Master of Myrror Fantasy Mod 2.0

[Drift]

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?

 

[mrtn]

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.

 

[Drift]

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?

 

[mrtn]

It's talking about the Enkidu warrior.

 

[Drift]

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.

 

[The Last Conformist]

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

 

[Klyden]

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.

 

[Klyden]

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

 

[Drift]

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.

 

[Klyden]

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.

 

[Drift]

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?

 

[Klyden]

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.

 

[Drift]

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.

 

[mrtn]

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.

 

[Drift]

@mrtn

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

@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.

 

[gonzozen]

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.

 

[Drift]

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.

 

[mrtn]

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

 

[The Last Conformist]

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

 

[Klyden]

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.