Really annoying spell scripting issue - Bug?

[lch]

vfb said:
"Touch of Madness" gets scored really high because for some reason buffs are weighted much higher than attack spells. I can't find any way to mod the score lower. Nice stuff like "Storm of Thorns" is stuck at 150 points.

Low fatigue, some kind of buff, what's not to love??

vfb said:
As a side note, "Legions of Steel" is totally hosed as far as score is concerned ... the "Number of effects=5" effectively multiplies its score by 5, to the 6000 range. There's nothing even close. But at least legions is occasionally just a waste of casting time, not actually damaging like madness.

Ah, that explains why unscripted mages like to spam that spell. Even though it's quite useless with the number of effects limited by 5, of course.

[vfb]

It's area 25, number of effects 5. But the effects all strike together. In each "effect", the aoe will not overlap. But the aoe from multiple effects can overlap.

Like this (the log is in "typescript", one cast of Legions in the log):

# grep "aoe1 dmg64 eff10" typescript
blastsqr: unr2034 x21 y15 aoe1 dmg64 eff10 spc1086324736 as10193 al9
.... etc ...

# grep "aoe1 dmg64 eff10" typescript | wc -l
125

# grep "aoe1 dmg64 eff10" typescript | head -25 | sort -u | wc -l
25

# grep "aoe1 dmg64 eff10" typescript | sort -u | wc -l
48

This is with five clusters of army units; the same single cluster was chosen for a "hit" by all 5 "effects". All five clusters were in range, centered about 6 squares away, but max distance from each other. Only the units in one cluster got affected.

Legions of Steel could be just the equivalent of about an aoe-50 buff, for scoring-calculating purposes.

And Legions does rank below some self-buffs, depending on who's casting. A Marverni druid preferred to spam Legions.

A A3D3S3F3E3N3W3 pretender preferred to self-buff first:

spellscore, Invulnerability score 41579 (boost 99 scorat 0)
spellscore, Astral Shield score 36663 (boost 90 scorat 0)
spellscore, Fire Shield score 18540 (boost 91 scorat 0)
spellscore, Legions of Steel score 15044 (boost 116 scorat 0)

And the best part is, none of this analysis help in the slightest for stopping ordinary E2+ casters from spamming it.

The other "best" part is during testing I finally ran into Satima and her fancy robe, first time ever ... grrr...

[Evil Dave]

Here's a short mod that turns Berserkers and Touch of Madness off completely. It just sets both spells so they'll never be researched.

Code:

---

  

#modname "Touch of Sanity"

#description "Turns off Berserkers and Touch of Madness"



#selectspell "Berserkers"

#school -1

#end



#selectspell "Touch of Madness"

#school -1

#end

---

The mod's also here to save y'all the fatigue cost of cutting and pasting it. (You may need to right-click "Save as...".)

[Networkingguru]

Evil Dave said:
Here's a short mod that turns Berserkers and Touch of Madness off completely. It just sets both spells so they'll never be researched.

Code:

---

  

#modname "Touch of Sanity"

#description "Turns off Berserkers and Touch of Madness"



#selectspell "Berserkers"

#school -1

#end



#selectspell "Touch of Madness"

#school -1

#end

---

The mod's also here to save y'all the fatigue cost of cutting and pasting it. (You may need to right-click "Save as...".)

Thanks a TON Dave! That should be very helpful!

[Kristoffer O]

vfb said:
It's area 25, number of effects 5. But the effects all strike together. In each "effect", the aoe will not overlap. But the aoe from multiple effects can overlap.

Hmm, seems like a bug. I can't imagine it is intentional.