my mages cast crap spells?

[Manwich]

what's with the summon lesser fire elemental spam? I am playing as EA Abysia in a SP game vs a mix of mighty and impossible AIs, and I back up my armies with 4-5 annointed of rhuax stacked wtih fire gems. I researched to evocation 9, and was fairly satisfied with my mages' ability to wreck an army. I then researched into conjuration to allow my mages to pheonix fire and cast fire storm, or flame storm. However as soon as I researched conjuration all they do is quickly blow all their gems chain summoning lesser fire elementals. I can't imagine why I'd ever want to spend a gem on a lesser fire elemental instead of a fire storm, especially when my armies are immune to fire! In most battles I'd rather they cast the free spells such as falling fires, fire pillar, fire cloud, then summon lesser fire elemental.
My question is am I screwed? Can I get them to stop without scripting out spells for them? I can only script so many spells anyway. Do I have to resort to forgoing firestorm and flamestorm by not giving my commanders fire gems?

[Shovah32]

Are you sure the battles they were in would be considered big enough for them to use battlefield spells? That could have stopped them. If that is the problem give the gems to non-mages until your going into a big battle where they will cast the desired spells.

[Sombre]

I get tired of scripting mages - that kind of micromanagement doesn't really appeal much to me (which is fine, since I play SP) and I get what you're talking about. If you research nothing but evocation they're fine, but sometimes when you teach them a new spell that's actually pretty bad, they just go nuts casting that instead.

I think a very simple way to solve the problem (far more simple than allowing us control over AI 'weight' on different spells) would be to allow us to 'ban' or 'forget' certain researched spells - to toggle them on or off. That way you can restrict your unscripted mages to stuff that might actually be useful.

Good idea?

[Ironhawk]

Sombre, you know you can store spell scripts in hotkeys, right? Point at a commanders script space in the army setup screen. Press Ctrl-<number key> to store it. Then point at another commanders script line and press a number key to deploy that script. In this way you can script many mages quickly.

Same thing works for regular commanders and troop formations, as well.

[Sombre]

I know that, but it's still annoying because the script that would actually be useful varies according to the mages having gems, the situation you're in and the spells you have researched. So in effect the hotkeys don't really reduce the micro for me that much.

This is just personal preference - I can't be bothered tweaking the scripts of tens of different mages all over the map, hotkeys or not. I think a lot of people are in the same boat as me and being able to disable spells you never want cast (such as sabbath slave or whatever) would help people like me out. The AI also sometimes decides it doesn't want to cast what you scripted, so this would help even those who enjoy using scripts extensively.

[Manwich]

Even if the battle was too small to cast battlefield spells, the weaker summon spell still costs the same amount of fire gems. My point is shouldn't the casting scale with the cost of the spell instead of the power? If I'm fighting a small battle I'd still rather cast an expensive powerful spell then an expensive weak spell!

[jutetrea]

I'd love to be able to just check/uncheck a spell from a list to make it available to battlefield mages. Don't think we need to go so far as personal rankings, but maybe (ick, even more micro).

I'd also like a toggle per mage in the army setup screen to determine max # of useable gems per combat. Possibly just a set of 5 radio buttons, leave blank for none, click 1 button for max use of 1 gem per combat, 2, 3, etc. Bloody annoying to give 30 gems to a good mage and have them gone in 2 battles.

Have a script command for Self buff, army buff, offensive. For instance, I hate scripting mages as well..but then they waste the first 3 turns and 60 fatigue buffing themselves when they aren't even gonna get scratched.

I'd like it to be set up so it can be like no self buffs, 2 army buffs, then offensive for the rest of the battle using a max of 3 gems. (from an "approved" list maybe).

Is it me or do the AI mages seem to do better at spell selection?

[Sombre]

Those are good ideas and I'd love to see them in the game, but I think it's best to push something very simple to the Devs.

I don't know how hard it would be for them to add a toggle function to researched battlefield spells (I can't think it's that hard, all you have to do is flag the spell as not researched when it's 'off'), but I do know it would /drastically/ lessen the need for scripting, for the less hardcore players.

I'd turn iron will, body ethereal, barkskin, raise skeleton and numerous other spells off in a lot of my games if I could and for a few turns it might be good to turn off stuff like falling fires, thunder strike etc to avoid friendly fire casualties, only to turn them back on when approaching stiffer opposition.

[MaxWilson]

I haven't noticed them being particularly good at spell selection, but it's probable that the strategic AI scripts mages (it has a high tolerance for micromanagement ), which means that if you leave your mages unscripted it will be "better" for the first five rounds.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Sombre said:
I don't know how hard it would be for them to add a toggle function to researched battlefield spells (I can't think it's that hard, all you have to do is flag the spell as not researched when it's 'off'), but I do know it would /drastically/ lessen the need for scripting, for the less hardcore players.

Specifically, I think the spell research (F5) screen would be a good place to do this. Perhaps clicking on a researched spell greys it out again. This will prevent it from showing up in your list of ritual spells to cast if it's a ritual/global (makes it easier to hunt for the ones you want) and will prevent it from showing up in the tactical scripting AI list if it's a battlefield spell, as well as prevent it from being cast.

Edit: I can think of a potential complication, actually. Once you turn a spell off, how do you turn it back ON? The game would need to maintain a separate list of spells that are "really" researched, either because the right school level has been researched (Evoc-6) or because map commands started your nation out with that spell. What you'd do is keep the existing code for telling which spells are researched, but also maintain a separate, monotonically-increasing list of "really researched" spells. Every time a spell becomes available you add it to both lists; when someone grays out a spell you remove it from the "researched" list, when they click on an unresearched spell it adds it back into the "researched" list if and only if it's in the "really researched" list. That way the battlefield AI can keep its existing code for checking the "researched list," etc. I'm not sure how changes to the research lists would be encoded in .trn and .h files, though. It might be nontrivial.

-Max