Yes, thank you for the happy feet answer. I'll play around some more tonight, but even after setting it to 'happy feet', it just stays in place turn after turn. There is still plenty of map to discover. Like I said, this happened earlier, but after fiddling, it started scouting again, just not sure what I did to get it moving. Hope to hear any ideas, playing 1.2 on iPad.
Hello Edwin, that sounds a lot better, thanks a lot for clarifying! Of course, now I'll have to try and prove you wrong, that city spamming is still possible (great strategy for the Insects) That's weird, never had that happen before. What happens when you manually move the Spirit to an undiscovered location, and then switch on Autoscouting again? When you set the Spirit to Autoscout, deselect and select it again: does it show the feet icon in the topleft corner circle? @Warriv: Welcome, hope you enjoy your stay if you have any questions, ask away.
@doomtrader, got a few more questions: 1) It seems that each Unhallowed town needs to provide its own Upkeep in Negative Energy. And does not draw from the pool, like Living towns do for Food and Gold. Is that behaviour correct? For example, in my Unhallowed Capital, 9 population are fixed as Gatherers (cannot move them to Production). When I destroy a few buildings to reduce N.E. Upkeep, one gets freed up and reduces the fixed amount to 8. 2) What does the Unhallowed building Corrupted Sanctum do exactly? I assume that it keeps tiles in the town's influence area from being purified; but the description is a bit vague with "keeps Negative Energies from being dispelled". Can you clarify? 3) Can you provide a list of all terrain types and their effects? Including racial differences, if there are any. I am experimenting with the terraforming spells, and figuring out this data by hand/testing is quite the chore.
1. Yes - though living towns must accommodate for their own Food consumption. 2. Indeed, it prevents purification. 3. Can do (in the manual).
v1.2 Unhallowed Water Mastery game - Turn 100 Battle Report 100 Turns in, time to report back a bit for your entertainment. Enjoy First of all, while the AI did improve a lot, it still makes silly mistakes now and then. Prime example from this game: Instead of sending one large army with 10+ units, several smaller ones - which weren't total pushovers anymore, have to give it that - trickled in. Also - but this very likely is asking a bit much - it doesn't seem to learn from lost battles. Example: 4 Reapers against 2 Huecuvas and 6 Skeleton Archers is decidedly not a good idea, they'll just get slaughtered. Instead of trying something else, or simply coming back with a lot more units, the next army was something like 3 Reapers and 2 Skele Archers; still nothing to write home about. On the plus side, the enemy Sorcerer - also with Unhallowed - did found new towns like it's going out of style, and even managed to garrison them properly. Also, I did have to use a lot more garrison troops than before. Had to change my default from 4 Skele Archers or so, to 8. NOTE:The 2 Huecuvas in each garrison were not needed at all. Next time I'll go with 2 Ghouls or simply more Skele Archers, also to keep upkeep costs down. I am replacing the Huecuvas with Ghouls now, and pulling them together for an assault on the next Plane. Setup Pretty much the usual. Went with 3 Planes (Prime, Paradise, Shadow) and 4 enemies this time. Hardest difficulty, double movement, Speedx4, all resources set to lowest. I used Water 9, Water Mastery, Alchemist, Archmage, Merchant (great choice, more on that in a bit), Pious; Ascetic, Butcher, Tyrant. Starting Spells: All of Tier 1. Tier 2: Freezing Weapon, Resist Magic, Quicksilver, Cold Pulse. Tier 3: Creativity. That wasn't too smart, took me a long until I actually cast it. Next time, go with Nagas. So, how's it going? Took some adjusting of strategy (as expected), but I'm doing very well. I just eliminated the other Unhallowed Sorcerer on the Shadow Plane, and am gearing up for major mayhem now. My Capital is producing fully powered Arcane Wraiths, I summoned a Hero (got Aquestrielle, just kept her) and can put some serious effort into fitting her out with high-grade equipment. My Spellcraft is almost at 100, allowing for interesting shenanigans. With 15 towns, Merchant produces so much Gold that I frequently switch my Power completely away from Mana to Research or Spellcraft; 1000+ Mana in the bank take a bit to drain Overall, despite the fact that I haven't visited the other 2 Planes yet, I am very confident that I will win this game easily. The first 50 turns were a lot more difficult than before v1.2, though. Especially needing lots of garrison troops slows things down significantly. Bit pressed for time now, so I'll just copy my notes and give more details later: • founded one town around turn 15 • took over 3 enemy towns with a few Nagas and Skele Archers • cast a lot of Wetlands for more Swamp, to keep up with my N.E. needs --> could have gone for turtling up and summoning lots of Nagas instead of casting Wetlands; might have been better choice to do that and be more aggressive. • AI a lot more dangerous, killed all my scout Spirits, kept attacking me with larger armies -> needed to build up garrisons to 8 S.Archers, binds resources, cannot develop towns as fast as I want. • Cast Magic Affinity (+25 Spellcraft ~turn 60), switched my power output from research to increasing Spellcraft. • earlier, I had switched fully to Research a few times; to get Nagas, Wetlands, Magic Affinity. • didn't even have free cycles to cast Creativity and Prosperity; still need to wait till turn 75+, I estimate. • Mana needs covered by Gold: Merchant + Alchemist. • took over enemy town to the NW of my area ~turn 60. Will slowly expand from there now, with Nagas for garrison and attack, Spirits for scouting • turn 65-70: took over 2nd enemy town, gearing up to attack his Capital a bit further west, maybe till turn 75/80 • need to cast more Wetlands to improve the new towns. will go for Creativity first in better towns • t80-85: founded 2 more towns. Both near Planar Gates, and settled in spots with good production bonus. • turn 95: Destroyed last town of enemy Sorcerer on Shadow Plane. Still only cast 3 or so Creativity, and no Prosperity. What I still did not do at all - which is remarkable for turn 100 - is explore dungeons. Before v1.2, I was romping through high-level dungeons to get more Spell Schools around turn 75 at the very latest. Now, I simply did not have the resources to waste on even stopping by a few easy prey dungeons to grab a quick Mana snack or such. And just for fun, here's some music I listened to while writing this
1 - True. It does even out a bit with Living food production, and simply is part of the different playstyle for Unhallowed. Just wanted to be sure I got it right. 2 & 3: Thanks and thanks!
Minor Issue and a question One wizard leveled up and was presented with a number of skills from which to choose. One of the skills was "Spell Penentration". In the place for a description of the skill it listed "spellpenetrationdesc". I assume this is a placeholder. This is not an important issue. Please put this on the list for correction at some future date. The independents seem more aggressive since patch 1.2. I know 1.2 was supposed to make the AI Wizards more aggressive but did it also make the independents more aggressive? The independents wrre already aggressive prior to 1.2.
I'm very impressed at the depth this game has to offer. It is a bit scary at first, theres a lot to read and understand, but after you start playing, everything falls into place. Of course I'm a wimp and I'm on the easiest difficulty for now Seriously, if anyone is on the fence about this one, even if you are not familiar with 4X games, this game is worth your time and money. At 833MB, I don't think it will ever leave my 16gb device. I'll buy the rest of the game as soon as I finish my first campaign, it's that good! (If you're into strategy games, of course). There's just so many possibilities, so much we can tinker with, my head is still buzzing, haha.
I changed some of the structure of the script, and I'm now writing pieces individually so that they can be swapped around easily (should have started there *grumble grumble*) I'm really liking the 1.2 patch. Well done!
@doomtrader @nullzone holy crap it appears the trello board is being used? At least I see two cards have been moved into "In Progress"
Okay, update on the auto-scout: The small feet icon, check; that's what I thought, but was really scratching my head what I might have been doing wrong. After playing 30 turns into a few different 'learning games', here is what I found. 1. My hunch is that the auto-scout will pause if the spirit encounters certain events, such as being near other roaming armies, not being within xx number of spaces from 'undiscovered' areas. 2. Another hunch is that it takes a turn for auto-scout to resume after selecting auto-resume from another state, and again is dependent on being near undiscovered areas, not next to an army, etc... keep in mind, I was selecting different orders (fortify, auto-scout, etc...) even on the same turn to try and figure out why the spirit wasn't moving around. I think I was resetting the 'turn counter' every time I did that; hence forcing the game to wait another turn. So I was just preventing myself from re-starting the auto-scout. While these are just hunches, after further gameplay I'm convinced that what I was experiencing wasn't a bug, just not understanding the system. I'm really not concerned at this point to even getting a specific answer. And off to learning more things in the game. Some advice for new players: 1. Read Nullzone's posts on starting races/strategies in the separate thread (btw Nullzone, could you do a quick addendum post on the Grey Elves single plane game. This is the first game of this genre of for me, I've been mostly space-based 4x, so if you could give basic milestones for xx number of turns [25, 50, 100, etc..] in order to get to a winning scenario, that would really help me understand the mid/late game. I'm kinda lost after turn 40 or so. What to focus on and why.) 2. Read the manual. In version 1.2, you can open it from the main screen, and push it to your iBooks. Very readable on both my iPhone 6+ and iPad. I ended up printing it out so I can mark it up and read/re-read it. A LOT of detail helpful to understanding the game (ex. how to get heroes if you don't have the MENTOR trait. Four ways to get them listed on pg 33). Personally I love long, well-written manuals, willing to mine them for more insight. I suspect that it will be updated over time to be more complete, but is great even in it's current state. Awesome that it's usable right on my devices if I have a specific question as I play. Wow, just meant this to be a quick update to share that I'm no longer concerned about auto-scout being an issue -- but became a little more. Really can't give this game enough love. Like many of you, I was concerned with the early posts about Worlds of Magic; after a night of research and back/forth chats on Steam, understood that this game is basically the same 'gameplay' as WoM, but is new code, new UI, and a completely different animal. Essentially, the dev is going to migrate this game back to Steam in a couple of months as a new game, and provide it free of charge to the Worlds of Magic installed base. I can empathize their situation, glad they believed in the game concept, and came up with an 'end around' strategy to bring it to life with Planar Conquest.
This will make a lot of people happy. For me, these devs are in the same league as butterscotch shenanigans in terms of support and community engagement. @doomtrader please extend my appreciation to your team for their obvious dedication to producing this game. And to you, thankyou for sticking with this thread, you're generating some hardcore fans here.
That was me added the items I posted here, and put them in progress as Edwin wrote he'll take care of them. Sure can do, give me a few days. I continued that example game, but it was over before turn 20 or so, had the enemy Sorcerer sit right next to me For turn 40+ I'll have to use a bigger map, it seems. Or I'll just keep playing and leave the poor sod alone; sounds like a better idea, then I still have the same starting conditions as in the first post.
Goldmine of Knowledge One of the challenges I have is that I never played a fantasy 4x before, and didn't ever play Master of Magic. An earlier post suggested that it's helpful to read the Master of Magic Strategy Guide from GameFAQs website (page 10-ish of this thread), and I dug a little further into the interwebs and found the following: 1. FAQ Strategy Guide (same as the GameFAQ guide) 2. MoM Manual PDF 3. MoM Spellbook PDF 4. MoM Strategy Guide PDF All in all, 600+ pages of psuedo-relevant information, as MoM->Worlds of Magic->Planar Conquest. I'm hoping it will really help pull me out of fantasy 4x newbie-ness, and might help some other souls who never played the grandfather of Planar Conquest. http://www.myabandonware.com/game/master-of-magic-21t Scroll to the bottom of the page, under DOS VERSION section, click the MANUAL button, and it will download a zip file 'master-of-magic-de.zip'. Everything will be contained in the zip. ------- Completely unrelated, but to date myself, I played a game called 'Dungeon' on a mainframe (distributed over the ARPANET ), which was a re-imagining of a simpler game called 'Colossal Cave', then later re-imagined as 'Zork' on CP/M, Apple DOS, and a startup OS called MS/DOS from MicroSoft. When I saw Master of Magic was published by MicroProse, it brought back a lot of fun memories. And yep, I'm almost 52. Somehow work and marriage caused me to miss a lot of games from the 80's and 90's. -------
Wow, over by turn 20? Well, impressed and humbled. I'm sure I did a lot of newbie wandering and squandering of resources, but yes, I'll look forward to your additional details on the build and milestones to hit in order to win. Much appreciation and thanks in advance.
No worries, that only works on the small maps. I just replayed that one, here's what happened: I summoned 3 Magic Spirits. As I was on the left side of the map, I sent the first Spirit off to the right. By turn 3, it found the enemy Capital, 4 turns march away for Grey Elf Archers. Enemy Sorcerer has Orcs, with 1 each of Settler, Raider, Wolfguard, Wolfmaster, Skald for defense. As they are all melee (except the Skald who's a ranged Caster), they are easy to overwhelm for Archers. I immediately sent my whole army out and summoned a Harpy for a bit of extra oomph. Reached enemy territory on turn 6: he had just founded a second town, so I razed that first. Turn 7, and I take over his Capital, game over Looks like I really need to use a larger map for a turn 40+ game... I usually play with second largest map size; there it can take 20+ turns just to find the enemy, let alone his Capital. And by the time you get there, he's usually geared up enough that a starting army cannot take him without some serious help from e.g. combat summons.
