Various questions
 

Having spend awhile reading through and searching this forum there's a few mechanics that aren't fully clear to me, was wondering if anyone could kindly answer them for me:

a) For precision, what is the actual hit %? would 10 precision hit 46% of the time and follow the standard progress (11 precision = 54%). I am wondering about the dimishing utility of throwing eye of aiming on top of eagle eye/ aim / guiding wind.

b) In Edi's excellent DB in regards to site. I read somewhere that a frequency of roughly 0=60%, 1=30%, 2=10%. However in http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showt...t=38133&page=2 #11 It seems that lvl 1-4 sites each have 0,1,2 (common, uncommon, rare), is the distribution of lvl 1-4 site all the same? Meaning 25% of each level?

c) working from b), how does the game spawn the sites in a province and what the terrain effect is? I know there's 4 sites max, and only the best terrain apply. in a 45% spawn setting, a forest farm mountain province (+20 -30 +20) should give +20% as it's the best? given a 65% to spawn site, does it roll 4 shots of 65% or does it roll one and see pass or fail (if fail it stops right there). Is there a list of terrain with % chance to spawn which path? (I've seen some good analyst on total 0/1/2 by path by terrain already, but nothing on the spawn% of each path's site by terrain)

d) Ring of regen (or N4 + saint cloth) can counteract disease completely? So a scout with bane venom or fetish can last indefinitely?

e) Buff sequence on army, I've had a lot of trouble to direct my buffs (const 5 armor buff, body eth, luck ...etc) as my mage either buff the wrong thing or the army charged ahead (on hold and attack cmd) before I got around to them. I've read some tactics and the closest I got is having units guard mage while keeping others out of range, and have mage retreat after full cycle of buff. Of course you need another commander left and some chaff to distract. Are there any better way to quad/penta buff a set of elite more efficently? Having to move my mages in and out gets annoying really fast.

f) If I key a mage with "Return", is he/she immune to horror and assination? She should go 1st everytime?

g) Are domes the best way to protect your research center vs map spells? Does it intercept assassin spells like infernal disease, earth attack ...etc or only the DD spells like firestorm / seeking arrow?

h) is having a lab without fort in any province (for MP game) asking for it? as things could jump in and jump right out after?

I) For improved cross-breed, what are the monster list? Other then the bunch of variant foul spawn I've seen the cockatrice, grotesque and dracolion, are there anything else? (maybe something worth GoR on?). I personally love this spell, and also LA R'yeth's void gate.

J) I've noted that when I take luck +3, if I have provinces outside of my dom and have misfortune, I tend to get bad events for those first before I can any good event in a turn. Is this an actual mechanic or is it gambler's folly on my part? (I have had around 12 provinces with +3 luck, and 3 with -2 or -3 misfortune, and I score 1-2 bad event almost every turn on those 3 provinces)

L) EA Sauromatia has a caster hero with air, but after I used her for about a dozen turns she dissappeared into thin air. Is this due to her discription? So she has to sit in the capital? (Much like hama dryad have to stay in its province or risk getting wiped?). I assume its the same mechanic as the blood guards, which is a shame consider how awesome blood guards are in EA.

M) when I have mages in the castle forging or research, is there a way to set it to respond to attacks without setting it to patrol and waste its turn? I keep getting my recruiting locked down by weenie armies at the gate but unable to take my mages off forge / research / ritutal duty... Until I pushed the border back.

N) When sending horrors (Blood) and your stealth army joins the fight, does the horror turn on you?

Phew that's the lot, any input would be very welcome. I searched most of them but it could very well have slipped pass me :o so apologies in advance if there's big neon signs elsewhere that answered any of these.

Re: Various questions
 

a) The mechanism in the manual explains this quite accurately, although as I don't have the manual to hand I can't type it out. It isn't a case of diminishing returns, though.

b: No. There are less high level sites. Search level is not directly linked to rarity.

c: Sites are determined at game start. The game more or less rolls sites in each province until a roll fails to generate a site, IIRC.

d: Regen reduces hp loss to 1/year, rather than completely negating hp loss.

e: Welcome to spellcaster AI :) Making sure there's only one group of soldiers in range of a buff helps a lot, as does the hold and attack order.

f: Yes.

g: Domes have a chance to intercept any spell cast directly at the province they inhabit. So assassin spells like Earth Attack can be stopped. As can friendly units trying to get in via teleport.

h: It's a risk, yes.

i: There is probably a list, but I don't know it.

j: Interesting - I don't know the answer to this one.

l: Don't know off the top of my head.

m: If you want researchers to respond to attacks on their province, don't build a castle for them to hide in. Cross-reference with h: above :D

Re: Various questions
 

Thanks a ton! a lot still flew under my radar even after I read the manual (especially the precision :doh:)

Re: Various questions
 

a) Precision isn't quite so simple, though the mechanic is clearly defined. Precision affects the chance of hitting the target square and that chance drops with range, so it's not as simple as x% chance to hit. More importantly, since a range attack will affect whoever is in the square that it does hit, precision doesn't even directly control the chance of hitting someone. If you're aiming for the center of large army and your shot is off by 3-4 squares who really cares?

c. It's 4 separate rolls of whatever the chance is for that province. The mechanism doesn't pick which path and then pick a site, rather sites have restrictions on which terrains they can appear in. Forests do not have a higher percentage chance of having nature sites, there are more nature sites that can appear in forests. It works out pretty much the same though.


d. I don't believe regen completely removes the chance of getting further afflictions from disease either, though it does reduce them.

Re: Various questions
 

I don't know the exact answer to this, but it may have something to do with the province numbers. Meaning that the game may check for random events starting with the lowest province and moving up or something like that. Province numbers are generally lower in the bottom left corner of the map so depending on where your war is taking place, all the provinces with the lower numbers may have misfortune and be picking up the events. Again, just speculation but that could be a possible reason for your luck scales not working well.

Re: Various questions
 

Interesting, so basically the game checks from lowest to highest # province to generate events until it fills the 3-4 events quota per turn. I should start another game with Turmoil 3 luck 3 and expand north to see. In my current game I jade dagger blood rushed my new provinces so the problem has gone away, a 3k gold event came right after :happy:, sacrificing virgin works!

Re: Various questions
 

I doubt that in this case. It's a common randomizing mechanism in the game, but it would be too blatant here. Easy enough to check on in a big empire. Events would cluster top or bottom each turn (most of the id number order "randoms" randomly switch from top-down to bottom-up.)

Re: Various questions
 

Well I'm not saying for sure that it does it from lowest to highest, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is a mechanic that is something like that. For instance, when you build your empire out, you often get events on the fringes of your empire and you less frequently get events in your capital and your core provinces. I have definitely experienced what you are talking about when I am expanding in a certain direction into a misfortune dominion and get a disproportionate amount of bad events in newly conquered provinces.

Re: Various questions
 

You are getting comparatively more events in the enemy provinces you are expanding into because of the way the game handles scales and dominion. As you will mostly always have a greater chance of events occurring in enemy misfortune dominion than your own if you have Order scales. This is because bad scales affect a province regardless of whose dominion is there, but good scales only affect a province (in your favour) when there is (your) positive dominion in them.

As an example, your nation, and the nation you are invading, both have the popular combination of Order 3 Misfortune 2.

In positive dominion this gives (values are for CBM 1.6)
- Chance of event happening = -15% (Order 3) + +14% (Misfortune 2) = -1%

In negative dominion this gives
- Chance of event happening = 0% (Order 3) + +14% (Misfortune 2) = +14%

Chance that event is good = -30% in both cases.


So you will get more events when expanding into enemy misfortune dominion because that is how the mechanics work. I can't say I have personally seen any evidence to suggest that which province gets events each turn has any connection at all with the province numbers.

(Edit2: Now I think about it more, I guess the game has to have some sort of order for deciding on which province gets events. So perhaps, as many things in the game, it's random each turn between cycling in order through 'high-low' or 'low-high' province numbers. Maybe Edi can shed light on this due to his recent excursions into the event code)

Re: Various questions
 

c: Actually, forests *do* have higher density of nature and death sites. Somewhere I did a statistical analysis on all sites and determined the median gem likelihood on each type of terrain. search the threads and you'll find it.
f: Only if you are on defense.
l: Sauromatia has two heros, one kills and eats the other if they meet.
on the sites more or less it rolls a site, based on the site %. If the site is rare it has to be confirmed with another rare roll.

Sites are selected according to a mask filter for the territory in question. Finally, sites continue, up to 4, until it fails the site% roll.

Re: Various questions
 

Thanks for all the good stuff.

I'll definitely have to find your statistic by terrain type thread, it is exactly what I'm looking for. :happy: I started on it a little by myself with Edi's excellent DB, but there's some site mask that don't correspond to anything in the terrain index.

The site gen mechanic seems strange, I've read the same mechanic on the other thread, though I asked again because those threads had arguments on the mechanic.

Playing on default 45% site gen, that should mean 55% of the lands have no sites at all, and 45% have 1-4 site. The breakdown seem to be:

55% Provinces have no site
45% of them having sites:
4% - 4 sites
9% - 3 sites
20% - 2 sites
67% - 1 site

My gut feeling is that they appear more often and the 2 sites show up more then 20%, though that's probably gambler's folly on my part. I'll have to test a 50% game with a rainbow pretender methodically.

Re: Various questions
 

You must mean Delgnat. She has the same mechanic as Naids. She loses hp each month she is away from your capitol.

Incorrect. Sauromatia has three heroes: Kirke, Skögu and Delgnat. Kirke and Skögu have animosity towards one other and it is possible to have Skögu eat Kirke by a bad event if they are in the same province.

Re: Various questions
 

There was a long debate about how sites were generated a while back. The conclusion was that the 4 checks were separate. The other mechanism just didn't match the results.

Finalgenesis's numbers look right for the theoretical chance based on rolling until a check fails.
Here's what I've found in one EA game: (Site searching mostly complete)
31 total provinces
0 sites: 4 - 13%
1 site: 8 - 26%
2 sites: 12 - 39%
3 sites: 5 - 16%
4 sites: 2 - 6%

I haven't calculated the chances for separate rolls or figured in terrain, but that just doesn't match the roll until you fail mechanic.

Re: Various questions
 

I'm not incorrect, I answered the question asked - which wasn't how many sauromatia heroes are there, its why did X disappear.

For example: 'Jomol has two army units, that will kill each other.' is also true, and also does not say Jomol only has two army units.

Re: Various questions
 

Yeah, I have to agree with you here. And thinking about things, I think the mechanism that was announced for rare sites is also wrong. Still, any individual game map isn't useful because of terrain. We need to make a map of all farmlands, stick strands of Arcane power on, and see..

Lets imagine that each province has four slot

Re: Various questions
 

Thanks for the date :happy: (Still working on mine), in EA the spawn is 45% I think, but you got 0 sites only about 13% of the time, whereas the "roll 1 by 1 until failure" mechanics would mean that 55% provinces should have 0 sites? Your data would fit a "roll 4 dices" mechanics better where the chances are:

assume 45% spawn:
0 sites - 9% (55%^4)

Re: Various questions
 

The individual game isn't conclusive, due to terrain and incompletely searched provinces. Still, even the rough data shows us something. Those results are on a bell curve as "roll 4 dice" would suggest, not dropping off steeply as expected with "roll 1 by 1 until failure".

Re: Various questions
 

Agree, I'll stick with a "roll 4 dices" theory when planning my searches. Now to dive into Edi's DB and calculating % of each path base on terrain... (I hate my optimizer obsession :doh:)

Meanwhile in a SP test game I ran into a new question:

Is it possible to rearrange commanders on the world map? Eg. my research center have various mages in complete chaos, I'd like to put the various different mages with various bonus together for easier management (skelly spam squad, astral squad, seeking arrow squad, priest animator squad ...etc).

Nothing in the manual and search didn't generate any dead-on hits :shock: Any answers will be appreciated.

Re: Various questions
 

I think the answer is no, but could you clarify your question a little?

Re: Various questions
 

Oh, okay. You really should be more precise when anwsering questions. General statements like that are really misleading and not really helpful.

Re: Various questions
 

Ah, I meant that where there is a list of 4 Columns of commanders when you right click on a province on the world map, where you can scroll down to see the rest. They can't be organized in any way that I can tell, I've renamed them all but would still like to have them sorted by alphabetical order, it would make my crafting, mass ritual, mass priest animating much easier that way then hunting through 50 commanders to select all the right ones.

Re: Various questions
 

There is no way to reorder them, I'm afraid. They appear in order of unit ID by the way, and this can be useful for setting up communions.

Re: Various questions
 

Ah okay thank a ton. For the ID pertaining to communion, you mean if you want to set up reverse communion where your master and slaves go in specific order? I'll have to try it out, it's unfortunate that AI is too weak to force my hand on this monstrosity :D

Hmmm I wonder if its possible to mod an interface to change unit ID in game as a way to rearrange commander list and controlling communion order.

Re: Various questions
 

No, that's impossible. That would not only modify the interface, but the game behaviour. Mods can only change the base values of elements that the game is being made up of, i.e. units, armors, weapons, spells and so on.

Re: Various questions
 

Hugely unfortunate, I'll live with it, I appreciate the info.

Re: Various questions
 

You can swift click them to group them. This means that when you select one from the group, others are selected as well. That helps somewhat.

Re: Various questions
 

yeah, but when you have 2 pages of them each with random picks in path, and you want to drop a couple summon horror / Infernal disease on an invading army....

Re: Various questions
 

Rename them. Not fun, but it cuts down micro. Just don't ever empower one in the HOF.

Re: Various questions
 

Some new questions on movement phase (I've read P.71 manual on the phase order already):

1. Do assasination spells (Earth attack / Infernal disease ...etc) happen during assassination phase or magic battle phase?

2. if assa spells occur during magic battle phase, does it come before or after magic battles summons? (Call of the wild, call of the wind, infernal horde, summon horror ...etc)

3. If you cloud trapeze / teleport / astral travel into an enemy province, I assume they enter magic battle phase or can it join your mundane battle? If you had some summon horror spells on the same province would those unit fight in the same instance?

4. Stealth units attacking the province its in, if there are both ritual summon attacks and mundane army attack, the stealth unit will join the magic battle? I understand that stealth units join mundane battle phase if there is no magic battle?

Re: Various questions
 

1. Assasination spells work immediately after they are cast, so if you target enemy commander without teleport abilities or with teleport abilities but not on the lab (and not equipped with boots of planes or gatestone), your assasination will happen, and it will happen before any magic movement related battles. If you target enemy commander on the lab with tele abilities, you have essentially 50/50 chance to initiate assasination (depends on unit IDs and the orders flow direction for the current turn). If the target has boots of planes, I think he will always move first if he was ordered to cast teleportation from boots (but here I may be wrong).
2. All magic assasinations will take place before any magic movement or magic summoning ordinary battles.
3. If you teleport force A on enemy prov and move force B there, you have several possible outcomes:
A destroys enemy, B moves to your province to join with A.
A loses, B moves to enemy prov to fight remains of his forces.
If enemy also moves his forces, they will join after fight A if you lose, or attack your combined forces if you win and he moves from neighboring province or has flying. If he ordered move from not-neighboring province and the force in target prov was destroyed during magic movement, the movement is cancelled.
If you send Horrors or GR on the same prov, they will fight independently of your A force but definitely before B moves in. So, in this case it's possible to have A fight with defenders, then GR/Horrors fight with A. If they win, the prov will become independent and your B force will take it without fight. There is no way to ensure that GR/Horrors will fight enemy and not your army, or at least I don't know about it.
4. This is somewhat tricky, at least for me. Some observations: if you attack from stealth and teleport some force in, the stealth force will appear during the magic battle. If you attack from stealth and cast GR/Horrors instead, you can end with attacking full enemy force with your stealth force, or just capture the prov if GR already cleared opposition (not sure here, haven't done this for a while). Personally I prefer moving stealth force from neighboring prov which you *don't attack remotely* this turn, this way you will definitely capture the enemy prov if the GR/Horrors succeed in clering opposition and the enemy not moving something there too from neighboring square, which is actually a good counter to this type of raiding.
If there was no magic battles, stealth units will join ordinary fight or attack alone, and I think it'll happen after ordinary movement, so you can't "ambush" the enemy without magic movement/summon "trigger".

Re: Various questions
 

That's some great info many thanks! I was pulling my hair out when my stealth unit refuse to join the main army attack and got the whole unit killed >.< I guess there's no way to control whether a stealth unit bands with the main attack or attack solo.

Re: Various questions
 

Seems I have nothing but questions... Here's another.

If I intend to stick 2 stone bird (okay maybe not so economical...), is there a way to control what weapon a thug use first? e.g. I want the 8x attack to hit the enemy before I use the main, -16 defense should open any thug/sc up...

Also when using dual stone bird, do I get 2x 6-range repel defense? Be nice if it the thug is also a little bit raid-able.

Also I read somewhere that D9 bless gives an 100% auto disease effect. Does using Shroud saint mage dropping ritual spells (fires afar, murder winter, flames from sky ...etc) and battlefield spell confer 100% disease? I already know it should drop tons of affliction :D This seemed crazy to me at first until I realized there's a little spell called leprosy...

Finally, do +penetrate item confer the bonus to base attacks / seductions ...etc? Say mind blast, mind control (aboleth hero), life drain, Petrification, vengeance, fear, awe ...etc.

Re: Various questions
 

A Death 9 bless doesn't give a disease effect, it gives a resistable 2 Armor Negating Damage on top of any other damage. I'm uncertain whether it's conferable like the primary (not the 2 AN damage) Death bless is. I doubt it.

They don't confer to attacks. I think they *may* to seduction, but I'm not certain. I always wanted +pen to do stuff too, like help with dispelling globals and stuff, but it doesn't quite work that way, apparently.

Re: Various questions
 

1) No way to change attack sequence, however if you put boots of quickness/jade armor you'll be able to strike with 2nd attack sequence *after* def had been reduced. Also I don't know if 2 birds combine, usually there is better use for 2nd misc (luck/ama). Don't know about repel.
2) Never heard about 100% desease, probably there is some mistake here.
3) Penetration only helps with spells cast directly by the mage, not by weapons. So for example you cannot increase penetration for charm crown or ethereal crossbow. I think the same goes for built-in weapons you mentioned.

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The Death 9 bless effect (2AN damage) only affects melee weapons. Just like the F9 effect.

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I got the disease tip from :

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showt...=38392&page=20

Love this forum, thanks for all the answers :happy:

Re: Various questions
 

It's a common misconception.

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Maybe you're thinking about the bonus to affliction rate? A unit with a death bless will have a bonus (+100% at D4, +350% at D9) to the chance of causing afflictions. So if you have a high death bless it's a really good idea to use the shroud when casting overland damage spells :)

Re: Various questions
 

Yes, I'd forgotten about that. It would only be with the melee weapon D9 effect. I suspect it also only happens if the 2AN damage gets by the mr check, which means it's least effective on those you'd most like to disease.

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Hmm, Endoperez says that it's a secondary effect of the death weapons you receive at D9. Which would mean that it only works for physical attacks, not spells.

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Ah well, I suppose having 350% affliction rate with your nuking mage is more then enough, disease is like overkill lol.

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Actually it's not a 350% affliction rate, it's a +350% bonus to your ordinary affliction rate. I find it easier to describe it in mathematics :D -> (affliction chance after bless) = (affliction chance before bless)*4.5

It's still pretty good though. It's considered one of the weaker blesses but it's good in some situations (like when casting flames from the sky).

Re: Various questions
 

The affliction rate is absolutely worthless.

Death is for tarts, banes, mound fiends, darkness, soul vortex, ...etc

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I dunno, i'm a fan of a d-bless for mages. You'd be surprised how often an inconvenient chest wound makes the difference between an SC or tough sacred kicking your *** or falling over dead. Limp, cripple, and blind can all be rather nice as well. And scoring feeblemind or mute against mages is generally enough to make them absolutely worthless.

That said, D4-6 is generally enough for these purposes. No need to go all the way to D9.

Edit:
The bonus affliction chance is separate from the D9 weapon effect and applies to any damage the blessed creature does. Mages casting spells? Check. Sacred hydra poison cloud's poison damage? Check.

Re: Various questions
 

Lol a D9 saint shroud mage dropping AoE ritual/battle spell sounds good, too bad the death weapon +2 AN + disease bonus don't get added. The D9 bless actually sounds a lot better vs thugs/SC/Giants then the standard fire bless in mid-late game. You'd get a super efficient ghost summon with that kind of Death...

Some more questions popped in to my head:

- When using stone sphere into domed provinces, do you trigger the dome's retaliation effect if any? If the retaliation effect does occur and your sphere holder dies, do your other commanders pick up the stone sphere (assuming they have slots for it) 100% of the time?

- if a D9 saint shroud mage cast global or dome, like that lighting strike in your dominion global or a fire/ice dome, do those lighting/fire/ice damage also carry +350% affliction power?

Re: Various questions
 

I think this is a tough one:

- Will a mage casting transformation / crossbreeding get better chances at rares creature(s) if Lady of fortune (or firebird for that matter) was present in the same provinces.

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AFAIK no.

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I did about 60 casts and had no discernable differenc.e

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Are they an independent effect, or do they increase the local luck scale? Because i think its based on local luck scale.

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My presumption was they increased the luck scale.
Either way, my tests were done G3L3 vs G3L3 with LoF.