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larienna

Second Lieutenant
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Jul 1, 2012
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  • Warlock 2: The Exiled
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Warning: Long post

I am a huge fan of Master of Magic and I have been analyzing this game for more than 12 years. I am still trying to adapt it as a board game to be able to play the game in a shorter amount of time without a computer. I played a lot of games that tried to replace it like Age of Wonders and Elemental. So when I heard about Warlock, I was pleased to have another game to play. Now that I finished my first game, I thought that I should write a review about it. I'll divide it in 3 sections, the "good", the "could be good" and "bad" comments.

--- What is good about Warlock ---

Simple City management: This is the first 4X game where city management does not consume 80% of the player's time. In warlock, there is no worker placement and the player can build up to 1 building per 100 population. So you cannot build everything and that is OK.

Fixed construction time: The production time for units an buildings is fixed. I find it much more convenient than dividing cost by production. It avoid the syndrome that a unit takes 60 turns to build and then adding population reduce it to 20 turns. It makes it easier for players to plan ahead their production.

Double production queue: I always thought that having a queue for buildings and units was very logical. I hate it when I have to paralyze my whole city development because I am in war and need to build units.

Double Resources usage: I like the idea that I can use a resource in different ways. For example, use silver ore for money or for silver weaponry. It gives more choice to the player's city development.

Water Mobility: Allowing all units to move on water is simply AWESOME! It prevents many AI problems, simplify the army management, the user interface and reduce deployment time.

Fusion of world and tactical map: Having the tactical map on the world has numerous advantages. I know it was already implemented in Civ 5, but Warlock is the first place where I could experiment it. It first simplifies the game interface since each hex can only have 1 unit, so there is no need to select a unit within a stack, or to do stack management. Second, it makes it much more mult iplayer friendly because you do not have to "pause" the game to resolve battles. The battles evolves as the game progress. Finally, it makes the game feel more like a board game.

Hex Map: Hmmmm! ... Hex maps!

--- What could have been good ---

Gods: Adding gods to the game was a great idea but there is little interaction with the gods and their impact on the game is minimal. Players should have the option to choose a god to support in other ways than making quest and temples. They should also be able to have diplomacy with their gods. You could make the player dependent on the gods, like a primary source of mana is given by gods. The god you believe in could also fix the political situation of the world. Like you are more likely to ally with players of the same god. Then when a player has enough power, he could rebel against his god and stay on their own but get attacked by other players on random god events. I still think there is too many gods. I would have used between 3-5 gods, not 8.

Tasks: This is another idea that could have been interesting, but it ends up be very boring. I think it could be a good way to link gods with task. The tasks should always be requested by gods and they should be something more interesting than build building X, or defeat enemy Y. The request could be related to diplomatic relations between the gods and the players. If a god does not like a player, he could require that you capture a city or kill some of his units.

Land gives no basic income: Well this is not necessarily a bug, it's just easier to have buildings gives % bonus when you have a basic income because 1000% of 0 = 0; In other Civ game, the terrain where the city is built generate basic income. I like this idea because it allows player to find the best place for their city.

Warlock gives fixed income from other buildings instead. So more income requires more buildings. I find this solution less logical because it's like if for example, you population did not have any economy if you did not have the building to generate gold. It also force you to have buildings that gives income and then building that multiplies income. Making it more complicated to know which solution will benefit you more. Personally, if you want to keep the game simple by not making each piece of territory give food and gold output, why not make the population level give basic food and gold output and make buildings modify the output. For example, each population gives 1 food and 1 gold. So larger cities will give more resources and buildings would multiply the income.

Shared buildings which are not shared: The engine seem to support the idea of sharing their effect between cities by marking buildings with a check mark. Right now the only sharing available is to be able to pay 50 gold to get an upgrade for any unit on the board. Personally, I would like building abilities to be shared between cities if at least the cities touch each other. This means that if a city allow master work equipment, than all connected cities also get the master work improvement. This feature would apply to all buildings with a check mark. So that will also affect unit production buildings. If you can build a unit in a city, all connected cities can do it. I would add a restriction that the cities must be of the same race.

This also prevent another problem where a large chain of dependencies is required to produce high level units. So a city needs to build a large amount of building before unlocking higher level units. So what happens is that each city can only build 1 branch of unit because it's too expensive in space to diversify in multiple branches. I don't ask for dependencies to be shared between cities, only that other cities could build other cities units.

--- What is bad about warlock ---

Weak Repetitive Magic: This is a problem with almost all video games that involve wizards: Game designers are scared of wizards. They always think that wizards are too powerful and will unbalance the game. This is why in D&D, you must learn your spells in advance and have specific ingredients to cat, this is why in Dragon Age, all mages are locked up into a tower. So I am not surprised to see that in warlock, magic sucks too. In fact, there is 2 video game that I know where magic kick ass: D&D Shadow over Mystara (Ironically a D&D franchise) and of course the one and only Master of magic. In all other games, or almost, magic is extremely weak (age of wonders, heroes of might and magic, elemental, etc).

The second aspect specific to warlock is that most spells are made of the same 10 effects that are repeated over and over with different parameters. Like a damage spell, with various elemental properties, range of damage, area of effects, etc. This just create a large list of spells which are all the same. Oh! Another unit resistance spell, healing spell, attack spell, etc. Some spells are truly repetitive since for example: lightning bolt and fire ball does both element damage, so they are the same type.

So not only magic should be enhanced, but there should be a much wider variety of effects, rather than having fireball lvl 1, 2, and 3. In case of making different spells, why not make 1 spell where you can pump in additional mana. There should for example have more city enchantment, they should add global enchantments, land enchantments, etc.

No Magic school:It is much more easier to add variety if there could be schools of magic to choose where to get your spells from. I also does not give to all players access to the same spell, so it creates some sort of rock-paper-scissor relationship between the players. What made master of magic very interesting regarding variety is that various combinations of race and magic school created various kind of game play results. If you give all the same spell to all the players, it prevent players from planning combos during their race selection.

Excessive maintenance cost for buildings and unit: The maintenance cost is simply annoying. I think you should use the CiV rev solution which is, remove almost all negative modifiers. Maintenance cost for units is OK, you want to limit the size of a player's army. But maintenance cost for buildings is ridiculous because the number of buildings you can build is already limit. So even with 0 maintenance cost, no abuse would be possible. The restriction for buildings is actually: try to optimize the management of your space. You do not need a double restriction.

As for units, can somebody explain me why Higher level unit consume more food than basic units. They eat more! I think that food maintenance should be always 1 for all units except when it's obvious that there is an higher food consumption. For example: cavalry need food for the horse and the horseman. Trolls probably eat more than a regular humanoid. More gold maintenance is OK since more experienced unit would require higher wages, but not food.

Planes only have 1 access: I think what makes the Myrror plane interesting in master of magic is the interaction between both planes. It works a bit like an electronic circuit board where the paths are different on the top and the bottom of the board, but the connection are at the same location. But all that dynamic is lost with the current plane system.

Water is useless to cities: Unfortunately, nothing can get build on water and that is a huge problem because if you have a city which is surrounded a lot by water, you end up not being able to make any buildings which could mean having no income. Of course, you can choose where to build your cities, but what if it's your starting city. This is why I suggest that there should be a few kind of buildings that goes on water. Probably they will not do anything special and only give food or gold. But at least, you can do something.

Unit Upgrades are too expensive: Unit upgrades after they are built is simply too expensive. Most upgrades cost 50 gold even if you could build the same unit for 25 gold and get the upgrade for free. I think that upgrades like "Master work", "drilled" and "fine armor" should cost around 5-10 gold and nothing more. Or use a proportional value, like 10% or 20% of the unit price. So that a 25 gold unit would cost 2.5 or 5 gold to upgrade.

No multiple path to city config: In my point of view, each city should be allowed to use different configuration and be able to change these configurations during game play according to the player's needs. The problem is that buildings has so many requisites and you can build so few that you can only allow cities to focus in 1 branch and stay there for the rest of the game. Maybe reducing requisite, or having generic requisites (like you need X military buildings in your city to build building Y, instead of you need building X to build building Y) could help increasing the flexibility of city management.

Too many buildings does the same thing: For example, the there are at least 4 gold bonus buildings that respectively gives +50%, +75%, +100%, +100% plus another 2-3 buildings that gives basic gold income. This is way too much buildings considering the building limit for a city. Maybe 2 buildings would have been enough one at +50% and one at +100%.

Hard to get high level buildings: Because there is so many dependencies, it's hard to be able to build higher level buildings. You need to know the tech tree by hard and focus intensively on a path to be able to build high level buildings. Be removing requisites or using more flexible restriction, it could make higher level buildings more accessible.

Struggling for resources: I always seem to be short in resources, it partly related to many of the points listed above like maintenance, upgrade cost, buildings and income source. Fixing those things above could make it easier to be able to run your empire with positive income.

Little Mana: You have so little mana that it makes magic worthless to use. I think there should be more magic nodes like in Master of magic that should give and output of 2-4 times the amount of gold of a large city. If people have more mana, they are more likely to be willing to pay to enchant units. Else 1 mana per unit is way too expensive.

Low Research: In my game, I kept the same research level for the first half of the game. Probably because it took a lot of time before being able to place buildings that allows to research spell. In MOM, mana can be converted as research. Warlock has the opposite feature, research can be converted as mana, but not otherwise. If players have more mana by placing more nodes, like explained above, it would give them more mana that could be spent on research. You could make player set a minimum nb of mana not to convert as research and then convert the rest when researching a spell.

Unit enchantment expensive: Like previously mentioned, unit enchantment is expensive because the mana generated is so low and because the enchantments are so weak, so they are not worth their share of the maintenance cost.

Little Diplomatic Options: There is so little diplomatic options. It's almost peace and war and nothing else. Adding trading between players could be good, but adding trade and research treaties like in Master of Orion 2 would be a minimum. I would even exchange access to units and upgrades your empire have. Like exchanging 3 "Masterwork equipment" pack for X gold and get 3 free upgrades. Exchanging services is another idea: kill that greater elemental and I'll cast a spell on your city.

If you want to keep things simple, instead of making individual transaction, make exchange treaties a la Master of Orion, that simply gives income and advantages on both sides while the treaty is active. This way, you will only need to have a bunch of treaties to design with various bonus, and you'll only need to negotiate which treaty you want. You could have upgrade exchange treaty, trade treaties that could boost gold, food, mana, research ot any other stats. You could have training treaties that share exp between empires. Many options are possible and it should not be so hard to implement.

In diplomacy, the player is always the loser: Sorry, but when I control half of the map, can I have some negotiating power? I hate when the player is always disadvantaged in negotiation and must always pay a supplement to get things done. I played at the lowest difficulty and could never get a fair trade, imagine at hard. Could it be possible to have fair trade at normal diplomacy and maybe have more factor that influence diplomacy.

Lack of building queue: You cannot place in queue more than 1 building, but you can queue multiple units. Adding a building queue should be easy to do, if a building in queue cannot be built for any reason, then simply give a warning message to the user.

No production buildings: There is no buildings that boost production. I can somewhat understand this because there is no production to accumulate since the production time is fixed. I have 2 solutions to get buildings that would boost production. A) make some buildings reduce the cost of units B) make all requirements depend on these production buildings. For example, You could have production buildings of level 1,2,3. If a building is of level 2, then you need to production building level 2 to unlock all level 2 building. This way, all your dependencies are attached to 1 path of buildings.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is all I can think of so far. I know that many people will object to many points I am proposing. Still, if a few of theses suggestions could actually reach the design of the game, I would be pretty happy.

Enjoy!
 
Good review. I agree with mostly everything. But, since it was your first game, you probably haven't figured out some things that would nip a lot of stuff in the bud.

Mana, gold, upkeep, upgrades, resources, etc., are all pretty moot when you spam cities. There is no penalty to make cities, and buildings act as roads. Make 1 or 2 unit producing cities, and focus everything else. A couple food focused cities is usually more than enough. The rest build all the +%gold and +gold. For mana, hijack some undead cities and have them go hog wild in the mana department.

I'm not saying that infinite city spam is the best thing ever, it needs to be toned down in my opinion since every game in 90% of all cities you just focus on gold, but if you focus your cities you should have more than enough income to do whatever. Which is another problem all by itself, but alas...

In my opinion, I wants the multiplayer. If ever there was a turn based strategy game made for multiplayer, Warlock is it. And it better have hotset or I'll stab someone in the neck with a pencil.
 
Considering you only played one game you show yourself to be pretty observant on some things with valid points, but I have to say quite a number of things would have been cleared up if you played more than one game before writing a review. I don't think anyone can give a fair or comprehensive review without logging in a good few hours and games. Welcome to the boards though, glad you bought and liked the game.
 
Thanks for posting. I don't necessarily agree with your "bad" points, other than diplomacy. Many of the city specific items seem to be there for a reason - you need to dedicate a city to get a high level unit, and yes its going to cost in terms of maintenance - a city spec'd for building a dracolich is going to cost way more in terms of maintenance than a generic mana focused city where all the buildings are +mana. If this wasn't the case, there would just be high level critters running around.

Diplomacy is poor, but otherwise there are a lot of good points to the game.
 
As others have said. Some of your points seem to be made because a lack of understanding on how the economy and other things work in Warlock. Your familiarity with other 4x games and the expectations of how the mechanics should work in them, seems to have made it so you expect that behavior in other 4x games.

That being said it is interesting to get a fresh perspective on the game from someone who just sat down and played their first game. The pit falls and trappings made from a first play through and the expectations brought in from other games.

Gods: ... I would have used between 3-5 gods, not 8.

This game is based off the Majesty series so it takes the list of Gods from the previous games. Besides the wheel setup works nicely as you can get on good terms with 3 gods at a time, one primary and two secondaries.

Weak Repetitive Magic: ... The second aspect specific to warlock is that most spells are made of the same 10 effects that are repeated over and over with different parameters. Like a damage spell, with various elemental properties, range of damage, area of effects, etc. This just create a large list of spells which are all the same. ... lightning bolt and fire ball does both element damage, so they are the same type.
...
So not only magic should be enhanced, but there should be a much wider variety of effects, rather than having fireball lvl 1, 2, and 3.

Actually this is a problem in a lot of games, and the fluff behind the mechanics from the two games you mention have nothing to do with the spells or spell list. It is how the spells function mechanically that make them feel unique, not how few spells you can use or what the backstory of prejudice in the game world that make them feel unique.

The problem is like you said the spells do X amount of damage of type Y. Some spells do 2X, 3X, and so on of Y damage making them little more than more powerful spells you unlock as you research up the tree. Part of this issue I feel is due to the limitations in damage types. All the elements being lumped together for the sake of convenience has lead to things like people asking why fire Elementals are not immune to fire(elemental) damage.

But the bigger problem is more along the lines how how to make the spells actually feel unique. In MoM, which didn't even have damage types, it wasn't about the spells being restricted to curtain fields and simply having Air do lightning bolt of X damange and having Fire do Fire bolt also for X damage. The spells were actually unique because they did different things.

I remember reading an interview from one of the developers of MoM and he said they specifically set out to avoid this very problem when designing the game. They had seen how magic was done in lots of other games, not just video games but tabletop RPGs as well. So they had an internal rule that every spell had to be unique and there was not going to be a one for one trade of any spell where they were identical in mechanics yet different in flavor text. You will be hard pressed to find any two spells that behave exactly the same in MoM which is why the game is so engaging with so many different options and each Magic path feels unique.

Part of how they achieved this was the very mechanics themselves in the game allowed for large amounts of variety. First off unlike most 4x games the number of Models in a unit was not just there for graphical fluff like it is in Civ5, Warlock, and etc. When you saw 6 guys in a group there were actually 6 guys in that group each with the stats listed in the unit details. What this means is you can have spells that work off this mechanic to create uniqueness among them. For example a dragon may have 20 HP while a unit of spearman contains 6 guys each with 3 HP for a total of 18 in the unit. Then there were some spells that do single effects and others that do effects to all models in the group. For example say a fire bolt spell does 10 Attack Damage while a Fire Ball does 2 Attack damage to all models in a unit. In this case the Fire ball spell would be quite worthless against the dragon but on the unit of spearman it's going to do 12 Attack damage.

The other thing that help make MoM unique, which intern allowed for more spell variety, was how combat actually worked. Most people are use to comparing Strength of units like in Civ5 or Warlock and they know higher is better but there is not much beyond that in terms of depth, except Warlock added resistances. In MoM however you had different values for your Attack and Defense stats, and while Warlock has resistances it not quite as deep a mechanic as MoM had. The unit models mentioned above also came into play here as giving a +2 Attack bonus to a group of 6 guys worked out to a lot more boost than +2 bonus to that Dragon. This is how weaker units were able to stay competitive late game.

The real thing that made MoM's combat unique was those 4 weapon icons on attack strength did not simply represent a power of 4 but instead represented individual attacks. Each weapon icon was a roll of the dice with a 50% chance to possibly do damage. The Defense icons represented the same thing on defense as you had 50% chance of negating one of the damage done. Anyone who has played table top war games like Warhammer 40K should be familiar with this concept as it's the same basic shoots are potential wounds vs saving throw setup.

The thing is this system then allows for a huge amount of variety in terms of spells. You can have spells that give your existing attacks a better chance of actually doing damage, you can increase the number of attack dice you get, you can do similar things with defense and resist stats. Just a quick look up of some of the spell examples from MoM for Units. Eldritch Weapon - Opponents defence decreases by 10%(lower chance of rolling a successful save), Flame Blade - Adds 2 Melee and Missle attacks, and Holy Weapon - Can hit creatures immune to normal weapons and +1 to-hit bonus. So 3 buffs spells that all effectively increase your ability to do damage to the enemy but do so in a very different way. The Flame Blade obviously gets better with units that have more models, while the Holy weapon is good for units with lots of attacks, and lastly Eldritch weapon is good if you going against units with high defense values because if you have a unit with less attack then the enemies defense you get more boost by lowering their defense than you do with increasing your to-hit.

The amount of variety and depth was tied into the whole game's mechanics. Any game is ultimately limited on it's spell casting list by the rest of the game's mechanics. It is the reason fire elementals are not immune to fire attacks. The mechanics are not deep enough to separate a fire attack from a lightning attack or any other element since they are lumped in together. That being said I do think there is room for improvement as there are no spells that do Melee or Range damage. While the only spirit damage spell is accessible only by worshiping a curtain god, and life damage is also equally rare as I've rarely seen it and suspect it also requires favor with a god. Elemental and Death damage are the two most common damage types in spells but with undead and elementals being completely immune to death it feels like half the units in the game are immune and thus they are fairly worthless a lot of times, especially if you face an undead player.

In case of making different spells, why not make 1 spell where you can pump in additional mana. There should for example have more city enchantment, they should add global enchantments, land enchantments, etc.

The game already has Global Enchantment spells. As for city enchantments there is +% for Food and Mana as well as a flat + for population growth. Though I could see some other city enchantments being useful, like boost resist or attack. As for land enchantments there is no real effect of the land types other than movement and combat modifiers so I'm not sure what type of land enchantments they could add other than simple terraforming.

Excessive maintenance cost for buildings and unit: ...
As for units, can somebody explain me why Higher level unit consume more food than basic units. They eat more! I think that food maintenance should be always 1 for all units except when it's obvious that there is an higher food consumption. For example: cavalry need food for the horse and the horseman. Trolls probably eat more than a regular humanoid. More gold maintenance is OK since more experienced unit would require higher wages, but not food.

Well for one it's done for balance reasons. But as for fluff reasons it was common in medieval societies to give larger rations to the better fighters and officers.

As for cost of things it seems obvious your trying to play the game using the standard economic model from other 4x games like Civ. Due to the unique natural of city building in this game you need to focus more on specialized cities with only a few dedicated to troop production while the majority of the other cities focus on resource gathering, aka Gold/Food/Mana.

Planes only have 1 access: ...

Water is useless to cities: ...

Actually a common complaint in the forum suggestion area.

Too many buildings does the same thing: For example, the there are at least 4 gold bonus buildings that respectively gives +50%, +75%, +100%, +100% plus another 2-3 buildings that gives basic gold income. This is way too much buildings considering the building limit for a city. Maybe 2 buildings would have been enough one at +50% and one at +100%.

It's obvious that you played humans as you mention +100% twice which is from the treasure house that only humans have. The purpose of the increasing percentage is to give better returns on a city that specializes in an area. There are actually only 2 basic gold income buildings. The market which is +4 gold and the Craftsman district +3 gold. The market serves as a nice quick boost to your gold income but your are limited to one. The craftsman district has less gold but you can build an unlimited number of them.

Hard to get high level buildings: Because there is so many dependencies, it's hard to be able to build higher level buildings. You need to know the tech tree by hard and focus intensively on a path to be able to build high level buildings. Be removing requisites or using more flexible restriction, it could make higher level buildings more accessible.

I think this is an intentional design choice as it forces players to have large specialized cities to unlock curtain units and perks.

Struggling for resources: I always seem to be short in resources, it partly related to many of the points listed above like maintenance, upgrade cost, buildings and income source. Fixing those things above could make it easier to be able to run your empire with positive income.

Actually it's very easy to run an empire with a positive income once you understand the economy. Go check out the 90 turn challenge thread and you can see some of my screen shots on around turn 76 I have about 200-300 gold per turn coming in. I never really payed that close attention to it but I'd say around turn 40-50 is probably when I start making over 100 gold per turn if not sooner. By turn 100 it could easily reach 500-700 gold per turn.

The numbers go up so fast because of the very buildings you suggest they should cut, the +% gold buildings. For example if you build on a gold mine which has +12 gold then those +% buildings give you +6, +9, +12, and +12 for a total of 51 gold in that city. If you removed those buildings and stuck with just craftsman the city would only get 24 gold for that same building space. Not to mention the +% bonuses apply to all the other buildings in the city so +4 Market, +2 Caste, and +2 Rogue guild which is 8 gold getting a 325% bonus when included with the gold mine that is a total of 85 gold from that one size 7 city. Take out the +% buildings and and replace with craftsman gets you 32 gold from the city instead.

Little Mana: You have so little mana that it makes magic worthless to use. I think there should be more magic nodes like in Master of magic that should give and output of 2-4 times the amount of gold of a large city. If people have more mana, they are more likely to be willing to pay to enchant units. Else 1 mana per unit is way too expensive.

LOL. Mana flows like water in the game. Magic is still fairly worthless though the reason is your limited to one cast per turn, or in the case of some spells 1 per every other turn. This is a common complaint in the suggestion thread as many people report having thousands of extra mana and no way to spend it.

There are also already several mana resources in the game magic nodes which give +10 mana, magic fields which give +5, pumpkin fields give +4, and for undead silver can be used for +7 mana. Once again when you combine these with the +% buildings for mana the numbers really start to add up quickly. Even without the resources the capture of a single undead city specialized for mana production should meet much of your mana needs, unless your going real heavy in magic usage then you might need 2-3 cities. You can go for mana with Human or Monsters but they have higher upkeep cost on mana buildings so it's not as cost effective.

Oh and tip on maximizing Mana production in Undead cities, don't go for Magic Bazaar as it requires you go up a completely different spec tree just for that +100% bonus. The extra mana you get from just building extra mana farms is more than enough to make up the mana gained from it's +100% compared to all the building space lost trying to unlock the Bazaar.
 
Sorry for not replying sooner

Considering you only played one game you show yourself to be pretty observant on some things with valid points

I am a hobby board game designer, so it's easier for me to do, since I analyze games all day long.

Mana, gold, upkeep, upgrades, resources, etc., are all pretty moot when you spam cities. There is no penalty to make cities, and buildings act as roads.

On another forum, another player talked that city spamming was a very powerful strategy. Personally, I like optimizing space and plan ahead city development.

I'm not saying that infinite city spam is the best thing ever, it needs to be toned down in my opinion

There best solution would be to set a minimum distance between cities like most 4X games.

In my opinion, I wants the multiplayer. If ever there was a turn based strategy game made for multiplayer, Warlock is it. And it better have hotset or I'll stab someone in the neck with a pencil.

Warlock would play well in multi-player because the fusion of the tactical and world map remove the need to resolve battles separately and make players way for the battle to end. Second, the play time is pretty quick, so it's more multiplayer friendly.

Your familiarity with other 4x games and the expectations of how the mechanics should work in them, seems to have made it so you expect that behavior in other 4x games.

Of course, we all have some basic 4X knowledge where some mechanics could be our favorite ones. Still, I am open to new ideas, and I liked many of the mechanics in Warlock. I think I would need to mod the game to keep what I like and add what I want.

This game is based off the Majesty series so it takes the list of Gods from the previous games.

That is what I thought.

I remember reading an interview from one of the developers of MoM and he said they specifically set out to avoid this very problem when designing the game. They had seen how magic was done in lots of other games, not just video games but tabletop RPGs as well. So they had an internal rule that every spell had to be unique and there was not going to be a one for one trade of any spell where they were identical in mechanics yet different in flavor text. You will be hard pressed to find any two spells that behave exactly the same in MoM which is why the game is so engaging with so many different options and each Magic path feels unique.

I think that is the reason why Master of Magic is a success. It's a shame that few games followed it's footsteps.

What this means is you can have spells that work off this mechanic to create uniqueness among them.

In my game designer language, I call this expanding the area of effect of special abilities. It means increasing the amount of things that can be influenced by a special ability to increase the number of possible effects.

Each weapon icon was a roll of the dice with a 50% chance to possibly do damage. The Defense icons represented the same thing on defense as you had 50% chance of negating one of the damage done.

This is similar to the "Roll X dice and keep all dice > Y" mechanic. The advantage is that a strong unit could be defeated by a weak unit if very bad lucky. So there is no impossible rolls.

The game already has Global Enchantment spells

Maybe my game ended too short.

The purpose of the increasing percentage is to give better returns on a city that specializes in an area. There are actually only 2 basic gold income buildings. The market which is +4 gold and the Craftsman district +3 gold.

Personally, I would find it more elegant if buildings only game % and basic income came from another source.

on around turn 76 I have about 200-300 gold per turn coming in

I think there was a period where my income was around 10-20 gold per turn. That was a very rich era that did not last very long, most of the time, it stayed below 10 gold.

This is a common complaint in the suggestion thread as many people report having thousands of extra mana and no way to spend it.

I started to have more than 5 mana income when I found a city where I could build a mana pump. But that was after the first 3rd for the game. Still I never had an income that exceeded 20 mana through the whole game.

thanks for the comments.
 
You must have wielded a very big army with barely any cities *at all* if you have just +10 gold and +5 mana...
Maybe next time less warfare, more building? ;)

At the end of my first game I had +1000 gold income per turn.

The current system does work, but yes, city spam is too powerful. So I wouldn't say no either to a distance limit (especially seeing how overlap works now). However it should be properly shown to work efficiently (so when the settler's creation button is selected, everything "bad" is red, and good is green, otherwise it's just try and try and try and waste turns...
 
I think the magic system deserves a bit more credit than people are giving it. I mean aside from lightning bolt/fireball, the spells are all unique in their function and powerful enough, that it is magic that most often decides the winner of battles. I mean look at the two most similar looking spells: shadow bolt and fireball and their derivatives. At first glance they look the same, but there are pretty critical differences. Equal level shadow bolt always has a higher damage value, especially since a lot of enemies have just a bit of elemental resistance. But there are a lot of death magic immune units, which render shadow bolt useless, so you have to be careful in their usage. The spells also have a progression. First there's the weak version, that only gets used at the start when you have little mana and few units, where even a bit of extra damage is useful. Next you get the standard version which is used most of the time when you have some extra mana. Then at the end game you get a bigger version that is just basically: "ok, you're swimming in mana and most units have some resistances now, so here you go, a really expensive big version of the standard nuke". And don't even get me started on the way overpowered anhancement spells....I just wish the research wan't so random, which I think is something they could work on.

For the resource part, I'll just point out that there is a clear way to have huge gobs of resources. You can't decide to not use the method, due to lack of elegance, and then complain that the game doesn't give you enough resources. It's not the game, just you. You can however complain that you don't like how the game forces you to play a certain way, but that's a separate issue.

Other than that, good points.
 
So I wouldn't say no either to a distance limit (especially seeing how overlap works now). However it should be properly shown to work efficiently (so when the settler's creation button is selected, everything "bad" is red, and good is green, otherwise it's just try and try and try and waste turns...

There is a distance limit. You can't build a city within 3 hexes of any other city; when you hover over the "build city" button on your settler, you see red text telling you you're too close.

Yes, it'd be convenient to see red/green shading of the map in some late-game stages, but the feature is there now, and works nicely IMO to limit city spam.
 
While I wouldn't mind that otherways, there is one problem with making the gap bigger. When there are resources close together, it would be really bad if a previously placed city would block you from taking another resource node. Wouldn't be such a big problem if the borders grew more quickly, but if I have to wait untill the city is level 10 to get that resource node, then we have a serious problem...
 
I think 3 tiles gap is perfect. Anything more would lead to highly optimal cites that are barely ever connected between them.

And any change here would not solve ICS. It would only make place for less cities total.
 
While I wouldn't mind that otherways, there is one problem with making the gap bigger. When there are resources close together, it would be really bad if a previously placed city would block you from taking another resource node. Wouldn't be such a big problem if the borders grew more quickly, but if I have to wait untill the city is level 10 to get that resource node, then we have a serious problem...
Which would make planning your location more important.
Win/win?

If you really can't wait, demolish and rebuild closer by... I think the gap should be 6. So you can still take up every block, but it takes planning, and is time-consuming. And probably not the ideal buildplan for maximum profit. All good stuff, no?
 
Increasing the minimum distance between cities is only really a modifier on map size. It shifts your position on the line/curve without changing its shape. It still means more cities is always better than less cities. It only alters the number of cities per map size. The same effect can be achieved by simply dropping the map size.

Creating a real choice requires an additional "resource" like happiness in Civ5 or corruption in Civ3. Additionally, in order for this to be a valid strategic choice there must be pros and cons to going tall or going wide (which also requires being able to manage population growth/size). Otherwise it's just making one better than the other, which is just six of one and half dozen of the other, not a valid strategic choice.
 
Which would make planning your location more important.
Win/win?

If you really can't wait, demolish and rebuild closer by... I think the gap should be 6. So you can still take up every block, but it takes planning, and is time-consuming. And probably not the ideal buildplan for maximum profit. All good stuff, no?

It would make city placement a bit too important. Half of your time would be spent avoiding taking resources from other cities, and it would precisely create the problem I mentioned where you would need to wait 10 pop untill you get some resources. At which point it would be too late anyway. Most games are decided by the time your secod city hits that border expand. I'm already wasting enough time playing checkers with my cities, to make it even more bothersome. There's nothing more annoying than having a wasted resource on a city, like having pigs in your gold city's radius etc.
 
IMO that would be a good thing (importance of placement rather than just dotting down a bunch).
As said, if you want the resource, plan carefully, instead of just placing a bunch of cities and expect to get them all easy.
+ Stategy
 
IMO that would be a good thing (importance of placement rather than just dotting down a bunch).
As said, if you want the resource, plan carefully, instead of just placing a bunch of cities and expect to get them all easy.
+ Stategy

No no and no. City placement is already important. You can already get a lot more out of your cities with a little placement, rather than mindlesly plopping them down. Not to even mention defensive benefits. In your case it would just turn into a huge chore and a problem. There's a difference between a strategy element and just being a nuisance to work around. And also good job completely ignoring the problems with border growth.

Look, if you want to curb ICS then there are ways to do that. This isn't the way though. It would create more problems than it solves. I personally love ICS, but just to be constructive I'll throw one solution out there: Have each subsequent settler cost more and more and take longer to train. This way, you can quickly and easily get the first couple out, but slow it down towards the mid game, especially since the increased build time is most likely done in your capital which is most likely also your main military unit producer untill other cities grow, forcing a strategic choice.
 
I've always hated ICS in Civ - too much micro. I've gone wide I think only twice in Civ5 because it is a valid strategy with very different requirements on the player, but I usually build tall empires. In Warlock I don't really care either way because city management is a lot less work.

I have not seen one suggestion that would have any impact whatsoever on ICS. Increasing distance between cities does not in any way reduce the value of the next city and the next and the next. It is a shell game where the only difference is how many cities fit on a given map size. As long as you still receive all of the benefits and no penalties for each additional city then it is always better to have more cities, nothing to consider or weigh at all.

That doesn't mean you have to fill the map with cities. I have in more games of Warlock than not stopped building cities and finished the game with a small empire. Similarly one can choose to give cities lots of land and time to become huge for fun. Taking away the choice to do either makes no sense. It's one thing to replace the current mechanic with one that makes the choice become one of pros and cons and differing strategy. Just changing the rules to enforce every player uses a city spacing that some prefer...what purpose does this serve?
 
OTOH, that would really slow the game down, and it's a rather quick paced game...
In your case it would just turn into a huge chore and a problem.
I don't see how invalid placement red, allowed placement green and the city outline (a 3 hex area around the settler in white if the location is 'proper') is really confusing to what a city will inhabit or not. Or be a chore instead of assistance.
If you really want a resource fast, don't have it border the white outline or be in the most outer circle of the white outline. Rather have it in the first circle (immediate) or second (lvl 5). With the rest of the white outline you can quickly see if any other nice resources are made difficult to achieve with this, or another city.
It's certainly more clear and less 'darn my food city took my gold mine' than the current system of expansion. And yes, having cities further apart is an addd bonus, making individual cities more vital, and more important to properly defend instead of just having a small flux of cities almost all covering each other...
And also good job completely ignoring the problems with border growth.
I've already stated this before, maybe you skipped over it. Since the limit where you can build a new city is 6, and the max hex range of a city is 3, there is no border lap overgrowth. As for making resources harder to acquire, requiring 10 pop I repeat my answer of "build the city closer then", simple as that. Not every hex needs to be covered by city. As for 'risking taking resources of other cities' I am pretty sure players are capable of seeing what's marked white, allowing you to plan perfectly well what does and does not is in the border lines (eventually) and that the resources just outside of the line will become harder to acquire, taking more time, plan accordingly.
 
Yeah ok, if you want to intentionally play stupid, then I can indulge you and explain. The problem with border growth is not border overlap, or lack thereof, but that you can't get the resources on the outer ring untill about 70 turns into the game, at which point the game is usually either won or lost already. See that nice silver resource 4 hexes from your capital? Want silver weapons? Well too fracking bad cause the closest you can put a city will make sure that you wont get it untill something like 70 turns into the game (yes it's a guesstimate, I haven't actually bothered to count how long it takes, and it's affected by spells anyway). The reason it's a chore is not because I don't know how to check for good city locations, it's because now I have to count to 6 in every direction making sure I won't enforce that situation I just mentioned on my future cities. No it's not strategic, any idiot can count hexes. It's a chore. No it's not hard to see what your fancy new city will have in it's area. Any idiot can do that math, counting to three is not hard. It's the part where your next cities will be shafted where the problem is. And no that consideration again is not hard. count to three twice. Grats, on passing first grade maths. What it is, is a useless layer of complexity. And a liability, because of the scenario I mentioned. I don't know if you've noticed, but there are resources on the map more closely than once every 6 hexes. So no matter how you plan your cities, you will get wasted resources. You're not taking resources from other cities because they fall within your borders (although that happens in your model too now that I think about it), you're taking them by forcing the other city to wait untill the 10 pop to be able to utilize them. "But Lyfa you can just build the city closer you big dummy dummy" Except no you can't, because you just increased the minimum distance between cities, so any resource that is 3 or 4 hexes away from a city, is effectively wasted. There's a reason you don't currently consider anything 3 hexes away a part of your new city in the current system. The reason being that you won't be able to utilize it anyway, untill it's too late.

The current system allows for excellent city planning and resource control. Don't fudge it up, for those of us who actually can do it and enjoy it, just because you don't like ICS, and can't let go of your pet solution.

EDIT: Also, remember those nice roads you can currently build with your improvements? Yeah say goodbye to them too in your model. Just lost one layer of strategy, for no benefit.
 
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