Rites of Oghma: working as intended?

[crazy_achmed]

Hi,
i recently made some tests with the "Rites of Oghma" ritual in BTS FFH2 0.41 patch J (no modmod).

I think what i got were no bugs but possibly not working as intended, so i decided to post in a new thread and not in the bug thread.
I finished the ritual at least 25 times (in different rounds to get different results [different target tiles for the new mana nodes]) playing as Svartalfar. The results are:

that only empty tiles (no buildings like mines, farms... roads are OK) were choosed, no matter were in the world. But the real problem is that forrest tiles are not choosed too!
Especialy when playing the Svartalfar (or the other elves) sometimes Way of the Leaves is a good religion to choose especialy because of the defending treants which can appear on improved tiles for them, and so i like to plant trees on every free tile in my realm.
Therefore the Svartalfar (at least as i am playing them) get no benefit from the Rites of Oghma, which creates a conflict between forrest affinity of the elves and the magic affinity of the only Svartalfar leader!

So i suggest to keep the Rites of Oghma as it is (just creating nodes on unimproved tiles) but include unimproved forrest tiles as possible targets.
Why should not break new mana nodes through or in forrests? Maybe destroying the forrest during the break through process but i think there is no technical, mythological or lorewise reason for not making this reasonable extension. Or iam wrong here?

 

[Emptiness]

I didn't realize that Rites of Oghma only created nodes on unimproved tiles; I assumed that any tile without a node or resource would be a valid location for a new node. (I've never completed that ritual myself.) I don't see any reason to exclude developed tiles, or tiles with forests or other features (except special features like Odio's Prison or the Pool of Tears, upon which a mana node could never be placed).

As a workaround, you can destroy your own improvements and chop down your own forests to make places for nodes to appear in your territory. (Naturally, you'll probably want to do this in tiles that are not being worked by your cities.)

 

[crazy_achmed]

I would not have a problem if the nodes were created on improved tiles too and so would destroy the improvment, but i think it is even no problem when they just appear on emtpy tiles. But forrest should not be a reason for excluding the tiles.
The question is, is it intented that the nodes does not appear in forrests (at least old forrest but iam 99% sure its all forrest types) or is it a bug or just not noticed until today.
Iam sure that it is intended that improved tiles are excluded, maybe forrest are unmeant handled as improvements too?

Your workarround is not realy helpfull, especialy in multiplayer, because elves cannot chop forrests (at least with Way of the Leaves) and World Builder is no option in multiplayer, in general i did not use it if i did not have to.

 

[Emptiness]

Elves can chop forests just fine, they just don't receive for chopping them.

Do you mean to say that you are playing in Multiplayer games that are lasting long enough to get around to casting Rites of Oghma? That's a very late-game ritual, and I was under the impression that multiplayer games (competitive ones, anyway) were over long before anyone would have Strength of Will.

 

[crazy_achmed]

Elves can chop forests just fine, they just don't receive for chopping them.

Are you sure? I did not tried the normal forests but iam sure i tried it with old forest and it did not worked. Maybe it was an older patch version, but when i am thinking about it (i controll all my worker manualy) i cannot remember seeing a "chop forrest" button on the worker buttonbar.

Do you mean to say that you are playing in Multiplayer games that are lasting long enough to get around to casting Rites of Oghma? That's a very late-game ritual, and I was under the impression that multiplayer games (competitive ones, anyway) were over long before anyone would have Strength of Will.

Yes you are right but iam playing with 4 friends, so we are 5 humans and around 10 AI players, and we like to play long games, do not make war against each other (mostly, and if then we do not eliminate each other). We like to build up creating fancy citys and armies and have fun with the athmosphere

 

[Emptiness]

Are you sure? I did not tried the normal forests but iam sure i tried it with old forest and it did not worked. Maybe it was an older patch version, but when i am thinking about it (i controll all my worker manualy) i cannot remember seeing a "chop forrest" button on the worker buttonbar.

Yes, I'm sure. I just rechecked with the Svartalfar, and chopping Forests and Ancient Forests are both an option even after converting to Fellowship of Leaves, and is still an option after adopting Guardian of Nature. I'm sure it is the same for the Ljosalfar. You can see for yourself, with worldbuilder, by starting a new game and giving yourself Mining, Way of the Forests, Hidden Paths, one or two workers and a Disciple of Leaves (used to spread the faith).

Yes you are right but iam playing with 4 friends, so we are 5 humans and around 10 AI players, and we like to play long games, do not make war against each other (mostly, and if then we do not eliminate each other). We like to build up creating fancy citys and armies and have fun with the athmosphere

Well, there's nothing wrong with that. You might consider posting about this in the Game Balance thread. Elves can have nodes and forests in the same tile, so it does seem odd that they would block new nodes. Even if forests block the appearance of nodes in tiles for non-elves, it seems like elven forests should not do so.

 

[Lord Parkin]

I just noticed this myself. Playing as Cassiel, I have a huge and advanced late-game empire. It's the first time in a game I've ever got to the point where I can build the Rites of Oghma, so I figured why not. But then, because my territory is all fully upgraded, most of the new mana nodes appear in the desert-filled former Malakim lands, which now belong to the Hippus (no surprises there). Is this really how the ritual is supposed to work? I counted - I didn't get a single new mana node throughout my entire empire (easy to tell because I'd already improved most of the existing ones). So effectively I just gave the Hippus about 10 free mana nodes, while giving no benefit to myself, and costing myself 2500 hammers. Seriously? That seems downright dumb. Probably didn't help that I completed Genesis not long before as well, making most of my lands into forest... but how was I supposed to know?!?!

The mana nodes, IMHO, should be evenly dispersed. There's no reason why they can't appear on a tile with an improvement on it - just limit them so they don't appear on tiles with a resource already on them. That way, if you get a new raw mana node appearing on top of an improvement, it becomes a choice whether you want to burn down that improvement in favour of another mana source, or if the improvement is needed too much for the moment. To me, that makes sense.

On the other hand, having to pillage and raze almost all the improvements in your entire empire to have a decent shot at getting a few of the new raw mana nodes from the ritual that you paid 2500 hammers to complete just seems daft. Even worse when some other rival civ gets almost the entire benefit of the ritual. I'm tempted to just reload and stop the thing from being completed, to prevent empowering the Hippus so much at my own expense.

 

[God-Emperor]

I just build the thing for the second time (in my second FfH2 game ever). Controlling 25.68% of the land plots I got exactly 0 new mana nodes (my voluntary vassal, the Hippus, got 4, the Ljosalfar got 2, the Grigori got 1). In my first game I got 1 by the edge of some small city (I was the Ljosalfar and most of my plots were ancient forest), but at least I already had a metamagic node which cut the build time in half. This time one of my better cities, about the 3rd or 4th highest production, wasted something like 36 turns building the useless thing. The perversity of the pseudo-random number generator strikes again.

The 7 new mana nodes did appear on plots with improvements, in fact all 7 of them were on already improved plots: a farm, 2 cottages, a village, 2 towns, and a mine. None of them have forests.

Funny thing: after entering all the above, I switched back to the game (which is still running) to make sure I spelled "Grigori" and "Ljosalfar" right and it crashed (the occasional "zooming out a little too far, so it wants to switch to globe view, but while it is trying to switch I zoomed back in" crash that happens in the unmoded game from time to time too). I reload the auto-save from the turn before. I re-run the turn. Clearly something different happened since this time I got 5 out of the 7 new mana nodes in my territory. This time the 5 in my territory appeared on tiles with a farm, 2 windmills, 2 villages, and a town (I didn't check the other 2) - also no forests. Apparently a crash can sometimes be a good thing.

 

[crazy_achmed]

I just build the thing for the second time (in my second FfH2 game ever). Controlling 25.68% of the land plots I got exactly 0 new mana nodes (my voluntary vassal, the Hippus, got 4, the Ljosalfar got 2, the Grigori got 1). In my first game I got 1 by the edge of some small city (I was the Ljosalfar and most of my plots were ancient forest), but at least I already had a metamagic node which cut the build time in half. This time one of my better cities, about the 3rd or 4th highest production, wasted something like 36 turns building the useless thing. The perversity of the pseudo-random number generator strikes again.

The 7 new mana nodes did appear on plots with improvements, in fact all 7 of them were on already improved plots: a farm, 2 cottages, a village, 2 towns, and a mine. None of them have forests.

Funny thing: after entering all the above, I switched back to the game (which is still running) to make sure I spelled "Grigori" and "Ljosalfar" right and it crashed (the occasional "zooming out a little too far, so it wants to switch to globe view, but while it is trying to switch I zoomed back in" crash that happens in the unmoded game from time to time too). I reload the auto-save from the turn before. I re-run the turn. Clearly something different happened since this time I got 5 out of the 7 new mana nodes in my territory. This time the 5 in my territory appeared on tiles with a farm, 2 windmills, 2 villages, and a town (I didn't check the other 2) - also no forests. Apparently a crash can sometimes be a good thing.

Yes, as i said improved tiles are no problem but forrest tiles are. I think this should get changed.

 

[God-Emperor]

Yes, as i said improved tiles are no problem but forrest tiles are. I think this should get changed.

If you said that, it wasn't in this topic...

Your earlier posts here claim that it doesn't put them on tiles with improvements.
For example, in your first post: "only empty tiles (no buildings like mines, farms... roads are OK) were choosed", and "as it is (just creating nodes on unimproved tiles)".

But it does put them on improved tiles, as long as it isn't also a forest of any sort.

Apparently the map generator won't put them on forest tiles either, assuming it uses the data in CIV4BonusInfos.xml. The Rites uses the CyPlot.canHaveBonus() function, which ought to obey this file's info too. The key to making them appear on forest tiles of all 3 sorts (new, regular, and ancient) is to fill out the FeatureBooleans tag (currently empty) to list all 3 of those features (and possibly jungle and flood plains would be good too) and then pretty much duplicate what is in the TerrainBooleans tag in the FeatureTerrainBooleans (also currently empty). This is because the TerrainBooleans lists what bare terrain a bonus can appear on - if you want them to appear with features you also have to list the features and the terrain that can have those features under their respective tags. Deer, for example, have a TerrainBooleans that lists only tundra (so they can appear on bare tundra) and a FeatureBooelans that lists only forest plus a FeatureTerrainBooleans that lists only tundra (so they can also appear on plots that are tundra with forest); horses, on the other hand, can only appear on featureless plains, grasslands, and tundra since those are listed in TerrainBooleans but FeatureBooleans and FeatureTerrainBooleans are both empty (it looks like only deer, fur, and silk can appear on forest tiles - I think you can plant a forest on top of others in-game, the map generator just won't place them them in a forest). I haven't tried this, but it ought to work.

 

[travathian]

If you said that, it wasn't in this topic...

Actually he did . . .

But the real problem is that forrest tiles are not choosed too!

twice . . .

But forrest should not be a reason for excluding the tiles.
The question is, is it intented that the nodes does not appear in forrests (at least old forrest but iam 99% sure its all forrest types) or is it a bug or just not noticed until today.
Iam sure that it is intended that improved tiles are excluded, maybe forrest are unmeant handled as improvements too?

Funny you bothered to quote his first post but apparently couldn't be troubled to read it entirely.

That said, this should go in the bug thread to be fixed.

 

[God-Emperor]

Actually, he didn't. You have fixated on the "forest" part and forgotten the "improved" part. His claim included that the new mana resources are never created on tiles that already have improvements:

The results are:

that only empty tiles (no buildings like mines, farms... roads are OK) were choosed, no matter were in the world.

and

I would not have a problem if the nodes were created on improved tiles too and so would destroy the improvment, but i think it is even no problem when they just appear on emtpy tiles.

are two examples.

This is not correct. They do appear on tiles that already have improvements. Tiles with forests, with an improvement or not: no. Tiles without forests but with improvements: yes.

Somebody would have to check but it may well be features in general, not just forests, that block the new mana. You probably wouldn't want it popping up under the various unique features anyway, but not having it appear on tiles with ordinary features like forest is strange, and bad for the elves.

(If you want to point out problems, my earlier post has a math error towards the end where I say "5" and then list 6 things. I don't remember what happened well enough to say where the mistake was in that part of the post.)

 

[snarko]

All features block the creation of mana. This is because mana isn't set to appear in any feature, only terrain without them, and rites of oghma follow the normal rules for placing them.

Mana cannot appear:
*In a plot with another bonus (hardcoded)
*On peaks (hardcoded)
*On plots with features (set in XML)
*In all terrains - I believe only water ones are off limits for mana (set in XML)
*In an area (isle) two tiles or less (set in XML)
*In any tile which cannot be worked by a nearby city. Not sure of the exact meaning of this but I think it's water plots near a landlocked city that no other city can work.

The following limits could apply, but do not:
*Can appear in both hills and flatlands (set in XML)
*Can appear next to rivers (set in XML)
*Latitudes do not matter (hardcoded in python, not that it would matter anyway)

 

[crazy_achmed]

You are right, i realy said that new nodes are not created on improved tiles. I said that because as i started the thread i had the impression that this was true, but that was wrong because i was so focused on forest tiles, sorry that i stated the oposite on the later post (that time i had already noticed that improved tiles are not excluded but forgot that i wrote that in the first post).

And thanks for the hint with the xml file, maybe i will try to fix this for my own (and my multiplayer oponents) but i still think that this problem is worth to be adressed in a future patch.

 

[Azhral]

Strange, I've never had any problems with Rites of Oghma. The new mana nodes pop up under farms or cottages willy nilly. And this was with a game on the most recent patch only a few months ago. I'll play a game and test it out tonight...

 

[Emptiness]

It turns out that forests are what is blocking the appearance of new nodes, not improvements - which can be a problem for Elven civs but would probably not be noticed by anyone else.