Really annoying spell scripting issue - Bug?

[Sombre]

The AI loves to cast touch of madness. It would rather spend the day casting touch of madness than go to an amusement park and go on all the rides for free, it loves it THAT MUCH.

[Networkingguru]

Sombre said:
The AI loves to cast touch of madness. It would rather spend the day casting touch of madness than go to an amusement park and go on all the rides for free, it loves it THAT MUCH.

That really, really sucks. I would just about rather mod it completely out of the game than have her cast it on my longbowmen. Really painful to watch your great archers run ahead of the main army to jump on a sword...

I saw that the LoS bug was on the shortlist, any chance of this one getting on it as well?

I also saw a thread on a request to make spells selectable/desectable via checkboxes or some such. Don't want to rock any boats, but is that likely to ever happen? Sure would be nice for stuff like this.

[Loren]

Did someone goof and cast touch of madness on the developers? I can't think of any other reason for this behavior!

[vfb]

If the opposing army is not considered strong enough, spells that use gems will get scored down. If you've got Wind Guide as spell 1, and it gets scored down, your choices for spells 2 to 5 are not considered. It will just use the highest scoring spell that it found when it computed the spellscores for your caster in round 1. Most unfortunately for your archers, that was "Touch of Madness".

[Networkingguru]

vfb said:
If the opposing army is not considered strong enough, spells that use gems will get scored down. If you've got Wind Guide as spell 1, and it gets scored down, your choices for spells 2 to 5 are not considered. It will just use the highest scoring spell that it found when it computed the spellscores for your caster in round 1. Most unfortunately for your archers, that was "Touch of Madness".

I guess that makes some kind of warped sense, but is there any particular reason ToM is scored so high? I can't imagine a single situation in which that would be my first pick for a spell.

[Folket]

How come I have never had this problem?

[Sombre]

Playing as Man and Pangaea it seems if you have touch of madness researched and they at any point deviate from the script (you left them unscripted or they didn't want to cast the spells you scripted) it will be the spell they cast. Not something nice and safe like storm of thorns or protection or something. No, it's touch of madness every time. Especially if there are archers nearby.

It was modded to cost 1 gem in cbm, which makes it much less likely to get cast.

[Edi]

I haven't seen this particular problem in my own games, but that doesn't mean much because I use such difficult research settings that I need to prioritize carefully, therefore this often comes late.

I can add it to the shortlist with a question mark.

[vfb]

I ran a simulation with all N spells researched, with an N3 caster and a small army, and the N3 caster scripted just to "Cast Spells", and holding two N gems.

Here's how the spells scored:

Eval: Sleep Touch score 0 (fat 2)
Eval: Vine Arrow score 14 (fat 5)
Eval: Sleep Cloud score 0 (fat 6)
Eval: Breath of the Dragon score 0 (fat 6)
Eval: Poison Cloud score 0 (fat 10)
Eval: Stream of Life score 35 (fat 10)
Eval: Eagle Eyes score 118 (fat 1)
Eval: Poison Touch score 0 (fat 1)
Eval: Resist Poison score 0 (fat 1)
Eval: Barkskin score 59 (fat 1)
Eval: Protection score 244 (fat 5)
Eval: Elemental Fortitude score 4 (fat 2)
Eval: Swarm score 1526 (fat 25)
Eval: Wooden Warriors score 1110 (fat 16)
Eval: Creeping Doom score 495 (fat 100)
Eval: Mass Protection score 1778 (fat 50)
Eval: Polymorph score 0 (fat 100)
Eval: Tangle Vines score 0 (fat 5)
Eval: Maggots score 0 (fat 25)
Eval: Howl score 530 (fat 66)
Eval: Wild Growth score 0 (fat 40)
Eval: Healing Touch score 0 (fat 5)
Eval: Personal Regeneration score 772 (fat 13)
Eval: Regeneration score 245 (fat 20)
Eval: Heal score 28 (fat 5)
Eval: Haste score 605 (fat 50)
Eval: Poison Ward score 17 (fat 33)
Eval: Serpent's Blessing score 6 (fat 100)
Eval: Berserkers score 115 (fat 6)
Eval: Sleep score 5 (fat 6)
Eval: Panic score 0 (fat 6)
Eval: Touch of Madness score 1580 (fat 15)
Eval: Growing Fury score 128 (fat 100)
Eval: Charm score 0 (fat 15)
Eval: Storm of Thorns score 150 (fat 6)

"Touch of Madness" gets scored really high because for some reason buffs are weighted much higher than attack spells. I can't find any way to mod the score lower. Nice stuff like "Storm of Thorns" is stuck at 150 points.

But there are 2 bright spots of hope here:

You'll probably cast "Mass Protection" instead of "Touch of Madness". But there's a long way between Thau 4 and Alt 7. So this is actually a dim spot.

Here's the actual bright spot: "Swarm" just barely lost out.

So here's a potential Touch of Madness workaround: If you mod "Touch of Madness" from fatigue 30 to fatigue 50, and your N3 caster always has N gems and has researched Alt 4, then he should cast "Swarm" instead of "Touch of Madness", when he doesn't know what to do. And "Swarm" is actually a nice spell to cast.

An easier workaround is just to mod Touch of Madness to fatigue 300, and don't carry 3 N gems.

As a side note, "Legions of Steel" is totally hosed as far as score is concerned ... the "Number of effects=5" effectively multiplies its score by 5, to the 6000 range. There's nothing even close. But at least legions is occasionally just a waste of casting time, not actually damaging like madness.

[lch]

vfb said:
"Touch of Madness" gets scored really high because for some reason buffs are weighted much higher than attack spells. I can't find any way to mod the score lower. Nice stuff like "Storm of Thorns" is stuck at 150 points.

Low fatigue, some kind of buff, what's not to love??

vfb said:
As a side note, "Legions of Steel" is totally hosed as far as score is concerned ... the "Number of effects=5" effectively multiplies its score by 5, to the 6000 range. There's nothing even close. But at least legions is occasionally just a waste of casting time, not actually damaging like madness.

Ah, that explains why unscripted mages like to spam that spell. Even though it's quite useless with the number of effects limited by 5, of course.