Warlock - Master of the Arcane Catch All

I'm pretty sure I researched a dispel for cities.

Also, how do you learn that Unity spell? My research wheel has been empty for a while now.

D-Man777 wrote:

I'll bite.

The manual says that a food deficiency can keep population from growing. Is there anything that can accelerate growth?

Also, what influences the speed at which a city's boundary expands?

There's spells to increase food production in a target city, and a separate one that increases the speed of population growth.
I...guess they are permanent unless dispelled? Maybe?

Is there a proper way to use the teleportation spell? The tooltip implies you can choose the destination but any time I cast it it just teleports the unit to a random nearby hex.

The Unity spell isn't in the game yet.

muttonchop wrote:

Is there a proper way to use the teleportation spell? The tooltip implies you can choose the destination but any time I cast it it just teleports the unit to a random nearby hex.

I was using that last night. What I did was select the unit, click on the notification thingy on the right side of the screen, and then selected the hex I wanted them to go to. Worked great; was able to stave off stupid Paladins of Duros or whatever who were banging on my captial's gates.

tboon wrote:
muttonchop wrote:

Is there a proper way to use the teleportation spell? The tooltip implies you can choose the destination but any time I cast it it just teleports the unit to a random nearby hex.

I was using that last night. What I did was select the unit, click on the notification thingy on the right side of the screen, and then selected the hex I wanted them to go to. Worked great; was able to stave off stupid Paladins of Duros or whatever who were banging on my captial's gates.

Ah, I was trying to cast the spell ON the unit so I guess I was actually selecting the space it was already in, which caused it to teleport to the nearest unoccupied space.

There's a spell to enhance population growth in a city. Seems to be persistent with mana upkeep.

The one thing I have not figured out that should be obvious is how to get the better units. For example, one building produces Hunters and Rangers. But I've never seen Rangers. Do you produce them? Or are they some kind of upgrade?

Man, started at 1600 today, ate a veggie burger, and got up to get a drink of water, and it was 2030! I was totally oblivious to everything else going on.

Robear wrote:

The one thing I have not figured out that should be obvious is how to get the better units. For example, one building produces Hunters and Rangers. But I've never seen Rangers. Do you produce them? Or are they some kind of upgrade?

Usually the basic unit production buildings will produce a unit and an upgraded version of that unit, but you'll need one or more other buildings to unlock the upgraded unit. Once it's unlocked, you can produce the new unit directly or upgrade your existing units by clicking on the star icon by their portrait.

I don't know what building specifically unlocks Rangers, but the building will say if it does. If there's no building in your list that mentions Rangers then you should probably focus on buildings that unlock other buildings until it becomes available.

There's a little button at the bottom of the building list that shows all buildings, whether you can build them currently or not. It'll be in that list. I think it's the "Training Grounds" but I don't remember if Barracks or something else comes before Training Grounds.

Teleportation: Comes in two varieties, Teleportation and Meta-Teleport. The basic version is short ranged, pretty much the screen. Click on the unit to be teleported, cast the spell, click the hex. If the hex is empty, the unit appears there. If not, then close by. Meta-Teleport works much the same, except you can click anywhere. The same screen, across the map, on another plane, doesn't matter.

Cities expand based on available resources in that city - food for most races, mana for undead. Spells such as Prosperity directly effect the population growth. Harvest Blessing improves the food production in a city, and thereby indirectly improves population growth. At set numbers (I think 6 and 10) the area controlled by the city expands. You can stack multiple spells, some of the Divine spells duplicate effects, so at one point I had Prosperity, Harvest Blessing and Blessing of the Sun (same as Harvest Blessing) on the same city, for explosive growth. When the food/mana supply goes negative, then the population growth slows or reverses. These spells are permanent until dispelled or you cancel them, they all have an upkeep you need to pay or the enchantment lapses.

I haven't played too much yet, but the upkeep costs seem to be getting away from me--mana mostly. Mana traps seem to be a pretty crucial structure in the early game.

Today's patch added the Unity spell. Among other things.

I couldn't find any patch notes.

Patch notes of sorts:

Senior Writer at Inoco wrote:

Here is the patch notes I could gather so far:

Patch 1.1.2.26

* Fixed Unity spell
* Fixed crash when removing unit's enchant
* Fixed the pathfinder on the cylindrical map
* Fixed building disable issue
* Fixed the loading of old game saves (for beta-testers only)
* Fixed the bug with new buttons appearing
* Max number of cities was increased

muttonchop wrote:
Robear wrote:

The one thing I have not figured out that should be obvious is how to get the better units. For example, one building produces Hunters and Rangers. But I've never seen Rangers. Do you produce them? Or are they some kind of upgrade?

Usually the basic unit production buildings will produce a unit and an upgraded version of that unit, but you'll need one or more other buildings to unlock the upgraded unit. Once it's unlocked, you can produce the new unit directly or upgrade your existing units by clicking on the star icon by their portrait.

I don't know what building specifically unlocks Rangers, but the building will say if it does. If there's no building in your list that mentions Rangers then you should probably focus on buildings that unlock other buildings until it becomes available.

I think its barracks that gives you veterans and rangers. You can also upgrade your existing warriors and huntsmen once you have a barracks built. When you select the unit, there will by an up arrow on the left of the unit card you can click to upgrade the unit. It costs gold to do it (100 or 125 I think). On the right side of the unit card is a star; you can click that to upgrade gear. Also, gear stacks.

Edit: just saw this on the Paradox forums, thought folks might be interested.

Edit the Second: The building required for rangers and veterans is the training grounds. It is the next building after barracks. So the progression goes: ranger guild | warrior guild -> smithy -> barracks -> training grounds

Picked the game up yesterday afternoon and, 8.5 hours of game time later, I can safely say it is quite good. Sure, there are a good number of rough edges to get past, but it executes on the limited goals it does take on well.

A few observations after completing my first game:

  • The Master of Magic similarities are huge. The city resource, building tree, and race systems are close to identical, and they in turn end up making up pretty much the entire economic aspect of the game. Similarly for the magic and alternate planes. Not that any of these are a bad thing, but I found it very striking.
  • The resource and upgrade system is loads of fun. Collecting various goodies and then being able to award them to your veteran troops over the game is incredibly satisfying. In many ways it feels a bit like a Diablo-style loot chase and I think it goes a long way towards engendering the "one more turn" feeling this game has.
  • I like the way magic starts out early on being weak, but still powerful when properly applied. As the game progresses it shifts in character and ends up being more quite strong. The only problem is that how your magic develops is a bit of a crapshoot now. Some stronger elements of choice or specialization would be appreciated.
  • The AI is okay. As others have observed, it acquits itself well tactically with well timed withdrawals and some sneaky flanking. My biggest gripe tactically is that it has a lot of trouble picking out which units in a given area are the biggest threat that it should address. There was one time in particular when I had a powerful, though brittle catapult beating down a rival mage's capital. He had a bunch of fast units that he sent around the flanks, though they were all directed against the couple of mage towers I had near the border instead. It is way better than Civ5/Panzer Corps regardless, so I'm mostly happy here.
  • Strategically, the AI is also a mixed bag, though it's a definite step down from the tactical level. The other mages can be pretty sneaky with their casting. For example, during one long I noticed that my food levels were gradually dropping until I ended up sitting at a pretty big deficit. Only they did I realize that the AI had been casting Swarms of Locusts on many of my big cities (-75% food production). Well done.

    It's biggest weakness lies in the inability to build up quality units. The game's resource and upgrade system encourages a kinda "everything is equally overpowered" school of game balance. So, to make it work everyone needs to be able to abuse what is available to them and put together a few super awesome units. Sadly the AI is incapable of this and chooses instead to throw waves of useless units out. This is a real shame because when given some powerful units to play around with in the form of roaming monsters it does pretty well.

  • There a lot of obvious places to expand upon the design already in place. Heroes would be an obvious and great inclusion. Just adding more races could be pretty fun too. I hope it's successful enough that the developers are able to stick with it.
  • All in all, a big thumbs up from me. It's very light and easy to get into, making for just about the perfect $20 strategy game in my book.

Gunner wrote:

The Master of Magic similarities are huge. The city resource, building tree, and race systems are close to identical, and they in turn end up making up pretty much the entire economic aspect of the game. Similarly for the magic and alternate planes. Not that any of these are a bad thing, but I found it very striking.

While similiar, its not really close to identical. MoM had full blown alternate planes, it was an entire world which you could start on with the right perks. Warlock's planes are pocket kingdoms, much smaller than the main world. You can pretty much ignore the planes in Warlock, where as you needed at least a foothold in MoM.

It's biggest weakness lies in the inability to build up quality units.

The one thing that I've been running into is dragons. The AI makes and uses both red and gold dragons in fair numbers, and does a pretty good job of it, mostly. Other than that, eh, the AI loves its hordes of rats. And the AI handles the planes oddly. After a while, they just stop sending monsters through the portals to this world, and instead build up hordes all over the map. It makes breaching the portals challenging, enough so that by the time you can break through and start clearing out the planes, there is little point, you will likely be winning by taking out the other great mages. That's assuming the AI hasn't run around killing themselves off. The other night I had some invisible bats hanging out, eating popcorn, and taking notes while Elspiriter was sending dragons in to take out the capital of the Lich King.

There a lot of obvious places to expand upon the design already in place. Heroes would be an obvious and great inclusion. Just adding more races could be pretty fun too. I hope it's successful enough that the developers are able to stick with it.

Overall, the game is solid, I'm at least as pleased with it as with Civ V. Not regretting buying it.

Yeah, you're right about the planes. They are kinda similar, but MoM's system is more tightly integrated and better. In fact now that I think more about it, MoM's planes were downright awesome, weren't they?

The AI building stuff like dragons would be exciting. In the game I played they didn't last long enough to get units like that. Something to look forward to.

Anyone found a way to see what enchantments are active on a particular city? I can't remember which ones I've already cast Prosperity and Bountiful Harvest on.

how do i dispel an enchantment that's on me. I've got mana vampirism, i researched dispel but that is for units.

There's a dispel to use against other players. I have the same problem. But I can't seem to shake the vampirism, either I've cast the dispel against the wrong player, or it failed somehow.

The game does not tell you who cast it...

Active enchantments for a city show up as little bity icons n the bottom left of the city view. Took me a while to find them too.

For dispelling there are a handful of different dispel spells. So, there are specific ones for unit, city, and player level. As with everything else, it's just luck of the draw on which you will get.

Gunner wrote:

For dispelling there are a handful of different dispel spells. So, there are specific ones for unit, city, and player level. As with everything else, it's just luck of the draw on which you will get.

Maybe if the upgrade system wasn't hidden from players, it'd be defensible. Right now I scream, "Just give me a tech tree!"

Caravel wrote:

CARAVEL!

cyrax wrote:
Gunner wrote:

For dispelling there are a handful of different dispel spells. So, there are specific ones for unit, city, and player level. As with everything else, it's just luck of the draw on which you will get.

Maybe if the upgrade system wasn't hidden from players, it'd be defensible. Right now I scream, "Just give me a tech tree!"

The magic system is the big thing they need to change. I'm really surprised they didn't customize it to the leaders (ie you pick and choose your area of magic) would add so much more depth. The issue I really think is that their honestly isn't that many spells. Or at least not enough to truly specialize.

Enjoying the game in general, and time flies by with it.

Nice touch, there was another mage unit in my city as we were friends, I declared war on him. Then I could shoot that unit with my archers, not only did I hit it, I also damage my city

I am going to try harder difficulty, Normal is not challenging, and from other peoples comments, AI lacks initiative going on offensive.

I'm enjoying challenging but I think the AI cheats on it. I'm fighting off a massive amount of ghost wolves that I'm sure he shouldn't be able to afford. I found normal to be too easy but I enjoy the aggressiveness of Challenging, but I don't want to deal with an AI that totally disregards the game rules.

My constant complaint with AI in games, i want the higher difficulties to be represented by better choice making and tactical decisions rather than here AI have +10000 everything to compete with the human. I'm playing on impossible now, and the diplomacy is pointless the AI (once discovered anywhere in the world) will make a random demand for mana or gold (typically 5/6's of my total treasury) and my option is hand it over or declare war.... so now i'm at war with the whole world but on the upside they are all so far away that they can't do crap so i'm just going to kick the snot out of the Rat King with my 3 draco lich's and 3 flying galleus's and slowly conquer the world.

Cayne wrote:

My constant complaint with AI in games, i want the higher difficulties to be represented by better choice making and tactical decisions rather than here AI have +10000 everything to compete with the human. I'm playing on impossible now, and the diplomacy is pointless the AI (once discovered anywhere in the world) will make a random demand for mana or gold (typically 5/6's of my total treasury) and my option is hand it over or declare war.... so now i'm at war with the whole world but on the upside they are all so far away that they can't do crap so i'm just going to kick the snot out of the Rat King with my 3 draco lich's and 3 flying galleus's and slowly conquer the world.

I restarted it on challenging and it hasn't been as bad. That said I'm playing a medium world and on challenging the monstrous hordes are kicking my ass. I've got 2 greater fire elementals that I found on turn 3 that are smashing everything.

Stylez wrote:

I'm enjoying challenging but I think the AI cheats on it. I'm fighting off a massive amount of ghost wolves that I'm sure he shouldn't be able to afford. I found normal to be too easy but I enjoy the aggressiveness of Challenging, but I don't want to deal with an AI that totally disregards the game rules.

I have this happen to me before and I sort of figured out what was happening. The wolves come from a magic summon, if you opponent has that one perk that lets them cast spells twice as much they can do it in one turn. With a large stockpile of mana this can lead to a whole ton of them lasting for a while even if they can't afford them. I had an ai opponent like that and eventually he could only field one or two wolves at most. Of course I had to slaughter 20 or so to get to that point.

Cayne wrote:

I'm playing on impossible now, and the diplomacy is pointless the AI (once discovered anywhere in the world) will make a random demand for mana or gold (typically 5/6's of my total treasury) and my option is hand it over or declare war.... so now i'm at war with the whole world but on the upside they are all so far away that they can't do crap so i'm just going to kick the snot out of the Rat King with my 3 draco lich's and 3 flying galleus's and slowly conquer the world.

In the game I'm playing right now, I've basically conquered the entire world except for a crappy 3-city kingdom surrounded by volcanoes. Every so often the AI makes a ridiculous demand and I declare war. Then a few turns later she'll call me back and offer some resources in exchange for a peace treaty. A little while later, she'll make another insane demand and I declare war again. This cycle has repeated about 5 times now.