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Yannos posted:As promised: http://users.telenet.be/YannickJ/SAVES.rar Thanks a lot! I'll check it out when I get to work.
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May 6, 2014 07:50
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Oh yeah, another good one is to pair any class with a -morale to armies spell with enough destruction to blight the land. Blight it, then cast your morale dampener and laugh as parts of your enemies armies abandon ship next turn. Sorceror and Dread Omen for example, but i think the warlord also gets something the same?
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May 6, 2014 12:11
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Rogue gets both incite revolt and plague of bandits, so they can pretty much make cities bottom out on morale just with those. Blight would make it even more crazy to be sure, but blight empire only spreads from cities you control. It does make attacking your cities a bit annoying which is always nice!
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May 6, 2014 12:22
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You get another spell thats point and click blight, unless im crazy and wrong?
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May 6, 2014 12:34
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It'd be nice if there was an option to also set the rarity of the treasure structures that spawn. So I could say "No Strong structures please" and therefore get more interesting items. I've had Mass Curse out of a Wizard Tower that was set at Mythical and that's definitely one of the ones you see inside structures, but even in games where I have Treasure Structres set to as high as possible you're still pretty likely to only have one Mythical wizard tower on the whole map. Say have a slider that has Strong - Epic - Legendary - Mythical on it and you can just turn one of those off.
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May 6, 2014 12:35
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Thyrork posted:You get another spell thats point and click blight, unless im crazy and wrong? You don't; that's just for temperate. [Climate] Empire spells will spread out well beyond your borders, though, and if you've had them active long enough, conquering or settling a new city will immediately spread a huge chunk of Blight or Ice or Heat.
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May 6, 2014 14:32
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Yannos posted:As promised: http://users.telenet.be/YannickJ/SAVES.rar OK! So, the map is completely broken due to a mistake that someone (me) made in code  The whole hit them in melee and capture them thing is broken since version 1.1... I'll speak to the producer about a hotfix, but he's not here at the moment.
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May 6, 2014 15:45
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Finished the campaign, feel like the campaign was a somewhat weaker offering than AoW2 or SM. Then again, I'm probably remembering my exultation at actually beating SM and not the hours I spent cursing at a computer screen. However, I love the zooming-all-the-way out function. The strategic map looks absolutely gorgeous, and makes building a kingdom and stomping my opponents that much more satisfying.
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May 6, 2014 16:58
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I'm currently on the process of taking out an Emperor AI who's on the run. It had a pretty decent city left with stone walls and such. When one of my hero stacks which was just one hero and his five tier 1-2 buddies got about a three turns close to the city, the AI took its two hero stacks, burned the city to the ground and retreated... about two turns worth and took over an undeveloped neutral city with no walls. loving hell AI... how does this help you  At least my heroes are now closing in from all sides so I can purge its artificial stupidity from existence.
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May 7, 2014 06:13
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Fewd posted:I'm currently on the process of taking out an Emperor AI who's on the run. It had a pretty decent city left with stone walls and such. When one of my hero stacks which was just one hero and his five tier 1-2 buddies got about a three turns close to the city, the AI took its two hero stacks, burned the city to the ground and retreated... about two turns worth and took over an undeveloped neutral city with no walls. It often feels like the AI is weighing up your entire existing army against what's in their city, rather than just the enemies it can see.
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May 7, 2014 13:22
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I'm discovering that Hero Stack is kind of stupid strong on anything that isn't a huge map. On a smaller map the loss of projected power in multiple areas is less of a big deal, and it lets you level up and conquer bigger sites quite fast. Also Resurgence is totally busted in rmg play  It's a great option for the campaign, but it's just totally abusable in rmg. You can suicide storm most independants with combat heroes, and if a few die in the process? No big deal, they're back after combat. Pity, it felt better to play with, but it's too cheesy. Waiting on AI tinkering at the moment for more map play though, other than screwing around.
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May 8, 2014 13:41
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On Resurgence, once i got the hero resurrection spell researched, i was doing the exact same thing. 
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May 8, 2014 16:29
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Thyrork posted:On Resurgence, once i got the hero resurrection spell researched, i was doing the exact same thing. Oh sure, but at least you have to research it to cheese with them Resurgence is basically built in suicide power from the word go.I kinda think heroes shouldn't be allowed into the same stack, but then there's no great way to solve the adjacent hex issue pulling them in I guess :/
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May 8, 2014 16:48
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In the same advanced options that toggles resurgence you can set how many heroes before you hit a softcap of new arrivals. Make it two and it should feel better with the resurgence option on. Alternatively, refuse new heroes after 2 or 3 so the AI can have more. Eitherway, that should soften up hero doomstacking. 
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May 8, 2014 17:46
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Resurgence probably needs a bit of a nerf, the spell too. Maybe make it like the Leader skill, you have to wait 3 turns and they come back at your capital, and that would probably be plenty enough to make losing heroes sting a bit. I'd say also 'lose some XP' but that would probably still be exploitable or a pain to code fairly. Honestly I don't mind heroes being really powerful or there being hero stacks, and as mentioned you can just turn down the number of them you get if you want.
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May 8, 2014 18:09
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victrix posted:I kinda think heroes shouldn't be allowed into the same stack, but then there's no great way to solve the adjacent hex issue pulling them in I guess :/ It causes havoc with the AI as well, and the path finding systems. Hero stacking is kind of tricky, since a lot of people like the idea of having a D&D band of heroes tromping about, murdering everything they come across. On the other hand, it can't be so powerful that there isn't really any viable alternative. It used to be a lot worse, before we introduced one spell per turn and army upgrades only work for the army leader. In the beta, almost every game I saw was 5 heroes and a random tier 4 in a doomstack.
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May 9, 2014 07:45
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Any chance of having an option for MP tactical combat speed up? I was doing a game tonight and we all had fun but were constantly giving each other poo poo about doing manual combat because it slowed things down so much.
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May 9, 2014 07:54
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PlotDevice posted:Any chance of having an option for MP tactical combat speed up? I was doing a game tonight and we all had fun but were constantly giving each other poo poo about doing manual combat because it slowed things down so much. I added a game setup option in the next patch which forces all tactical combat to run at high speed.
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May 9, 2014 08:03
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Thank you! That will help quite a bit to ease the issue of watching one person at a time do battle in multiplayer.
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May 9, 2014 12:38
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Gerblyn posted:It causes havoc with the AI as well, and the path finding systems. Yeah I can't think of any obvious elegant solutions, other than 'turn down max heroes when I play rmg'. The leader powers don't really discourage it enough for me, really it only comes down to map size. On a medium or small map, I pick one hero to be the stack leader, and then every other hero gets maximum combat or spellcasting stats. They rapidly outpace any tier one or two units you can encounter, and it doesn't take them long to reach tier 3/4 power, especially when working in concert. The constant flow of income from conquered sites both powers your early econ and soon lets you craft powerful targeted artifacts that amp them up even more. On a larger map, it makes more sense to spread them around, so your roving stacks all get enhanced leader powers.
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May 9, 2014 14:48
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Could pathfinding be the evil behind unresponsive AI in random maps? It seems to do OK in the campaign and scenarios where it presumably already knows the map.
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May 9, 2014 16:54
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I guess me playing large maps is what means I never really see the power of heroes. While they're good it takes too long to develop them into something I'd rather use than any named T3 or 4 - they're just too squishy.
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May 9, 2014 17:39
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boho posted:Could pathfinding be the evil behind unresponsive AI in random maps? It seems to do OK in the campaign and scenarios where it presumably already knows the map. I think it's because random maps are very open, so there's lots of things for the AI to look at and consider doing. In campaign maps, the AI is already established, so there are fewer things for it to consider. It's also probably fenced in in various places, like "The AI cannot move here until the player goes there" which helps a lot too. But yeah, an awful lot of what the AI does is path finding from various places to various other places.
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May 9, 2014 18:20
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Gerblyn posted:I added a game setup option in the next patch which forces all tactical combat to run at high speed. You rock so much  . That was my only complaint besides occasionally getting butthurt about not seeing disjunction forever (aka hard mode).
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May 9, 2014 18:23
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It's awesome that there are so many variables you can tweak when starting a new random map game, but is there any way to set a new default for the options? I've restarted more than a few games when I realized I forgot to turn on/off Underground or set it to Classic turns.
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May 10, 2014 01:30
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I'm curious to see what the team does with spellcasting in tactical combat. I know there was talk they they were looking into making non-nuke spells more attractive, since nukes are so effective right now. Has anyone talked about moving the mana bonus from nodes from apprentice to mastery in the specs? It would certainly make masteries more attractive and remove the option to just grab a bunch of apprentice skills for the passive mana bonus, which is extremely powerful. You don't actually really use the mastery spells in an aggressive game anyway since they are so expensive, and in a game where you can afford to research/cast them you will already have the income to support it regardless. Moving the bonus from apprentice to master is more about the (huge) early game potential. It also makes a bit more sense thematically, not that that is terribly important. Alternatively the passive mana income bonus could be a research in the apprentice skill list, not given away for free. That would alleviate the huge early game bonus as well. Carnalfex fucked around with this message at 01:08 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 00:52
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Carnalfex posted:Has anyone talked about moving the mana bonus from nodes from apprentice to mastery in the specs? It would certainly make masteries more attractive and remove the option to just grab a bunch of apprentice skills for the passive mana bonus, which is extremely powerful. You don't actually really use the mastery spells in an aggressive game anyway since they are so expensive, and in a game where you can afford to research/cast them you will already have the income to support it regardless. Moving the bonus from apprentice to master is more about the (huge) early game potential. It also makes a bit more sense thematically, not that that is terribly important. Alternatively the passive mana income bonus could be a research in the apprentice skill list, not given away for free. That would alleviate the huge early game bonus as well. Is it really that much of a big bonus? It only applies to one type of mana node, so it's pure luck whether or not you actually come across one in your early game anyways. I always saw it as a kind of minor thing... Genuinely curious here, I don't normally play fast aggressive games like you describe.
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May 11, 2014 10:57
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Gerblyn posted:Is it really that much of a big bonus? It only applies to one type of mana node, so it's pure luck whether or not you actually come across one in your early game anyways. I always saw it as a kind of minor thing... Genuinely curious here, I don't normally play fast aggressive games like you describe. I think the idea is that if you're getting bonuses from half the nodes on the map thanks to taking 3 different adept spheres, it can really add up, especially in smaller, faster matches where you're not likely to research (much less use) the master-level spells.
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May 11, 2014 13:38
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Taliesyn posted:I think the idea is that if you're getting bonuses from half the nodes on the map thanks to taking 3 different adept spheres, it can really add up, especially in smaller, faster matches where you're not likely to research (much less use) the master-level spells. Even then, I'm not it makes that much of a difference. Planting cities takes up time and gold and focusing on expanding can cripple you if you neglect building up your armies, especially when the AI loves to pick on unprotected or poorly defended cities. Alternatively if you take the time to trundle a builder over, I think you probably earn it. Mana nodes aren't exactly a priority (even as a sorceror) when I could grab +gold or treasure sites instead. Granting some kind of bonus for mastery specs would be nice though. I like the idea of shrines providing periodic buffs, maybe allow passing armies to receive an 'attunement' buff where they get elementally charged weapons for a battle? If that's too much, they could radiate their battlefield effect to the surrounding hexes in your domain or let you construct a thematically appropriate defense tower for that city or garrison.
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May 11, 2014 14:44
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Magic Spheres feel pretty tacked on in AoW3 in general, they only have what, 8-10 spells total each? And sometimes you can't even research them because your book is entirely filled with class/avatar skills anyway. I guess it works okay how it is, but if they wanted to make them actually interesting they're probably have to overhaul the sphere/trait/research systems a fair bit. Probably something like, let the player research 1 class skill and 1 sphere skill at the same time. Give sliders to adjust the balance (ala MoM), with a minimum value for each to encourage/force the player to use spheres too. I'd probably let the player convert excess mana to research too like previous games, which would help with the having too much mana in late game issue, and bump up the research cost of things a bit to compensate. Semi-related, I just had a super weird thing happen in Shadow Magic. I was doing perfectly a-okay in a random map and just finished wiping out another player, and when I loaded my save game a few days later, my starter race had went from loving me to super hating me. I have no idea what the hell happened, but it ended my game right there since all of my units deserted me. :I
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May 11, 2014 21:06
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I think the spheres feel tacked on because they aren't that different from each other and they generally aren't as good as the class specific stuff. The terraforming spells in particular are kinda boring. By the end of the tech tree you should be able to do poo poo like drop meteors to destroy sites, raise the sea level and build mountains around your cities. As it is now it's a bunch of make city like x terrain, and here's x combat spell. DrManiac fucked around with this message at 21:37 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 21:32
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Yeah I glossed over that part. They'd need to add a lot more interesting spells to the spheres first because as it is right now they're mostly just boring and samey. But if they start adding a lot more spells to the spheres, the spellbook is going to feel cramped as hell and I'm still not sure people would research them over class skills/units most of the time. Being able to research a skill and sphere at the same time would help solve that problem and make sphere choice more important.
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May 11, 2014 21:42
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Gerblyn posted:Is it really that much of a big bonus? It only applies to one type of mana node, so it's pure luck whether or not you actually come across one in your early game anyways. I always saw it as a kind of minor thing... Genuinely curious here, I don't normally play fast aggressive games like you describe. You can take three minors which means three kinds of node bonus and correct me if I'm wrong but starting locations seem influenced by your character/race choice, so you tend to get node/climates/etc based on that.....so taking three apprentice perks means a pretty big starting mana bonus from the nodes around your start location AND a very good chance to benefit from any other nodes you may find. The main thing is any benefit early is huge compared to later game perks, since once you have an advantage over your neighbor you can beat/buy them, grow bigger faster than others, and continue to steamroll. Early game is important because it means not only an early advantage, but ramping up so you get to "late game" faster than anyone else, too. 4x games are greatly influenced by resource income. Having more resources generally means not just a temporary advantage but the ability to use that to get an even bigger advantage. This steamroller mechanic could be mitigated with some kind of scaling income tax on empire wide resources (mana, gold, research), as was mentioned before when people were complaining about explosive economic growth and cities. As for playing aggressively, I mostly play the game multiplayer since the AI is very passive. I agree that against AI opponents (except for high difficulty) you can just sit back and relax with relatively little threat to the player, and nearly any spec/strategy will work fine. Against players that are actively trying to beat you (or an AI with absurd income benefits) you are facing an actual threat, so you need to be proactive and seize control of resources both to fuel your growth and to limit your opponent's. This is pretty much 4x strategy basics, though. A proactive player is going to have an inherent advantage in resources, and early advantages play to that strength. It doesn't mean passive income perks are a terrible idea, it just means that right now it is kind of a no brainer to pick them because man, that early advantage is pretty big. When you only have perhaps 20 mana income another 10 is a big deal, and that perk never stops being good as it affects future nodes and cities, too. This is actually also added to by the fact that basic nukes are so good right now, and all basic nukes are apprentice skills, so having more options for nukes is a nice bonus! Still, not all players like high stakes aggressive gameplay and perhaps being aggressive should be viable and attractive, so maybe this tactic doesn't need to be changed as much as alternatives could be made more enticing. One way to make mastery skills more attractive without nerfing this aggressive apprentice strategy would simply be to allow a player to choose their starting skills instead of it being random, giving X choices from each pool or X amount of research to spend in each as they choose on turn 1 as opposed to tossing random spells in their book from those pools. This would mean a player could potentially start assured of an impressive tool to base a strategy around, like the climate changer enchantments. This kind of change would also work better and better as more content was added to the game, opening up more strategies, while the current random method would mean more spells = less likely for any given strategy to see the light of day in a given game.
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May 12, 2014 01:50
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Delacroix posted:Even then, I'm not it makes that much of a difference. Planting cities takes up time and gold and focusing on expanding can cripple you if you neglect building up your armies, especially when the AI loves to pick on unprotected or poorly defended cities. Alternatively if you take the time to trundle a builder over, I think you probably earn it. Mana nodes aren't exactly a priority (even as a sorceror) when I could grab +gold or treasure sites instead. I actually honestly find mana much more important early since your ability to spend gold is limited vs your gold income by city production, while you can easily dump 100% or more of your mana income each turn just getting basic scouts out even with starting casting skill. That being said, this can be heavily influenced by class choice, luck in your start location, and game settings. Starting with an advanced city will give you more production (speed to spend gold) as well as the necessary city upgrades to build more expensive troops, which can be built quickly and have a higher upkeep. A starting city with shrine/temple etc adding to your mana income would also skew your priorities more to gold acquisition as well. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:Magic Spheres feel pretty tacked on in AoW3 in general, they only have what, 8-10 spells total each? And sometimes you can't even research them because your book is entirely filled with class/avatar skills anyway. I guess it works okay how it is, but if they wanted to make them actually interesting they're probably have to overhaul the sphere/trait/research systems a fair bit. Probably something like, let the player research 1 class skill and 1 sphere skill at the same time. Give sliders to adjust the balance (ala MoM), with a minimum value for each to encourage/force the player to use spheres too. I'd probably let the player convert excess mana to research too like previous games, which would help with the having too much mana in late game issue, and bump up the research cost of things a bit to compensate. These ideas are interesting! Anything that makes sphere choices more meaningful is great in my book. Carnalfex fucked around with this message at 02:45 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 02:06
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Looting my umpteenth unicorn mount, I was reminded of something kinda funny - master of magic had a bug (wait, hold on) exactly like this. The loot from lairs was supposed to be mostly random and affected by certain factors, buuuuut, it wasn't. Certain items just never showed up. The more things change...
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May 12, 2014 13:20
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I stopped agonizing over the spheres I picked for my custom leaders when I realized the only spells I cared about were the basic nuke spells (for classes that don't have one already) and the Domain spells so I can turn a race's hated territory into favored. This means I have a lot of FIre and Air custom leaders so expanding into volcanic and arctic terrain is less problematic. Expanding the sphere spell lists would be a pretty cool thing to see for future patches/DLC so those choices felt more important.
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May 12, 2014 18:58
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Been playing this for a week. Overall, it's great fun. But it really needs an option to decrease hero XP gain for larger maps. Anyone know how to mod that? On even a large map I get high level abilities like Chaos Rift before anyone else is even at level 5, even on Emperor. The fun part of the game is early on when your hero isn't God Emperor of the tactical map. Mopping up 4 fifths of the map gets boring. I'm also kinda surprised dwelling defenders don't seem to scale up at higher difficulties so I've just been turning them off. The dev diary made it seem like it would be smart to just do missions for dwellings but by bringing multiple armies they can never even do anything before they get mowed down.victrix posted:Looting my umpteenth unicorn mount, I was reminded of something kinda funny - master of magic had a bug (wait, hold on) exactly like this. The loot from lairs was supposed to be mostly random and affected by certain factors, buuuuut, it wasn't. Certain items just never showed up. I figured that might be an injoke by Gerblyn. You know the running joke in Photoshop threads where people just add unicorns, rainbows, and len-flares. Unicorns for everyone! Rosscifer fucked around with this message at 02:22 on May 13, 2014 |
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May 13, 2014 02:00
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The Unicorn thing is a bug of some sort and yeah it's still in there. A good way to take a look at the AI is to set the game to fixed teams, you can watch the kind of stuff your AI buddies do and how they think. Honestly the more you watch it the more incredibly stupid it looks, I saw my AI partner lose a starting hero and all his starting armies right on turn 2 by marching them onto nearby nodes/shrines in small stacks and lose fights against like, 3 Tier 1 units. I have no idea what it's doing, but it doesn't seem to have any concept of what is a 'safe' fight or how to organize its armies to capture nearby nodes and such.
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May 13, 2014 02:23
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Rosscifer posted:Been playing this for a week. Overall, it's great fun. But it really needs an option to decrease hero XP gain for larger maps. Anyone know how to mod that? On even a large map I get high level abilities like Chaos Rift before anyone else is even at level 5, even on Emperor. The fun part of the game is early on when your hero isn't God Emperor of the tactical map. Mopping up 4 fifths of the map gets boring. I'm also kinda surprised dwelling defenders don't seem to scale up at higher difficulties so I've just been turning them off. The dev diary made it seem like it would be smart to just do missions for dwellings but by bringing multiple armies they can never even do anything before they get mowed down. People have been asking that we increase the number of defenders for giant and dragon dwellings. I'll ask around to see if anything became of the plan. We're also looking into the XP system in general, since it's too easy to cheese yourself to godlike status. However, I'm not sure the changes we've made would address the situation you're referring too. Another slider might be the only real fix, since if we slow down XP gain then people who play aggressively will get screwed over. One fix for now is to turn on "All Heroes Have Resurgence". The AI tends to lose heroes in auto combat sometimes, which is one of the reasons your heroes are so much better than theirs. Resurgence will keep heroes around much longer to help the AI out a bit. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:A good way to take a look at the AI is to set the game to fixed teams, you can watch the kind of stuff your AI buddies do and how they think. Honestly the more you watch it the more incredibly stupid it looks, I saw my AI partner lose a starting hero and all his starting armies right on turn 2 by marching them onto nearby nodes/shrines in small stacks and lose fights against like, 3 Tier 1 units. I have no idea what it's doing, but it doesn't seem to have any concept of what is a 'safe' fight or how to organize its armies to capture nearby nodes and such. The AI tries to assess what army it needs to win a fight, and fucks it up, basically. It sees a node defended by 2 units and assumes that 3 units will be enough to defeat it, with a mana node there's a multiplier applied to take into account the magic effect defending the site. This is hardly a foolproof system though, hence the results you see. We tried having a more complex system, where the AI would actually simulate little fights to take into account what unit was weak to what damage and things, but the real tactical combat system is far too complex for this to work properly. In the end, it often gave worse results than the simpler system we use now. Also, the unicorn thing is finally fixed in the next patch, thank god.
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May 13, 2014 07:55
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Gerblyn posted:One fix for now is to turn on "All Heroes Have Resurgence". The AI tends to lose heroes in auto combat sometimes, which is one of the reasons your heroes are so much better than theirs. Resurgence will keep heroes around much longer to help the AI out a bit. gently caress. Hadn't considered that. I was planning on turning resurgence off because it was too easy to abuse hero doomstacks with it, and/or lowering the hero cap. I guess I could leave the hero cap at 5 and resurgence on, and just play with a self enforced one hero per stack rule :/ quote:Also, the unicorn thing is finally fixed in the next patch, thank god. This makes me irrationally happy, even as I decry the problems with heroes. Even the crunchiest of hardcore players has a soft munchkiny rpg heart
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May 13, 2014 11:12
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