Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

Update! Update! Get your update here!

Well, people, it's time for another DB update. There is a new DB file: Magic sites.

I have, with the help of Kaljamaha and with gracious assistance from IW, substantially reworked the old magic site DB made by Sunray. The new Site DB has the same format as the old one, just a bit rearranged, tightened and cleaned up, and there is new information.

The Magic site DB features

• rechecked gem income, gold and resource income and unrest values (these were in many cases significantly off since there had been no rechecking since DomPPP)
• rechecked site recruitables (there have been changes since DomPPP
• rechecked magic site levels (again, many were outright incorrect) and types (a few had been classified to wrong path)
• more accurate info on site specialties (e.g. chances of getting diseased at Inkpot End or being bLasted by holy fire at a Pool of Sanctity), and the addition of missing site specialty info (there were a lot of sites that had no specialty info listed when they had e.g. magic bonuses or scale effects)
• info on which sites are unique and rarity information for all sites
• location information, i.e. which terrain the sites can be found in (which also explains why some sites are very, very rare while others are less so)
• pruning of obsolete entries (e.g. Moss Tower has been removed, the previously unique site The Cypress Forest has been changed from nature to air and made non-unique)
• completely new entries. Ever seen a Moon Mages Circle? Did you know that each metal order had three different types of towers? I certainly didn't...
• a table (quality and accuracy not 100% guaranteed) of how many different sites can be found in what terrain and breakdown by rarity.

As to how all of this esoteric information was gleaned, Illwinter was kind enough to give me the actual source code snippet that has the site definitions, so you guys have one more reason to profoundly thank them.

The Site DB is attached to this post, the rar file contains both MS Excel and Open Office Versions. It is also available for download at Arryn's web site.

The followup post will contain an updated Unit DB (there were several entries which had some information incorrect, and there is additional info on e.g. the gold upkeep costs of several ritual summons like sea trolls and free levies like Mictlan slaves and thralls. The Magic site recruitables list also has several new entries that were discovered in the course of the Magic Site DB project.

And the third post will have the Weapons & Armor DB attached so that everyone who desires can have all three DBs (collectively the Dom2 DB) in both Excel and Open Office format. Feedback will be much appreciated.

Edi

Re: Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

Updated Dom2_DB_Units

Re: Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

Dom2_DB_Weapons_&_Armor

Re: Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

Wow, where you'd get that info on Oceania? That's the new theme right?

And thanks for the great work as always!

Re: Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

You're welcome. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Oceania is not a new theme, it's a new nation that will likely become available in patch 2.15, which to my understanding is somewhere in the near future as opposed to the distant future.

The units themselves were already in the game pre-2.14, but were not available for recruitment (other than the basic mermen from the merman indie poptype). I made a test-mod where I assigned all of those units to Atlantis and got the info that way. When I discovered that all the merman units had both land-walking and underwater forms, it seriously cut down on the number of actual new units and was just enough for one new nation, whose name we had already heard.

When you look at the ID numbers, the C'tis DT units Tomb Guard and Desert Ranger are all more recent additions than the Oceanians.

Edi

Re: Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

Hello,

Thank you for the great work!
I was especially happy about the magic sites database. Very well done.

One question is on my mind;
What is the difference between rare and uncommon sites?

I think I read somewhere that when the site is first rolled, if it's a rare then a reroll is made.
Do you have any information on uncommon sites?

Thanks again, Turms

Re: Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

I don't know the actual probabilities for common, uncommon and rare sites, but generally common sites appear at least twice as frequently as uncommon ones. It looks like there are about two or three common sites for every uncommon one, and the same seems to hold generally true for the relationship between uncommon and rare. Note that this observation is not reliable, it's more of an educated guess.

I suppose if they have something like 55-60% common, 20-25% uncommon and 15-20% rare, and rare gets always rerolled on the first try, you could get the numbers right that way. Mind you, those were off the top of my head and I have not done statistical analysis (don't know very well how, so my methodology would be off and I suck at statistical math). Kaljamaha is better equipped to answer that question, especially since he did statistical analysis of underwater sites, and the rare sites were really rare.

I can post the results of that later. Doing an overall probability analysis is complicated by the additional factors of terrain restrictions for a lot of sites, which means that frequency of certain types of terrain directly affects the results. Only if you have an equal number of every terrain will the results be reliable.

There's a map (named Sitefinder) Kaljamaha made that he and I used for DB purposes before we got the code from IW, and if anybody wishes to pursue this, we can easily make that available. It is only suitable for testing purposes, but very useful especially for site related testing.

Edi

Re: Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

Very nice! Very useful! Thanks for including the .sxc files, saves the conVersion trouble!

Comments:
-Does the site database really imply that it is always useless to search for Air4 if one has searched for Air3 already and the terrain type is not Plains?!

-I find it confusing that "special" is used in two ways: once within the level column to indicate a level-less national site and within the frequency column. I assume that a special frequency means that the site will not appear unless specified within the map file, right? (Not explained in the legend what special means.) If so, then those two "special"'s are not related and maybe replacing "(special)" with "(National)" in the level column might save others the confusion I had...

Re: Edi\'s Dom2 DB Update - New Stuff
 

You're welcome. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif As I recall, there was a bit of a request from several people in one thread to have all the DBs also in OO format, which I also personally prefer over MS Office file formats (I won't go near those with a ten foot pole, if I can help it...), so I thought it would be the decent thing to do to give people what they wanted.

Yes. The site levels and terrain restrictions have been lifted directly from the source code of Dominions 2.

Palace of Dreams is the only Lv 4 Air site, and can only appear in plains terrain. Likewise, Fire 4 searches outside waste provinces are useless, because Prison of the Desert Sun can only be found in wastes and is the only Lv 4 Fire site.

It hardly matters, really, because I tend to use Auspex, Augury and the other radar spells (and Acashic Record in late game) to do searches, much faster and more cost efficient than having mages running around costing money and being able to do useful things only every other turn.

Thanks for pointing out my oversight in forgetting to put the explanation into the Legend sheet. I'd been working enough on the file to summarily overlook it and never notice anything.

You're right, the Level "special" and Frequency "special" are unrelated. The level could easily be changed to "national" or something else, but I kept Sunray's notation in this case. The DB is a rework of his original DomPPP Site DB that just had new sites tacked on without rechecking old ones.

The special frequency means exactly what you suspect, that the site must be scripted manually to a map file, or is only generated by events (such as The Deepest Cave of the Province).

The source code is not consistent in this regard, because there is a list of special/scripted/national sites as well as some others that never appear randomly, while some of them are mixed in among the randoms but are scripted or special or National (e.g. the Carrion Groves). E.g. Iron Mine, Copper Mine, Gold Mine, Silver Mine, which are always event or map file generated, despite being common, it's some kind of idiosyncracy of the coding.

Quite a few other sites have also been marked "special", because unlike the script-only sites, these can appear randomly, but they have other operations done on them (e.g. assignment of special guardians like Starke the Ice Druid for Starke's Ice Cave) that invoke additional scripts.

The rarities in the source code are 0, 1, 2 and 5, which stand for common, uncommon, rare and special/script-only/scenario specific sites. That's why when comparing DB and source yields a couple of inconsistencies (like the mines). I don't know what to do about it, it's confusing to try and make totally accurate notation without resorting to long explanations, as this post indicates.

Edi