Enhancement I would like to see

[Schmoe]

I know that people have discussed adding options to combat scripting. I have one that I think would be pretty simple to add, and it would greatly improve your ability to control a mage's combat actions.

Let's say, for example, that I have a Marshmaster with a random in Astral. I would like the Marshmaster to cast Quickness, Communion Master, Power of the Spheres, Eagle Eye, and then cast Nether Darts for the rest of the battle. With current scripting, he will cast a single Nether Darts and then move on to potentially useless spells, such as Raise Dead. Kind of silly, when the whole point of the scripting was to make him an effective Nether Dart caster. That brings me to:


Repeat Cast

When this option is chosen, you can select a single spell, just as if you had chosen Cast a Specific Spell. For the remainder of the combat, the mage will cast the chosen spell.


I think this would be a great help to getting mages to do what you want throughout an entire combat. With melee troops and with missile troops you can give them orders that make them effective throughout a battle. With mages, however, after the first 5 scripts it is a crapshoot. This would alleviate that problem considerably. It also seems like the code changes required would be relatively minor, so you get a very high return on investment to the game.

Any thoughts?

[Boron]

Yeah would be a good idea .

If you haven't won after 5 turns with your mages some are rather useless

I saw it at the moment myself in one of my games : My 2 caelum mages were scripted to quickness + 4x false horror to scare away the enemy normal troops .
After the 5 scripted castings they prefered phantasmal warriors and i promptly lost the battle marginal . If they had continued the horror spamming i would have won .

So if a battle Lasts longer than 5 turns and you mainly rely on Battlemagic after 5 turns or 3 with quickness you have bad chances .

[Schmoe]

I know that some of the other scripting enhancements that were proposed were improved spell selection AI, an option to define certain scripting templates for re-use, and the ability to mark specific spells as "no-cast" or create a pool of usable spells. The devs have said that AI programming is not enjoyable, so improved spell selection AI probably won't happen. The other options add quite a bit of new game logic and data storage. The Repeat Cast option adds a single scripting option (UI code), re-uses existing spell selection code (from Cast a Specific Spell), and adds minor logic to the combat AI. It can probably re-use a lot of the existing code for the Cast a Specific Spell script.

Of course, I don't actually have access to the source code, so all of this is just speculation.

[Reverend Zombie]

This is an excellent idea, IMHO.

[rylen]

Instead of adding a new command, another solution would add a "COUNT" to all actions. So, (fire dart)(fire dart) would be (fire dart x2).

Two more difficult additions I'd like to see are tweaks to the Hall of Fame list. I propose two toggles on the setup page -- "Mortal Fame" and "Celebrity Status."

"Mortal Fame" excludes pretenders from the Hall of Fame. The don't benefit but take up space. Plus they've got a big edge on the folks trying to get in.

"Celebrity Status" allows everyone to see the description (and even equipment?) of the commander. Call it the price of being well known.

I don't want these changes forced on all games, but I think they'll be fun options.

This may have happened in 2.13 -- my MP game hasn't upgraded so I haven't either. I'd like to see more information about castle capturing battles.

Rylen

[Endoperez]

This has been suggested before, multiple times, and if something is going to happen it probably would already have. Besides, if the spellcasting AI was perfect the game would be more biased towards spellcasters. They are pretty powerful as it is, and can wreak havoc even as they are ATM.

I leave it to the devs to decide if they want to add this, but I don't think they will and would not become depressed just because my mages are not under my full control.

[NTJedi]

I leave it to the devs to decide if they want to add this, but I don't think they will and would not become depressed just because my mages are not under my full control.

You are most likely correct.
This is a good idea... yet the programming and beta-testing involved makes this more of a feature request for Dom_3. The biggest improvement the game needs is improving the AI for computer opponents.

[Gandalf Parker]

Endoperez said:
This has been suggested before, multiple times, and if something is going to happen it probably would already have.

I wouldnt say that. MANY things have been suggested that have gone on some level of a to-do list. The patches have included about one-change-a-day which isnt bad for someone not doing it fulltime (that wouldnt be bad for alot of fulltimers). So I wouldnt write-off something that hasnt shown up as never showing up IMHO. As long as you dont try to put it in a "this is the single most important thing they can do" Category then you probably wont be disappointed. JohanK and KristofferO both appear to have obvious preferences as to what gets worked on first.

[Schmoe]

Endoperez said:
This has been suggested before, multiple times, and if something is going to happen it probably would already have. Besides, if the spellcasting AI was perfect the game would be more biased towards spellcasters. They are pretty powerful as it is, and can wreak havoc even as they are ATM.

I've read a lot of the threads about suggestions for improvements, and I honestly don't remember this particular enhancement being mentioned.

Obviously, it is up to the developers to decide what they like and what they don't. I'm not arguing that, and I'm not even suggesting they should like one thing over another. They've said in the past they don't like AI coding, as it is tedious for little reward, and I'm fine with that. I simply thought that this might be something that requires little work on their part that could add a lot to the game. I leave it to developers to decide if it's something that is worth their time to add.

From what I understand, your argument is "Don't prevent the mages from casting worthless crap, as otherwise they will be too effective." On the one hand, I can see that this will make battlefield magic more effective. On the other hand, I'm not sure it was the intention of the game that you only get as many uses out of certain spells as you are able to specifically script, because at the moment that is exactly the situation. Leave a fire/death mage unscripted and see how many times he casts Banefire. Not many, I'll bet. Now, why should you research Banefire? Is it so that you can force 2-5 castings through scripting and then throw the rest to the wind, or is it so that you can actually have mages use the spell throughout the combat?

Looked at from another angle, what is so crucial about having *5* guaranteed spells and the rest random? Maybe mages are too powerful already and there should only be 3 script slots available. Maybe there should be 6. Maybe the decision of 5 script slots was actually fairly arbitrary or completely unrelated to game balance. My opinion is that it was one of the latter two choices.

Anyway, I'm not actually ranting and raving against you, I'm just using your response as a platform to further explain my opinions. Hope you're not offended by that.

[Schmoe]

NTJedi said:

This is a good idea... yet the programming and beta-testing involved makes this more of a feature request for Dom_3. The biggest improvement the game needs is improving the AI for computer opponents.

Hmm, I guess it depends on how much code re-use they would be able to use when implementing it. If it requires only a little new code, then I"m not sure it would take a lot of testing. If it requires a significant chunk of new code, then you're probably right.

As for the AI improvements, I wouldn't hold my breath. I've taken a few AI courses, and it's very challenging code with a lot of potential for things to go wrong. Talk about heavy beta testing requirements! But I'm happy with the AI as is, because the wonderful MP completely replaces the need for competent AI, and I enjoy "sandboxing" against the existing AI.