Are devils worth 7 blood each?

[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?

[Thufir]

Graeme Dice said:

This wouldn't make any difference, because I'm going to have 50 mages researching in my capital underneaeh several domes by the time I have 100 clams anyways.

I've read all the following debate on domes and whatnot, but I still believe it would be an improvement to require mages to have the clams. It may not make a big difference, but it will make a difference. For one thing, even if the mages are as invulnerable as scouts, it is more thematically appropriate, and just looks better.

But I don't think it's the case that the mages will be as safe for clam holding as scouts are. After all, you will go through some portion of the game without a dome up. And dome or no, the mages will still be vulnerable to assassins, correct?

[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

[archaeolept]

the thing is, there are some things in my experience that would tend to support Wendigo's claim of determinism in casting order. But Johan did say that casting order for explicitly random, so I'm a bit confused. i would love a confirmation that two mages each vying for a unique summons would each have an equal chance of getting it...

two salted herring for the dev who first confirms it

Returning to the main topic of the thread, I thought I'd do another ROI calculation for purposes of comparison.

A typical Arco early expansion army might consist of 1 commander, 1 priestess, 16 Hypaspists and 4 Elephants. Total cost approx 800 Gold. Assume this army conquers 5 provinces with an average value of 40 Gold each, before attrition or bad luck ends its progress.

So, total income from the conquered provinces is effectively 146 gold (we lose about 54 per turn to pay maintenance on the army), which means our investment in elephants pays back in a little under six turns. That's pretty damn good; an awful lot better than you could expect in real life.

I wonder if it's unbalanced?

Mark

[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.