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victrix posted:Gerblyn, as requested, here's the doc, cleaned up a bit: Thanks! I just read through it. One question, what do you mean with "no hotkey for next action". I don't understand what action you mean? Delacroix posted:It looks like heroes who die and get resurrected via resurrect hero lose any leftover hero points they had. Also it seems mind controlling the independent heroes who spawn near cities gives you zero points to assign. I thought I'd steal a level 5 theocrat hero that just spawn on a AI's throne city to give a stack some army bonuses but he's useless. The level 5 heroes who spawn have already had their points spent, I think. I'll look into resurging heroes losing skill points though, I don't think that's supposed to happen...
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Apr 30, 2014 13:58
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Gerblyn posted:Thanks! I just read through it. One question, what do you mean with "no hotkey for next action". I don't understand what action you mean? The big one! ie, every time you click 'next event' in the bottom right of the screen, I'm surprised there's no hotkey that mimics that function. Right now space cycles to the next event, I'd rather have space 'do' the current event and have tab or something cycle. I mean I can autohotkey it of course, but it seems like a pretty nice common usability thing for anyone. edit: Speaking of resurgence, I think there's a bug with it in the campaign - I had my 'main' hero the orc sorc die in a fight and finished it fine, but then in another one Sundren died and instant game over. Dunno what's going on there, quest flags or something interfering with it maybe.
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Apr 30, 2014 14:03
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victrix posted:edit: Speaking of resurgence, I think there's a bug with it in the campaign - I had my 'main' hero the orc sorc die in a fight and finished it fine, but then in another one Sundren died and instant game over. Dunno what's going on there, quest flags or something interfering with it maybe. Did you start the map with the new patch, or it a save game? The setting won't apply properly to save games, only newly started maps. Anyways, I made a case about having a shortcut key for selecting the next to do event and passed your doc on to the ghuy in charge of interface improvements. Thanks again! Kanos posted:To test the new beta patch, I've run through two full Lord AI games, 5 AI, large map, city founding off but everything else default. First game was Elf Theocrat and second game was Dwarf Sorcerer. Yeah, mana income isn't really fixed yet, though we're a bit stuck with how to do it. Some people, never have enough mana and hate the new changes, while some people still have too much. One of the reasons we added in the cap was to stop people who didn't spend it fast enough creating vast stockpiles of it. We're looking into adding more racial stuff, hopefully humans will get something nice. I agree their blandness is excessive.
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Apr 30, 2014 14:22
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Swank, thanks. As for the resurgence, hmm... I'm almost positive I started the new map after the patch, because I seem to recall playing through the pirate island map after it. It's not on hard, so it's not that either. I may take a break from the campaign to do some rmg though, I want to test out the balance changes without scripted/scenario stuff interfering - one of the reasons I didn't include many/any balance/gameplay type stuff in that feedback doc was I don't feel like I've spent enough time with the changes yet to give really useful feedback on them. Where 'not enough' is still probably 10-20+ hours so far already  Also tell MCA I love his music, I still have the original Unreal/UT/deus ex/Aow1 soundtracks in my game music folder after all these years 
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Apr 30, 2014 14:33
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Gerblyn posted:Yeah, mana income isn't really fixed yet, though we're a bit stuck with how to do it. Some people, never have enough mana and hate the new changes, while some people still have too much. One of the reasons we added in the cap was to stop people who didn't spend it fast enough creating vast stockpiles of it. I know I'm not the first person to throw suggestions like this at the wall, but have you guys thought about decoupling your leader from the one-cast-per-turn? As in, keep all of your heroes on a shared one cast per turn in one battle, but let your leader throw around spells up to their CP limit independently of that. I'm 100% on board with needing to prevent hero stacks from trashing everything and the one cast per turn is a really good way to stop that. I think leaving heroes restricted to supporting caster roles while letting your leader throw around spells freely will solve a lot of problems re: mana being valuable/scarce and re: low-level buff spells being useless. I'm really pleased by how the game's progressing. I really liked it when it came out and it's been getting better with every patch. It's great that you guys are willing to make major game balance changes and it's even better how responsive you are in this thread. Kanos fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 14:40
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Kanos posted:I know I'm not the first person to throw suggestions like this at the wall, but have you guys thought about decoupling your leader from the one-cast-per-turn? As in, keep all of your heroes on a shared one cast per turn in one battle, but let your leader throw around spells up to their CP limit independently of that. I'm 100% on board with needing to prevent hero stacks from trashing everything and the one cast per turn is a really good way to stop that. I think leaving heroes restricted to supporting caster roles while letting your leader fliff around spells will solve a lot of problems re: mana being valuable/scarce and re: low-level buff spells being useless. There are lots of opinions about the whole "One Spell Per Turn" thing, a lot of the beta testers hated it when introduced it, even though it was their complaints that made it obvious we needed it (or something similar). The main argument against relaxing it with loopholes like the one you suggest is that it becomes a lot harder to explain and communicate to the player. Currently the plan is to make the more useless spells more useful, so bless and stoneskin would become AoEs or affect all your units, for example.
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Apr 30, 2014 14:47
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Gerblyn posted:There are lots of opinions about the whole "One Spell Per Turn" thing, a lot of the beta testers hated it when introduced it, even though it was their complaints that made it obvious we needed it (or something similar). The main argument against relaxing it with loopholes like the one you suggest is that it becomes a lot harder to explain and communicate to the player. Currently the plan is to make the more useless spells more useful, so bless and stoneskin would become AoEs or affect all your units, for example. That's actually a really good way to address Bless and Stoneskin. I'd cast them pretty frequently if they hit my whole army.
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Apr 30, 2014 14:50
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Can anyone spoil the Commonwealth ending if you decide to side with the Torchbearers? I tried the other route, and it did seem extremely awesome for a while, but then the final slide played 
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Apr 30, 2014 14:51
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Mana thoughts. I think you're still running into the issue of fixed, non scaling costs, but highly variable income. That is, the income of any given city might be reasonably predicted, but depending on the number/type of sites present, specializations, and especially the size of the map in question and whether or not city settling is enabled, you can have wildly varying amounts of income. This will also create the wildly varying feedback on the mana amounts - depending on the game/map/size settings of the player in question combined with their personal playstyle, you're going to get fast aggressive players on small maps who have serious mana problems and never touch high upkeep spells, or slower empire buildy players on large maps who hit the mana cap quickly but have functionally unlimited mana because the income is so much higher than the fixed costs. On top of the fixed costs/upkeeps, you also have the issue of mana throughput. Because mana income isn't capped but casting power is, you're never going to be able to spend your incoming mana past a certain point unless either a) mana upkeep costs get to really high levels or b) you raise casting power. Upkeep costs are problematic because if they're too high they feel punitive and they discourage players from casting spells with high upkeeps if they don't seem remarkably powerful. Right now, the upkeep for city enchantments that might do something useful are far higher than the upkeeps for summoned units that will do something useful, those probably need to be flipped, or the power of their effects needs to be looked at. And of course there are no sustained army/unit buffs. I'm still incredibly wary of persistent unit enchants, I've seen them break too many games like this, but I do still think hero/army enchants could be fun without totally ruining the ai. As long as mana upkeep is a player voluntary action, you're going to have to work to get players to lower their own income - everyone builds armies, and unit upkeep costs plus high building/unit construction costs and (very important) high gold throughput via multiple cities lets you spend down your gold every turn. The same isn't true at all for mana right now. There's a few ways you could tackle this. One is to add a scalar that applies to mana costs and upkeeps based on map size and whether city settling is on or off. gently caress if I know how you'd nail those numbers right, but it'd give you the possibility of keeping mana costs relatively consistent across map sizes. If it was a player controlled slider you could probably get away with fudging it slightly, and players could adjust it as they see fit (mana poor<-->mana rich world). Another would be to adjust spell throughput. I would suggest totally decoupling strategic and tactical level casting power. It might seem odd, but you already have the weirdness of having your 'leader' caster power being used for strategic spells, summons, and combat spells, while your 'hero' caster power is only being used for combat spells, and the weirdness of having leader casting power be a research, but hero casting power be an upgrade. By decoupling strategic casting power, this would give you leeway to have high cost, high 'voom!' spells and effects with high upkeeps, and expensive summons/upkeeps, but without completely distorting available mana or costs in tactical combat. You could also move leader combat casting power back to being a normal hero upgrade, and let empire wide casting power research have totally different, larger numbers. Or you could have the same research, but it gives say +100/+10 casting power for strategic/tactical, whatever. Point is to separate them so you can adjust the scaling better. Just some thoughts, I could probably kick out a few other random ideas. edit: Which is nearly functionally identical to just globally raising casting power and increasing mana costs on combat spells. Ugh. Remind me not to write suggestions when I'm tired. The only major difference is that scaling everything up in cost would make smaller games and earlier turns far more mana constrained, while splitting them would leave most combat magic viable early in small games, but more expensive strategic level stuff would be the realm of late game small map, mid game medium map, etc. Arguably this is true for units as well, but the nature of their persistence and necessity is distinct from that of a lot of spells that are easy to view as nonessential when you can only cast one or two of them a turn, vs building one unit for every city you own per turn. I think you need to open up the floodgates to some extent, either by letting strategic spellcasting consume more total mana per turn from a higher strategic casting power cap, or adding more structures that can be built in cities with high mana costs, low gold costs, that increase casting power. The latter might be more of a newbie trap - a vet will quickly recognize the power of building those, the newbie might not. Having the casting cap raised by the same research as before, just bigger on the strategic level would be more 'automatic' than delaying the construction of units and other structures in cities to raise your casting cap. That said it looks like a decent alternative otherwise? I'm probably making less sense as I write more  
victrix fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 14:58
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victrix posted:As for the resurgence, hmm... I'm almost positive I started the new map after the patch, because I seem to recall playing through the pirate island map after it. It's not on hard, so it's not that either. OK, so did some asking around and other people have been reporting issues with this. Turns out, only newly created heroes and leaders are getting resurgence. Heroes that are carried over from previous maps do not get it, which is why Sundren didn't have resurgence but your main hero did. Working on a fix now, but we can't hotfix it I'm afraid, it'll need to come in a later patch.
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Apr 30, 2014 15:32
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Gerblyn posted:Yeah, mana income isn't really fixed yet, though we're a bit stuck with how to do it. Some people, never have enough mana and hate the new changes, while some people still have too much. One of the reasons we added in the cap was to stop people who didn't spend it fast enough creating vast stockpiles of it. That ain't gonna help your problem. Capping my mana at 400 +200 a turn is functionally no different than 9999 + 200 a turn. You need a redesigned mana economy, a reason to risk running in the negative. Currently there is no risk of doing so at all unless you're the most incompetent player imaginable. Who the hell "never has enough mana?" Are they just flat out ignoring everything but "produce unit, attack AI?" Those are broken players, not broken systems. Supporting every retarded strategy should not be your prerogative. You have to let the player lose. Ways to make a mana economy: -Alchemy (mana to gold at a fuckoff : 1 rate). -Item forging requires mana, not gold. And becomes actually worth doing. -Permanent unit enchants with substantial upkeep. "The AI can't figure them out" is based on invisible flying stacks of halfling slingers from Master of Magic, not modern games. Ways to facilitate this mana economy: -Significantly fewer heroes generated per game, which makes kitting them out a big deal. -Spell of Mastery victory condition that freezes all mana income. -More spells worth casting. Yeah, that's content, and suggesting fixes via more content sucks, but if there's nothing to spend your currency on, you're going to hoard it. If there's one design lesson that Master of Magic taught the world that went completely ignored it's that it's OK to throw balance out the window as long as there are enough options to emulate difficulty levels. If you want to play High Men and roll flying Crusaders, sweet. Enjoy your compstomp. If you want a challenge, try Klakkon or Lizardmen. And the wide spectrum inbetween. Please don't take any of this personally. I realize I am, to an extent, calling your baby ugly. I apologize for that, but I'm not sure how else to say it. AoW3 is still fun, but I'm worried you're painting yourself into a corner with reactive design changes instead of proactive ones.
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Apr 30, 2014 15:41
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No sweat, I'm planning on mucking with some rmg action later anyhow, nosing around the build times and mana/casting stuff. Another radical thought on the tac/strategic mana thought - dump mana from tactical combat spells entirely. Give them either a limited number of uses, a cooldown like other combat skills, or both as appropriate. That would free you to experiment with mana costs, upkeeps, and throughput on the strategic level without worrying how it would impact early game spellcasting in tac combat or on smaller maps. It would also let you directly target and tinker with individual spell power on a finer level. The problem currently is you basically have tactical level ability use being tied to empire wide resource production/consumption, which is a really really weird thing if you look at it that way. Orc units only attack if you spend 25 gold per swing! (seems reasonable really...  )edit: Sorry, I had to quote this, it made me laugh: boho posted:-Permanent unit enchants with substantial upkeep. "The AI can't figure them out" is based on invisible flying stacks of halfling slingers from Master of Magic, not modern games. Guess what is completely and totally broken and the AI can't figure it out in Warlock 2, a modern game? Literally exactly that, invisible flying stacks of <whatever>. The game is totally broken by maximally enchanted units that the AI can't handle because it doesn't stop yours and it doesn't know how to abuse its own. In some cases it can't, if you never expose your uber units to the AI while they smash neutrals and build up your resources/artifacts/loot/etc, something you can absolutely do with super stacks in AoW3. victrix fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 15:43
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Gerblyn posted:The level 5 heroes who spawn have already had their points spent, I think. I'll look into resurging heroes losing skill points though, I don't think that's supposed to happen... My last save is too far away for me to replicate MC'ing a newly spawned independent hero sadly. I specifically mean resurrecting dead heroes with the avatar spell and not resurgence though. In my last game I had a arch-druid whom I saved up points for druidry so he could cast vengeful vines. He later died and when I brought him back (after the RNG finally gave me resurrect hero) he was missing the three points I left unassigned. It was all the more telling because I got a second arch-druid at level 5 with enough points for all his skills plus extra stats.
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Apr 30, 2014 15:57
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boho posted:That ain't gonna help your problem. Capping my mana at 400 +200 a turn is functionally no different than 9999 + 200 a turn. You need a redesigned mana economy, a reason to risk running in the negative. Currently there is no risk of doing so at all unless you're the most incompetent player imaginable. Who the hell "never has enough mana?" Are they just flat out ignoring everything but "produce unit, attack AI?" Those are broken players, not broken systems. Supporting every retarded strategy should not be your prerogative. You have to let the player lose. Many people never have enough mana because they cast so many spells and have so many summons and other sustained spells, that they use it all up. It's not that they're incompetent, it's the opposite. Part of the problem is "Spells not being worth casting" is very subjective. For example, some people tell me that "Incite Revolt" isn't worth casting, even though a -600 happiness hit on a city can reduce it's income and growth by 40%. We can't force people to cast spells, if people choose not to cast them, that's up to them. Delacroix posted:I specifically mean resurrecting dead heroes with the avatar spell and not resurgence though. In my last game I had a arch-druid whom I saved up points for druidry so he could cast vengeful vines. He later died and when I brought him back (after the RNG finally gave me resurrect hero) he was missing the three points I left unassigned. It was all the more telling because I got a second arch-druid at level 5 with enough points for all his skills plus extra stats. Oh, I see. I'll make a case for someone to check it out and see if we can reproduce the bug.
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Apr 30, 2014 16:03
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I think people are way too focused on balance changes and major gameplay changes when in truth this is a game with a fairly passive strategic AI that lets you get away with all sorts of sub-optimal gameplay in random maps (neglecting T1/2, hording mana, over expanding, etc.). The chill AI isn't so much of a problem because not every game has to be cutthroat and empire building games are sometimes more fun with foils instead of true competitors, but I wish people would stop pushing so hard for balance changes when balance really isn't the problem. This is a game where you can do almost anything and, if you're decent at the tactical combat, you'll probably be fine. The devs seem to be chasing the balance-problem-of-the-week and are going to drive themselves nuts trying to appease their base who can't even agree on what the problems actually are because the game is so forgiving that everyone has wildly different playstyles and requests. If they wanted to shut their players up, they should create an insanely aggressive AI variant and watch all the complaints about excessive available mana and the uselessness of T1/2 vanish.
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Apr 30, 2014 16:18
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I don't have any issue with T1/T2 units, I use them and early spells heavily, and an aggressive AI would not fix the issues with mana income. Once you're past the early game, unless you're just absurdly constrained on cities, you can't spend fast enough to outpace mana income. Your casting power won't let you. All the games I've played after the patch have followed a similar arc - I'm tight on mana very early in the game because I'm spending my casting limit or near it almost every turn and my income can't keep up so I'm surviving on found mana, then my mana income surpasses my casting power and I'm stockpiling a surplus, which goes into creating more mana buildings, and then it's no longer an issue and I'm hitting my mana cap unless i'm just spamming upkeep spells like mad. You can get enough upkeep going to drain your income, and depending on what you build in your cities you can burn a good chunk of mana per turn on buildings, but not nearly as much as gold per turn with the way costs are now.
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Apr 30, 2014 16:31
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Before the current patch, i felt the AI was lacking aggression too. Mind you, i've yet to play on the highest difficulty for any length of time. I'd love to see AI personality traits added. Letting you setup how leaders think and what they prefer. For example, one could be a mixture of "the builder" and "The summoner", leading to a city building/expanding player who preferes summoned units. Another could exclusively be "The rusher", resulting in a very aggressive player who has no preferences past "TOTAL WAR!"  Obviously these would need better names, Warmonger = Rusher for instance, but the essence of being able to have personality breathed into the ai might go a long way to spice up beating up the computer. Plus it would add even more love to the leader creation and could lead to hilarity as you get your butt kicked by a leader you designed.
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Apr 30, 2014 16:35
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Are these RMG or campaign games Victrix? One of the biggest changes in 1.1 was reducing the number of mana nodes in RMG maps, since too many were spawning. I don't think the campaign maps were edited with the same ideas in mind.
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Apr 30, 2014 16:35
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victrix posted:Sorry, I had to quote this, it made me laugh: It's also next to impossible to actually beat the game without heavy use of things like this. Oh, your next gate is guarded by 3 Diamond Golems? gently caress you, figure it out! Point being it's a feature, not an oversight. I'm not convinced you can win Warlock 2's campaign mode without exploiting every tool at your disposal. If you're talking about Warlock 2's 'regular' mode, I can't speak to that as I haven't played it. But if it's anything like the first one, that doesn't surprise me.
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Apr 30, 2014 16:41
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Gerblyn posted:Are these RMG or campaign games Victrix? One of the biggest changes in 1.1 was reducing the number of mana nodes in RMG maps, since too many were spawning. I don't think the campaign maps were edited with the same ideas in mind. Both, the campaign obviously has mounds in general, but I played several rmg games (and a few scenarios for kicks) between campaign maps. Map size/settling/etc still plays a role, as does how aggressively you scout and expand - I try to have whatever my weeny summoned flying unit is up in numbers scouring the map for loot/fort sites/city sites/targets as fast as possible, and then prioritize the weakest and nearest targets that give the most return. I don't abuse truly gratuitous cheese (farming endless hero xp with disables and/or retreating), and I'll suck up non game over losses from a battle without reloading, I'm fine with that leading to a game loss eventually as part of the learning process. TBS games do not favor fair fights or pyrrhic victories in the early game (one of the reasons I'd love to see post auto-battle manual replay, encourages fast aggressive play in general, and lets everyone learn what they can and cannot take with a given army more quickly without an annoying reload or map restart if you're masochistic).I'm still playing with various hero setups and ai settings, the breadth of options is large, and pointing to any one specific thing as being OMG IMBA is tricky, but some things remain fairly constant between games (mana income/expenditure in this case). If I start winning consistently via some cheeseball method I'll report it, if i'm just winning consistently I'll up the difficulty or adjust the settings, and if I reach the point where I'm winning consistently on maxed difficulty with hard settings I should probably start streaming so you can make the expac even nastier edit: One other thing, I should be clear on. I don't care about things being 'broken' as long as they're fun. Too much balance of the wrong kind leads to a really loving bland and boring game. I do care about things being broken if they impact the game on a fundamental level such that playing smart means playing boring, or if something being broken means that whole chunks of the game aren't worth using (whole tiers of units, full spell categories, entire classes or races, that sort of thing). victrix fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 16:47
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Something that's "missing" from Mana in this game is that you can't choose to allocate it to Research like you previously could. Also in MoM, you could allocate it to Skill, which was how you increased your casting points. I actually wouldn't mind removing the 'Sorcerer I' trees and such, and just replacing them with a Skill slider, that way you could focus on researching interesting things and spend your excess mana to improve your total casting points instead. I dunno how well that would work within this game's mechanics though.Ohthehugemanatee posted:The devs seem to be chasing the balance-problem-of-the-week and are going to drive themselves nuts trying to appease their base who can't even agree on what the problems actually are because the game is so forgiving that everyone has wildly different playstyles and requests. I agree with this. I think more important than focusing on balance issues should be fixing up bugs, the UI, improving AI, and getting modding tools out to the players. Once the players have modding tools, they can muck with the balance all they want and play whatever mods they like the best. And yeah, the AI still has a lot of weird behaviors that don't make sense, and they aren't anywhere near aggressive enough. It's been mentioned a number of times, but every time I see an AI city (not capital), they have a bunch of resource nodes or mines that just aren't even cleared of neutral troops. AI rarely seem to go after battles that look fairly even, they seem to only pick on undefended cities and ones with 1-2 units on them. I would also like to see the addition of AI personalities, if for nothing else, it could allow the devs to mess with some experimental levels of aggressiveness and such, and the players can test and see which AIs seem to do the best. victrix posted:edit: One thing I didn't list on there. Right click/drag to set a units facing is really loving important, and I can't for the life of me remember if its noted/emphasized anywhere in the game in combat. I don't have any brilliant suggestions for this, but it's something that new players need to know. I didn't even know this made it into the game actually. Though to be fair, it's only situationally useful. 99% of the time you either use an action, after which you can't adjust facing, or go into guard mode, in which facing doesn't matter. It just matters for spellcasting since you don't turn to face your target, and that only matters in those cases when you've done something like say, moved away from an enemy and aren't facing them anymore.
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Apr 30, 2014 16:58
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I agree with this. I think more important than focusing on balance issues should be fixing up bugs, the UI, improving AI, and getting modding tools out to the players. Once the players have modding tools, they can muck with the balance all they want and play whatever mods they like the best. I think like 90% of that feedback I wrote was UI stuff UI quirks drive me crazy.Gerblyn mentioned their primary strategic AI coder is on a much needed hiatus sometime recently, they'll probably start tinkering with behavior after that. It definitely has some... odd habits. I've seen it send out probing scout units to steal undefended forts and cities, and I've seen it move coordinated offensive armies, but I've also seen it run like a scared cat, burn its cities down, and retreat to huddle in its capital. Tac AI feels fairly solid, though a lot of the bigger fights are city sieges, and most of those I've beaten by focusing my army on one side of the map (which takes an annoyingly long time due to the lack of a deployment feature), then playing footsie games with ranged units and spells, presenting hard targets and following up with the real threats. The AI is generally somewhat tentative about coming out from the walls as long as it has ranged units, even if it's only hitting your bait for low damage every turn. The closest fights I've had have been the ones that involved no heroes at all, instead ragtag groups of t1-t2 units that I sent out to capture cities, or small groups of low tier units defending against a roughly even offensive force (go go defensive battering rams ). They might get one or two leader tac spells as support and that's it.A typical hero stack swarm fight would be 6 on 12-18 or 12 on 24 and winning handily, while a low tier scrap might be 12-12 and one or two units comes out standing The latter fights are pretty fun just because they're less predictable, but you usually can't afford too many 'wins' like that unless you are on even footing or better than the ai resource/production wise.Hmm, speaking of, anyone know what advantages the AI gets on higher difficulties? Is it purely resource bonus type stuff, or are AI routines handicapped below a certain setting? And speaking of hero stacks, I still don't know what triggers them showing up for recruitment - is it totally random, or weighted if you're below the other players in hero count or something?
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Apr 30, 2014 17:16
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AI bonuses are (currently): Squire: No bonuses. AI logic is deliberately limited to make it more passive Knight: No bonuses Lord: +33% production and gold King: +66% production and gold, +25% mana and knowledge Emperor: +100% production and gold, +50% mana and knowledge I believe the stronger AIs get more starting units too. In tactical combat, AI difficulty level doesn't affect anything (yet). As for our focus, it is actually on UI, Bugs and new features right now. The mana balance stuff was all about trying to fix the game's flow, though I think this little experiment has proved to everyone we're fighting against the tide with it. We're also looking into unit balance, but that's more with an eye to making them more varied than really balancing them too much. The only reason we nerfed assassin's was because they were brokenly powerful in multiplayer. AI improvements and personalities are definitely planned, hopefully we can start working on them soon. They're much harder to implement than a lot of what you see in the patches though, so I'm not sure when they'll actually be ready.
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Apr 30, 2014 17:32
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Gerblyn posted:The only reason we nerfed assassin's was because they were brokenly powerful in multiplayer. I'll say my piece on this and move on, trying to fix what players cheese each other with in MP and get the AI to pose a threat in SP with the same balance changes without pissing off SP players is a losing battle that has hosed over more than one game in the past. Not saying it can't be done, just saying I've seen it done badly many times. That aside, I'm stoked to hear AI profiles will be in the works at some point. Doing a full game of warmongers or team fights where you stick a builder/expander type in the back can make for some cool wars. I can't remember the last game I played with good solid ai types. I still have no idea if civ5 leaders hewed to certain behavior reliably. They all felt equally diplomatically abusable to me  Oh wait. AI War I'm not sure if I'd call them AI personalities exactly, but they were distinct and very cool and completely changed the way the game played out depending on which ones were in the game.
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Apr 30, 2014 17:47
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Gerblyn posted:Many people never have enough mana because they cast so many spells and have so many summons and other sustained spells, that they use it all up. It's not that they're incompetent, it's the opposite. I think this is more class based than anything. Sure, a Sorcerer or Druid who's spamming high upkeep T3 and T4 summons is going to eventually run out of mana. But how is a Warlord or Rogue ever realistically going to run out of mana? Without summons your mana expenditure is heavily limited by your CPs since the AI loves to Disjunct global spells. Even if your spells don't get dispelled, it's not hard to get a mana income that dwarfs the upkeep costs of global spells. City enchantments are naturally limited by how many cities you have (and usefulness as well, for example, there's no point in using Authority of the Sword if it doesn't make your domain hit a resource node nor is there a point on using Dragon Oil on a city far from the frontline). I agree that Incite Revolt is super powerful. Not only is it a massive penalty on all production and income, it will often cause a bunch of units to desert. The problem is the scale of it. If you have 3 cities, getting hit with Incite Revolt on one of them is a disaster. If you have 15+ however, it's a minor nuisance. When you're fighting an Emperor AI who loves to (and has the resources to) spam tons of cities everywhere, just hitting one of them with a spell does feel useless. Another of the problems of offensive city enchantments is that it's often easier and simpler to just attack the city and take it for yourself instead. Since you need vision on cities to cast spells on them, usually you can only cast spells like Incite Revolt on cities on the fringe of your opponent's territory, which are the same cities you can also conquer the easiest. Sending a suicide scout deep into enemy territory over several turns in order to maybe hit a single city with an Incite Revolt that's going to get dispelled a few turns later does not seem like a great strategy.
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Apr 30, 2014 17:51
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Global enchants in general run afoul of the disjunct mechanics which seem to boil down to 'he who has the larger mana penis wins'. And you only get off easy from the AI because its been hard coded not to nuke them constantly. I don't know what the brilliant solution there is, there were a ton of bright ideas earlier in the thread when people were talking about dispelling.
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Apr 30, 2014 18:00
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MoM did it by having a chance for success for the dispel based on the difference between the cost of the spell and the dispel (you could pump extra mana into dispel to increase the power). For less expensive spells you could spam a couple basic dispels and wipe it, but for powerful (or dangerous that need to be dealt with NOW) spells, you would want to dump extra mana to increase your chance of success. This leads to competition between the opponents, but can still be gamed if you are willing to roll some dice and not brute force it with your mana wallet. MoM also had alternate, more efficient dispels available for certain magic schools as well as enchantments that acted as automatic counterspells using a similar versus system to hinder enemy casting in combat, but then MoM had a boatload of spells.
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Apr 30, 2014 20:33
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Carnalfex posted:MoM did it by having a chance for success for the dispel based on the difference between the cost of the spell and the dispel (you could pump extra mana into dispel to increase the power). For less expensive spells you could spam a couple basic dispels and wipe it, but for powerful (or dangerous that need to be dealt with NOW) spells, you would want to dump extra mana to increase your chance of success. This leads to competition between the opponents, but can still be gamed if you are willing to roll some dice and not brute force it with your mana wallet. This is exactly how it worked in AoW, AoW2 and Shadow Magic. I'm not sure why it was changed.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:04
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Because the 2 main designers hate the mechanic  I'm thinking it might be a good idea to bring it back though. Another suggestion has been to let people overcharge spells to protect from dispelling somehow. So, you could spend twice the mana amount to make the spell X times more expensive to dispel. I imagine we'd make it so the extra mana didn't require casting points so it's a more effective mana soak or something...
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Apr 30, 2014 22:06
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Is it too early to tease about these "new features"?
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Apr 30, 2014 22:23
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Gerblyn posted:Because the 2 main designers hate the mechanic How about you cast a global or city enchantment, then you can cast it again, casting it again on the same city / the same global adds another layer to it, making it show up a different colour or something, you have to knock down all the layers to get rid of the spell, also the more layers you have the tougher it is to knock one off. So if you can pour a bunch of mana/casting points into something unopposed, it's not going anywhere without a big investment on the part of the enemy, but it can be whittled down if the enemy focuses enough attention on it and you don't oppose them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 22:39
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TheOmegaWalrus posted:Is it too early to tease about these "new features"? Well, we're working on new races and a new class. We're also looking into revamping some of the more underdeveloped parts of the game, like diplomacy.
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Apr 30, 2014 22:41
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OwlFancier posted:How about you cast a global or city enchantment, then you can cast it again, casting it again on the same city / the same global adds another layer to it, making it show up a different colour or something, you have to knock down all the layers to get rid of the spell, also the more layers you have the tougher it is to knock one off. I think that would work well for low cost spells, but for more expensive spells it would be too slow. People have suggested similar things like spell shields too, like a spell you cast that prevents your other spells from being dispelled until it itself is dispelled.
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Apr 30, 2014 22:46
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Gerblyn posted:I think that would work well for low cost spells, but for more expensive spells it would be too slow. People have suggested similar things like spell shields too, like a spell you cast that prevents your other spells from being dispelled until it itself is dispelled. Too slow to dispel or too slow to put up? If the latter I would sort of hope that'd be the idea, a lot of the expensive spells are really really good and if you could make them too tough to dispel they might be a bit busted. Mostly I was just suggesting it because it seems relatively intuitive method of doing it, to do it more in depth I think you might need a proper spell/dispel interface to explain the mechanics. If you wanted to do that though it'd be neat, but it's a tricky thing to communicate to the player and the game generally does a good job of that.
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Apr 30, 2014 22:50
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Gerblyn posted:Well, we're working on new races and a new class. We're also looking into revamping some of the more underdeveloped parts of the game, like diplomacy. Huh-wha? Is this expansion stuff or are you actually going to just add this stuff with patches??
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Apr 30, 2014 22:54
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Gerblyn posted:Well, we're working on new races and a new class. We're also looking into revamping some of the more underdeveloped parts of the game, like diplomacy. I like how casually you just dropped this bombshell
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Apr 30, 2014 23:06
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Gerblyn posted:Well, we're working on new races and a new class. We're also looking into revamping some of the more underdeveloped parts of the game, like diplomacy. gently caress yeahhhhhhhhh this owns you guys own
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Apr 30, 2014 23:07
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I can't really say any more, it's possible I've said too much already 
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Apr 30, 2014 23:12
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You can go ahead and admit to us that the new race is Frostlings, it's okay because it's what we all want to hear anyway.
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Apr 30, 2014 23:14
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boredsatellite posted:I like how casually you just dropped this bombshell Gerblyn posted:I can't really say any more, it's possible I've said too much already Not like its that big a bombshell really  Kajeesus posted:Huh-wha? Is this expansion stuff or are you actually going to just add this stuff with patches?? I hope its in an expansion, not that i'd object to regular content patches but im also entirely behind hurling more money at Triumph for this games... uh... triumph... Heh.
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May 1, 2014 00:30
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