Massive fatigue spells

[MaxWilson]

Kristoffer O said:
You are on track. Max nbr of gems are mage lvl. This includes casting cost and increase lvl cost.

thejeffs example is correct.

Furthermore:
A mage can only use one gem to empower himself during a casting. This is the only way for him to reduce fatigue. He will not use more gems then one to reduce fatigue, and fatigue is only reduced as a side effect of him being temporarily more powerful.

There's a bug, then. In a test game last night, I gave an E9 Cyclops orders to cast Earthquake (E4, 300 fatigue) twice and gave him 7 gems just in case he decided to use one gem to reduce fatigue.

He cast it once using 6 (3 + 3 for fatigue) gems and didn't have enough gems for the other. By the way, he ended with 40 fatigue after one casting, and would have had 60-odd if he had done it with only 3 gems, so the bug makes casting much more costly in gems and not much cheaper in fatigue.

-Max

[Twan]

Yes I noticed the same thing, mages often use more than one additional gem, in addition to base gem cost of spells requiring gems (and this even when they have the level for the spell).

If only one can be used to reduce fatigue and boost level at the same time, there should be a bug somewhere.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they use another time the base gem cost of the spell to reduce fatigue, if they level and number of gems is sufficient, instead of base gem cost + just 1 gem to empower/reduce fatigue.

[MaxWilson]

Hmmm, interesting hypothesis. I'll check this later.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Twan,

I just checked, and the hypothesis turns out to be false. Some casters can overuse gems by more than 100%. I had a D6 caster scripted to do Shadow Blast x6, and his number of gems went like this:

Pre-battle: 20
Round 1 complete: 17
Round 2: 14
Round 3: 11
Round 4: 5
Round 5: 0

Some weird things going on with usage there (at the beginning he's almost conservative), but at one point he's blowing 6 gems on a 100 fatigue spell when he's already +4 on levels.

-Max

[Renojustin]

Spellcaster AI really needs to be tightened up. Just fixing this gem use issue would go a tremendously long way toward helping us script for major battles.

When we've played a game for two months, and then spend an hour or more scripting for a major battle, only to see your mage blow 5 gems on a Shadow Blast (when KO just said you cannot ever spend more than gem cost +1) and he can no longer cast that BE that is the key to your strategy...

disappointing isn't really the word. More like, time to find another game.

[MaxWilson]

I'll report in the bug shortlist thread. Done.

[Endoperez]

"By using a magic gem, a caster gains one skill level in that magic path. This can be used both to allow a mage to cast a spell for which he would not normally have the skill, or to reduce the fatigue of a spell, or both."

"Example: Bageroth is a Fire-3, Astral-2 mage. He wants to cast Astral Fires in battle. This spell requires Astral-3 and Fire-1. Bageroth could use one Astral gem to increase his Astral skill to 3, which would make him able to cast the spell. He could use two Astral gems, which would not only allow him to cast the spell, but would reduce the spell fatigue by half. He could not use three or more gems because his original skill in Astral magic is two."


The Manual, page 89, "Using magic gems in combat", referred to in the index, page 290, as 'gems, in combat, 89'.

The mechanics work as was intended. It seems Kristoffer was wrong on the part where he was quoted. Perhaps he misremembered; it wouldn't be the first time.
The AI doesn't work as it should. That can be listed as a minor bug. I suggest that you now discuss how many gems AI should be allowed to use in a single spell, without adding in a checkbox for "spend these gems", without adding in a selection tool for how many gems can be used in a battle, without complicating spell selection by you having to choose how many gems are used per spell, and without adding any other mechanics.



As an example:
It would be better if AI only used one gem for reducing fatigue. 400-fatigue spell cast by a mage 2 levels higher than the required level could use 4 gems and be left at 133 fatigue + enc, or 5 gems and be left at 100 fatigue + enc, but not 6 gems and be left at 80 fatigue +enc. At least there wouldn't be any confusion about the matter.

[Twan]

If using more than one gem was really intended (KO is the the guy who designed the mechanic, when Bruce Geryk in the manual just described how he understood the game was supposed to work, so I'm not sure the manual has to be > to KO view on the subject)

Anyway, a good formula for me would be something like :
(carried number of gems) / X rounded down (X being a fixed number between 5 and 10)

It would allow the player to be sure that mages having less than X gems don't use them just to reduce fatigue, but also to make them use several gems by giving them a lot.

A good value for X would be 9 because 8 gems is the maximum gem cost for a battle spell (so with X=9, giving 8 gems to a mage and using a 0 gem spell in round one, you can be sure he will still have 8 gems to cast even master enslave in round 2 instead of using one to reduce fatigue on first spell).

Then if using a formula is considered too complex, I'd simply say one per spell.

[thejeff]

Max, if you've still got that test you just did around, what were the fatigue levels after each cast? Maybe there's some logic in that. Also does anything show up in the debug log about gem use?

As for a better mechanic, I'd like to see it tied to fatigue. Use a gem if it'll save you a certain amount of fatigue. Maybe 20 points?
So for Shadow Blast:
D2 caster 1+0 gems: 100 fat
D2 caster 1+1 gems: 50 fat
Uses 1 gem, saves 50 fat

D3 caster 1+0 gems 50 fat
D3 caster 1+1 gems 33 fat
D3 caster 1+2 gems 25 fat
Uses no gems. would only save 17 fat.

Max's D6 caster would only use 20 fatigue without gems, using 3 only saves him 8 fatigue. Using 6 saves him another 3. That's silly.

I wonder if the AI is figuring in the extra area and damage? No noticeable fatigue savings, but if it does a lot more damage it might consider it worth it.


I'd also prefer if they wouldn't use gems if, even using gems, fatigue would still end up over 200.

[Loren]

How about a different approach:

When faced with gems and scripted spells the AI should look at what combination of assigning gems to spells results in the lowest final fatigue. That's how the gems should be allocated. Under no conditions should gems be used so as to preclude casting all scripted spells unless it's impossible to cast them all.