Are devils worth 7 blood each?

[Wendigo]

Graeme Dice said:
Spells are cast in random order. You have no way to make your spells go in any particular order, and a proper set of domes only gives a 7% chance that any one spell will make it through.

Graeme has a supberb knowledge of the game mechanics, but I believe he is wrong on this one:

Casting order is actually fully deterministic.

Every single trooper & commander in a Dominions game is tracked with an ID number (ranging from 1 to aprox 30,000) that is used to track experience, afflictions....
Spell casting orders (rituals+forging+battlefield spells) are resolved according to this number.

Back in Dom PPP you could use the debug screen to gather this data regarding your mages (& get the exact order in which spells would be cast), tho I believe this is no longer possible in Dom II. You can get some clues however if you pay atention.


This issue can & does decide games:
will you claim that Last unique commmander that just died or will you get a "Nobody answered the spell" because somebody else did?
will you forge that disputed artifact or will your opponent pull it instead?
Are you capable of getting your slaves to cast communion slave before their master runs through his script?
Will you burst the air dome with arrows & other cheapo spells before your MW/FFS have to roll vs it?
will you nail that teleporting SC with an assasination spell before he jumps away?

[Cohen]

This are damn good to know if we could know the number of the guy ...

So you can dispel too and cast a global in the same game-turn, if the dispel is cast by someone with a previous number that the guy that casts the global.

[deccan]

JK established in this thread that the casting order of ritual spells is explicitly random.

[Kel]

Humm, nice information, even if it seems a bit cheesy to use.

The easy way, I suppose, is just knowing that if mage a casts before mage b, he will always cast before him in the future.

- Kel

[Cohen]

I'd really put some clue into remote spellcasting ...

If you want to Ghost Ride a province and then teleport in a guy, you should be able to do that, your mages should coordinate the military action ... probably Dom2 counts of SNAFU too.

[johan osterman]

Cohen said:
I'd really put some clue into remote spellcasting ...

If you want to Ghost Ride a province and then teleport in a guy, you should be able to do that, your mages should coordinate the military action ... probably Dom2 counts of SNAFU too.

This is wholly unrelated to the order in which magicUsers cast their spells and is utterly unfeasible as anything except hardwired sequences for certain categories of spells, and would require additional battlechecks in the turn sequence, which would result in other now available options dissappearing.

[Cohen]

Seen you've answered to this, about the proposals about clams, contracts and such ...

It seems many ppl would like to see something changed ... and there're a lot of ideas to take from or have your own.
Should we expect something in the next patch?

[Kel]

Cohen said:
It seems many ppl would like to see something changed ... and there're a lot of ideas to take from or have your own.
Should we expect something in the next patch?

I don't think you have sufficiently proved a problem with vamps, clams, contracts or castling.

I think they are fine as they are.

- Kel

[atul]

Wendigo said:
Casting order is actually fully deterministic.

Every single trooper & commander in a Dominions game is tracked with an ID number (ranging from 1 to aprox 30,000) that is used to track experience, afflictions....
Spell casting orders (rituals+forging+battlefield spells) are resolved according to this number.

Not willing to bet my neck on this, but I believe Dom2 has added a small random variable here. Random turns resolve spells/forging in backward order, going from the largest ID to the smallest. I tested this with setting 6 casters on cast monthly ritual, and scrolling turns forward - there was only two different cast resolving ques, and they mirrored each other perfectly.

So, the order wouldn't be in a real sense random, but one can't have any foreknowledge what is the order of two castings.

Of course this can be abused if you have enough resources, putting the same casting on both ends of que, nearly ensuring a positive outcome.