Master of Mana Xtended

[Psychodad]

The main drawback of summons is the mana upkeep. They burn mana even when idle.

 

[hydezt]

I agree on having adepts/mages cost herbs. It will limit the quantity of fielded adepts.

Also, keep that spells can kill units. It's more :FUN:
But lower the damage, though. Your summon can die attacking, but your adepts can't.

 

[Randomness]

I think it's best to think of spell casting as seige. Summons might be able to do more direct damage, but a few fireballs can make the city defenders weak enough to take out with regular troops.

 

[User0918]

I tried my above proposal and found myself asking this: if spells are this weak, then why bother casting them?
It is better for me to use summons since:

• Summons can kill.
• Summons' strength are increased by mana affinity, making them somewhat useful until mid/late game.
• Summons can get promotions, which increase their strength and abilities further.
• The only drawback of summons is that they can be killed.

Summons are better investment for spending mana, imho.

What do you think?

Thanks for putting that much effort into trying to balance this out. As I can't test your modified version, I have no way to judge the fun factor for myself. But of course I'll believe you when you say it sucked the life out of magic. That was never my goal, I love the supernatural part of this mod.

But at the moment the flavor text from the GP Averax the Cambion sums it up for me: "They march down our roads in brave, glorious columns. They have drilled their formations. Left turn. Right turn. I have spent a handful of minutes preparing magics which shall end all of those years of practice."
That's the problem, magic is too "easy" and too effective compared to regular combat. That's also the reason why in basically any fantasy setting magic is mainly used as support, otherwise all you'd see would be mages hurling fireballs back and forth over the battlefield.

Maybe a complete overhaul is overkill, why not just start with the 50% reduction on Sorcery Discipline and the "can't-kill-units-in-siege-mode" change, maybe that'll tilt the scale already. Making the mage a national unit and limiting it to 8 or 12 might also help, then it would be adept (unlimited)>mage(8)>archmage(4). You could still bring those 8 mages for a siege, but your homeland would be kinda vulnerable against stacks of doom then.
EDIT: In order for the unit limit to have any effect, you'd of course have to restrict the more powerful spells to mage/archmage, otherwise you can just mass-produce adepts and still cast tier 3 spells. At the moment, only "Meteor Swarm" has a Channeling III requirement, any other (researchable) spell can be cast by any arcane unit.

Summons being able to aquire promotions always confused the hell out of me. How do you teach a slab of molten rock something about tactics and discipline? Imo at least half of the summons (mostly the elemental type things) should be lacking the mental capabilities to learn anything. And the more advanced ones (angels and the likes) should come with predetermined promotions, they should not be able to become a swiss army knife like the regular units.

 

[zoommooz11]

Really, magic is not the problem. This mod, along with every other mod for civ 4, or civ 5 for that matter (and many, many other strategy games) suffer this same problem. As the game gets more components, and the human player gets more goodies, the ai invariably suffers--to the point where even on deity, games are easily won.

I do sympathize with modders, who wants to spend hours (or more likely weeks and months) and then come online and say "Huge mod coming out, spent a thousand man hours on it, and....... I've improved the ai" Still, if I could have a wish, its not more features, nor more balance, its an ai that can actual beat players (even if this takes emperor level bonuses).

I play A LOT of games, and this really is the Achilles heal for almost ever stratergy game out there.

 

[Calavente]

I tried my above proposal and found myself asking this: if spells are this weak, then why bother casting them?
It is better for me to use summons since:

• Summons can kill.
• Summons' strength are increased by mana affinity, making them somewhat useful until mid/late game.
• Summons can get promotions, which increase their strength and abilities further.
• The only drawback of summons is that they can be killed.

Summons are better investment for spending mana, imho.

What do you think?

I'll sum it up here:

• spells can kill : level 6-7 mage kill most units with a fireball or 2. (and easy to get a mage with 50-60xp..)
• summons need to have affinity / mage get +2 str...
• summon str needs affinity and mana specialisation to follow-up through the game... spells automatically follow-up: they use %damages and are not impacted by unit str
• summons only kill 1unit and risk dying / spells affect multiple units and the mage doesn't die.
• using a spell or 2, the stack as softened and you can attack the rest without any risk of losing units.. you can level multiple units.
• mages/adepts further carry auras.. while the summons aura are unknown or un-existant
• summon cost... for 400 mana +10/turn for 40 turn, I can launch 20 fireballs, killing up to 40 units...
• you are limited in summons due to their upkeep, and high mana costs... while you can have 5-6-10 adepts/mages to spread on all your fronts

some games I liked summons... but as replacement of units (ie better units/ or different niche)
however spells are "support" + siege.
and now they are uber powerful. 2 fireballs and the defending stack is at 50%str or less...and it CANNOT resist to my melee... or even recon... even with the -25CA...

that said: report on Luirchips (still the old version).
I had no AI that researched techs that gave +2 str (save maybe warfare...)
Artificers do not benefit from the +2strs techs :/
artifiers could finaly get the dwarven hammer... if I took the defense discipline !!
iron golem needing iron /mithril was a hard thing... lots of metal on stock but no possibility to build them until very late. Maybe iron golem could not need it, but clockwork golem would need it ?

 

[tzcgmx]

If you have a Master of Mana folder, then you should be able to play the game.



Ah, I forgot to add the help text for Mazatl world spell.

About the Righteousness, I think it is a bug. Mazatl is agnostic, right? I think they can't research Righteousness because they can't have the 3rd Sacred Knowledge (from religions) that is required.

Duh, sorry about this.

For quick fix:

1. Download and unzip this attached XGUILDS_CIV4TechInfos.zip
2. Copy and replace it to Master of Mana/Assets/Modules/NormalModules/Xtended/XGuilds

This will allow Mazatl to research Righteousness and it should not break your save game.

What's causing the GFC error then?

 

[tzcgmx]

i do have a master of mana folder

 

[Calavente]

re on spells:
they are like catapults.... or even trebuchets... that are stronger and that don't risk themselves... so you can use them every turn.
and you get them earlier in term of tech.

 

[zoommooz11]

Another thought regarding magic, why not limit the amount of magic users? Make them powerful, but rare and expensive.

So four adept, three mages and 2 Arch mages. While having all of them together would still be powerful, it would mean that elsewhere on the map you have no support.

 

[Calavente]

I disagree.
hard limits always have issues of balance : depending on map size, game speed... even amount of land mass !!
for me it should mainly be an easier access to spell resistance... especially for AI

a way that may do it would be to have each class and discipline and combat IV-V have a slight spell resistance (I'm not speaking about elemental resistance). thus, you could have a 40% resistance on higher level units, more with specific promotions or equipement.

/regards

 

[esvath]

Combat IV and V give small magic resistance is good idea. Let me try that first.

We are testing new version on magic/spells balance now.

 

[User0918]

... hard limits always have issues of balance : depending on map size, game speed... even amount of land mass !! ...

Good point. I always play on pretty large maps with continuous landmass, so a unit limit would probably work there. But I agree that on small-scale maps the effect would be greatly diminished.

I still think that the more advanced spells should be somewhat restricted to advanced arcane units. At the moment an adept can cast any spell excluding Meteor Swarm. Seems just not right that someone, who just got inducted into the art of magic (at least that's how I'd define it) is just as efficient as a grand master in said art.

 

[CarnivalBizarre]

Good point. I always play on pretty large maps with continuous landmass, so a unit limit would probably work there. But I agree that on small-scale maps the effect would be greatly diminished.

I still think that the more advanced spells should be somewhat restricted to advanced arcane units. At the moment an adept can cast any spell excluding Meteor Swarm. Seems just not right that someone, who just got inducted into the art of magic (at least that's how I'd define it) is just as efficient as a grand master in said art.

They are not as efficient thought, but I agree that they should not even be able to handle spells that cost more than a certain amount of mana or something like that.

 

[deephouse7]

Installation question, when you say to move the assets folder to Master of Mana should I delete the old assets folder from MoM 2.2 beforehand?

 

[esvath]

Installation question, when you say to move the assets folder to Master of Mana should I delete the old assets folder from MoM 2.2 beforehand?

No need to delete anything. Just move and replace any necessary file.

 

[EvilBlobOfDoom]

I can create more than one Terror-that-lurks-beneath, but a the end of the turn I lose control of them and they move randomly.

 

[EvilBlobOfDoom]

Temple District still gives +2 faith per pop, but gives malus: -20% hammer and commerce.

In fact, the malus is -20 hammers and commerce. So it's a sacrifice that you can only do in a very large city

 

[User0918]

I can create more than one Terror-that-lurks-beneath, but a the end of the turn I lose control of them and they move randomly.

You normally shouldn't be able to create more than one of those, it's a world unit. You loose control, because it has the Manifesting Terror promotion, which in turn has a 100% chance per turn to grant Wild Nightmare. It hands the control over to the AI and is removed after combat, but reapplied next turn. So it basically becomes a barbarian unit as soon as you create it, you can't do anything with it - UNLESS you also have Hemah, it's combataura suppresses Wild Nightmare. So it's basically useless to build it without the latter.

Regarding the hammer/commerce malus, yeah it's pretty steep. But it was probably the only way to push back the Faith victory, because before the change it was by far the easiest victory condition to achieve. Far far easier than the culture one, which it should have been on par with.

 

[EvilBlobOfDoom]

You normally shouldn't be able to create more than one of those, it's a world unit.

Yeah, that's why a posted here. ^^

You loose control, because it has the Manifesting Terror promotion, which in turn has a 100% chance per turn to grant Wild Nightmare. It hands the control over to the AI and is removed after combat, but reapplied next turn. So it basically becomes a barbarian unit as soon as you create it, you can't do anything with it - UNLESS you also have Hemah, it's combataura suppresses Wild Nightmare. So it's basically useless to build it without the latter.

OK, so i need to have Hemah in the same army, I suppose. I already have him. I'll try that. Thank you.

Regarding the hammer/commerce malus, yeah it's pretty steep. But it was probably the only way to push back the Faith victory, because before the change it was by far the easiest victory condition to achieve. Far far easier than the culture one, which it should have been on par with.

Yeah I find it really easy too. I'll deactivate it in my next game.