This is one of those posts I feel foolish about, because come on, it cannot be that I'm the first to discover this. However, searches don't turn up anything, so chances are I'm doing something seriously wrong... or I don't know.
From very superficial testing (I haven't put more than half an hour into this) it seems that fireballs have been unaffected by magic and fire resistance ever since 0.20 (when the new damage types were introduced).
Basically, the way I tested this was to always put a bunch of mages on the map for me and a bunch of crossbowmen (since they're likely to survive a simple fireball) for the enemy. I'd give us each three of those. One of the crossbowmen gets no promotions, the next gets magic resistance, and the last gets magic resistance *and* fire resistance.
Then I'd create the fireballs and first do a combat hover. Since my first intuition was not to trust the combat odds (where NOTHING shows up ever since 0.20), I also ran a number of combats trying to find different trends for naked crossbowmen/crossbowmen with full protection. I could find no differences there either.
I went all the way back to 016 (and how the main splash has become prettier ever since! Kudos on that ;P) and lo and behold, there's my mag. res. / fire res. in the combat odds and also reflected in the combat results.
Could it be that the new damage types simply don't work with resistances? Or is this a special case with fireball/meteor (which I've also tested, even more superficially, coming to the same results) since it's somehow different from other stuff? I could go on testing this with fire elementals / with the new lightning damage spell and lightning resistance etc, but I thought I'd just put it out here so someone can tell me, d'oh, you forgot to recalibrate the plasma manifolds or whatever very obvious thing it is I've surely overlooked.
From very superficial testing (I haven't put more than half an hour into this) it seems that fireballs have been unaffected by magic and fire resistance ever since 0.20 (when the new damage types were introduced).
Basically, the way I tested this was to always put a bunch of mages on the map for me and a bunch of crossbowmen (since they're likely to survive a simple fireball) for the enemy. I'd give us each three of those. One of the crossbowmen gets no promotions, the next gets magic resistance, and the last gets magic resistance *and* fire resistance.
Then I'd create the fireballs and first do a combat hover. Since my first intuition was not to trust the combat odds (where NOTHING shows up ever since 0.20), I also ran a number of combats trying to find different trends for naked crossbowmen/crossbowmen with full protection. I could find no differences there either.
I went all the way back to 016 (and how the main splash has become prettier ever since! Kudos on that ;P) and lo and behold, there's my mag. res. / fire res. in the combat odds and also reflected in the combat results.
Could it be that the new damage types simply don't work with resistances? Or is this a special case with fireball/meteor (which I've also tested, even more superficially, coming to the same results) since it's somehow different from other stuff? I could go on testing this with fire elementals / with the new lightning damage spell and lightning resistance etc, but I thought I'd just put it out here so someone can tell me, d'oh, you forgot to recalibrate the plasma manifolds or whatever very obvious thing it is I've surely overlooked.