Master Of Magic - Creation Thread

[gvari7]

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this while working my difficult, but fortunately not brain power consuming summer work.

I think making a good scenario replicating MoM would be quite doable.

First of all I will make some random, but geologically realistic maps.
(Difficult part, I am never at all happy with maps I make so nothing ever gets past that stage.)

Then planning units and techs.

Units are easy.(They look damn good already!)
Terrain and other such graphics will be mercilessly stolen from various Sleaguers.(Dunno what to do about nodes though.)
Technology will be replaced with spells.
Each wizard will have his own tree.

Rather than have spells make all kinds of units available they will "summon" (via script) the unit relevant to the spell.

This is an idea I like for one reason in particular. The computer never builds all the units available, in fact it can be relied on not to do much interesting in this respect.

Since Wizard Fortresses will be stuck in place and loosing them will cause the Wizard to be eliminated(or perhaps they should just be very, very expensive?)
having summons all appear in one city should not be a problem....

The big question here is how much room for scripting I have.
Does ToT not support lots and lots of scripts?
I am quite sure MGE would not support all that I want to put in to this scenario.

So anyone have any suggestions or thought?
Also anyone have any idea just how much room there is for scripting?

[King Mir]

Here 'r some (3) good random maps that I found for a similar purpose. If you use them, you should probably look up and credit the original authors.

[Elok]

Problem: "Summoning" via script means you can summon each unit either exactly once, or at a rate of X units every single turn. Controlling what the AI builds isn't super-hard, the main trick is to avoid giving it a false perception of "superiority." Basically, when the AI decides what to build, it considers only A and D, and to a limited extent M (it thinks in terms of two types of units, "move less than two" and "move two or greater"). So if you let it build a "horseman" with 5a/3d/2m/1h/1f no flags, it will build that and ignore the "dragoon" with 4a/3d/3m/2h/2f pikeman flag. Giving the dragoon 4d would eliminate the problem, while giving it 6a would keep the AI from building the horseman. Oh, and this is all assuming they both have the same role.

It sounds confusing, but basically if two ground units have the same movement "set" and role the AI will always build the one it views as stronger, based purely on attack and defense. Shield costs, flags, health and firepower mean nothing to it. One workaround is to assign different roles; a ground unit with three (air superiority) will be treated much like one with zero (attack). These rules don't seem to apply to air and sea units, and I don't know which ones do. For details, see "Advanced Scenario Design" by Leon Marrick. I read it ages ago, it's pure gold: http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/re...e/advscen.html

Hey, after re-reading it just now, it seems the rule I just mentioned only applies to move two or greater!

[duke o' york]

Think this'll have to be in ToT.

You could use huts as nodes - well, maybe one of the possible outcomes of a hut, as the 'found new town' option, but the town comes with a special building that is unavailable to build in any other city. Only trouble would be that while new towns can have a granary ore whatever, I don't think you can choose to have different huts giving different towns with different buildings, to allow different kinds of magic for each node. Alternatively, you could make the nodes barb villages with incredibly weak defenders and no ability to build buildings or other troops, and give each a different wonder to represent the type of magic there.

In fact, having typed all of that, you'd be better off having a separate civ for the nodes, giving each node the same graphic and a different wonder. That way the barbs could take them too, leading to more fun.