Master of Myrror Fantasy Mod 2.0

[The Last Conformist]

Is that a reduction of 20 percent (50% bonus -> 40%) or by 20% percentage points (50%-30%)?

I think giving Death mage some sort of help with Science would be good. In my game, I'm struggling to keep up in research, despite being the biggest civ. It's partly my own fault, since I essentially wrecked my ability to buy tech for gpt or resources by abandoning Rjak, but getting out-researched by Oberic is kinda pathetic when I'm a few times larger.

 

[Drift]

Reduction is 20 percent (50% -> 40%)

Yeah, I believe I'm going to go through with the +50% research bonus improvement for death mages. Also, I think making Firewall become obsolete at some point might be a good idea considering the troubles it has caused. Being able to destroy dark towers and palaces is enough to warrant its removal actually, but I'm a little undecided.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Letting the Firewall go obsolete after an era or so is probably a good idea.

I've not tested this, but it may be possible to avoid the bugs via a building that puts a Civil Defense-style improvement in each city; the Civil Defense counts as any old improvement for the purposes of bombardment. Of course, the bonus would then apply to cities of all sizes, and so better be made fairly modest to keep metropoleis capturable.

 

[Phant]

Its not that Death mages expand slowly, its that the other mages expand too quickly. Also Death mages seem to be the weekest of the four magi, not only do they fall behind in the tech race, but their units seem to be underpowered and over expensive, compared to similler units of the other magi.

Firewall should be obsolete with Assension atleast, afterall not even the greatwall lasts forever

 

[Drift]

@TLC

I don't think I'm going to add a new improvement just for Firewall or modify the walls so that they can be built to any city size - I don't want to risk screwing the combat balance. Idea is good though.

@Phant

It's true that Death mages probably fell behind in more ways than just one when the other mages got the trade bonus. One thing I'm probably going to try is wrapping +50% tax bonus to the improvement giving +50% research. I'll look at the units as well.

 

[Phant]

Would it unbalance the governments if Death was imunes to propaganda?

 

[Drift]

No, it probably wouldn't but I'm not sure I want to add it. I've naturally thought of giving the governments immunities to some forms of espionage, but so far I've decided against it.

 

[Klyden]

Oberic game report continued:

Well, after giving it a lot of thought, I have decided to be agressive and push the issue with SSS'ra. My plan is basically to keep him at war and hope he continues to send units where I can kill them and minimize my own losses. He somewhat helps in this regard in giving me an excuse to start our third war. I continue to do good research and improve my economy and infrastructure while killing off Sssra's troops. At one time, I have quite the number of elite troops, but this changes as some of them get attritioned out. I can't describe how huge it is to have those bowhunters retreat if they are losing. Sometimes they don't, but even when I loose a fight and they retreat, I still win as I have weaken the other unit and have enough to finish it off.

I finally research the sorcerer unit (new version 2-4-1) as I am not sure on SSSra's status and want them ready if Chaos Warriors show up. SSsra has a particularly brutal turn when he sends 6 units in and they die in my counter attacks. He offers peace and I see what he is willing to part with and decide to clean out his treasury.

After going to peace, I discover he is not nearly as far along on the science as I thought. This is to be expected as the area he occupies is not very good. Most of it has no water.

The peace is somewhat short lived as I consider ways to get around his dwarven defenders. I decide to hold at the bottle neck like I have been doing and launch an amphibious invasion on a town I can reach with my ships. After building up a fleet of 4 ships and 14 bowhunters, I send them in for an amphibious invasion. I manage to take the city (only two healthy bowhunters left and lost 4 of them taking it). Defenders were 2 dwarfs, 1 beast, 2 fanatics. I ship in more troops to face what appears to be his main army of 2 dwarfs, 7 beast, 4 fanatics. With my sorcerers in the area, he elects to pull back towards his capital and it appears he will consider sending them to the bottle neck area. I decide to pull some troops from the bottle neck area and with a little new construction, I take the next city up the coast. SSsra is now down to 5 cities. The two cities towards his rear are now open and that is also where the dwarves are at. I will probably try to take them and force a peace and then go for one more war to finish him off.

The thing that has really saved me is the fact my bow hunters have a chance to break off the attack if things go badly for them. I have enough defenders/other units that SSsra can't take advantage of my wounded units to finish them. With his strongest attackers being 2 pointers, he won't try my 3 and 4 point defenders in the hills and mountain areas.

The thing on this game will be how the rest of the world is doing. I should be able to secure the island soon, but what is the status on the rest of the world? I just missed getting the spell of knowledge by 1 stinking turn.. (grats me on very expensive market).

 

[Drift]

@Klyden

Send me some savegames when you are further down that game, looks like a great game.

- -

I've been designing the next patch during the last few days and just played a quick test game with debug on. I've just advanced to second era and so far, none of the civs have fallen too badly behind. Death mages are hanging in there although I can't understand their building priorities - cheap improvement with no upkeep giving +50% tax, +50% science and +25% production gets built at the end of the first era. Anyway, Rjak especially is doing ok as a midsized bully, Vlad is second weakest and Mordja somewhere between the two other death mages.

In terms of power, the leading civ has ~400 points and the weakest civ ~200 points so it has been an even game. Wars have started to break out, but they have been slugging contests with very few cities trading owners. Nature mages are the strongest and it seems to be a trend of sorts.

Changes I've made regarding the death mages:
- Support: 6/10/10
- Well of Souls improvement: upkeep 0, cost 20 shields, +50% tax, +50% research, +25% production. (Amazing bargain according to everyone else but the death mages themselves)
- Essence of Death makes 3 citizens content in each city instead of 2.
- Hurry and draft mood penalties raised to normal 20 turns.
- Some death mage units come with a cheaper pricetag.
- Cog taken away from the death mages and replaced with a combined warship and transport. Tentative name Cursed Ship (4.4.4 transports 3, costs 50, enslaves into new Cursed Ships, sinks at ocean) Gonna rethink that name as it sounds so corny.

New race specific ships:
- Turtle (4.4.4 transports 6, costs 40, sinks at ocean, requires lizardmen) comes around the same time with Cogs.
- Longship (4.2.4 transports 3, costs 30, sinks at ocean, requires men) comes around the same time with Galleys (seas accessible earlier for civs with men)
- Sunhawk (8.4.5, costs 60, sinks at ocean, requires elves) comes around the same time with Galleasses/Hawk Ships.

Some changes to the units:
- Griffins turned into offensive units: 8.3.3, costs 120, ignores movement penalties on mountains, hills and swamps.
- Carrying capacity of the bird units reduced with 1. Relocating is still possible.
- Warrior Monks produced by monasteries are now 1.3.0

Some improvement and wonder balancing.
- Monasteries pushed a bit further down the tech tree and their upkeep changed to 2.
- Small balancing here and there.

Government assimilation rates are as follows:
Death 12% (they kill the citizens)
Life 8%
Nature 4%
Chaos 4%

Node appearance ratios dropped back to 240 from 300.

Most defense bonuses reduced by 20%. (for example, mountains give 80% def bonus instead of 100%)

Must be more, but I believe I've covered the major ones.


I'll release the patch in the near future. It's again a test patch and doesn't yet contain new graphics for the new units apart from the Longship that comes from Conquests. It also requires the Beta 10 Prerelease 1.

Now is your time to voice your opinions, objections to the stuff going into the patch.

 

[Psyringe]

Hi

Can't give much feedback unfortunately as I'm short on free time and haven't gotten around to playing beta 10 yet. I think I'll hold off until the next patch comes out.

- Changes to Death mages:
Sound reasonable, however I find it astonishing what an impact it has that Death mages don't have the trade bonus. Seems that you have to throw in a lot of bonuses just to balance this single deficit. I've thought a little about governments lately and pondered whether there might be a different solution. However this would require a more radical change, which may not be appropriate because the mod headed for another direction for a while now.

If I understood correctly, the reasoning behind your giving the trade bonus to most mages was that a) something had to be done against the dominance of life mages which was based on the fact that they (and only they) had the trade bonus, and b) you didn't want to make it harder for life mages to maintain a reasonable military force because you wanted them as active "warriors of the good side", who are able to fight battles against the "dark side".

While this is perfectly reasonable, I keep thinking about a differect approach. Perhaps the combination of trade bonus *and* military force is just too much, so that you have to give too much bonuses to the other mages to make up for it. Another approach might be to diversify the strategies of each magic type a little. For example we don't have to have one single "life government" for all life mages. We could as well give each of them his/her own government. Ariel (for example) could maintain the trade bonus, but have very low military support (1/2/4 or something like that), whereas Oberic could have a larger military, but no trade bonus. Merlin could take a more balanced approach (perhaps no standard trade bonus, but bonuses to money and research). The some could be applied to the other mages, so that in the end we have (at *each* magic type) one builder, one militaristic type and one balanced type.

I'm not sure whether this is actually a good idea, and I feel that I'm a little late to tell it now, because as I said, the mod has headed in another direction, and implementing this idea might make a lot of the tweaking and balancing that has been done during the last week invalid, because (for example) science progress would slow down when less mages have the trade bonus, so we'd have to look at research costs again, etc. So there are probably good reasons *not* to follow the path I laid out above, but I wanted throw the idea in nevertheless, perhps something useful comes out of it.


- Turtle unit:
Nice to have that one in, wakes memories about the turtle unit in Master of Magic.


- Cursed Ships and their name:
If you don't mind having earthbound legends in a fantasy world, "Flying Dutchman" might fit as a name?

- Carrying capacity of the bird units reduced with 1. Relocating is still possible.
I'm not sure how this will turn out. Limiting the carrying capacity does not only limit the unit's use as a troop transport (the desired effect), I fear it will also limit its uses as an airdropper (no a desired effect). The alternative (carrying power 3, no relocation, speed reduced to 4) sounds better for me. Maybe I'm missing something?

- Most defense bonuses reduced by 20%
I do like the stronger defense in MoM, but nevertheless I think this reduction is worth a try. Even if I like meetinmg strong defenses - and can cope with it -, the AI can't cope with them as good (as my last game shows), so the reduction of defensive bonuses might actually help the AI. I'm not sure though ... well, let's have a look.

Have to do some work now, but I'll be able to monitor the forum. Unfortunately I won't have time to play MoM until the weekend.

 

[Drift]

@Psyringe

Trade bonus is so important because it affects everything - economy, science, military...

At the moment, only the death mages are the exception to the rule regarding the trade bonus - all other have the combination of trade bonus and military power. I want to keep it this way, but it does require quite a bit of counterbalancing to keep the death mages in the race.

Individual governments is an interesting idea and would definitely allow a lot of diversity, but the civ3 government system doesn't go really well with it. There are shunned governments, government specific improvements... Like you said yourself, it's also a bit too much away from the mod's current course. I'm starting to feel the pressure of the deadline and I've already invested too much time to the project. My current aim is to just get the current setup balanced, hopefully get Angel from Kinboat and two death mage ships from aaglo and wrap it up. There are some other units in production as well, but I'm going to add them later in a patch to the 1.0 version.

Flying Dutchman crossed my mind too, but it's probably a bit too specific.

Birds are problematic because I can't take away their relocation or they are bound to stay in the city they are built. They have to be air units and air units can't move in a regular fashion. Reducing their capacity reduces their effectiveness as airdroppers, but they were IMO too strong with their reloc. Player just has to build more of them. I feel they will still fill out a niche, but we'll see when I release the patch.

Reduced defense values have worked fine in my test game. As I play with debug on, I've witnessed every single fight fought during the game and it has worked pretty good.

Gotta go now, already in a rush. Thank you again for the feedback and don't worry about not getting any playtime in before the weekend.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Re: Death Mages' apparent hesitancy to build that improvement, tried fooling around with the Build Often settings?

Random suggestions for name of new Death ship:
Zombie Ship, Death Barge, Phantasmal Mariner, Fog Cog, Tombship, Man'O'War, Man'O'Death, Plague Ship, Nightship.

Of if you've got the graphics - Zombie Leviathan!

 

[Klyden]

Some economic/military information to go along with my last post.

This is the picture at turn 138:

10 cities: Inc 176, -95 Sci, -12 ent, -21 corrup, -21 maint, -24 unit costs.
Army is 21 allowed and 45 units total.

8 Workers, 11 Bowmaster, 13 acolyte, 13 cleric.

Currently (turn 178)

12 cities (2 from SSsr'a)
Income is 268 -97 Sci, -17 ent, -33 corrupt, -41 maint, -69 unit.
Army is 28 allowed with 97 units total.

1 Settler, 10 worker, 38 bowmaster, 12 acolyte, 17 scorcer, 5 great galley, 13 cleric, 1 catapult (hey, every army needs one ).

*Edit* Changes you propose look good Drift.

 

[Phant]

Alternate names for the new Death Ship:
Skull Cruiser, Mist Sailors, Jolly Roger, Ghost ship (renaming the Ghost ship, the Wraith ship), Floating Death, Brains, Phantom Cruiser, Shadowliner, Shadow Galley.

The changes look ok.

Edit About the bird units, instead of having them act like helicoptors, why not remove the airdrop abillity, keep the transport capacity of 3, and have them act as an alternative railroad? I dont know if the AI could handle them that way tho.

Also, the Ghost - Wraith upgrade path, is broaken, or is it intentional.
Aditionally Ghost enslave to Ghosts, and Wraiths enslave to Wraiths or Ghosts?

 

[Pfeffersack]

...
Death mages are hanging in there although I can't understand their building priorities - cheap improvement with no upkeep giving +50% tax, +50% science and +25% production gets built at the end of the first era
...

I have dealt with this problem during betatesting DYP.The AI tends to build especially production increasing improvements only if it considers them as "valuable" (means a decent base shield production) and it generally starts building improvments most of the time after the expansion phase is over.
Making them cheap, cutting maintenance or adding additional benefits hasn't a great impact on this flaw.
After doing some intensive testing in DEBUG mode I finally found a way to make the AI build them a lot more - I simply make them giving 1 culture per turn.I don't know if it works for your scenario and adding culture may be a bit odd, but it may be worth a try...if you are interested, i can run a test with it after you realease the next version and send you the save.

 

[The Last Conformist]

I like "Shadow Galley".

 

[The Last Conformist]

Current army strength in my Vlad game:

10 Workers
10 Pike Saurus
16 Black Orcs
1 Skeleton Warrior
1 Skeleton Spearman
3 Zombies
8 Necromancers
8 Shadowmen
6 Death Knights
14 Catapults
6 Fire Catapults
And a multitude of Zombie Workers.

Economy:
Income: 231
From cities: 226
From other civs: 5

Costs: 192
Science: 98
Corruption: 46
Maintainance: 48

17 Cities.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Me being an idiot, I managed to lose my capital to one of Lo Pan's raidng parties. Damn.

Oh well, the city is back in my hands now, and Lo Pan's homeland defense is disintegrating. He won't be alive to see the end of this war.

 

[Drift]

Military strength reports:
Thank you. It's nice to see the breakdown between units and the military relation to economy.

Death mage ship names:
Thank you for the suggestions. Really good ones. I like Shadow Galley too - that's for the level 1 ship. I was thinking of calling the level 2 ship Dreadship.

I don't have a zombie leviathan, but Kinboat was interested in doing a regular leviathan at some point. It's for a future version of MoM though.

@Pfeffersack

Thank you for this information and thank you for your offer. However, I think I can test it myself as I would like to clear the issue before releasing the patch. My only worry about giving them 1 culture is that culture increases over time and they would be racking quite a bit of culture by the end of the game...

@TLC

I don't think the "build often" helps here.

@Phant

I don't think the AI could handle it and I'm not that excited about the reloc feature myself. I meant the units as paradroppers and the reloc was something of a side-effect. I'm glad people like it though, but I'm not going to make the units pure relocators.

Thank you for the Ghost-Wraith upgrade bug report. I'm not sure what you mean with the enslavement bit though. I checked the latest version biq and Ghosts and Wraiths enslave into Crypt Skeletons. It's as it should be. If you meant it as a suggestion, I feel it might be a bit too strong for the already pretty strong defenders to create new equally strong defenders.

 

[The Last Conformist]

And there Lo Pan bit the dust. He earns the questionable honour of being the first mage to go, since Rjak is holding out on the traditional arctic island.

Next target's Sss'ra ...

Edit: OK, crusade against Sss'ra cancelled; Tauron declared war for not apparent reason.