that all three death mages were close to the bottom for score and power. I found it hard to keep my army numbers high due to the following reasons. General waste problems with death mages; High loss of units when i'm attacking (low attack attributes and slow). Loss of the ability to draft. Downgrading of skeleton spearman to def of 2. Perhaps I just played a bad game, but I'm of the opinion they need a boost. I thought that drafting was very characteristic for them and offset their negatives.

@mrtn

Why do they keep changing the interface? :mad: ;)

I really wish I had documented the interface color job better. I think I need to go trial and error with finding the correct combination of effects I've used.

Thanks for noticing it. :)

I'd just like to add a couple of comments. Firstly, excellent mod drift. I've been spending many a late night playing it. I've just resigned on a game playing as mordja. I normally play emperor on a standard or large map. I got of to a reasonable start but slowly was being beaten by merlin. I noticed that all three death mages were close to the bottom for score and power. I found it hard to keep my army numbers high due to the following reasons. General waste problems with death mages; High loss of units when i'm attacking (low attack attributes and slow). Loss of the ability to draft. Downgrading of skeleton spearman to def of 2. Perhaps I just played a bad game, but I'm of the opinion they need a boost. I thought that drafting was very characteristic for them and offset their negatives.

Thanks for playing. :)

I wasn't sure how drafting worked so I removed it as a test of whether it would reduce the insane amount of units death mages were putting out. Also, embryodead's stance on the matter of draft is that it tends to cripple AI and I guess I was affected by that too. It may well make a return, but I want to observe the effects of last patch a bit first. The other problem with draft was that I couldn't decide which units should be draftable. However, rest assured - I'm intent on balancing the mod for as long as majority of the people playing it feel it's ready. :)

Skeleton Spearmen now come at Death magic II, but they may still need some kind of a boost. I'll think about it. Death mage units are rather slow and not as offensive as chaos mages, but in general they have pretty good arsenal IMO. The new Death Knight (4.2.2) and Nighmare Rider(6.3.2) changed the way they play quite a bit. However, if they can't build enough of their units and maximize their support bonuses, it doesn't matter how good their units are. Draft could really be the answer.

Thank you for the feedback. It feels really good to get this much comments. :)

To all:

What kind of units should death mages be able to draft? Defensive units or footmen? How strong should the strongest draftable unit be?

I would think the drafting of footmen would be more appropriate. I think that the drafting in the warhammer mod employed by the Khemri (Undead) is a little overpowered. From memory they can draft all the way till a city gets to 1 pop. So the tactic was to take a city then draft it till it hits 1 pop. Very powerful and also the unit had very good stats 3att 2def compared to the top infantry of something like 5att. If you could only draft whith pops of 7+ as in vanilla civ I wouldn't think it overpowing especially when combined with the worst corruption and waste rates. I would think that the 3att 2def crypt skeleton warrior would be appropriate from the start. Then perhaps a 5att 3 def skeleton for the 2nd age. (Death magic 6)

Yup, it's probably better to choose two or maybe three footmen units for the draft. Crypt skeletons can't be it though because they cost no maintenance, but their stats sound good.

More suggestions are still welcome. :)

The game I am currently playing as Vlad continues to be quite interesting. I am resigned I will probably loose, but I have been having some fun with it.

The life mages have sort of taken over this game as Merlin and Freya have tag teamed up on several other positions. The first big hatchet job they did was on Tauron and they basically trashed him in nothing flat. Both are fielding the upper end life mage units with a mix of Paladins and other cav type units. Tauron dropped trading me a death node, so I attacked in hopes of getting one. I was suprised at the weak defense he mounted (but then figured out he was at war with Merlin and Freya). Tauron's position was large, but not very strong with a lot of tundra. He also had access to trolls and that combined with their high expense meant he probably did not have much for units. I saw mostly devils and very few offensive units and a troll or two.

At any rate, I got probably 5 cities from Tauron and also got orcs as a resource, but no death node and I can't get anyone to trade it to me, so I can't build any of the upper death units. Fortunately, I now have access to elves, orcs and lizards, so have a good selection of units to build from.

The other death mage in the game is also at the bottom of the heap and has no death node either. Best unit he seems to have is the 3-3-1 unit and he has a pile of them in his capital.

Nature mages seem to be in the middle of the pack and I have had Raven come after me 3 times. One of the other nature mages came after me for a short period of time with mostly earth elementals. Very tough as I really did not have a 5 point attacker to deal with them. I managed to blunt the attacks without losing anything and quickly made peace.

Lo Pan was doing well against one of the life mages, but now has 2 life mages after him.

I am finishing off Acendency from the first age, but the leaders are up to at least 8 in some categories. I think Merlin has close to 50k in points and is simply huge. On the power graph, the life mages have the lead.

My own starting position is taking a toll as I loose 2-3 pop a turn due to disease and it is somewhat frustrated as my capital has been as low as 5 pop at times. I am currently massing on my death mage neighbors door even though I am on good terms with him, I feel I am going to have to attack him because I need the space and conquest points. I can also get close to the death node that Raven took away from him and then see about attacking the 4 cities that Raven has on the continent and get a death node myself. I am currently working on trying to get the Glade Rider unit of the elves (6-3-3). I have one corps marker open for this unit and should have a second complete in time for those units to get stuck in there.

One note. Are Ancient Forests considered forests for movement purposes for the units that can move through regular forests? If not, they should be.

Will try to post some screen shots later and can send you some saved games at various points if you would like Drift.

Well, my assault on Rjak did not work out very well. My assault with probably 30 or so units was met with 60 plus of the Shadowmen and I failed to take a city before being forced back on the defensive and hoping he would not come after me too heavily.

I probably should have waited until I got the Glade Riders instead of trying to use the War Dancers to give me a bit more of an offensive edge, although given the numbers the enemy had, I think it would have been marginal help anyway.

Drift, I can see about sending you some saved game files as the boards won't let me post them here.

I will be trying out another game here shortly as something other than a Death mage. This is an unusual game in that I had a lot of other resources available, but could not really depend on using death mage units so it is hard to comment on them except I do feel they skeleton spearman needs to be upgraded to a 1-3-1 unit.

For drafting, I would perhaps set it up high (like have to have a minimum 6 to be able to draft). That allows the cities to stay at a reasonable level, yet be able to draft without having to put in the city growth improvement if you are not near water. (I am on a streak of about 5 in a row without being next to water).

@Klyden
- Death mages shouldn't suffer disease. I have probably forgot to include swamps to the list.
- Ancient forests are treated as forests when it comes to units that negate movement in forests.

The game seems very interesting. You can send the saved game in the same address you used last time - I would love to see them. Are there any balance issues that you've come across? For example, were the Earth Elementals too tough (I personally feel that they might be a bit too strong)?

Drafting would require >6 population. I'll see about the skeleton spearmen. They do need a little something.

Thanks again. :)

Should the elven units be able to move through the forests like nature mage units do?

I'll look into the Rune Mastery. I have never played that far ( :blush: ), but the one time I tested it, I think it worked ok. I'm not sure though so I'll check it out.

As for the screens having text in the wrong place, my guess is that you don't have the latest patch for Conquests. They show up right with me. Either patch to 1.22 or if you wish to stay in your current version, delete labels.txt from Civ3\Conquests\Scenarios\MoM\Text\.

I can't make the minimum reseach time different for different eras. It's down to 6 in the latest test patch though.

Thanks for the feedback and nice to hear you like the mod. I'll look into the spacerace ASAP. :)


Yeah, I was looking through the last page of the thread and wrote out a huge reply to a bunch of stuff, went to post it and I had timed out by then and had to re-log-in, I clicked back to recover my post and...... You do not have permission to view this page. :P So I could've said a lot more but I just couldn't bring myself to do it at that time, I was tired :/

I just upgraded to 1.22 yesterday so I'll test out labels and dates and stuff again.

As far as the space race goes, while starting my next game and glancing through the options I realized.. I may have turned the space race victory off and not remembered that. I noticed it seems to have a default of "off" in my game making. oh well.



btw as for raven liking the pterodactyls.... He thinks they're the best friggin thing since sliced bread.

You may want to increase the cost a bit as it's annoying to have a city next to a chaos node (playing chaos) a screen or two south of the heart of your empire, fairly inland (3-4 spaces from the edge of the second level culture sphere, so really some 7-8 spaces from the choas) and have raven drop ONE pterodactyl on the coast and come in the next turn and destroy said city. (I had a devil and a fanatic in it, what more do you need? :/) If he had taken it over I would've taken it back but he destroyed it... just sort of took the heart out of that game. :/

@Klyden

Elves are supposed to be able to move through forests in similar fashion as the nature mage units do. Don't they?

@azzacanth

I hate timing out when writing long replies. Doesn't happen too often these days, but I often copy the reply to clipboard before posting.

I'll have to look into the Pterodactyls. It's difficult to balance them right. I want them to be a flavor unit in the nature mage armies - not a mainstay, but the AI may try to build them as a mainstay, regardless of the cost. I'm very sloppy defender myself so I believe I may get into a lot of trouble with them.

I played some more turns in my Tlaloc game during the weekend. I had almost eliminated Ariel when suddenly Raven turned up with a pile of Ents and a horde of Centaurs. It looks I'll be able to fend him off fairly easily - he went straight into my big Ent/Catapult stack, but I'll have to leave Ariel alone till he accepts peace, which of course means I can pretty much rely on a city or two flipping back to her. :mad:

They did not in the game I sent you. (Part of my strat in ambushing my neighbor is that I had a large number of elven units and they could move and attack the city closest to me when I declared war). This turned out not to be the case.

I have started playing another game as Lo-Pan. Lots of islands and I have a interesting starting spot with 1 of each node and the dark elves and that is it. Have 7 cities on my little island and have a life mage and a death mage for neighbors close to me. Will see how it goes.

@TLC

So the nature mages prefer Centaurs as well. It could be that the pterodactyls get dropped off the build lists after they get centaurs. Good to know. :)

@Klyden
I'm really sorry. War Dancers were the only elven unit that didn't have the "ignore movement penalties in forests and ancient forests". I'll fix it for next patch.

I checked out the savegames quickly. Thank you, interesting stuff. I'll look into them better tomorrow - it's getting late here in Finland. :)

Nice to hear that you finally have some luck with the nodes - they were really sparse in those savegames. I should probably test the map generating with bigger maps too.

No worries, that is what play testing is for. Good we could find it now rather than later.

@TLC

So the nature mages prefer Centaurs as well. It could be that the pterodactyls get dropped off the build lists after they get centaurs. Good to know.Um, you realize that this is BETA 8, and those are the old 1.2.2 Centaurs?

Um, you realize that this is BETA 8, and those are the old 1.2.2 Centaurs?

Sorry, I had forgotten that your Tlaloc game was running beta 8. :) Now that I think of it, I was pretty impressed by the way you shrugged off a horde of 5.2.2 Centaurs when you had just Ents and catapults. :lol:

I'm now planning these changes to the unit system (they are a result of me sitting down to think about the 'flying' units in the mod. I don't like the way they force players to defend so deep from the border and the way they can conquer cities and often burn them down.)

Pterodactyl (nature mages)
4.1.2(atar) => transports 2 units 4 squares away, costs 60

Great Eagle (nature mages)
6.1.2(atar) => transports 3 units 6 squares away, costs 90

Dragon (nature mages)
8.3.2(atar) => 0.5.2(atar) bombardment 12.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 100

Dragon of Light (life mages)
6.3.3(atar) => 0.4.2(atar) bombardment 10.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 100

Helldrake(chaos mages)
7.2.2(atar) => 0.2.2(atar) bombardment 12.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 80

Black Dragon (death mages)
5.3.2(atar) => 0.3.2(atar) bombardment 10.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 80

Tell me what you think. :)

Edit: also, I'm introducing Skeleton Guard(3.2.1 - 30) and Death Guard(5.3.1 - 50) units. There's no point in building them as there are better alternatives at the same cost, but they can be drafted. Skeleton Guard comes at Death Summons and Death Guard at Death Magic VII. They form their own upgrade chain. Current graphics are simply Crypt Skeleton and Cursed Legionary as they share their stats.

Well, here's a new test patch. Changes include all the things changed in the last test patch, the unit changes listed in the above post and in addition to them:
- Earth Elementals are 6.4.1 instead of 6.5.1
- New victory point graphics
- Fixed graphics for the F4 screen.
- Cog doesn't fire its cannons, only arrows
- Added icons for Dragon Turtle and Skeleton Spearman
- War Dancers ignore movement penalties in forests and ancient forests.
- Maybe something else.

Extract to Civ3\Conquests\Scenarios\ after installing Beta 8 and Beta 9

Should be some interesting changes.

I am going to continue with the current version with the game I have going for right now before doing the new version.

In regards to the flying units, I think they do offer an interesting spin on things. The dragon units are extremely powerful from experience with the War Hammer mod. There is no real defense against them except another dragon and hope you get to attack first. The bombard feature might be the way to go.

Will post more info on my current game when I get a chance to return to it.

Turning the dragons and such into bombarders wasn't a decision I made happily. If it had been possible, I would've just made it impossible for them to capture cities. Let's hope the choice turns out to be a good one.

I'm waiting with interest to hear how the game turns out. I've been busy today and haven't had the time to check out the savegames more thoroughly. Life mage dominance was a bit alarming though.

What does (atar) mean?

So these changes make the level X units only bombard? not sure I like that :/ I mean what's the point of getting level X then? :P




Dragon (nature mages)
8.3.2(atar) => 0.5.2(atar) bombardment 12.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 100

Dragon of Light (life mages)
6.3.3(atar) => 0.4.2(atar) bombardment 10.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 100

Helldrake(chaos mages)
7.2.2(atar) => 0.2.2(atar) bombardment 12.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 80

Black Dragon (death mages)
5.3.2(atar) => 0.3.2(atar) bombardment 10.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 80[/size]



Edit:

On second thought I suppose if the dragons are so invincible it might be a bit of a downer. I haven't actually gotten far enough in a game where I was fighting to use them, or had them used against me.

What does (atar) mean?

So these changes make the level X units only bombard? not sure I like that :/ I mean what's the point of getting level X then? :P

Edit:

On second thought I suppose if the dragons are so invincible it might be a bit of a downer. I haven't actually gotten far enough in a game where I was fighting to use them, or had them used against me.

(atar) is short for "all terrain as roads"

I could rearrange the units from top level techs so that the new dragons wouldn't be the payoff units from level X. However, I believe the new dragons are very useful as well. :)

In short, I feel the old dragons were too dominating and they were very difficult to balance. They may still make a comeback, but I really don't like the way they can be used to capture cities behind borders and then burn them down. I feel it may well add more hassle than enjoyment to the mod. :(

Don't know if you have given this more consideration or not, but would like to see the Chaos warrior and devil units switched between level 3 and summon chaos units. I think Chaos needs some basic offense (over a defensive unit).

My current game is shaping up to be an interesting one. I am Lo Pan and while the science front has not gone well (I have been stuck at 10 or 20% for most of the game), I have managed to trade a bit with the other PC's, although none of them are fond of me.

I launched an invasion against Morja and managed to get a bridgehead against the horde of 3-3-1's he has. Morja has been duking it out with the other inhabitant on the island, a life mage. I managed to capture 5 cities from Morja and now have ivory and wine for resources to help with my people management situation as soon as I can get some harbors built.

It appears that Morja and the life mage have been in a pretty even slugging match as not much has changed hands and some scouting shows a couple destroyed cities in the middle of the island. I made peace with Morja (demanding tech along with it) and will see what the life mage has for units before deciding to jump on him for a few cities.

I have made contact with a nature mage and that has been the extent of my contact so far. Rjak was reported as destroyed someplace else.

I may be behind in science, but am in a pretty good position for the most part. I have the Chaos summons done and production is not bad. The Chaos warriors were not hacking it against the shadowmen, so I switched to knights and while a bit more expensive, they have 5 vs 4 attack and also can retreat from battle, so have been handy. I have had one elite unit produce a leader, so now I have 4 knights running around in a corps marker. Very brutal.. ;)

@Klyden

You can consider the Chaos Warrior - Devil switch done. I like your reasoning. :) I'll also think about the balance between Chaos Warrior and Knight.

Is there something wrong with the science in general or is it just this one game? 10-20% sounds really low. Chaos Knight army at that point is probably pretty devastating. Can't tell myself as I have yet to have a single army when I've played MoM. I guess I'm just a pacifist. :lol:

If you have installed the new test patch, how do you find the new graphics for the victory points? Are they visible enough?

Well, here is some information and you can be the judge.

I currently have 12 cities. My income is 122 and 7 of the cities have markets in them. I also have some tax men going to help as I can't leave squares in production as I get into moral issues. I have 10 percent going for luxuaries to help keep my population happy. Economic breakdown is as follows:

Income 122, -5 sc, -5 ent, -21 corruption, -33 maintenence, -36 unit costs.

I am currently running 10 percent science on a level 4 tech. I can ramp all the way up to 50% before it will decrease. At that point, I am -24. 60% is -29 and 70% is -43. My total pop is 58.

My army is 72 units:

1 Settler
6 workers
1 Army
5 Beastmen
12 Fanatics
4 Chaos Warriors
16 Chaos Knights
8 Galley
19 Devils

Not an overwhelming force by any means and if you knock out 24 units of that (would allow me to break even at 50%) I don't know that there is much I could do.

To me, this seems pretty puny. You figure that I have 24 units tied up in city garrisons to help maximise keeping the populance happy.

I can send you a saved game turn if you would like and you can experiment a bit. One of the reasons I tried to jump on Morja was to keep him from getting an overwhelming number of the shadowmen. I was partially successful and probably the only reason I succeeded is that he was also fighting the life mage as I saw a couple stacks of 8 and 10 go off to the front instead of dealing with me. Obviously, I am also going to win most fights with 5 point attackers against 3 point defenders as well.

Here is a screen shot of the current game I am in. The nature mage is off to the south.

I have just finished a war with Morjad and the screen shot shows where Morjad and Merlin have had a titanic struggle in the middle.

(atar) is short for "all terrain as roads"

I could rearrange the units from top level techs so that the new dragons wouldn't be the payoff units from level X. However, I believe the new dragons are very useful as well. :)

In short, I feel the old dragons were too dominating and they were very difficult to balance. They may still make a comeback, but I really don't like the way they can be used to capture cities behind borders and then burn them down. I feel it may well add more hassle than enjoyment to the mod. :(

yeah no problem with that. A less movement-powerful unit with strong offensive properties might be nice though, something with maybe 2-3 movement and NOT atar. Sorry if I don't have any suggestions though :/


btw, when are you going to add kinboat's nice dragon turtle graphic....? :D

Another option to consider on preventing deep strikes on the dragons is to make the ATAR, but only give them a 1 move. This would allow them to move around at a good rate, but be limited on attack.

Perhaps another option as well is to leave their movement higher (gives them a chance to retreat from battle, which makes sense for a flying unit) and instead of ATAR, have them ignore movement penalties on terrain. (In other words, if it is not a road, they only get a max of 3 moves while they would get 9 on a road if they were a 3 movement point unit). Does not necessarily make sense from a flying standpoint, but for game balance, it might fit the bill.

*edit*

In regards to the balance between chaos warrior and knight, I think I may have come across wrong in that I was not having as much luck with warriors winning battles as I would have liked to have had. In addition, a knight losing a fight has a chance to retreat and live to fight again where a warrior can't do that. To get my bridge head, I had a pile of devils in the mountains defending while I landed attackers. As the attackers would kill defenders (but be wounded) I would shuttle them off on ships to heal and then return. Knights were especially handy as they could attack, have a movement point left and then board a ship on the same turn.

@Klyden

The savegame would be nice. Although you've provided practically all the required information here. :)

With that kind of numbers, you really should be able to pump the research higher (and it really should have some kind of an effect before 50%) Do you have any suggestions regarding this? Are the techs still too expensive?

Is the death mage unit production a problem? There seems to be a trend of them massing Shadowmen in huge numbers. I guess it's part of their nature, but if it renders them invincible it's a bit problematic.

@azzacanth

Are you referring to nature mages with the 2-3 move strong offensive unit? (Life mages have tons of fast attackers, chaos has wyvern riders and death nighmare riders) I guess nature could use a fast attacker, but on the other hand, they did get the air transport units to airdrop their strong, but slow land units. I also don't have any unit graphics to go with it. Maybe later. :)

Dragon Turtle will be added in a later patch. I won't put it in these test patches as they often replace the patch before them and then people would have to download the unit several times (dragon turtle is ~2.5 megs zipped). Also, Kinboat is probably finishing his angel soon, so I can get rid of the both placeholders at the same time. :)

@Klyden

You replied while I was still typing. :)

1 move all terrain as roads dragons is a bit slow, but it could be considered. It would also be pretty slow to get your flying units from another side of the continent to the other as they would slug on at 3 moves / turn. Rebase could be an option, but I'm not sure really.

As for them ignoring movement penalties, I'm not sure if I can get over the fact that they would triple their movement while flying over roads. You are right though about it probably being probably a very good choice in terms of game balance.

I'll have to think about the flyers. Thanks for the good ideas.

I guess the Chaos warriors are ok. They are half the cost of Knights, but they can't really shine when you don't have the economy to mass them.

Edit: just remembered that the latest patch includes the much wanted 1.3.1 Skeleton Spearmen (costs 20 shields)

Are you referring to nature mages with the 2-3 move strong offensive unit? (Life mages have tons of fast attackers, chaos has wyvern riders and death nighmare riders) I guess nature could use a fast attacker, but on the other hand, they did get the air transport units to airdrop their strong, but slow land units. I also don't have any unit graphics to go with it. Maybe later.


I guess... Nature is the only game so far I have played up to the higher level units. I need to start another warlord-difficulty game and get a good start, and get back to you with suggestions on that. My advice is a little biased without that. :)


1 move all terrain as roads dragons is a bit slow, but it could be considered. It would also be pretty slow to get your flying units from another side of the continent to the other as they would slug on at 3 moves / turn. Rebase could be an option, but I'm not sure really.


What about making them true flying units? I am not sure though, how flying units work in civ3 (something else I need to play with I guess - by the time I get that far in a regular civ game I am usually just sitting by passively building up culture, or sending out armadas of tanks and guerillas) I know I was a little disappointed when not only could my pterodactyls and hawks not fly over water, neither could my great eagles or dragons. :P Is it possible to make air units that attack land units, or are they bombard or vs air only? I guess if the latter is the case, air units would have their whole own balancing system. (Dragons like bombers and great eagles like fighters?) But that would solve the city taking-and-burning problem.. even if the units could still get back there.

@azzacanth

I don't really feel the air unit system of Civ3 fits the mod. Air units are either bombard or air vs. air and my experience from them is that you need loads of them to achieve anything. Also, only the big dragons have bombardment anims. It would also bring the question of anti air units.

I'm looking forward to hearing how your next game goes. :)

I have also experienced death mages with extremely massive numbers of shadowmen. Of course, I play on huge maps, so (coincidentally Mordja for me as well) had a decent number of cities... say 20... but he was carrying on a two front war (I'd gotten Airiel to ally with me against him, and she actually had a much longer border with him) and STILL managed to counterattack with a stack of FOURTY shadowmen somewhere around turn 200 (fortunately I managed to get him to agree to peace before they reached the city I'd most recently taken). I'll get precise numbers for you when I fire up civ3 again, probably tonight.

It's interesting to note that, of the units I saw, easily 95% of them were shadowmen. I saw a grand total of 2 necromancers, 3 skeleton spearmen, and 2 or 3 1/1/1 skeletons throughout the entire ~40 turn war. Every other unit was a Shadowman, and I must have killed at least two dozen of them, and Ariel did her share as well (I had hawks watching her border and playing hide-and-seek with Mordja's units - they like chasing the hawks around, presumably because they have no defense value. You might make them 0/1/2 units so that they aren't such a big target for the AI).

@Zurai

Thank you for the feedback. :)

I should probably remove the defensive AI strategy from Shadowmen now that the Skeleton Spearmen are 1.3.1. It could even it out a bit. Good idea with the Hawks - will do. :)

I could also consider tweaking the Death mage unit support, but I'm not sure.

I think that the first few science techs are too high. Even pumping science up to 80-100% often gives no improvement from 10%. So i keep it on 10%, save my money and trade gold for techs.

@coolake

I'll try to test the tech costs today and see if I can find a better balance for them.

I'm just worried that when I get the tech cost right, the techs come so quickly that the player has hardly enough time to use the new units before they get to the next one in the upgrade chain. I'm starting to feel like I should have built the tech tree 3 eras long in the first place.

I'm starting to feel like I should have built the tech tree 3 eras long in the first place.

I couldn't get this out of my head. How insane do you guys think it would be if I reworked the tech tree to span three eras? Some techs would offer a little less, but individual techs would be cheaper.

I feel a bit like I'm rushing these changes - it's hard for you guys to test the mod when it keeps changing all the time. However, balancing the tech research with two eras has proven to be a tough nut to crack. It may require some drastic measures.

The WH mod got better when the tech tree expanded from three to four eras, thus, by conjecture, I think this mod is gonna get better as well if you expand the tech tree. :)

@mrtn

Let's at least hope it will 'cause I feel like I'm going to go through with it.

I've got a first draft of the 3 era tech tree ready, but it needs a lot more polishing still. When I've worked some more with it, I'll post it here in case people want to check it out and voice their opinions on it. :)

Couple things:

Flagging the skele spearmen 1-3-1's as defensive should help. I don't know why the AI is bascially dropping everything else to produce those shadowmen units, but I would certainly tinker with them some. You may have to raise the cost on them slightly in addition to tinkering with their attributes as well. The Death mages get there and seem to stop progression from what I have seen and just produce tons of those units, even if they are not fighting.

I also agree the tech tree going to 3 eras with reduced costs could be very beneficial. Something else to consider would be to incorporate your changes you were talking about earlier (IE drop the minimum time to 6 turns and increase the max a bit as well, although with more techs to research, perhaps 50 is a good number as a max).

As far as the different versions, my advice (for what it is worth) is to take a deep breath and be patient. I think coming out with lots of small changes is not as beneficial as coming out with bigger updates that are better planned. The version you came out with all the unit changes was a big one. Let the play testers do their thing (the more playtesting of the different races, the better) and compile notes of the changes you want to incorporate into the next version.

As far as my economy goes, I would be interested in comparing it to some of the other positions. I will try to find a few old save games and compare income and see how it stacks up. The nice thing with the system you have in place is that each group has it's own government type, so individual tweaking can be done with relatively ease.

Can't tell myself as I have yet to have a single army when I've played MoM.I didn't mention it, but I did get an Army during my war with Lo Pan. I filled it with three Veteran Centaurs and attacked a 1HP Beastman on a forest tile. Needless to say, the Army died.

@Klyden

Skeleton Spearmen are flagged defensive. Let's see if flagging Shadowmen just offensive helps.

As for the updates, I know I've been impatient with them lately. My philosophy has been to keep the testers in pace with myself, but I have probably overdone it a bit. :) It's just that the recent surge in the amount of feedback keeps bringing new stuff to the surface and I find the mod to have much more issues than I thought. Some of them affecting practically every bit of the mod. Because of that, I've kept reacting so quickly, to make sure the problems that I know of are dealt with. Naturally, it contains a very real risk of rushing things and mucking up something new or responding to a problem that in fact wasn't a problem.

I'm now slowing down a bit. My focus is now on a large patch that will make the mod 3 eras long. Keep the feedback coming, I'll take it slower with this patch and try to take everything into consideration.

I looked over some of my saved games checking on the economics as best as I could and the results are.. interesting and could explain a few things.

Nature, Death, and Chaos get 1 commerce from a road. Life gets 2.

For the nature mage, I had 14 cities, 57 pop. Income of 80 and 33 units. Free support is 28 units. No markets.

For the death mage, I had 10 cities, 61 pop. Income of 120 and 68 units. Free support is 52 units. 8 of the cities had markets.

For the life mage, I had 21 cities. Income of 476 and 123 units. Free support is 48 units. Many cities had markets.

For the chaos mage, I have 12 cities, 58 pop. Income of 122 and 72 units. Free support is 36 units. 7 of them have markets.

The Chaos and Nature positions appear to be in the weakest position with low income and lower support. Death has the most free support for units to help offset the low income. Life seems to be extremely powerful with the best coin production and a better support factor over Nature. This could help explain the dominance we have been seeing out of Life mages.

Mordja had 28 cities at the start of the war, 3 of them utterly isolated and corrupt (though still of course providing unit support). I destroyed two of those, the ones in my territory, in the early stages of the war. On the turn I ended the war, he had 23 remaining cities supporting the 39 shadowmen, 1 necromancer, and 1 skeletal spearman in the immediate vicinity of the front line city and at least another 20 behind the lines moving forward (spotted by postwar hawk scouts).

@Klyden

Government support rates are at the moment:
Death: 4/8/12
Chaos: 3/6/10
Nature: 2/4/8
Life: 2/4/8

Based on your research, life may need toning down slightly. 2/4/6 would sound logical, but it would kick in only after city size 3. 2/3/6? Or something completely different? Double unit support cost is probably too radical...

And what about Chaos and Nature? Chaos has good support, what's holding it down? Nature has lowest corruption/waste so it should help.

What do you think about all this? Is it enough to bring the life mages closer to the main pack or should the other ones be touched? Chaos mages seem to be doing constantly a little worse than others.

I think chaos needs a bit of a bump and life needs to be toned down a bit. Life seems lead on research from what I have seen and obviously can field very powerful forces.

Life at 2/3/6 may not be bad and would probably be a good starting point.
Chaos might be able to stand 3/7/10. Considering that they are likely to be first with markets, they still need a bit of a tweak, because markets are not going to be that effective for them (or anyone else except life).
Death is ok as is I think.
Nature seemed weak as well, but does benefit from being able to generate high populations with their irrigation ability and food advantage. You still have to take into consideration that they will hurt unless they get lucky with position to be able to grow beyond 6 as they won't get any relief until they research enchanted springs, which is a bit in the depth chart. This has the effect of hurting the nature mages early in game as they don't generate the same cash as life mages do and yet have the same support. Perhaps 3/5/8 might be in order for them.

You figure most people (and the AI) are going to park 2 units per city to maximize the effect on their population. This essentially means that currently life or nature mages can have no other units (including workers) without it cutting into their economy and in the case of nature, that is especially hurtful.

*Edit*
Minor issue I found with the Civlopedia. Says War Galley sink in the ocean. They also sink in seas.

Good suggestions, thank you. I believe I will start with them and see how it goes in test games. :) I'll also fix the war galley pedia.

BTW, since Chaos has limit of 3 for military police, does that mean that they are parking 3 units per city instead of 2?

I will check from the standpoint that I usually put in a garrison up to the point that it stops changing pop from unhappy to content.

My game continues to be interesting and Morja just seems to have tons of units. At one point, I counted 82 3-3-1's and he has taken 2 cities from the life mage. I had another brief war with him and probably killed off a good 20 units with my Chaos Knights while taking minimal losses. I had to get a peace with him again as my units were all pretty much depleted and I was endanger of losing 2 pop centers. To my suprise, he took it without reparations. I counted 40 3-3-1's on one side of the map facing me. Considering my entire army has 82 units in it and I am basically crippled for advancement (still running 10% science and have a surplus of about 5 or 10 gold) and I don't think he is any larger than I am (I have 12 pop centers) and that he is ahead on science, I am rather impressed and it tells me that I need to keep pounding him down or I will eventually loose. The only reason I am in this is because of the chaos knights at this point.

The life mage has 1-3-1's and 3-4-1's that he has been fighting with, but has been overwhelmed for the most part. Still doing very well on tech.

According to the victory screen, I am increasing in power, so I am gaining ground in that regard and the fighting is helping as far as victory points go.

I wish I knew what makes the death mages build all those units. Every report I get says they build tons of Shadowmen. Them being flagged both offensive and defensive may be part of it, but even if the numbers were divided into defenders and attackers, it would still be a huge amount of units.

One possibility for the amount of Death mage units could be that I have halved the penalties from whipping and drafting. I've noticed death mage cities sometimes staying very small even though they have had ample time to grow. It could be that the AI is whipping new units out in regular fashion. Maybe the 10 turns isn't enough of a negative side-effect. Don't know, I'm in the dark here. I should probably run some games in debug mode and see what goes on with them.

I'm playing as vlad with your latest little patch. I'm finding them very dynamic to play now. They are responding very well to my needs. (defense or attack). IMHO they are close to being well balanced. Earlier in the game it does seem an advantage for them to be able to lose pop to hurry things. Perhaps reducing the support of cities slightly might make computer not rush quite so many. I also think that the science levels are getting close to where they should be. They really are a horde army in comparison to say nature or life. Individually most units can't compare to the equivelent of others, but enmasse is where their advantage lays. Sometimes the only counterattack against them is to let them exhaust themselves against your strongly fortified defensive units. I've found Chaos can duke it out with them easily with thier cheap chaos warriors and knights. A sustained war can hurt them as they usually lose more units in any battle.

Actually Nature can't really do anything to Shadowmen until they research Nature 5 or get one of the offensively oriented races. Nature only has 2 attacker units in the first era, and only one of those (Centaurs at Nature 5) have a signifigant increase over the 3 defense to make them win enough to matter in the face of Death's vastly higher number of units. The loss of Pteradactyls (the other attacker unit) by making them pure air transports will make Nature completely unable to mount an offensive until halfway into the game. Yes, they have Treants, but attacking Shadowmen with Treants is a losing proposition, as the stats are the same and Death will have more Shadowmen than Nature has Treants.

Another bad aspect of Nature: Their initial defensive unit, Gnolls, upgrade to Gnoll Rangers at Nature 4 (IIRC). However, the upgrade cost *per unit* is 105 gold!!! It's utterly unfeasible to upgrade the units at that price, considering Nature does not a governmental trade bonus. Even with 70 gpt from selling excess luxuries, 3 luxuries of my own, and upper 40's city totals, I'm only making 70 gpt at 50% science 0% lux. Many of my cities are underdefended, and if Tauron attacks me (he's been demanding money from me the entire game) I'm doomed, because I simply do not have the resources to combat him on that very long front.

I HAVE managed to make serious inroads into Mordja in my second war. I have three races under my control (Dwarves, Trolls, and Men), and I had 4 Drake Ships filled with Raiders travel along Mordja's coast, razing cities as they went. I took out 3 port cities before his cogs started attacking and forced me to capture one of the cities to make repairs. I also took one of his border towns, *finally* got a pair of military great leaders, promptly made armies with them, and took Mordja's sole luxury from him with the armies. Ariel (who's now in a MPP with me) too has taken a couple cities, as she's the most technologically advanced wizard and has second era units, while Mordja has no strategic resources (having lost his death node to me in the first war and his goblins to Ariel in the second) to make higher level units of his own.

That being said, the only reason I was able to make any advance on my border was because approximately 75% of his units were being occupied by Ariel. I watched a stack of approximately 40-50 units leave my target town even as I pulled up, and they steadily advanced parallel to the border, directly towards Ariel. Given that her cities are still standing, and that she has White Riders, I assume that she beat back the attack. I managed to batter the (barrackless, thankfully) town down with a dozen fire catapults, redlining all five defenders, then sending in the centaurs. I'm confident that Mordja's days are numbered, but it'll be quite some time before he finally loses his last city, since Ariel seems content to simply defend at the moment.



In my opinion, Nature has several glaring weaknesses:

1) Only two true offensive units in the first era, both of them requiring signifigant research to get to and both fairly expensive to build. One of those two units (the lower tech one) is going away in the next patch. Neither of them have any noticeable defense.
2) Very low gold income. My current income, in 1355 AD, is as follows:

Total income: 778
Total expenses: -789
Science: -309
Entertainment: -0
Corruption: -170
Maintenance: -248
Units: -62
Treasury: 1713 gold
Net loss: -11

That's with 46 cities. My military consists of 212 units, mainly workers (41) and gnoll rangers (60, all built, not upgraded). The remainder is divided roughly evenly between Fire Catapults, Ettins, Hammerhands, Raiders, Pteradactyls, Half Gnolls, and Centaurs.
3) Inefficient government. Nature's government is utterly mediocre. It has neither the best nor the worst unit support, neither the best nor the worst war weariness, etc. It doesn't lend itself well to anything. It's simply there. There are no advantages to use.
4) The above factors prevent Nature from being a leader in the tech race, barring extraordinary luck with their starting position and the positions of the nearest opponents. Nature simply cannot afford to raise science past 50% for more than the short term (as I'm doing currently, to get to Nature 6 and the Harmony spell before Ariel completes it), and it cannot afford to buy techs past the first hundred turns or so. Despite being only 6 turns from completion (out of 20 to start with), Ariel refuses to trade me Nature 6, *because I cannot afford it, even prorated*. She's been quite willing to trade me other techs, and is gracious to me, so it's not because she dislikes me, and at least both other Life mages know Nature 6 (presumably learned from Ariel), because they were in the running for Transmutation Mastery.
5) Nature units are not cost-effective. Take for example Centaurs, a 5/2/2 unit that ignores Forest and Ancient Forest move costs, for 80 shields. Then compare them to the other mages' level 5 units: Champions, 4/2/2 +1hp amphibious for 50 shields; Cursed Legionaries, 5/3/1 enslave zombie workers for 50 shields; and Chaos Ettins, 7/3/1 +2 hp for 80 shields.



In my opinion, Nature mages need two of three things: They need a better government, a much earlier true offensive unit, and/or cheaper units overall.

By the way, here's the minimap from my current game. I'm Tlaloc, the tealish color with the large land area to the southeast. Mordja is the purple one to the south center. Ariel is the white blob north of Mordja. Tauron, the sole Chaos mage, is the very large red blob in the center. The other mages are pretty irrelevant to my current situation.

The hole you see in Mordja's culture along his south coast is where my Raiders have torched three of his cities. His border with me on the northeast is two city-ranks southwest of where it used to be ;)

@coolake

Good to hear the death mages seeem to be falling in their place. That's exactly what I imagined them to be when I started this project. :)

@Zurai

This is a nice way to start a morning - loads of feeback. :)

Making Pterodactyls transports did hurt the nature mages' offensive options in the first era. Hmm. I'll have to think about their unit balance. Some kind of an attacker is in order for their early game.

Unit upgrades are a bit costly in general. I haven't touched the upgrade cost (it's 3 gold / shield), but I could try 2 gold / shield. Upgrade gives an advantage to life mages who are probably only ones who can mass upgrade their units (which in turn upgrade really well). With 2 gold / shield the advantage would still be there, but others might be able to do it as well.

Gnoll Rangers are IMO correctly priced at 50 shields, but maybe I should put all gnoll units in the same upgrade chain. Currently both Gnoll and Half-Gnoll upgrade to the Ranger, but I could make it Gnoll => Half-Gnoll => Gnoll Ranger. The upgrade from Gnoll to Half-Gnoll would be 45 with the old system and 30 with the new one. Upgrade from Gnoll to Gnoll Ranger would be with the new system 70 gold.

Changing the nature support to 3/5/8 should help with the money problem. One other thing I was considering is 50% worker bonus for them. It would cut down a bit on the number of workers that are needed and therefore, leave more money for the military/research. As for nature mage government being bad, they do have the lowest corruption/waste at minimal, while life and chaos are nuisance and death problematic. It's not much, but the 3/5/8 support should help too.

Some nature units are admittedly a bit on the costly side. I'll look into it. Centaurs are a unit nature mages weren't originally meant to have (the birds were meant to be their 'cavalry') so I priced them a little higher than usual. Of course, now that the birds no longer are cavalry, Centaur cost should be addressed. Or the birds changed back to offensive, but I still don't have a thoroughly good way of doing it.

Your game seems interesting. If Tauron does attack, at least you have lots of choice for possible allies. :) How have you found the human units BTW?

Thank you both for the feedback. :)

Hi :) I finally started playing your Mod and want to give you some feedback. First, let me say that you (and all the people who contributed to the mod) did an outstanding work there. In fact I regret that I cannot tell you exactly *how* much I like it, but doing so would require time and I need my to play the mod. ;) Let's just say that your mod is the reason for me to come out of lurking in these forums for more than three years.

I wanted to play your mod since i first learned about, but didn't until recently. I read some posts of you where you sounded a little disappointed because you wanted more feedback, so I thought why I didn't start playing earlier. For me, the "beta" status was the problem. I always thought "I got to play this mod once it's out of beta". This may be understandable because I like to play epic games which may well stretch across several weeks. It's very disappointing to lose such games due to bugs, so I refrained from testing the beta. In fact I remember a post in this thread were you stated that "this beta might be the final version", and this post finally pushed me over the edge and I started playing as soon as I had some time. (I also started to put myself in your perspective and found out that it's a little egoistic from me to wait until others run into the bugs and do the dirty work so that I can play my "perfect" mod later on.)

Speaking about feedback, it might make sense to leave your email address somewhere in the mod, preferably in an accompanying readme, and in the blurbs that are shown when selecting a scenario and when pressing "I" in the game. Perhaps it's only me, but I prefer mail contact over forums, and if I didn't like this mod so much, this might have been another reason for me not to provide feedback.

Now to my game: I'm playing beta 9, Update 1 installed, on a large world with all opponents, on regent difficulty (I usually play Monarch). All other parameters are set to random (probably suboptimal for playtesting, but I like it to play this way, I like it *not* to know what's awaiting me.) God Random decided that I should play as Vlad. :) So far I enjoyed the game very much (so please don't be fooled by following nitpicks). Some things i note may be old knows or even obsolete by now, i don't follow this thread regularly, my apologies if I'm only repeating known problems.

First impressions:

- Very innovative concepts, I like the way how you integrated the different races as resources, and how you built a "magical" tech tree.

- Great graphics :)

- Many specials on the map, which is a little confusing at first, but I like diversified terrain, so I do like them, I justed needed a little time to learn them.

- The interface still is a little too dark for my taste. It's probably more my problem but the interface's, as my eyesight isn't too good. However I find it hard to read some number, e.g. cities' happiness and treasure in the domestic advisor screen.

- I also have difficulties to recognize that other civ's colors. To the southeast from me there is a point where Tauron, Sssra and Lo Pan meet. Since the area is partially in my sight range and partially out of it, there are six different shades of red running around, and I find it very difficult to see who's who. To a lesser extrent I had the same problem with Ariel and Oberic who started in my north and northeast.

- I started right on a death node, with ten other nodes no more than 8 steps away. With my first two cities I covered all four node types. A little too easy for my taste, I like the battles for scarce resources. But I might just have been lucky. (In fact my starting location had a death node, a nature node, a river and three grass lands with cattle along the river. Compare that to Merlin's start location - he has a couple of mountains on the east coast of a vast desert. But I like diversified terrain. :) )

- The scientific advisor still babbles about learning horse riding and many other techs that aren't in the game - you probly know this. ;) I guess if there was an easy way to stop him, you would have done it already. :)

- The Civilopedia could contain a little more information, but that's low priority. The link from "Spider Mastery" to "Giant Spider" leads to an invalid entry. In the pedia text for Tauron, his government is listed as "^Chaos".

- When I look at my build list and see wonders, I sometimes want to know whether they are great or small wonders. However when I liik at the pedia entry for them, this isn't stated there. I have to go up a pedia level and see whether this leads to "Great Wonders" or "Small Wonders" to retrieve this information. But perhaps I'm just stupid here, I sometimes am. :) However I suggest putting information like "This is a small wonder" into the pedia entries for all wonders.

- My flood plain cities still suffer from disease (quite heavily sometimes), although the Pedia states they shouldn't, because I'm a Death mage.


My game is running smoothly so far. In the beginning I secured four nodes and built skeleton warriors (very cheap) to use them as scouts. Putting money into research didn't have any effect for the first three levels of research, so I hoarded money instead (seems that the first techs are a little expensive). Quickly made contact to most others, traded some techs, expanded. I started near three rivers and built some cities along them, now that I have them up and running, I can afford a really *large* military. I continued to build skeleton warriors instead of zombies (because they are quicker to build), beelined for "Death Summon" (from Death Magic III on it started to have an effect to invest into science, probably because my cities grew larger and I got wizards guilds in the meantime), and spent all the money I was hoarding by upgrading my skeleton warriors to shadowmen. (This gave me more shadowmen as compared to building zombies and upgrading those.) With these I overran Ariel's capital and two other cities of her. She defends with clerics and acolytes - the clerics do okay, but her cities can't stand a storm of 8+ shadowmen. Also she doesn't seem to have offensive units to counterattack (but I think that's actually in-role for Life mages). In the meantime one city of Oberic and one of Tauron flipped over to me (I built shrines and wizard's guilds on the borders).

In the meantime I got a scientific great leader and built the spell of knowledge, which gave me three or for techs so far. With your mod's tech tree being less linear than Civ's, players are perhaps more diversified in their techs, which in turn makes the spell of knowledge very powerful, especially with many players on the map. However it's appropriately expensive. I just got lucky (again) with my great leader showing up right in time.

I'm pretty sure I'll win this game, it goes almost too easy. But this hasn't necessarily anything to do with the mod. I had a lucky start position and got a crucial wonder through a leader, and I play on Regent. My regular Civ games on Regent also tend to be easy when I my start is so lucky.

Okay, I hope me feedback helps. Again, don't be fooled by the nitpicking, I *do* find your mod absolutely gorgeous. And now back to playing it. :)

Just taking a step back a minute on the science and gov types. (Some thinking out loud).

In Civ, science research is generated by coin/trade. How much of this a person has is dependent on government types selected, improvements, size, etc.

The early developements are cheap, but they have to be because of the government types available. As time goes along and developements get more expensive, we have additional government types available that can be selected based on objectives.. war, research, etc. They all have their advantages and disadvantages, but obviously all are not created equal.

In this game, we have 4 locked governments. 3 of them produce low coin and all have variable amounts of corruption. With low coin production, I think this has a direct bearing on research (or how slow it has been going) and it also restricts how effective improvements are. (And amplifies Life's additional trade advantage).

Couple things to perhaps toss out on the table for consideration:

1. A later "improved" government type for each position.
2. An additional "com node" improvement that acts like a second capital (like the tower, but make it availble to be built as an improvement and/or make it available later in the game).
3. Consider a change in coin production for the game, particularly in light of the upgrade trees that have been put in place.
4. Make workers maint free.

Just some thoughts for now.

@Psyringe

You just saved my day with that post. :)

I fully understand that not everyone wants to play an unfinished product. And MoM was pretty unfinished for several beta versions. It's unfinished still, but it hasn't had game crashing bugs for a while now. However, it is in continuous change and the comment about the beta 9 becoming the final version was a premature one from me.

Some commentary based on the feedback:
- Good idea with the readme and the email. Will do for next release.
- I could at some point learn to edit the game palette's and give each civ new colors. I'm not entirely happy with all of them myself either. I'm not if I can use more different colors though.
- You were probably lucky with the starting location in terms of nodes. They are common, but it's rare to see that many in same location.
- Shutting up the science advisor is on a to-do list. I've kept all text editing a low priority and focused on the actual content.
- Thank you about the civilopedia bug reports. I've added more information from time to time and will continue to do so. However, as long as the most important information is conveyed, it's a low priority. Adding entry about small/great wonder is a good idea. I'll do it for next patch.
- Death mage flood plain cities shouldn't suffer from disease. Swamps do cause disease to death mages, but that will be fixed for next patch. I'll look into the flood plains, but everything seems to be in order as far as I can tell.
- Tech costs should be eased with the next patch as the tech tree expands to three eras allowing cheaper individual techs.
- Interesting tactic with the skeleton warriors and shadowmen. :)
- Good point about the added value of Spell of Knowledge. It is probably more useful than the Great Library in the normal game.

Don't worry about nitpicking. There was nothing nitpicky about your post. Every ounce of feedback is appreciated by me as it helps me understand what people feel about different things in the mod.

Thank you for the feedback and welcome aboard. :)


@Klyden

Interesting questions. They raise one extra question (at least for me):

5. Can there be balance as long as life mages are the only ones with trade bonus?

Maybe they could be given some other perk?

1. later governments can be considered. However, there are some government specific improvements and such.
2. Eliminating corruption completely? Hmmm. Have to think on what this would do in practice.
3. Could you elaborate on this one? Increasing the amount of coin terrain produces? It would lessen the importance of the life mage bonus coin. Interesting, but would require rebalancing a lot of things.
4. Would probably mean huge armies of workers. Don't know how AI would react.

Hi again :)

Regarding colors: As I said, my eyes aren't too good, so I'd put fiddling around with the colors on low priority until more people come up asking for it. :)

Regarding many nodes at starting location: I think there were two reasons for it; one was luck, the other is the world that has been generated. I suspect that the game chose a map with little landmass. IIRC the number of instances of any strategic resource depends on the number of players in the game (may be mistaken here though), so playing on a small landmass with maximum number of players should raise the chances of finding many nodes closely together.

Regarding disease: There isone city that suffered from disease and that has no swamps, only flood plains. However this is the city that recently flipped to me from Tauron. Is it possible that the city contracted disease while under Tauron's rule, kept being diseased when it flipped, and only from now on while not contract disease again? Unfortunately I don't have a savegame ... but I'll have an eye on it.

Btw, the pedia entry for barricades reads: "Workers can build barricades after the discovery of Construction". "Construction" is an invalid entry and should read "Chaos Magic IV". (I'm not sure if it makes sense reporting this since you're just reworking the tech tree, but I guess it doesn't hurt either. :) )

@Psyringe

Yup, small landmass and lots of players probably means more strategic resources.

Maybe the disease really is related to the city flipping. Flood plain disease is checked with "cured with sanitation" and Death mage unique tech is set to "Disable disease on flood plains". It should work ok so it's either related to flipping or it's a bug in the game itself. :)

Thanks for the pedia bug report. It's because of a feature I just learned a few days ago.

Each improvement, unit, wonder and such has two civilopedia entries: (example uses walls)
#BLDG_Walls
#DESC_BLDG_Walls

I've deleted the #DESC_BLDG entries as they aren't needed as I can fit all the information on the first page. However, the game checks for the missing #DESC_BLDG parts from the civilopedia.txt of the Conquests itself and in this case, finds the description of the walls.

I'll fix all of these for next patch.

Hi :)

Playing some more hours, I stumbled across another issue. Zombie workers can join cities (i.e. it is possible to give them this command), but the city population doesn't change.

This may be intended, as I can see some logic behind it. Roleplay-wise, it makes sense to treat zombies not like citizens. Balance-wise, zombie workers are already a big plus for Death mages, having them increase cities' populations might make them too strong.

However, since this behaviour is somewhat unexpected, it probably makes sense to note it in the pedia. (It would be even better to disable the "join city" command for zombie workers, but I guess this isn't possible). Also, their working speed (half the speed of normal workers) should probably be noted there.

On a side note, I see you took some city names out of "Master of Magic". The funny thing is that some of them are German cities that have been misspelled in Simtex' game. For example "Braunweig" obviously means "Braunschweig". I also think that "Rothiem" should read "Rotheim", although this isn't an existing city (but "-hiem" looks a lot like a misspelled "-heim" suffix). There also is a city named "Nightwath", were you probably forgot a "c". All these are Vlad's cities. (Btw, have you considered using Rumanian or Bulgarian city names for him?)

My game is running smoothly, I overran Ariel with little problems. In her last city she actually managed to build one bowmaster. While my army was away conquering Ariel's cities, Oberic got smart and sneak-attacked me. But I had enough Shadowmen to defend my two border cities. After that I built lots of death knights and some necromancers and drover him off his cities, presently he only has two left, both will fall soon. The bowmasters might actually have challenged my shadowmen because of their speed advantage (plus their bonus hitpoint), but Oberic doesn't have the production capabilities to build them in sufficient numbers. Seems that I attacked Ariel right in time though (i.e. before she got bowmasters). There is no "Life mage dominance" in my game; Ariel is dead, Oberic will fall soon, and Merlin is insignifant, occupying only mountains and desert. The Nature mages however do extremely well. Tlaloc and raven are right behind me in score, Freya may even be better, I haven't met her yet. They have many cities, they started on another continent and seem to have more room for expansion. Being rather isolated and undisturbed may have been good for them.

Playing as a death mage in my current game, I was suffering from disease in one of the cities I had built on a flood plain.

This was certainly not related to flipping as it was the second city that I had founded.

@Psyringe

Yup, I've meant to make a decision about the Zombie Workers being able to join city and actually increase the population, but I've forgotten to do it. I'm a little undecided with it. It might make them a bit too strong, so I don't think I'll do it. Their pedia should definitely be updated - thank you for reminding me about it. :)

Actually, all cities are from Master of Magic. :) I was amused by the abused real life city names as well. While checking out the savegames of Klyden and looking at all those cities with numbers behind their names, I've come to think that I should probably try to come up with more city names for all mages. Rumanian and Bulgarian cities could well be used for Vlad. :)

Bowmasters don't have extra HP btw. Another small bug in civilopedia it seems. I have a feeling that life mages are most vulnerable in the early stages of the game, but when they get going, they start being very formidable.

Edit:

@Mindlar

Thank you for the information. I'll have to look into it and check if there has been any talk of a bug in Conquests. I'm fairly positive that I've got it set up correctly, but I'll doublecheck one more time. :)

Some clarification:

I am not out to eliminate corruption totally, but rather I am looking for some way to reduce it a bit more over current methods. This will help with science and coin production, which is one of the things being considered. An additional node or improvement seems to be a way to deal with this.

I think it would be very difficult to balance life with the other govs if they remain at 2 and the others stay at 1. Life already has some important advantages (excellent unit mix and the lowest corruption rates of government).

Something to consider is that right now, life has a 2-1 advantage in most squares in trade bonus over the others. Bumping everyone up one notch would make life a 3-2 advantage in most squares and also brings corruption more into play as well. Unit support might have to be tweaked under such a scenario and also tech costs, but perhaps this would let up on the need to make the techs cheaper. The way it is now is that generally the life mages are going to have a scientific advantage in most cases.

1. later governments can be considered. However, there are some government specific improvements and such.


New, better govt. specific improvement for the later govt? Nature shrine version 1 for Nature Mage, nature shrine version 2 for upgraded nature mage, etc. The lack of option in my govt was somewhat annoying but wasn't too big a deal, but if you are greatly expanding the tech tree, it's something else you can look into.

Unit upgrades are a bit costly in general. I haven't touched the upgrade cost (it's 3 gold / shield), but I could try 2 gold / shield. Upgrade gives an advantage to life mages who are probably only ones who can mass upgrade their units (which in turn upgrade really well). With 2 gold / shield the advantage would still be there, but others might be able to do it as well.

Gnoll Rangers are IMO correctly priced at 50 shields, but maybe I should put all gnoll units in the same upgrade chain. Currently both Gnoll and Half-Gnoll upgrade to the Ranger, but I could make it Gnoll => Half-Gnoll => Gnoll Ranger. The upgrade from Gnoll to Half-Gnoll would be 45 with the old system and 30 with the new one. Upgrade from Gnoll to Gnoll Ranger would be with the new system 70 gold.

I was going to suggest making the chain go gnoll -> half gnoll -> gnoll ranger myself. That at least splits the upgrade cost into two installments. Reducing the multiplier to 2 would help considerably as well.

Changing the nature support to 3/5/8 should help with the money problem. One other thing I was considering is 50% worker bonus for them. It would cut down a bit on the number of workers that are needed and therefore, leave more money for the military/research. As for nature mage government being bad, they do have the lowest corruption/waste at minimal, while life and chaos are nuisance and death problematic. It's not much, but the 3/5/8 support should help too.

That should indeed help a lot with money. At the very least it'd let me run 60% science and still make a profit. The decreased tech costs will help a lot on that front as well.

Some nature units are admittedly a bit on the costly side. I'll look into it. Centaurs are a unit nature mages weren't originally meant to have (the birds were meant to be their 'cavalry') so I priced them a little higher than usual. Of course, now that the birds no longer are cavalry, Centaur cost should be addressed. Or the birds changed back to offensive, but I still don't have a thoroughly good way of doing it.

Birds are fine as transports, IMO, as long as you give nature an offensive unit at nature 2 or 3, so there's some early game