Master of Myrror Fantasy Mod 2.0

[Klyden]

Should be some interesting changes.

I am going to continue with the current version with the game I have going for right now before doing the new version.

In regards to the flying units, I think they do offer an interesting spin on things. The dragon units are extremely powerful from experience with the War Hammer mod. There is no real defense against them except another dragon and hope you get to attack first. The bombard feature might be the way to go.

Will post more info on my current game when I get a chance to return to it.

 

[Drift]

Turning the dragons and such into bombarders wasn't a decision I made happily. If it had been possible, I would've just made it impossible for them to capture cities. Let's hope the choice turns out to be a good one.

I'm waiting with interest to hear how the game turns out. I've been busy today and haven't had the time to check out the savegames more thoroughly. Life mage dominance was a bit alarming though.

 

[azzacanth]

What does (atar) mean?

So these changes make the level X units only bombard? not sure I like that :/ I mean what's the point of getting level X then?

Dragon (nature mages)
8.3.2(atar) => 0.5.2(atar) bombardment 12.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 100

Dragon of Light (life mages)
6.3.3(atar) => 0.4.2(atar) bombardment 10.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 100

Helldrake(chaos mages)
7.2.2(atar) => 0.2.2(atar) bombardment 12.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 80

Black Dragon (death mages)
5.3.2(atar) => 0.3.2(atar) bombardment 10.1.2 (lethal land and sea), cost 80[/size]

Edit:

On second thought I suppose if the dragons are so invincible it might be a bit of a downer. I haven't actually gotten far enough in a game where I was fighting to use them, or had them used against me.

 

[Drift]

What does (atar) mean?

So these changes make the level X units only bombard? not sure I like that :/ I mean what's the point of getting level X then?

Edit:

On second thought I suppose if the dragons are so invincible it might be a bit of a downer. I haven't actually gotten far enough in a game where I was fighting to use them, or had them used against me.

(atar) is short for "all terrain as roads"

I could rearrange the units from top level techs so that the new dragons wouldn't be the payoff units from level X. However, I believe the new dragons are very useful as well.

In short, I feel the old dragons were too dominating and they were very difficult to balance. They may still make a comeback, but I really don't like the way they can be used to capture cities behind borders and then burn them down. I feel it may well add more hassle than enjoyment to the mod.

 

[Klyden]

Don't know if you have given this more consideration or not, but would like to see the Chaos warrior and devil units switched between level 3 and summon chaos units. I think Chaos needs some basic offense (over a defensive unit).

My current game is shaping up to be an interesting one. I am Lo Pan and while the science front has not gone well (I have been stuck at 10 or 20% for most of the game), I have managed to trade a bit with the other PC's, although none of them are fond of me.

I launched an invasion against Morja and managed to get a bridgehead against the horde of 3-3-1's he has. Morja has been duking it out with the other inhabitant on the island, a life mage. I managed to capture 5 cities from Morja and now have ivory and wine for resources to help with my people management situation as soon as I can get some harbors built.

It appears that Morja and the life mage have been in a pretty even slugging match as not much has changed hands and some scouting shows a couple destroyed cities in the middle of the island. I made peace with Morja (demanding tech along with it) and will see what the life mage has for units before deciding to jump on him for a few cities.

I have made contact with a nature mage and that has been the extent of my contact so far. Rjak was reported as destroyed someplace else.

I may be behind in science, but am in a pretty good position for the most part. I have the Chaos summons done and production is not bad. The Chaos warriors were not hacking it against the shadowmen, so I switched to knights and while a bit more expensive, they have 5 vs 4 attack and also can retreat from battle, so have been handy. I have had one elite unit produce a leader, so now I have 4 knights running around in a corps marker. Very brutal..

 

[Drift]

@Klyden

You can consider the Chaos Warrior - Devil switch done. I like your reasoning. I'll also think about the balance between Chaos Warrior and Knight.

Is there something wrong with the science in general or is it just this one game? 10-20% sounds really low. Chaos Knight army at that point is probably pretty devastating. Can't tell myself as I have yet to have a single army when I've played MoM. I guess I'm just a pacifist.

If you have installed the new test patch, how do you find the new graphics for the victory points? Are they visible enough?

 

[Klyden]

Well, here is some information and you can be the judge.

I currently have 12 cities. My income is 122 and 7 of the cities have markets in them. I also have some tax men going to help as I can't leave squares in production as I get into moral issues. I have 10 percent going for luxuaries to help keep my population happy. Economic breakdown is as follows:

Income 122, -5 sc, -5 ent, -21 corruption, -33 maintenence, -36 unit costs.

I am currently running 10 percent science on a level 4 tech. I can ramp all the way up to 50% before it will decrease. At that point, I am -24. 60% is -29 and 70% is -43. My total pop is 58.

My army is 72 units:

1 Settler
6 workers
1 Army
5 Beastmen
12 Fanatics
4 Chaos Warriors
16 Chaos Knights
8 Galley
19 Devils

Not an overwhelming force by any means and if you knock out 24 units of that (would allow me to break even at 50%) I don't know that there is much I could do.

To me, this seems pretty puny. You figure that I have 24 units tied up in city garrisons to help maximise keeping the populance happy.

I can send you a saved game turn if you would like and you can experiment a bit. One of the reasons I tried to jump on Morja was to keep him from getting an overwhelming number of the shadowmen. I was partially successful and probably the only reason I succeeded is that he was also fighting the life mage as I saw a couple stacks of 8 and 10 go off to the front instead of dealing with me. Obviously, I am also going to win most fights with 5 point attackers against 3 point defenders as well.

 

[Klyden]

Here is a screen shot of the current game I am in. The nature mage is off to the south.

I have just finished a war with Morjad and the screen shot shows where Morjad and Merlin have had a titanic struggle in the middle.

 

[azzacanth]

(atar) is short for "all terrain as roads"

I could rearrange the units from top level techs so that the new dragons wouldn't be the payoff units from level X. However, I believe the new dragons are very useful as well.

In short, I feel the old dragons were too dominating and they were very difficult to balance. They may still make a comeback, but I really don't like the way they can be used to capture cities behind borders and then burn them down. I feel it may well add more hassle than enjoyment to the mod.

yeah no problem with that. A less movement-powerful unit with strong offensive properties might be nice though, something with maybe 2-3 movement and NOT atar. Sorry if I don't have any suggestions though :/


btw, when are you going to add kinboat's nice dragon turtle graphic....?

 

[Klyden]

Another option to consider on preventing deep strikes on the dragons is to make the ATAR, but only give them a 1 move. This would allow them to move around at a good rate, but be limited on attack.

Perhaps another option as well is to leave their movement higher (gives them a chance to retreat from battle, which makes sense for a flying unit) and instead of ATAR, have them ignore movement penalties on terrain. (In other words, if it is not a road, they only get a max of 3 moves while they would get 9 on a road if they were a 3 movement point unit). Does not necessarily make sense from a flying standpoint, but for game balance, it might fit the bill.

*edit*

In regards to the balance between chaos warrior and knight, I think I may have come across wrong in that I was not having as much luck with warriors winning battles as I would have liked to have had. In addition, a knight losing a fight has a chance to retreat and live to fight again where a warrior can't do that. To get my bridge head, I had a pile of devils in the mountains defending while I landed attackers. As the attackers would kill defenders (but be wounded) I would shuttle them off on ships to heal and then return. Knights were especially handy as they could attack, have a movement point left and then board a ship on the same turn.

 

[Drift]

@Klyden

The savegame would be nice. Although you've provided practically all the required information here.

With that kind of numbers, you really should be able to pump the research higher (and it really should have some kind of an effect before 50%) Do you have any suggestions regarding this? Are the techs still too expensive?

Is the death mage unit production a problem? There seems to be a trend of them massing Shadowmen in huge numbers. I guess it's part of their nature, but if it renders them invincible it's a bit problematic.

@azzacanth

Are you referring to nature mages with the 2-3 move strong offensive unit? (Life mages have tons of fast attackers, chaos has wyvern riders and death nighmare riders) I guess nature could use a fast attacker, but on the other hand, they did get the air transport units to airdrop their strong, but slow land units. I also don't have any unit graphics to go with it. Maybe later.

Dragon Turtle will be added in a later patch. I won't put it in these test patches as they often replace the patch before them and then people would have to download the unit several times (dragon turtle is ~2.5 megs zipped). Also, Kinboat is probably finishing his angel soon, so I can get rid of the both placeholders at the same time.

 

[Drift]

@Klyden

You replied while I was still typing.

1 move all terrain as roads dragons is a bit slow, but it could be considered. It would also be pretty slow to get your flying units from another side of the continent to the other as they would slug on at 3 moves / turn. Rebase could be an option, but I'm not sure really.

As for them ignoring movement penalties, I'm not sure if I can get over the fact that they would triple their movement while flying over roads. You are right though about it probably being probably a very good choice in terms of game balance.

I'll have to think about the flyers. Thanks for the good ideas.

I guess the Chaos warriors are ok. They are half the cost of Knights, but they can't really shine when you don't have the economy to mass them.

Edit: just remembered that the latest patch includes the much wanted 1.3.1 Skeleton Spearmen (costs 20 shields)

 

[azzacanth]

Are you referring to nature mages with the 2-3 move strong offensive unit? (Life mages have tons of fast attackers, chaos has wyvern riders and death nighmare riders) I guess nature could use a fast attacker, but on the other hand, they did get the air transport units to airdrop their strong, but slow land units. I also don't have any unit graphics to go with it. Maybe later.

I guess... Nature is the only game so far I have played up to the higher level units. I need to start another warlord-difficulty game and get a good start, and get back to you with suggestions on that. My advice is a little biased without that.

1 move all terrain as roads dragons is a bit slow, but it could be considered. It would also be pretty slow to get your flying units from another side of the continent to the other as they would slug on at 3 moves / turn. Rebase could be an option, but I'm not sure really.

What about making them true flying units? I am not sure though, how flying units work in civ3 (something else I need to play with I guess - by the time I get that far in a regular civ game I am usually just sitting by passively building up culture, or sending out armadas of tanks and guerillas) I know I was a little disappointed when not only could my pterodactyls and hawks not fly over water, neither could my great eagles or dragons. Is it possible to make air units that attack land units, or are they bombard or vs air only? I guess if the latter is the case, air units would have their whole own balancing system. (Dragons like bombers and great eagles like fighters?) But that would solve the city taking-and-burning problem.. even if the units could still get back there.

 

[Drift]

@azzacanth

I don't really feel the air unit system of Civ3 fits the mod. Air units are either bombard or air vs. air and my experience from them is that you need loads of them to achieve anything. Also, only the big dragons have bombardment anims. It would also bring the question of anti air units.

I'm looking forward to hearing how your next game goes.

 

[Zurai]

I have also experienced death mages with extremely massive numbers of shadowmen. Of course, I play on huge maps, so (coincidentally Mordja for me as well) had a decent number of cities... say 20... but he was carrying on a two front war (I'd gotten Airiel to ally with me against him, and she actually had a much longer border with him) and STILL managed to counterattack with a stack of FOURTY shadowmen somewhere around turn 200 (fortunately I managed to get him to agree to peace before they reached the city I'd most recently taken). I'll get precise numbers for you when I fire up civ3 again, probably tonight.

It's interesting to note that, of the units I saw, easily 95% of them were shadowmen. I saw a grand total of 2 necromancers, 3 skeleton spearmen, and 2 or 3 1/1/1 skeletons throughout the entire ~40 turn war. Every other unit was a Shadowman, and I must have killed at least two dozen of them, and Ariel did her share as well (I had hawks watching her border and playing hide-and-seek with Mordja's units - they like chasing the hawks around, presumably because they have no defense value. You might make them 0/1/2 units so that they aren't such a big target for the AI).

 

[Drift]

@Zurai

Thank you for the feedback.

I should probably remove the defensive AI strategy from Shadowmen now that the Skeleton Spearmen are 1.3.1. It could even it out a bit. Good idea with the Hawks - will do.

I could also consider tweaking the Death mage unit support, but I'm not sure.

 

[coolake]

I think that the first few science techs are too high. Even pumping science up to 80-100% often gives no improvement from 10%. So i keep it on 10%, save my money and trade gold for techs.

 

[Drift]

@coolake

I'll try to test the tech costs today and see if I can find a better balance for them.

I'm just worried that when I get the tech cost right, the techs come so quickly that the player has hardly enough time to use the new units before they get to the next one in the upgrade chain. I'm starting to feel like I should have built the tech tree 3 eras long in the first place.

 

[Drift]

I'm starting to feel like I should have built the tech tree 3 eras long in the first place.

I couldn't get this out of my head. How insane do you guys think it would be if I reworked the tech tree to span three eras? Some techs would offer a little less, but individual techs would be cheaper.

I feel a bit like I'm rushing these changes - it's hard for you guys to test the mod when it keeps changing all the time. However, balancing the tech research with two eras has proven to be a tough nut to crack. It may require some drastic measures.

 

[mrtn]

The WH mod got better when the tech tree expanded from three to four eras, thus, by conjecture, I think this mod is gonna get better as well if you expand the tech tree.