Touch of madness on longbows? Ai issue

[Ewierl]

Xietor said:
No, they were not scripted to cast touch of madness.

Two other useful changes I would like to see for mages, is (1)where after you set your 5 spells, to have an option to cast only "offensive" spells.

I'd been thinking something very much like this as well. Combat spells could be pretty easily categorized into a handful of groups: attack (direct damage/death/paralyze etc), harass (slow/penalize/curse etc), summon, and buff. Then, mages could have an option for after their specific script runs out to choose, for example, "cast buff" rather than just the "cast spells" currently available.

Heck, if there's any chance this could actually be coded, I'd be happy to volunteer to categorize spells...

[MaxWilson]

Ewierl said:
Heck, if there's any chance this could actually be coded, I'd be happy to volunteer to categorize spells...

That would be really cool. I wonder, though--historically, do game changes that require UI alterations get made in patches, or only in the next version of Dominions?

-Max

[SafeKeeper]

I suggested the breaking-down of spells before, in the lenghty list of suggestions I made prior to the release of Dom 3. Offensive spells, support spells, defensive spells, and whatever the Heck else. Would've been really nice. Being able to toggle gem usage on/off for individual commanders would be nice, too, to make them save the gems they carried for later, more important showdowns.

I think it'd also be nice, though a lot of work for our programming duo, to have spells be more 'intelligent' and dynamic. But I guess that one goes without saying.

[Ewierl]

SafeKeeper said:Being able to toggle gem usage on/off for individual commanders would be nice, too, to make them save the gems they carried for later, more important showdowns.

I thought about that, but I don't think it's practical without a very advanced AI. Just a toggle wouldn't solve the problem, after all; one of my least favorite things to have happen is when I have an army all set up to storm a castle, and my opponent drops a medium-sized army for a field battle outside first (breaking seige, or reinforcements from elsewhere). All those gems and spells and formations scripted for castle-storming get wasted before the main battle. A toggle wouldn't help that situation!

[Xietor]

But a toggle to only cast spells that require gems if scripted would help a ton, and it would not require too much work, would it?

[MaxWilson]

I note that you might also want the toggle to control whether they use the minimum number of gems required; otherwise a D2 mage casting e.g. Shadow Blast will burn 2 gems instead of 1 to try to keep his fatigue down.

It's true the toggle wouldn't solve every situation, but it would eliminate the annoying micromanagement of juggling gems between scouts and mages. It would solve *that* problem, at least.

-Max