Issue with difficulty scaling

[Scouter_Ted]

I'm not a noob to MOM. I've been playing it since the mid 90's, and still have the original box with 5-1/4 floppies down in my basement. Normally I play on hard or impossible.

Not so much with Caster of Magic. :-/

While I like a challenge this is crazy. I started my first game on Hard, got destroyed. Learned the value of save scumming every time I try for a node or ruin. Started my 2nd game on Hard, got destroyed even quicker. Started a game on Normal as Myrran, made it until the first mage showed up on that plane then died quickly. Played again on Normal, tried different books, etc, same thing. I don't think I took a single node on Normal, and only a few ruins. Even with the Familiar telling me I'll only take nominal casualties, I still get wiped.

So finally I swallowed my pride and played an Easy game. It sure was. I played as Myrran and had the whole plane explored, almost every node merged, every ruin conquered, and when the first mage showed up they groveled at my feet. On the save window I noticed it had "Win". I wondered wth? So I clicked it and I won the game because all the other mages bowed to my greatness.

There needs to be a more gradual shift in the difficulty between Easy and Normal.

I just abandoned another game I started on Normal difficulty. I played as Myrran, and had most of that plane wrapped up when the first mage showed up and immediately declared war on me. The first fight with him he easily slaughtered my A-team. That team had 1 champion and 5 heroes, all leveled up and with good equipment and most with buffs applied. Plus there were two veteran mages and a paladin. All died within 3 rounds. I reloaded the saved game, and tried adding more buffs. They all died within 4 rounds. I only killed one of his units. And that was with my absolute elite army.

And this is before I even mention that the history chart shows him as being twice as advanced as I am. He was on the main plane with 3 other mages, and I was on Myrran by myself, and he still wound up twice as powerful as me.

This difficulty is crazy. Normal is what I would consider Hard if not Impossible.

[Scouter_Ted]

Oh, and we can't forget the city I tried to take that had 9 Warlocks in it. They all dropped that spell that has the red v-shaped spike that comes down. First round 1/3 of my units are dead. 2nd round another 1/3 dead. 3rd round all are dead.

So after reloading I tried buffing with resist magic and bless, exact same result. I tried an army with 8 paladins, all with resist magic and bless and Prayer and the exact same results. I never was able to kill a single one of them.

And this is on Normal difficulty with some random city. I gave up on ever trying to take that city. Just like I gave up on probably 1/3 of the nodes that would consistently wipe my A-Team no matter what I did.

Yeah, something is a little off on the difficulty scaling.

[Seravy]

This is a very complex game with lots of details and optional settings which have large impact on difficulty.
For easier nodes or lairs, you should enable the "Easy lairs" modifier. It's not mandatory even on low difficulty levels and forcing it would mean there are no lairs or nodes left to conquer past midgame.
Picking Myrran makes the game "super easy mode" on Normal and below because you start alone on the Myrran plane while everyone else competes for the other plane. This is a feature inherited from the original game. Playing Easy or Normal without Myrran is completely different because you share your starting plane with opponents.
There is no way to balance that - starting alone on your plane is a greater advantage than anything else possible in the game - unless we want to entirely drop the "no myrran Ai on easy and normal" feature. Which can be done but then people who wanted to play a game without AI wizards on their plane can't do it.

I think the best possible solution might be to let AIs go to Myrror regardless of difficulty, but add a new scoring option : "No opponents on my plane".
But then we have another problem to deal with, which is, the AI is only allowed to play default wizards and those don't have the Myrran retort except for one, so I'll also need to make them discard a spellbook to gain it but then they are no longer a "default wizard" in the strict sense of definition as they will miss that spellbook and have Myrran instead.

[Scouter_Ted]

Picking Myrran makes the game "super easy mode" on Normal and below because you start alone on the Myrran plane while everyone else competes for the other plane. This is a feature inherited from the original game. Playing Easy or Normal without Myrran is completely different because you share your starting plane with opponents.

I think you are missing my point. The fact that the enemy mages, with 4 of them competing on the same plane, are all vastly more powerful than I am when I am all alone on Myrran is the problem. When one of their random armies can completely trash my A-team, with 1 champion, 5 heroes, (all leveled up with decent items), plus 2 mage units and paladins, (all veterans with enchanted blades), that is a problem. I'm lucky if I can kill one of them.

On this last game my magic power is up to 165. I don't know what the enemy's is, but when he casts that spell that has the golden pillars rise up in all of my units, it completely destroys my armies. Even if my A-team all have resist magic, bless, and I do a prayer my first turn, after his second cast of that I am lucky if my champion and 1 hero are still alive. By the end of the 3rd round my best army is dead and the enemy mage just demolishes every other army in his way.

This is the way it has happened on every game other than Easy.

I think if I am playing as Myrran the other mages should be at a disadvantage. But every time when contact is made I look at the History chart and they are all more powerful than I am. How can that be? I'm expanding as fast as I can on Myrran by myself.

I'm even save scumming so my main army doesn't get wiped out by some rinky dink neutral city that has 9 f'ing Warlocks in it that kill everything with their spells, (and once again, my A-team all has resist magic, bless, and a prayer and all die almost immediately). Yet even with all of that the moment contact is made I am completely outclassed by every one of the mages on the other plane.

Something is wrong with that.

[Seravy]

Do you have a save file for that?
It sounds unrealistic for the enemy to be twice as powerful as you when you own that much more territory so there might be a bug. Oh, wait a second. In the windows version the plane size scales depending on the number of enemies there. Maybe they actually don't have that little territory, I will need to look up how that situation is handled by the map generator.

Edit : I checked and the player alone on Myrror does get a large plane so it's functionally the same as the DOS version.
Please post the save file, I'll check if there is anything unusual.

[Scouter_Ted]

The save file doesn't really matter. It's the same in the game I just started today.

This time I picked all sorcery books for the Invisibility and Mass Invisibility spells, (so I could hopefully live through the enemy nuke spells since they can't target invis units), plus two life for the heal spell.

I take almost the entire Myrran plane, with about 75% of the nodes merged and 12 or so cities. This time when two other mages showed up at almost the exact same time i looked and not only were they both WAY more powerful than I was, when I checked out the spy report it looked like they were allied. They both started pouring high end units into Myrran and at that point I ended the game.

I'm not even bothering to play as (not Myrran), because if the enemy mages are this powerful while competing with each other, imagine how powerful one would be if he had myrran all to himself and then showed up on the other plane?

Yeah, the simple fact is that something is really off on the Normal difficulty scaling.

[Seravy]

The save file does matter because it helps me judge how much of a problem we have and what kind of adjustments are necessary.

I reduced AI resources slightly for version 1.0.2 on Normal, let's hope it will be enough.