Wildmana 7.6 Development Thread

[Neomega]

The End of the Ice Age Option does not kick in until the end of turn one going into turn two. I assume that this may have been done to allow the player to see the map more clearly before they settle the first city.
IMHO this takes away from the ambience of the starting enviroment, and the age of ice tile effects should be created prior to gameplay not after the first city is settled.
Yes it may be harder to see the underlying tiles for what they are, but there are toggles to help with that. Watching the world go from summer to winter in the first turn is more of a negative, then having to make a decision about city placement. Assuming that this was intended of course.

He did that so you could regenerate the map much quicker before you take your first turn.

The re-exploration adds a nice feature, but for me it is more of an aesthetic issue. It's really sad to see these features disappear from the map.

I agree 100% about aesthetics.

I think it would be hella cool if respective mana guardians could spawn at these too, even when inside your borders. So havign the broken scepulchre in your territory would be good for death mana, but every now and then a wraith would rise to defend it. I don't know about it appearing with spellbook or not, I guess that would depend on the randomness.

Another interesting idea would be only if you were aligned against the mana (ie Elohim with broken scepulchre), would it possibly spawn guiardians, or maybe if you have some kind of mana imbalance (5 water mana and pyre of seraphic) that the pyre would spawn guardians, maybe even have the chances rise the more of the "opposite" mana you have.

jus' random ideas.

 

[Sephi]

it had to be done to make the regenerate map option work at all.

 

[wapamingo]

Comments for 7.6:

Summoned units are very powerful because they can kill. As Amurites, I can win every time particularly as they are into this kind of stuff. Conversely, defending with summons is way too easy as well (in particular with Host of Eisenhar as they have guardsman promotion). Oh, on the note of Hosts - they get powerful and more powerful as time progresses (up to 3+5holy I saw), making them stronger than some tier III summons. So maybe an adjustment is needed here.

I suggest the following:

Make all Summoned units illusions, incapable of killing. Make the Svartalfar Illusionists into Summoners and give their summons the ability to kill - a sort of flip around.

 

[Honor]

wapamingo, what difficulty do you play at? You might want to up the difficulty level if the game seems too easy for a particular strategy. There are quite a few powerful strategies in this game, that is how the game is balanced, and that's why we usually don't like nerfs to anything.

I have a few suggestions for the next release:
1. Merge in the category structure for the "what would you like to build now?" interface (RifE has it, very useful for quickly finding what you would like to build next).
2. Great commander and great healer mechanics (RifE) add quite a lot of new tactical options to warfare. I would understand if you are reluctant to add this for AI reasons though.
3. Merge "Trackless" (Sidar Scout UU - from RifE, again).
4. Make the Defender and Protector promotions grant +4 strength instead of +2. make the Omnipotent promotion grant +8 strength and +20% heal after combat along with Blitz (for folks who have the Omnipotence vic. condition turned off), so that they are actually worth the blood and tears required to get them.

 

[Johnar]

Some kind of display showing how strong support you have from your noble house would be nice. I seems to recall there used to be one, but I can't find any now.

 

[wapamingo]

wapamingo, what difficulty do you play at? You might want to up the difficulty level if the game seems too easy for a particular strategy. There are quite a few powerful strategies in this game, that is how the game is balanced, and that's why we usually don't like nerfs to anything.

I start at prince and have increasing difficulty challenge, so the game gets to end-difficulty. I find that the summons strategy (especially with a leader that has their summons last extra) unbeatable. Anyways, I don't mind winning like this, it's just that I have not seen the AI use summons extensively (aside from a few fireballs here and there).

 

[Widget]

I've been playing around a bit (never played vanilla Civ4 or vanilla BtS) and been thoroughly enthralled by some of the Civilopedia entries; particularly for leaders, though there's some fabulous speculative narrative in many areas. I'm not very well-informed about the FFH canon at this stage but, if I were to contribute in any way, flavour-text would probably be it. I was just wondering, at this stage (making no promises, I'm afraid, given that I'm potentially unreliable) whether anyone could share a few ideas of what's already covered (whether it's already inserted or not), what's awaiting entries but already has ideas and, finally, what's totally open to interpretation.

I'd love to start playing around with the concepts, stories and psychology of the heroes and leaders who define this pseudo-mythology, regardless of whether it produces anything useful

 

[wapamingo]

AI needs to be thought how to use summons, and better.

I was just playing as the Fearies and was besieging an Amurite city, which has about 10 wizards, all with Law II - so they can summon the host. They did absolutely nothing but sit in the city to be picked off by my assassins (mind you, at a rate of around 2:1 in their favor - worth it for me to sacrifice assassins). If they summoned the host (so 10 units of 5 to 7 strength) and suicide-ed them against my force they would have driven me off. Keep summoning, and keep summoning for suicide attacks. That is what they are there for. I am yet to see the AI use summons en-masse as the are best at this.

edit: the Calabim are the exception to this as they do summon the permanent skeletons; but not the non-permanent specters (which would make the Calabim AI very very hard to deal with)

 

[Sephi]

AI needs to be thought how to use summons, and better.

I was just playing as the Fearies and was besieging an Amurite city, which has about 10 wizards, all with Law II - so they can summon the host. They did absolutely nothing but sit in the city to be picked off by my assassins (mind you, at a rate of around 2:1 in their favor - worth it for me to sacrifice assassins). If they summoned the host (so 10 units of 5 to 7 strength) and suicide-ed them against my force they would have driven me off.

AI really should do this. Do you have a save game of this game? It's not trivial to reproduce such a situation with worldbuilder.

 

[Sephi]

I did a test in worldbuilder and the AI uses summons. Gave an orc warrior LAW II and he summoned a Einherjar every turn and suicided it against my archer. I guess that in your Amurite game the AI wastes its casting turn on something else.

 

[Honor]

Possibly add a check to the AI algo:

IF arcane unit
  IF enemy assassin within 2 tiles
    IF access to law2
      cast host of the einherjar
    IF access to earth2
      cast stoneskin
    IF access to body1
      cast haste
      try to run and hide

etc

It would work better if you do a power comparison or compare the number of enemy assassins to the defending mages to see if the mages are facing a real threat or not.

Edit: Forgive me, I forgot you are the AI dudes. You probably have it all figured out already

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

with Esus blocking sanctify, civs that suffer greatly from hell terrain ( elves, mazatl, faeries, malakim etc. ) should find other ways to avoid it if using Esus. svartalfar for example might want to adopt a good religion for a short while to change alignment and keep hell out, and then convert back to the "false" religion they most prefer.

 

[wapamingo]

sorry guys, I tried looking for the save game but we continue playing on.

I'll make sure to save separately if I encounter something unusual in game play in the future.

 

[arstal]

with Esus blocking sanctify, civs that suffer greatly from hell terrain ( elves, mazatl, faeries, malakim etc. ) should find other ways to avoid it if using Esus. svartalfar for example might want to adopt a good religion for a short while to change alignment and keep hell out, and then convert back to the "false" religion they most prefer.

Maybe Esus shouldn't block that one spell?

Or, maybe a metamagic spell that dispels terrain, like a metamagic II or something?