[Arryn]

Originally posted by Aikamun:
The issue of Do / Don't Cast lists comes down to game balance. Mages, backed by just moderate research levels, would be immensely more powerful. The recruitment costs of mages would need to be raised proportionally to their new powers.

I strongly disagree with both it being a balance issue and with mages needing to cost more if it's changed.

It's a design flaw/oversight, technically. The devs only have so much time to create stuff, and to fix bugs. When they built the system, they (being a very small team of 2) didn't have the resources (time, etc.) to plan for every contingency and code accordingly. They implemented AI-driven combat spellcasting code that is one notch above basic. The only "frill" is a 5-order queue. Extra niceties like exclude lists, or a UI with enabling checkboxes they simply didn't have time for (assuming they had the idea in the first place). Therefore odd things happen during combat. No one in their right mind would intentionally design code that would spam useless spells. And to say that mages should cost more after this is fixed implies the system works as intended. Hardly. The devs have already stated that spell-spamming is not intended behavior for the combat AI. The current costs of mages assumes the combat AI casts spells rationally, which isn't the present situation.