Master of Mana

The new improvement system has went through a lot of adjustments since its inception, just now is it starting to get a little easier, though even I still have trouble understanding it in its fullest. But I also have not spent a lot of time trying to either, I just kinda limp along, and bit by bit I discover some little tidbit that I didnt understand before.

here is the link to the main thread on the Master of Mana website forum if it helps any.

http://www.masterofmana.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=548&start=0
 
Thank you, it helps :).

I wonder how do those resources (stone/lumber/leather) speed up the construction?

They seem to accumulate and never be spent. What does the "you have 241 lumber" mean? What can I do with that? :) I wonder do I spend them when I build something which is "sped up"?
 
Thank you, it helps :).

I wonder how do those resources (stone/lumber/leather) speed up the construction?

They seem to accumulate and never be spent. What does the "you have 241 lumber" mean? What can I do with that? :) I wonder do I spend them when I build something which is "sped up"?

The global yields speed up building and unit production.

If you have a stockpile of wood, then you can build that building faster (game turns) then without for example.

If you have a stockpile of metal, then a mele unit can be built faster AND have a metal weapons promotion depending on what level of metal you are currently producing.

http://www.masterofmana.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=64&start=0

is another thread that may help, should link you to a guide that one of the guys came up with.
 
Here's a hint for the current improvement system:

There is no restriction on building primary improvements next to each other. In fact, you are often better off doing so since some of them give bonuses to other adjacent improvements. Example: a watermill gives all adjacent cottage and trade post series improvements +1 production.

Also note that some optional features (enabled by a game option) block improvements in all adjacent plots: the mana shrine, witch hut, and lost temple. Generally speaking, once a city has popped its borders a few times and gotten a significant population the losses from not being able to improve the blocked plots can be much worse than the benefits from these features (a little extra mana, spell research, or faith each turn), so you should avoid putting your cities too close to them. In my current game, the first where I turned these on, my capitol is 1 plot diagonal and 1 vertical from a mana shrine, so that is blocking 4 plots from being improved (although I couldn't have improved one of them anyway as it has a unique feature - the Mirror of Heaven, or whatever it is really called) while the city could easily handle at least 2 more trading posts (as the Malakim, these only count for half) and a watermill without paying any upkeep (all the other improvable plots are improved). I knew this would happen, but didn't realize how great the impact would be a couple hundred turns down the line and there was not really any better place to settle in sight (or, as I discovered later, anywhere reachable without a ship).
 
  • AI was nearly completly rewritten for this mod. For example on the unit tactical level it uses a Squad-based AI, so don't worry, you won't get bored by Stacks of Doom in this mod. If the AI can take your cities it will try to put up as much of a fight as possible and pillage as much as it can to damage your economy. Putting a bunch of units into a stack and sending it from city to city isn't enough anymore. If you are more interested, I wrote some thoughts about the AI elsewhere
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How could I have missed this? Sounds like something that needs to be ported back to stock BTS for Better AI.


  • Radical different Improvement System
    • Improvements are powerful but they also have infrastructure costs. Small cities can only support a limited number of improvements, to be able to have more improvements a city needs to get more population and culture.
Sounds like an overly complicated new game mechanic. Any special reason why this has to be there?
 
Should I assume that the Advanced AI content mentioned back on the last page is of no interest? Just checking, since I there was no response one way or the other. I can certainly live without it, though I like the idea of letting in non-military units via an agreement without letting in all of another player's units.
 
Ahha! I now see why couldn't I build a mine, there was a temple in a forest nearby. Where can I get info on what they do? Their pedia descriptions are blank.

Sounds like an overly complicated new game mechanic. Any special reason why this has to be there?
I've played three games and got used to it. I believe that the special reason is that it's a cool mechanic :). You now have to plan your infrastructure ahead and you can get really wonderful results if you think a bit, or a disaster if you don't. I find it nice, it's good when the player's skill allows you to play better, rather than presets. In original game I would just automate my workers :).

Speaking of which, how are the automated workers here? I haven't tried to make them to work plots yet, I prefer to make it manually, but it would be nice to know.
 
I had thought Advanced Diplomacy was better known, but probably not. I've seen in at least RoM: A New Dawn. This is Afforess' description:

*snip*

From all I can tell, playing his mod a good deal, it works well.

Oops, sorry Soro, I missed it. It's a great system, I remember it. If we had more diplomacy options, especially a trade without unit movement, it would be grand.

May I suggest you to offer it on the mod forums? I am sure it will get more attention there.
 
Sounds like an overly complicated new game mechanic. Any special reason why this has to be there?

I believe that Sephi's basic idea was that having improvements in every tile didn't suit the flavor of a fantasy mod, so he wanted to limit them in some way.
 
Ahha! I now see why couldn't I build a mine, there was a temple in a forest nearby. Where can I get info on what they do? Their pedia descriptions are blank.
I recommend a look at the MoM Quick Start Guide posted by Kingknarf over on the offical MoM site's forums.

From that, and playing some, it looks like a mana shrine gives +2 mana/turn (same as an improved mana node, or double that of an unimproved mana node location, or the same as two mage guild buildings), a witch hut gives +3 spell research/turn (same as one mage guild), and a lost temple gives +4 faith/turn (base, there is a time related adjustment that starts out at -100% penalty on the turn you switch to a religion, increasing each turn until it hits a +100% bonus somewhat later) if you have a state religion (the same as two cities with your state religion). You don't need to be working the plots to get these benefits, they just need to be within your borders. Not mentioned in the guide, but from some hints in the game text file, it also looks like a mana node may provide some spell research each turn (or maybe not - the text may be out of date) and the witch's hut provides some of the new herbs accumulating resource (I think it is 1/turn). You may need to work the plot to get the herbs.

The mouse-over text for the plot with the thing on it should give info about it, like that you can't improve the adjacent plots and what extra yields it gives. Tags for this exist in the mod's game text files. Unfortunately that text is not actually displayed anywhere in the game that I have noticed.

The total benefit from lost temples is clearly listed on the mouse-over help pop-up for the faith resource, but the mana bonus is grouped in with other things and the research bonus is not listed separately anywhere I have noticed - by adding up everything else you could deduce the added research since there is a total given on the Overview page of the Magic screen.

Sadly, even if you had looked in the XML you won't be able to tell what these 3 improvements do since they are apparently hardcoded in the DLL (I expected to find new tags in the XML so that what they provide can be set there, but that is not the case and I find no mention of them in the Python therefore it must be in the DLL, the source for which is not in the mod download so I couldn't check to see what it says). The XML does reveal that they have the bPermanent tag set, which is why you can't raze them (and you can't settle a city on top of one to wipe it out either - on my cramped and resource poor section of continent in the game I mentioned above I ended up settling a city right nest to a lost temple because of this, which greatly hampers its development).

One more note. They don't block water plot improvements (fishing boats or fishing villages/pirate coves), which also don't count in the main improvement related upkeep calculations. Any time an improvement is blocked by one of these there should be a line in the displayed help text indicating why you can't do it, like "Your people refuse to work at this mystical place. They say Nature itself would smite upon them if they dare to construct an Improvement next to a Mana Shrine."
 
as weird as the new improvement system may sound, it's an excellent mechanic once you actually try it out. for the first time you'll actually be thinking about what to build and where.
 
As stupid as I may have sounded, I am not. I know I'd get the new system eventually, it's just more micro for no gain (as far as I can see at least, that esthetical requirement that tiles in a fantasy world shouldn't be completely covered with improvements sounds only like a fetish) but I am/was very worried about the AI. But if the AI being completey rewritten includes worker AI, my worries may have been unfounded though.
 
the aestethical point is A point, not THE point. the point is what I have posted previously. Sephi wouldn't make such a huge change just for the sake of aestethics, I have no idea how that rumour started :lol:
 
[to_xp]Gekko;10128277 said:
the aestethical point is A point, not THE point. the point is what I have posted previously. Sephi wouldn't make such a huge change just for the sake of aestethics, I have no idea how that rumour started :lol:

Sephi's first post in the thread describing the new improvement system, the very first bullet point reads "You will build less improvements and not every tile will have an improvement. Much better for a fantasy mod."

So maybe that's where the rumor originated. ;)

I don't doubt that there were other considerations also at work, but flavor/aesthetics was clearly involved as well.
 
good point :lol:

sure it's involved, it's just not the main reason ;)

check it out for yourself, constructive criticism is always beneficial...
 
How could I have missed this? Sounds like something that needs to be ported back to stock BTS for Better AI.
I thought about that as well. But it seems Better BTS AI is finished or not in Development at the moment even if they were interested.

Sounds like an overly complicated new game mechanic. Any special reason why this has to be there?
When I was more of a casual player of Civ, I really liked the Improvement System. But the more I played the game, the more I got annoyed by the fact, that you have to do a lot of decision, which are all mostly meaningless. There are games that do it better though:
Colonization (the original): When you improve a plot, it costs you tools which are expensive in the early game. So you need to make a decision which plots to improve first
Imperialism: When you improve a plot, it costs resources. you also need to connect the plot via railroad/ocean trade, so you have to make the decision what areas to improve first.
I think the new Improvement System has the same characteristic that is gives you less decisions (because there are less Improvements to be build), but each decision is more important. You can decide if you want to improve the local city or increase your output of globalyields like lumber or metal for example.

Should I assume that the Advanced AI content mentioned back on the last page is of no interest? Just checking, since I there was no response one way or the other. I can certainly live without it, though I like the idea of letting in non-military units via an agreement without letting in all of another player's units.
I think Afforress has done a great job and it surely fits RoM. But if I merge it, I would only pick up a few things.
Ahha! I now see why couldn't I build a mine, there was a temple in a forest nearby. Where can I get info on what they do? Their pedia descriptions are blank.
The pedia links to the wrong txt_keys. It will be fixed next patch.

As stupid as I may have sounded, I am not. I know I'd get the new system eventually, it's just more micro for no gain (as far as I can see at least, that esthetical requirement that tiles in a fantasy world shouldn't be completely covered with improvements sounds only like a fetish) but I am/was very worried about the AI. But if the AI being completey rewritten includes worker AI, my worries may have been unfounded though.

I actually wrote a new worker AI before. The new worker AI basically uses the same idea like the actual effects from BUG mod. So workers will calculate what an improvement will actually bring to the city. For example if the city has some buildings with commerce modifier, it will understand that commerce improvements give higher value. It's true, any improvement is useless if the AI doesn't understand it, but I think the AI is pretty good at it although it surely needs some polish here and there.
 
You could try a smaller world. Rumour says that there are less MAF issues on smaller map sizes. I will try to fix the memory allocation issue in Patch 1.1 but since we modders have no access to the graphic engine it is a blind guess

It looks like you were right; the CTD during "initializing graphics" only happens on the "huge" map setting. I had no problem on "large" or "standard" except that I get several "BUG failed to initialize" this and that error messages when the map first appears.
 
I think Afforress has done a great job and it surely fits RoM. But if I merge it, I would only pick up a few things.

I hope you'll consider it, but of course, I'll understand if you don't. You're adding a great deal, as it is.
 
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