Master of Myrror Fantasy Mod 2.0

@TLC

That kind of luck with resources wouldn't probably have happened with the old appearance ratios. I guess it's a good thing, although four resources with five cities is a lot. Flukes happen though. :)

Zombie-enslavement is a bit weird at times. :lol: If I could, I would make barbs immune to enslavement.
 
Hadn't noted the increased appearance ratios ....

Hm, it's now forty for all race resources, which should mean about one of each per two civs. Multiply by eight races, and you getting four races isn't really unlikely at all, even if you'd normally have to expand a bit more than I've had to. Isn't an expected four races per civ a bit much?
 
@TLC

I have to admit that I don't really understand the way appearance ratios work. Expected four races is a bit too much. Maybe 30 for the ratio? (I believe it used to be 20 before I raised it).
 
Drift said:
Keep me updated on the game. Especially on the faction balance.
Click to expand...
That's a bit hard, as I play a smal map with 6 opponents. Lo Pan is doing good, but is that because he's a Chaos mage, or because of his start? :crazyeye: I'm attacked by Mordja (he has the biggest army, and wanted someone to beat up after making peace with Vlad), but I managed to ally with Lo Pan, after he killed Merlin (apparently the AI really hate fighting two wars at the same time, rather smart, actually), so hopefully they'll beat each other bloody for a while, and I can build up my army a bit more. Rjak tried to extort Nature Magic II from me, but as she can't even sail across the sea to me I told her to push off, whereupon she declared war on me. :lol:
A future pet project is to take my modern army and go over there, and hunt some purpleskins. :)
 
@Drift

While I can't vouch much for the race resources, the mana nodes seem a little too common now, I think.
 
Drift said:
I have to admit that I don't really understand the way appearance ratios work. Expected four races is a bit too much. Maybe 30 for the ratio? (I believe it used to be 20 before I raised it).
Click to expand...

The editor states that a value of 160 means 2 instances of each resource per player. Therefore 80 should mean one instance per player, 40 should mean 0.5 instances per player, 20 (as it was before) should mean 0.25 instances of each resource per player. That is how I understood the editor's help text, however in my games the numbers actually seem to be different.

In my first game (beta 9 update 1, appearance ratio 20, 12 players), there should have been 12 x 0.25 = 3 instances of each resource. But the map did have exactly 1 instance of any race resource. This seems too different and too regular to be a fluke (could still be, of course, but it's very unlikely). One thing to note is that actual appearance ratios are also influenced by the frequency of the terrain they can appear in. But can this factor explain the rather large observed discrepancies?

In my second game (beta 9 update 2, appearance ratio 40, 6 players), there should have been 6 x 0.5 = 3 instances of each race resource. But I did only find 1 instance each of six resources and zero instances of the other two.

This is strange. Does anyone have any experience with low resource appearance ratios? Perhaps they don't work as expected. Drift, can you check the savegames you have for resources? Perhaps we should run the map creation several times with several appearance ratios and check how many resources were really generated. I'd be very interested in the findings because I like the way of having scarce resources. :)
 
160 is 2 per player in an 8 player game. That means 16 resources. Thus, 20 would be 2 resources on the map, on average, and 40 would be 4 (all based on an 8 player game... the editor is completely silent about how the ratios convert to other quantities of players).
 
@Zurai: You're right, I missed that. Reading the editor's help text again, I now think that it actually hints at resource appearance being independent of number of players. (However as, as you said, the editor does tell us very little at all, I may again be wrong.)

Let's see how the numbers add up under this perspective. Indepenence of number of players meany that an appearance ratio of 160 just means "16 instances", 80 means "8 instances" and so on. So in my first game I should have had 2 instances of each race resource on the map (but had only 1), and in my second I should have had 4 instances of each resource on the map (but had les than 1).

So this theory still doesn't fit very well. :( Another thing that might be a factor (although the editor never mentions it) is the size of the map. My first game had a large map, my second a tiny map.

I guess I'll have to run some tests to find out how the ratios really work ... or has this been done before? (Actually I'd be surprised if it hadn't, because resources are probably an important element for any rule modder).

Or am I just missing something obvious (always a possibility ;) )?
 
I would be *very* happy if you'd run some tests. The mod I'm working on relies almost exclusively on a lot of comparatively rare strategic resources, and I want to be able to fine tune the appearance ratios. I'm currently working on the assumption you mentioned (# of resources independant of # of players, ie absolute 10:1 appearance ratio), but the mod isn't quite to the playable stage yet so I can't test it. It looks approximately correct in the editor, however - the resources I have set at 20 and below only show up once or twice on generated maps (size 256x256).
 
I've just been playing a standard regent pangea with the pre10-beta, and this is fun!

Due to an early war with Ariel for control of the island we started on, and a failure to contact the mainland, i feel behind in the tech race to a point where its now quiker for me to steal/buy the techs off the other mages, than to resreach them myself.

But the best part is i'm inbroiled in a world war all becuase i refused to give Merlin some ivory, and my alies Freya have resently been destroyed.

Currently the rankings stand at (From most powerfull, to will die if you sneeze on them) Merlin, Lo Pan, Tlaloc, Raven, Vlad (Me), Tauron & Rjak, everyone else has been destroyed (its a 12p game).

Now the criticisum. Death needs a better navy. I cant even think about assulting the mainland, with my undead armys, becuase the moment on of my cogs trys to reach the mainland, one of the mages i'm at war with (Usually Lo Pan) will destroy it. PLEASE give Death something to compete with the other mages!

And death is so much better with communial waste
 
I'll put it on my ToDo-List, but can't make any promises. I don't know how much time I'll have during the next two weeks, and I'll probably want to use the major part of my Civ3 time for just playing. :)

Tell me when your mod hits the forum, sounds interesting. :) When Civ3 came out I had an idea of modding it into a much more resource-driven game ... i.e. let there be many resources, but most of them scarce; have many units and buildings depending on the different resources; and so let the availabality of resources decide which units are best to be built for any given civ. The idea was to get more diverse, less generic AI civs that way. Of course I never really got around to really make it happen.

Side note to appearance ratios: There also might be another reason why I encountered in my second game less race resources than the formula would predict. The world seems to be a cold one (lots of tundra), and there is no race resource linked to tundra. I'll add this factor to the things to test. :)
 
embryodead knows how the resources work in C3C, he made a good thread about it in that forum. AFAIK the numbers are percentages. 160 should then give 1.6 resources per player. This is modded by the fact that the map won't be filled with resources, only about 4% of the tiles total. BTW, this is just stuff I'm parroting from memory, I haven't tested things myself.
 
Race resource appearance ratios: thank you everyone for brainstorming. :) Embryodead's post has dropped off C3C forum so I couldn't check it out. I'll go over your thoughts on the matter thoroughly and try to do some tests. I'm pretty busy today though so let's see when I can do it.

Node appearance ratios: It's a two-edged sword. They are meant to be pretty common as AI doesn't seem to understand their importance. However, they might be a bit too abundant at the moment.

@Phant

Thank you for the report. :) Glad to hear that the communal for death is working for you too. However, death mages are again at the bottom of the litter in your game. I haven't seen a death mage dominate a game since those games where they massed Shadowmen in huge quantities. (@everyone - has that been fixed now BTW?)

You are probably right about the navy. It has been a little silly of me to make the death mage navy weaker by not giving them a warship for midgame at all vs. giving them a little weaker warship than what others get. I'll come up with something. :)
 
mrtn said:
embryodead knows how the resources work in C3C, he made a good thread about it in that forum. AFAIK the numbers are percentages. 160 should then give 1.6 resources per player. This is modded by the fact that the map won't be filled with resources, only about 4% of the tiles total. BTW, this is just stuff I'm parroting from memory, I haven't tested things myself.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I realized after posting on my original post on the matter than I was thinking of the CivIII/PTW workings of the appearance ratios, being mislead by the fact that the Editor help files were never updated. Expected race resources per player should be more like three per player, modulo the capping mrtn mentions.
 
Drift said:
.... However, death mages are again at the bottom of the litter in your game. I haven't seen a death mage dominate a game since those games where they massed Shadowmen in huge quantities. (@everyone - has that been fixed now BTW?)...
Click to expand...
In my 6 player game the death mages has been quite dominant. Mordja had the largest army until he attacked me. Now the death mages are in position 3, 4 and 5. They have problems keeping up with the tech race, but have big armies.
After Mordja failed to beat me he took the Lo Pan city nearest me, which I then took from him. This was the city with the Dimensional Rift (or the D. Rift, as it's colloquially known ;) ), so after two turns my first demon spawn turned up. It looks silly in the Ariel white, btw.
 
@mrtn

Yeah, tech is what I'm concerned with the death mages. Hopefully they don't fall of the trek too badly.

I would've removed the civ-color from the Hellspawns ages ago if my Pedit hadn't stopped working. I guess I could do it with PSP palette-editor, but it would be so much easier with Pedit.
 
Hi,

I finally got around to check the winning chances for fights dpending on number of hitpoints and whether a wall is involved or not. These numbers have been derived from the combat calculator 1.15 by Bomberman (I think, the program doesn't mention his name).

Be warned, however, that I didn't find the clear results that I expected and that it may not really be worth the effort to wade through all these numbers. ;)

Following are three charts, each shows the chances of an attacker to win a fight against a defender who is fortified in a town (pop <= 6) on grasslands, plains or desert. There are 3 different charts, each for a different attack strength of the attacker or defense strength of the defender. Each chart consists of two parts, the part to the left shows the values for an unwalled city, the chart to the right shows the values for a walled city (with the wall providing 25% bonus). In each chart the columns show different hitpoint values for the attacker, and the rows show different hitpoint values for the defender. The percentages given are the chance of the attacker to win the fight.

Fast units have not been included in this research, they rushed away when they saw me coming and I was too slow to follow. ;)



Chart 1: Attacker strength 4 vs. defender strength 3

1a) unwalled town 1b) walled town

D\A|..3.|..4.|..5.|..6.| ----- D\A|..3. |..4.|..5.|..6.|
---+----+----+----+----+ ----- ---+----+----+----+----+
. 2 | 68 | 80 | 89 | 94 | ----- 2 | 55 | 69 | 79 | 86 |
. 3 | 49 | 65 | 77 | 85 | ----- 3 | 35 | 49 | 62 | 72 |
. 4 | 34 | 49 | 63 | 74 | ----- 4 | 21 | 33 | 45 | 56 |
. 5 | 22 | 36 | 49 | 62 | ----- 5 | 12 | 20 | 31 | 41 |
. 6 | 14 | 25 | 37 | 49 | ----- 6 | 06 | 12 | 20 | 29 |


Chart 2: Attacker strength 5 vs. defender strength 3

2a) unwalled town 2b) walled town

D\A|..3.|..4.|..5.|..6.| ----- D\A|..3. |..4.|..5.|..6.|
---+----+----+----+----+ ----- ---+----+----+----+----+
. 2 | 76 | 87 | 93 | 97 | ----- 2 | 65 | 78 | 86 | 92 |
. 3 | 60 | 75 | 85 | 91 | ----- 3 | 45 | 61 | 73 | 82 |
. 4 | 45 | 61 | 74 | 84 | ----- 4 | 30 | 44 | 58 | 69 |
. 5 | 32 | 48 | 63 | 74 | ----- 5 | 19 | 31 | 44 | 56 |
. 6 | 22 | 37 | 51 | 64 | ----- 6 | 11 | 21 | 31 | 43 |


Chart 3: Attacker strength 5 vs. defender strength 4

3a) unwalled town 3b) walled town

D\A|..3.|..4.|..5.|..6.| ----- D\A|..3. |..4.|..5.|..6.|
---+----+----+----+----+ ----- ---+----+----+----+----+
. 2 | 66 | 79 | 87 | 92 | ----- 2 | 53 | 67 | 77 | 86 |
. 3 | 46 | 62 | 74 | 83 | ----- 3 | 32 | 46 | 59 | 69 |
. 4 | 31 | 46 | 59 | 71 | ----- 4 | 18 | 30 | 41 | 53 |
. 5 | 20 | 32 | 45 | 57 | ----- 5 | 10 | 18 | 27 | 38 |
. 6 | 12 | 22 | 33 | 45 | ----- 6 | 05 | 10 | 17 | 25 |



I've got mixed feelings about the results. From my playing experiences, I thought that the bonus hitpoint would have a higher impact. But as the charts show, in the range where battles usually take place (attacker having slightly better offense and about the same number of hitpoints as the defender), the bonus hitpoint raises the defender's chances to win the battle by about 15%. That's not bad, but less than I thought.

Walls raise the defender's chances by approximately another 15% (those are rough estimates as the variables are interdependent and the function is not linear). This means that (in the observed range of unit strength and hitpoints) the bonus hitpoint is about as valuable as a wall (as is a level upgrade).

The effects of a wall and a bonus hitpoint do of course stack. I also thought that they would strengthen each other, i.e. that a unit behind a wall profits even more from its bonus than a unit in the field. This is indeed the case, but the effect is negligibly small (it raises the defender's winning chances by some number in the lower single digits).

So I can't really explain why people (including me) get the feeling that the bonus hitpoint is very powerful. It might actuially be an illusion. However the charts above do not take into account that in order to defeat a city you usually have to take out many defenders, and these defenders heal if you cannot take them out in a single turn. But checking this would require me to run a simulation, which is beyond my capabilities at the moment.

I also get the feeling that there may be just too many variables involved for me to deal with them effieciently. ;) Nevertheless I hope the charts above may shed some light on one question or the other.

Time to get back playing. ;)
 
Drift said:
Node appearance ratios: It's a two-edged sword. They are meant to be pretty common as AI doesn't seem to understand their importance. However, they might be a bit too abundant at the moment.
Click to expand...

From my experiences with Civ3 in general, the AI does value resources, but it cannot tell whether a resource is absolutely crucial. In MoM, you absolutely need a node of your own magic type. So if the AI doesn't have one, it should put all if efforts into getting it, even if this means giving up other goals. For a chaos mage for example, a chaos node is *much* more important than a life node. But the AI probably isn't smart enough to see that.

I haven't played the beta 10 pre-release yet, but an appearance ratio of 300 seems a bit high to me (even when I take into account that I'm not really sure how these ratios work; I asked embryodead whether he still has his data, perhaps we're lucky). In C3C, horses and iron both have a ratio of 160, and I think they're pretty abundant.
 
@Psyringe

Awesome research! Thank you so much. That 15% doesn't sound much but I'm also convinced that in practice, the percentage of how much harder it is to take out a unit with extra hp is more than that. Like you said, there are lots of different factors here.

The numbers you've given are also an excellent way of seeing how different units fare against each other. I feel like a slight reduction in the defense bonuses is still in order - nothing drastic though, but a step closer to the A/D balance of regular Civ3.

The appearance ratio has been 300 since the beta 9 test patch. Before that it used to be 240. I increased it as there was a lot of times when a mage didn't have his/hers own type of node and was royally screwed. Of course, since that I've made more units not require a node so the situation has changed. However, I'm not going to change it quite yet. Let's see how it goes for a while first and I'll try to do some testing with it at some point when I have the time.
 
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