my mages cast crap spells?

[MaxWilson]

Playing devil's advocate here, motivated by the phrase "biggest problem": All of those ideas sound nice. At the same time, to a certain extent the art of war is about learning what works and what doesn't within the constraints you have, and as long as I can figure out WHY things work the way they do (Storm of Thorns optimizes for damage) I can still optimize. Stupid mages are one thing. Stupid, random and uncontrollable mages would be something entirely different. (You could still optimize, but it would be along the lines of "don't research the conjuration tree if you want to be able to cast Fire Storm." No fun.) I don't think the UI is a problem as it stands.

But, yeah. #2 and #5 would be especially great, and I could see how #4 would help some people a lot. Maybe we could agree that the combat UI is the area most urgently needing attention? (Well, that and disbanding units.) Although I'm all pumped about automatic site searching working properly in the next patch. Yay for Johan!

-Max

[mivayan]

Manwich said:
I then researched into conjuration to allow my mages to pheonix fire and cast fire storm, or flame storm.

You'll never get them to start a battle with phoenix power(+1 fire), fire storm(Battlefield enchantment) without scripting. So that's one guy to script at least.

And no, giving mages way more gems than they need for the scripted spells rarely works.. need to hand out a few gems each important battle to the flame storm casters. Maybe the fire storm caster spends the whole battle unconsious so he cant waste gems?

You could make just one hotkey with phoenix power, flame storm, flame storm, falling fires, falling fires, and give it to all your mages to save time.

[Loren]

One point:

I doubt the game keeps track of what spells are researched. That's needless data, it can be recreated in an eyeblink from the list of what research levels have been reached.

I do agree the AI goes nuts with buffing. SP, I was trying to take down the last few LA Ryleh provinces. Sending armies against them just resulted in them being routed for no gain at all. I had gems to burn, I empowered/wished my pretender to all 10's and over 500 hp and sent him in. Routed, zero kills?!?! I view the battle--he spends ages buffing himself and then starts summoning garbage, none of which makes it through the enemy spells. At no point does either side ever cast a spell or take a swing at the other (except the summons)!

Every attempt to script him to do something useful failed until I finally simply told him to attack without casting any buffs first. He still routed after 50 turns but managed to accomplish something first. I never did kill any of the powerful units but I did manage to kill a few prophets and then my dominion could push through and kill him that way.

[mivayan]

Loren said:
Every attempt to script him to do something useful failed until I finally simply told him to attack without casting any buffs first.

Did you try to cast 5 buffs and then attack? Was there already too many summons in play then?

Something that looks fun in the theory at least is to cast Foul Vapors, Shark attack, invulnerability, soul vortex, summon earth power (or fire shield or personal luck or personal regeneration), then attack.

[Loren]

mivayan said:

Did you try to cast 5 buffs and then attack? Was there already too many summons in play then?

Something that looks fun in the theory at least is to cast Foul Vapors, Shark attack, invulnerability, soul vortex, summon earth power (or fire shield or personal luck or personal regeneration), then attack.

It's been long enough I don't remember what all I tried. What I do recall was that if I scripted any spells the AI did it's own thing and utterly ignored the script.

I had enough good items I didn't have that much use for buffing, anyway. The force I was facing couldn't get past my regeneration even unbuffed.