Artifact lair loot

[rgp151]

I'm currently playing a "Sim City" game where I started on Myrror with the goal of winning by SoM. I'm now 20 turns away from completing casting. I got Planar Seal fairly early and have had the planes sealed almost the whole time. But Arial got 2 towns in Myrror and has expanded there a little bit, to no consequence. In the mean time I've conquered just about every lair on Myrror.

I've gotten many artifacts, but they are almost all garbage, or really they are all garbage. Most weapons are just +1. I've gotten over 20 weapons. Of these there have been 2 with +4 and 3 with +3, the rest are all +1 with other minor mods. All of the armor is just +1 to multiple stats. I've gotten a few amulets of stuff like flight and water walking, but nothing very good.

In Classic you often got really good Artifacts from lairs. I know that about a year ago I complained on various forums that AI heroes were unstoppable because they were getting insane artifacts that made them virtually unkillable. I was seeing fairly early in the game stuff like heroes coming in with Flying, Regeneration, Invulnerability, Magic Immunity, Guardian Wind, Death, Flaming, Stoning, etc. all stacked on a single hero who would just proceed to destroy everything. Was there some kind of over compensation against this?

It seems to me that when the Artifact loot is so poor that it makes Artificer all the more powerful. It seems to me the problem is their attempt at randomly generated artifacts. They should have just copied all of the named artifacts from Classic and left it at that, and maybe limited the random artifacts to only a certain power. But really, to have taken 95% of the lairs on Myrror and not gotten a single decent artifact, something is wrong. I should have gotten a Helm of Trollish Might out of this or something.

It does seem that the merchant still offers powerful artifacts, which IMO is still a problem since the AI can get tons of gold and buy crazy artifacts.

Also, on another note, even after starting the SoM no wizard has attempted to disjunction my Planar Seal. This would never have happened on Classic 1.5. It would have been dispelled long ago and I'd have to keep recasting it. Now every wizard is at war with me and have been for 50 turns or more, and not a single one has tried to dispell the Seal, even though they all have insane amounts of Spell Power, Mana, and all have high level spells. Also none of the Wizards have killed each other off, which also would not have happened in Classic. I recall seeing enemy wizards taking out other wizards in Classic all the time.

[COLINDSEY]

I concur with your points. Original MoM dropped powerful artefacts (but less of them) and that was fun. The loot that drops now is just trash to break into Mana, so essentially there is limited to no loot from lairs in the current version. Just gold and Mana. I did play MoM 2022 in January and the lairs dropped really powerful artefacts then; a little too overpowered probably but it sure was fun. I think the underpowered loot that drops now is just an over correction. And your point about Artificer is spot on too - I'm playing with Artificer as a trait. I feel it is critical in order to get decent gear, and that wasn't the case in the original game. Hopefully they'll adopt the original MoM list of specific artefacts, or adjust the artefact drop to be more interesting than it is now.

[GeorgeJJR]

What difficulty level do you have your lairs on? I have them on maximum difficulty, and the harder lairs drop quite nice items, +3 shields of invulnerability etc, +6 bows and so on. While easy lairs drop a bit of mana and gold. At least on high lair difficulty the drops are as good as in the original might of magic (that I played off and on for decades before buying this game).

[rgp151]

Hmm I hadn't changed any settings on that. Looks like it was set to "Skilled". I moved it up to Master. But still, I was taking out lairs with like 4 Sky Drakes and 5 other units and getting like a bow of +1 Defense. :p

[rgp151]

I just noticed they have a mod that eliminates the random artifacts for lairs and uses the originals instead. https://www.nexusmods.com/masterofmagic/mods/6

[ROE]

I concur and it is a big problem for me right now. Most of the fun of the classic came from raiding lairs and seeing what kind of cool swag I could find. This needs a fix.

[Xeth Nyrrow]

Several things are at play here. The random artifacts can make things very samey still but it's actually not because of this feature. The monster evaluations for lair budgets in the game (even on the highest difficulty) are way higher than in the original game. If I'm reading the wiki correctly, (and I'm sure drake is lurking around the corner to pounce if not) a Great Drake has a budget value of 900 where as in this game it's 4440. They did use encounter zone budgets similar to 1.5+ which seem to be roughly double the 1.31 ones. This leaves a roughly net half strength in lair power on average compared to the old game. As a result you get a lot of low end items.

Originally posted by rgp151:

I just noticed they have a mod that eliminates the random artifacts for lairs and uses the originals instead. https://www.nexusmods.com/masterofmagic/mods/6

I don't know if the author has updated this to work properly with the latest version so be careful. I have been in contact with both the authors of the 2 mods that do this type of thing to ask for updates. I know the mods also tweak the budgets so that you actually get decent rewards too which is needed.

Originally posted by rgp151:

Also, on another note, even after starting the SoM no wizard has attempted to disjunction my Planar Seal. This would never have happened on Classic 1.5. It would have been dispelled long ago and I'd have to keep recasting it.

This is part of the new game's AI still not being addressed yet. Not casting enough globals (like disjunction) as well as poor city defenses are the 2 big things left to address I feel.

[COLINDSEY]

Very helpful Xeth, I always appreciate your insights. I hope the Devs read these posts because, as ROE says, it was a lot of fun getting great swag. I'm leaning hard into Artificer to adjust and am still enjoying the game, but it was definitely more fun when lairs had a higher budget allocation.

[GeorgeJJR]

Originally posted by rgp151:

Hmm I hadn't changed any settings on that. Looks like it was set to "Skilled". I moved it up to Master. But still, I was taking out lairs with like 4 Sky Drakes and 5 other units and getting like a bow of +1 Defense. :p

That's interesting, I'm generally getting excellent loot from lairs with even just a single drake (to the point where it hasn't been worth creating artifacts as all six heroes have great gear from lairs). The soultrapped event lairs alone (on hard lair difficulty) equipped most of my heroes.

I wonder if their rng covers too wide a spread, so the same lair can either drop very strong gear or very weak gear.

[COLINDSEY]

Originally posted by Xeth Nyrrow:

Several things are at play here. The random artifacts can make things very samey still but it's actually not because of this feature. The monster evaluations for lair budgets in the game (even on the highest difficulty) are way higher than in the original game. If I'm reading the wiki correctly, (and I'm sure drake is lurking around the corner to pounce if not) a Great Drake has a budget value of 900 where as in this game it's 4440. They did use encounter zone budgets similar to 1.5+ which seem to be roughly double the 1.31 ones. This leaves a roughly net half strength in lair power on average compared to the old game. As a result you get a lot of low end items.

Originally posted by rgp151:

I just noticed they have a mod that eliminates the random artifacts for lairs and uses the originals instead. https://www.nexusmods.com/masterofmagic/mods/6

I don't know if the author has updated this to work properly with the latest version so be careful. I have been in contact with both the authors of the 2 mods that do this type of thing to ask for updates. I know the mods also tweak the budgets so that you actually get decent rewards too which is needed.

Originally posted by rgp151:

Also, on another note, even after starting the SoM no wizard has attempted to disjunction my Planar Seal. This would never have happened on Classic 1.5. It would have been dispelled long ago and I'd have to keep recasting it.

This is part of the new game's AI still not being addressed yet. Not casting enough globals (like disjunction) as well as poor city defenses are the 2 big things left to address I feel.

Xeth, is there anyway to modify/increase the lair budget? Hopefully by modifying a Database file? Specifically, I'd like to increase the incidence of retorts being awarded in game. Retort rewards are occurring much less frequently than they were earlier this year.

[Xeth Nyrrow]

Originally posted by COLINDSEY:

Originally posted by Xeth Nyrrow:

Several things are at play here. The random artifacts can make things very samey still but it's actually not because of this feature. The monster evaluations for lair budgets in the game (even on the highest difficulty) are way higher than in the original game. If I'm reading the wiki correctly, (and I'm sure drake is lurking around the corner to pounce if not) a Great Drake has a budget value of 900 where as in this game it's 4440. They did use encounter zone budgets similar to 1.5+ which seem to be roughly double the 1.31 ones. This leaves a roughly net half strength in lair power on average compared to the old game. As a result you get a lot of low end items.



I don't know if the author has updated this to work properly with the latest version so be careful. I have been in contact with both the authors of the 2 mods that do this type of thing to ask for updates. I know the mods also tweak the budgets so that you actually get decent rewards too which is needed.


This is part of the new game's AI still not being addressed yet. Not casting enough globals (like disjunction) as well as poor city defenses are the 2 big things left to address I feel.

Xeth, is there anyway to modify/increase the lair budget? Hopefully by modifying a Database file? Specifically, I'd like to increase the incidence of retorts being awarded in game. Retort rewards are occurring much less frequently than they were earlier this year.

Yes, it's actually the GameplayScripts.cs script file that changes the budgets technically. There's some interplay there with the monster budget as well.

[Ichthyic]

I always found the best items in this new version were obtained by buying them from the random vendors that pop up at end of turn from time to time. They are costly, but immensely powerful, and far more so than the things I tended to get from lairs. it's too bad they didn't just apply the vendor script to ruins frankly.

[Thewizardlord]

Originally posted by Ichthyic:

I always found the best items in this new version were obtained by buying them from the random vendors that pop up at end of turn from time to time. They are costly, but immensely powerful, and far more so than the things I tended to get from lairs. it's too bad they didn't just apply the vendor script to ruins frankly.

I rarely buy from merchants because they always sell me stuff that will nearly wipe up my treasury, so like if I have x gold, they will see me x-50 say . Too risky.

Well until my treasury starts to becone really high