Crystallized Mana; Conquerable Nodes

[orlanth]

Sounds cool.. I guess Creation could fit with some Inspiration/Hope-like city buffs, with a bonus to hammers or food instead of science/happiness. Creating a map resource would be neat for Creation III, but too powerful unless it also created plenty of nasty side effects to represent Agares' boundless lust for creation.

One effect I've always wanted to have available is a spell enabling you to actually "forget" a random magic sphere promotion and lose an experience level, in exchange for getting enough XP points to get you halfway back to the level you were just at. (Effectively allowing you to undo some bad past sphere-learning choices, since advancement can really slow at higher levels.) Could either fit with Mind I or Metamagic I, and be called Mindwipe or Disjunction or some such.

 

[xienwolf]

Best approach would be to remove all promotions which are purchased with Experience from the unit (I suppose checking to ensure that the Owner knows the Technology for the Promotion and the Unit has the right UnitCombat for it should do the trick. At the least that would keep you from removing Races and the majority of Spell Effects), and provide them with a number of Free Promotions equal to that same value. Then there is no need to allow for selection of which single promotion is lost, and you can regain all your promotions with a single one changed, or shuffle them all around (Possibly the balance for the spell would be that you only get Free Promotions enough to regain all but 1 promotion you currently have. But I do not know that it would NEED a balance as it isn't strictly speaking overly powerful, just tactical).

It would make a lovely Creation II spell IMO. The code could be a tad tricky to iron out just perfectly, but once done it would be quite simple overall.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Although I wasn't thinking of it as a Creation spell, I was already thinking I would probably add a spell that gets rid of all available-though-experience promotions and sets the unit's level back to 1, possibly leaving the actual xp unchanged so you could get back to that level but with different promotions on the next turn. I figured that some of your tags (the ones that make it clear that some promotions cannot be purchased) would make it fairly simple to know what promotions to remove, but I haven't tried yet.

 

[xienwolf]

Even with my tags it is quite easy to block access to promotions in a wide variety of ways. You have to go back through the whole Promotion list and select a single tag to use as an identifier, and hope all mod-mod people who use your work do the same. Or write a fairly convoluted IF statement to encompass all possibilities.

I think that I prefer making it Free Promotions instead of dropping the unit's Level. There are too many potential exploits if you bring the level down (drop to level 1 for an easy fight, get a lot of XP since relative level is out of whack, then grab all of your promotions back HEALING YOURSELF IN THE PROCESS)

 

[arcticnightwolf]

Arcane Lacuna resets all node to raw node ... ): ...
It could be interesting, if even conquered node can create some creature ... and if owner of this creature would be determined by align...
If player is good, then creature randomly generated on Light mana (weakened pernament Aurealis) will be under player's control, but creature randomly generated on Death mana (Skeleton) will be barbarian. Opposite if player is evil: Aurealis will be barbarian and Skeleton will be player's.

 

[Tarquelne]

I'd like to reduce the total # of nodes on the map. Is "iPlayer" the tag controlling how many nodes are placed? (And the only tag?)

 

[orlanth]

Tarquelne, the types currently have iPlayer=20 for about 0.2 appearances per player; they also have iConstAppearance=10 which I believe gives a small constant amount per map that can be modified by game settings like Blessings of Amaltheon affecting overall resource abundance. I did not use iTilesPer=x which would give an additional amount per x map tiles.

There is also a random chance for each type from iRandApp to get an additional mana, I tried to make this chance less for certain manas like Death, Life, Spirit etc that can also be provided by random world improvements like the Broken Sepulcher etc.

Metamagic mana and the colorless/raw mana work somewhat differently, they are limited mostly by having iUnique with a large tile radius to ensure they will be fairly distributed across wide areas.

You're welcome to tinker around with the settings & I'm interested to hear how they affect gameplay overall. I found this civ4.wikidot.com page very helpful in tinkering with the XML.

 

[Tarquelne]

Thanks for the info and the link!

I'm used to a house rule for MP games restricting mana types: A civ gets it's Palace 3, 2 more selected before the game, and then whatever it can get via trades, wonders, or the unique improvements.

Crystalized mana looks like fun - I'll just cut most/all the metamagic nodes and reduce the total # - or maybe eliminate the unaligned nodes. Shooting for something like the house rule but the "2 more selected before the game" would be replaced by "whatever you can get from the map."

 

[deadliver]

Hey are you gonna be updating your files or do I need to get off my lazy bum and learn how to do this for myself?
LOL.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I've heard on #erebus that Jhoniten is working on this, be patient

 

[Jhoniten]

Working on it yes, but it is slightly different. New spell in play called Mana Tap. Adepts only and gives random results including but not limited to conquering the node. Liberal merging of this and Marnok's stuff. One thing I did change was to make all the mana spawns the same creature, a much smaller golem like creature called Essence. Later thoughts include adding more critters to the spawns but not using something that is in game already.

 

[deadliver]

Cool.