Indep grimoire slightly improved

[Kristoffer O]

Don't get your hopes to high. It's nothing fancy.

I've just added raise skeleton to all instances with a raise dead, since that didn't work out too good, and added a few spells at path lvl 1 and 3, like flare and slime, since lvl 1 water was without spells, and there was only fire bolt at lvl2 fire.

It is not intended to make indeps powerful, just to give them something to cast.

[Tuidjy]

If you are working with raise dead/skeleton, can you make sure that our mages
do not insist on casting the raise dead spell when no corpses are available?
If that means that they will not cast it unscripted, so be it. It is much better
to get half the chaff five times instead of no chaff once.

[MaxWilson]

It's already on Edi's short list, medium (purple) priority.

-Max

[NTJedi]

Kristoffer O said:
Don't get your hopes to high. It's nothing fancy.

I've just added raise skeleton to all instances with a raise dead, since that didn't work out too good, and added a few spells at path lvl 1 and 3, like flare and slime, since lvl 1 water was without spells, and there was only fire bolt at lvl2 fire.

It is not intended to make indeps powerful, just to give them something to cast.

Yes that's fine.
Any chance a future patch can allow the independents research level to be based on the number of turns which passed in the game? Allowing the independents to grow as the game moves forward.
A level_7 independent fire mage should have learned a few more spells after 10_years.

OR

If #startspell gets fixed perhaps the independents can be specified as well allowing each map to add extra spells if desired.

Either of these would be wonderful.

[Kristoffer O]

The grimoire works differently from dom2, and I think that is why #startspell doesn't work anymore. In dom2 your grimoire was given at start and whenever you learned new spells they were added. In dom3 the grimoire is rewritten every turn, and filled with those spells you have researched, but spells you do not know are wiped. This makes patches less problematic, since you can't get your spells whacky due to added or removed spells, but it also makes #startspell obsolete in its current form. I suspect the command would need to reread the mapfile every turn, and that is not done atm, since it would open cheat possibilities. So some kind of change is needed, not just a fix of something broken.

[MaxWilson]

On the other hand, that might mean it's easier than it would have been in Dom2 to add a feature to restrict your mages from casting e.g. Touch of Madness, for those of us who hate that spell. Pretty please?

-Max

[Kristoffer O]

How do you figure?

[MaxWilson]

Well, you're already keeping track of two concepts here:

1.) The spells you really have access to (defined by your research level), and

2.) the spells you can cast.

Right now #2 is just a cache of #1, regenerated every round, but if you allowed disabling spells by clicking on a toggle or something you just remove them from #2 (and put them on a list of "restricted" spells to remove every time you regenerate #2 from #1). The combat AI doesn't have to change at all, and since it's purely subtractive there's no worry about bugs that "enable" spells you haven't actually researched yet. I'm presuming that the Dom2 way would have necessitated adding *and* subtracting spells to/from the list as they were enabled/disabled.

Of course, maybe it's not as simple as that. For one thing, you have to also encode the "restricted" list as part of the .2h file for PBEM games.

-Max

[Kristoffer O]

Uhu, I have no idea. You might be right.