Master of Myrror Fantasy Mod 2.0

[Drift]

@mrtn

I don't like upkeep on spawned units. It doesn't feel right. I don't like to see my upkeep rising because I've built an improvement that gives me free units. The rule would be same for everyone and the number of race units would remain moderate. Naturally a mage with several race resources also gets lots of free units, but that shouldn't present too big a problem.

I believe the AI would build it. It would have zero cost and zero upkeep.

The small wonders / improvements thing is still under thought. Both have their downsides.

At the moment I feel like the game engine is my biggest obstacle. The system may be so cumbersome that it just isn't worth the trouble. I like to keep the mod mean and lean - this doesn't go well with that plan.

 

[Klyden]

Something to consider.

I don't think we want to make all the techs untradeble, but how about the race related ones?

The AI seems to research these no matter what, but don't particularly seem interested in trading for them unless they can use them. This should help offset the AI tradefest that takes place and give the human a chance to at least keep up a bit.

 

[Drift]

@Klyden

Interesting suggestion. I think it's worth testing.

 

[Misfit_travel]

Minor bug in beta, Sss'ra faction name does not appear underneath their image in the diplomacy screen. I have beta 2 patch 3 loaded.

Regards
Misfit

 

[Uncle_Ted]

Drift:

First thing's first -- WOW! What a great mod!

Question1: Was it intentional that Death mages have no way to grow their cities beyond 6 without access to lakes/rivers? I noticed that there is a nature tech that functions as an aqueduct, but as a Death mage I don't have access to it. I just got sewers, so I'll have big cities and small cities, but no in-between.

Q2: Seems like on this map (standard size) that there are lots of nodes, but only one of each bonus race. Is that intentional too?

I'm currently playing Rjak and I'm now in the third age. Only Merlin is ahead of me on tech, but I'm kicking his butt so hard right now that this won't last long. At this point it's just me, Merlin, Ariel, and Oberic on a big continent, with Galen nearby on 2 islands (one big one small -- I took over one of his small islands to steal his dwarves!), and Tlaloc and Minervia each on their own tiny island (they're still stuck in the first age of tech). Everyone else has been eliminated. Ariel and Oberic are fighting each other; Oberic is fighting me too, but with Merlin in between and Ariel on his doorstep, he's otherwise occupied.

I started off surrounded my Merlin, Kharan, Tauron, and Freya. I kept each in check through limited wars until I could take them out one by one. Made sure to build a crypt in each city ... I love the maintenance-free waves of free 3.3.1 skeletons -- they make great throwaway troops.

I guess the key to keeping up with the AI on tech is to NEVER trade techs when they ring you up and propose a deal during their turns. Always be the one to initiate ... otherwise the first one to get your tech will trade it to everyone else before you get the chance. This is even more important in this mod than in vanilla civ, given the number of civs and the multiple branches.

Once again, awesome mod! (I did take out the purple-shaded terrain though ... it was killing my eyes!)

 

[bkwrm79]

I got Conquests for Christmas, MoM was the first mod I downloaded. I love it.

My first game was as Vlad, I gave up because I had no resources except ivory and was stuck on a relatively small island (despite it being a Pangaea map). I did figure out how some of the stuff works.

Second game is going well. I'm playing as Tauron at Warlord (I usually play Civ at Regent). I found Lizardmen practically right away, also some nodes (including Chaos) and luxuries, was able to build a decent-sized empire - enough to stay competitive. I was attacked by Freya, got Tlaloc (and some others who haven't played much of a role) to help me, and have been having quite a successful war - I just took Freya's capital, although she has a lot of cities left. I'm capturing cities slightly faster than Tlaloc is, which is important as Tlaloc began the war a bit bigger than me. No race resources at stake, unfortunately, but her capital gives me control of dyes.

I've been building Lizardmen units for defense and Chaos units to attack, mostly. I also have a small fleet, Freya has at least one island city I know of and when I get the chance I'll load up at least one of my two Giant Turtles, escort it with my Galleases and go grab it.

I've noticed that since Tlaloc and Freya have very similar armies, I really need to keep an eye on which Earth Elementals are friendly and which ones want to step on me.

Merlin has trolls... I'm pondering going after him to get them. Of course, this is a situation that requires caution!

Anyway, again, I love it. Thanks so much for making this mod.

 

[Drift]

@Uncle_Ted

Thank you for your kind words and good feedback.

Reply1: This was a mistake on my part, but it was fixed in 2.0 Beta 2. You seem to be playing Beta1 of the MoM 2.0. It contains several unfortunate bugs and problems. If you do patch up, you'll probably need to get your bearings for a while with the different unit stats (Beta1 was an experiment with unit stats - it failed).

The correct order of installations is: MoM 1.0 -> MoM 2.0 Beta 1 -> MoM 2.0 Beta 2 -> MoM 2.0 Beta 2 Patch 3

Reply 2: Yes, it's intentional. Race resources are intended to be rare in order for them to be more strategic and interesting. For example, in your game where capturing the single dwarves resource was enough to warrant a war over an island. There is only one of each race resource even in huge maps.

The tech trick may well work, I'm not sure as I'm not really an expert Civ3 player and stick to Warlord/Regent in my games - I don't really need special tactics as the competition isn't that stiff.

Too bad the terrain was too much. It's as light as it's going to get though, but luckily it's not difficult to do what you did and get rid of it. I understand that everyone doesn't like it.


@bkwrm79

Thank you. It's really nice to read posts like that.

Just out of curiosity, are you playing with the 1.01 or one of the betas?

The lack of civ colors on some of the units can be a little confusing. I've tried to minimizeuse of these units, but unfortunately some units with very good and fitting graphics don't have these colors (Ents and Earth Elementals are the best examples). It can be helpful to turn the civ color discs on for the units from the game settings menu.

Lizards are a good resource for Chaos. They have a decent defense and an attractive price tag. If you decide to do some naval warfare, remember that lizardmen are also amphibious. It's not always useful, especially as lizardmen aren't great attackers, but it can come in handy.

 

[Drift]

While testing the prerequisite buildings, I realised that my gut feeling had been right - prerequisite buildings don't have to remain in the city after the improvement requiring them has been built -> if the spawning building was an improvement, it would be possible to build several of them by building multiple palaces.

So, small wonders it is. If it ever will be. This is getting pretty cumbersome. I may give up on the idea, as good as it is on paper.

 

[syndicatedragon]

I noticed there are 11 opponents on a standard size map (as opposed to 7 on a standard map with vanilla C3C). Is the standard size map for this mod larger than the vanilla map? What is the rationale for the increase in number of opponents?

 

[bkwrm79]

@bkwrm79

Thank you. It's really nice to read posts like that.

Just out of curiosity, are you playing with the 1.01 or one of the betas?

The lack of civ colors on some of the units can be a little confusing. I've tried to minimizeuse of these units, but unfortunately some units with very good and fitting graphics don't have these colors (Ents and Earth Elementals are the best examples). It can be helpful to turn the civ color discs on for the units from the game settings menu.

Lizards are a good resource for Chaos. They have a decent defense and an attractive price tag. If you decide to do some naval warfare, remember that lizardmen are also amphibious. It's not always useful, especially as lizardmen aren't great attackers, but it can come in handy.

You're welcome.

I'm playing 1.01, so far.

Civ color discs... never knew about those... thanks. I will try that, as Earth Elementals are the basis of both Freya and Tlaloc's forces in this game, and both have lots of Ents as well. It isn't a big deal anyway, reminds me to keep an eye on what's going on along the battlefront.

Amphibious... that might indeed come in hand, if Freya has workers on the square I want to land on - and in that case the low attack won't matter. Anyway, I'm finding the Chaos/Lizardmen combo effective and fun, I guess I lucked out on the resource.

I checked, Merlin's trolls are on the far side of his empire from me... I think I'll find another target, especially since we've done a lot of good trades. Lo Pan has both elves and dwarves, and he's pretty weak (small empire, behind on tech, but slightly inaccessible... ROPs/MAs are good in war anyway).

I also noticed that Rjak doesn't have any death nodes, poor guy. But his 'empire' isn't next to mine, and doesn't seem worth conquering anyway.

 

[Drift]

@syndicatedragon

Yes, there are more players on the map than in regular Civ3. It's a matter of preferences really. I always felt like the regular game matches had civs too spread out so I increased the number for MoM. Also, since mages of each faction are very similar, I wanted to make it less probable that one or even two of the factions won't even appear in one game.

Embryodead has followed the same principle in WH2 with the exception that due to WH2 having more civs, its larger maps are even more busy than MoM's.


@bkwrm79

Good to hear you are enjoying the game. Going after Lo Pan seems wise as Elves and especially Dwarves are a good combination for Chaos. Chaos with Dwarves is a nightmare in capable hands. Lo Pan may actually be a tougher nut to crack than his tech position might suggest.

 

[Drift]

I couldn't abandon the new approach to race resources without seeing it in action. So, I went along and made the change. At the moment it's just a test, but if I like it, it may end up in the mod itself. We'll see.

The setup:
- There are five rally points for each race resource - one for each unit of the race. These are small wonders and each one of them produces one of the race's units.
- Only one rally point can be active at any given time. This is ensured by making them become obsolete with the tech that gives the next rally point in line.
- Rally points cost nothing to build and don't require maintenance. Units spawned by them are also free of upkeep.
- I'll tweak these numbers, but the preliminary setting is this
level 1 rally point produces units every 10 turns
level 2 - 8 turns
level 3 - 6 turns,
level 4 - 4 turns
level 5 - 2 turns
- Some races spawn faster than others (goblins at least).

I'll try to find some time to test it. I'm kinda excited about this. Hopefully it'll turn out right. I still may not include it in the mod though.

 

[Misfit_travel]

Drift:

If you would like a playtester for this concept, let me know. I have a commitment tomorrow, but could give you some in game feedback by the weekend.

I'm curious as well to see how it plays out.

Regards
Misfit

 

[Drift]

@Misfit_travel

Thanks for the offer. I'll put a test patch up here when I know I've worked out some of the inevitable quirks myself. The whole thing is still in movement as I made the changes during the last two days so it's going to take some days for me to be sure I've got it right and that no bugs got through.

 

[Drift]

I started a game and so far the new resources have worked well. I only got lizardmen, but I was happy to notice that apart from wanting to test them, I also really wanted to have them as I knew they'd give me free units. If I was a warmonger, I might start a war just to get more race resources. They are more important to my game like this than they ever were before. I guess that's a good sign.

It's too early to tell how they play though. All I've gotten yet is handful of Bow Skinks. The rate of spawning seems to be about right so far.

 

[rendermad]

@rhialto
It's possible, but it would really be more confusing than useful. The units with no node requirement would be in the build list even if the player had the node. Also, it would be confusing to have units with same name, but different stats.

What if you upgrade the weaker units to the strong ones?
for example: (W - weak, S - strong)
W unit 1 -> S unit 1 -> W unit 2 -> S unit 2
Besides, in the city screen you can see the unit stats before you build them.
Just a small suggestion, but I really liked the idea after playing a game without my corresponding node...

 

[Drift]

@rendermad

Is it really too much to require that the player manages to get a node for the third era? Vast majority of the units that require a node are from third era. The exceptions to the rule are Wizard (Life X), Ghost(Death X) and Centaur(Nature VII). Centaur may well change, it was originally given a node requirement in order to enhance the nature's handicap in cavalry.

I will not add a cumbersome double unit system if the problem I'm fixing is in fact no problem at all. Lacking your own node doesn't hurt unit wise at the moment. It does hurt in other ways, but the units come into play in the last era. Regular game requires player to get iron, rubber, oil and aluminium for units that are essential for the player's survival. Granted, it has civs spread out more sparse, but then again, nodes are very common and there's only one resource you need to hunt down for your own units.

What I mean is that you guys need to convince me that the units and nodes thing is a problem I need to take care of, because I don't see it myself that way.

I just read what I wrote and I realize I sound a little harsh. Sorry about that, wasn't my intention.

 

[rhialto]

Another crazy idea...

Have two levels of magic nodes. The 'advanced [element] nodes' would be required for some of the really powerful late game units and structures, and will be quite rare.

Currently, getting your nodes is a non-challenge, almost assured by the end of teh first age.

 

[The Last Conformist]

If you don't have your own node by the 3rd Age, you're going to have worse problem than lacking units ...

It's pretty much only a problem for OCC play, I'd say.

 

[Misfit_travel]

I don't have a problem with the proliferation of nodes in the game. By the end of the first age, I typically have at least 1 of each node. I find that I tend to race to or fight over the specials (Orc, Human, Dwarf etc.). These allow a nice mix of units that is worth fighting a war over to acquire.

My two cents.

Misfit