Magic question buildings

Magic question buildings

06:39:20 Jan 28th 15 - Mr. Vilhelm:

just out of curiosity,
would having MT in a warehouse and stashing MUS in a warehouse decrease STG results?

I,E looking to build a soley magic city, but not wanting to create a new city.

also whats the best ratio for a magic city MT/homes.

08:02:27 Jan 28th 15 - Kobuskan (Sir Drakul):

Bad idea to but warehouses in your magic city, MT give magic defence also and will make casting on it harder.

Better is to cast STG from an army of let say 8k MU upon a city only 1k warehouses, this will keep you losses low and STG more profitable.

For a good MC you need about 70K MT and 30K houses to stash 750k MU in

Then close to you MC you need your arms with about 15k houses and 6k Armouries to mass train your MU

11:34:47 Jan 28th 15 - Mr. Vilhelm:

oh really, i was always under the impression 5k wares / 1k homes for a warehouse city, should i change that thinking,

alright cool man thanks.

a very rough question a good guideline for Steal science magic?

11:44:55 Jan 28th 15 - Princess Aisha:

15k houses and 6k armories is a very bad idea, that would not give you full discount on training time. Better to ahve 7500 armories, that always gives the full discount no matter how many homes you have in your city.

15:33:29 Jan 28th 15 - HorusPanic (Lord Horus):

70K MT and 30K houses

are you smoking crack? 70,000 MTs? I surely hope thats a typo or you are trolling

16:15:53 Jan 28th 15 - Mr. Barny:

1. STG is a utility scroll that you cast upon cities, and the cost of casting utility scrolls upon cities is related to 'magic resistance' which is based upon building count. You are best served casting STG on a small city that is 100% warehouses. The only reasons to put homes in a warehouse would be to collect tax gold (negligible and the tax gold would be outweighed by the increased cost of casting the spell) or to house the troops that defend the warehouse (also negligible even if you are a halfling). If you do build a 100% warehouse city be sure to keep an army in the city at all times to avoid being plundered by a nazgul scout for tens of millions of gold.

If you want an incredibly simplified tl;dr version of how to STG you could make a city with 3k warehouses and no other buildings and use 4k~ MU to cast the spell on the city from an army that is within the city,

2. The best ratio of MT/Homes doesn't exist. You really should have as few homes as possible in your MC and store the MU in an adjacent city (I could go on and on about why having homes in your MC is shit) but people are lazy so they do it anyway because it works fine up until the late-era. This is a rather extreme statement that I know some people will disagree with so I'll just present information to you and allow you to reason through this on your own:

If you have, say, 10k homes and 5k MT you are not going to be getting the full magic power bonus that you could be getting by casting from a city with MT. Most people would agree that if you are spending tends to hundreds of millions of resources to train enough MU to reach a certain magic power that you need to cast a spell it is sub-optimal to reduce the % magic power modifier provided by MT just because you wanted to store your MU on-site.

As the era drags on you will need more and more mages to cast spells like Freeze/ROF/etc. Eventually the number of MU you will need will exceed hundreds of thousands, at which point you will need tens of thousands of homes to store said MU. When you get to this point you will either need a 'crack smoker MC' to both store all of your MU and have the full MT magic power bonus or you will need to store your MU in a city that is mostly made up of homes that is close to the MC.

The only reason that having 100% MT cities is not the optimal way to cast spells is because MT do not turn into wreckage when they collapse, therefore if you need (X amount of MT) to reach a certain range you would need to always maintain ({.5X} - 100) buildings in said city to build back up to your desired range.

It is for this reason that many mages many opt to build either 7500 armories or 4k-6k homes in their MCs. I would HIGHLY recommend training and storing most MU in a nearby city and not in the actual MC. If your MC has 5000 non-MT buildings then as long as you always have 5k+ MT you will get the full power bonus.

Let's say your city has 9k MT and 0 other buildings, if you cast high level spells and lose 90%+ of your MT then you suddenly are left with a sub-2k total building city that will require a very very long time to build back up even if you use slaves due to the limit of buildings you can build at once in a city being ((total buildings x 2) + 100)

If the same city has 5k homes then you can store 125k MU on city for ease and you can always build up to 10100 MT at a time even if you lose 100% of your MT.

16:36:40 Jan 28th 15 - Mr. Barny:

Regarding Steal Science:

Steal Science is an offensive spell that factors in your enemies 'Global Magic Defense', which makes it EXTREMELY difficult to cast upon enemies that are still alive and kicking.

The spell is mostly used when someone has effectively killed their opponent in battle yet their enemy still has a scout or city somewhere that the spell can be cast upon.

Somewhat related magic protip: I mention above that if you cast spells from a city that contains MT you get a magic power% bonus that is related to the ratio of not-MT:MT. The downside of casting spells from cities is that mages that would otherwise become injured become dead. With some spells the increase in power you can get from the full MT power% bonus heavily outweighs the additional casualties your will incur for doing so. This is a very important concept to understand. Let me provide an example below:

Let's say your army of 6/4 pony riders just got bounced by another army and now the guy who did it is coming to finish the job. You have AOTD, but your % for success is something like 36%. You are up against the ropes and magic protection doesnt matter to you, being not dead matters to you. What is your play? Do you just go for it and cross your fingers and cast AOTD at 36% from an army? That's what the uninformed and unskilled player would do.

The better player would detach his MU and settle a new city as close as possible to the city that his army retreated to, slave-build 102 MT, and then raze the initial GT. Doing this would suddenly boost your success% greatly and give you a MUCH higher % chance to succeed at casting the spell. You'd lose more in the event that you fail, but if you are in that situation you only have one shot anyways.

It's not a play you want to have to make, but it's a play you have to know how to make.

00:04:12 Jan 29th 15 - Mr. Vilhelm:

Thanks heaps barny, really appreciate the effort you went into.

I like your reasoning for every thing,

Now I just need to put it together,

Any other tips you got haha?

01:25:42 Jan 29th 15 - Alrisaia (Mr. Gallinar The Gray):

The best ratio of MT/Homes doesn't exist. You really should have as few homes as possible in your MC and store the MU in an adjacent city (I could go on and on about why having homes in your MC is shit) but people are lazy so they do it anyway because it works fine up until the late-era. This is a rather extreme statement that I know some people will disagree with so I'll just present information to you and allow you to reason through this on your own:

I'm just starting to see the effects of this as I push the 1m mp mark... In having to store my mu in an army which is drastically reducing the income I have. With a nearby city full of homes I could easily move them in as needed... Next era I'll have to give that a go.

18:54:00 Feb 2nd 15 - Mr. Barny:

15:04:12 Jan 28th 15 - Mr. Vilhelm:

Thanks heaps barny, really appreciate the effort you went into.

I like your reasoning for every thing,

Now I just need to put it together,

Any other tips you got haha?

I don't have a whole lot more to say about magic aside from raw numbers or information. I just wrote up a wall of text about general strategy/reasoning in VU before realizing that it wasn't at all related to the topic of this thread (I used this thread and Troll as a reference point for why some strategies are not good).

The best advice I could give anyone in VU regardless or experience or skill level is that everything is a matter of timing and efficiency. A lot of the time people forget that because everything is relative and sometimes people do things that are not efficient or they waste time. Never just assume that what someone is telling you is correct, always use your own judgement and reasoning (this is true of anything).

Normally I would just say fuck it and post the huge wall of text anyways and highlight the important stuff in orange, but this wall of text was probably longer than anything I've ever written on the VU forums. It had everything to do with general builds/ideal strategies/why some things aren't viable in competitive worlds and nothing to do with magic outside of the importance of certain magic levels for certain builds (2/4/6/7 being the important magic levels right now).

I saved what I wrote in a notepad in case anyone is interested at some point down the line.

20:11:12 Feb 2nd 15 - Mr. Mallikor:

Ill take it a wall of notes.

09:30:39 Feb 3rd 15 - Mr. Barny:

I thought of a solution, I can just break the huge wall of text into separate parts and post them here despite it being off topic. TL;DR/important stuff highlighting in orange.

Rather than immediately giving opinions on races/balance/etc I'll open with something more factual and less opinionated.

I have to preface this by saying that I love to flame Troll players. I don't think Troll is a very good race at all and I could go into great detail as to why that is, but the 'concept' of the race is good and Troll attracts a lot of good players like Kool, Pure, Darkmoor (best troll player atm imo), etc.

Part One: Ideal Builds vs Viable Builds

You always have to consider Opportunity Cost in Visual Utopia and keep in mind that gold has different values to different races (and different land counts). Gold is worth more to a 80k land Military 9 Orc than it is to a 500k land Military 7 Dwarf.

I remember coming back to the game and reading a discussion about Troll science builds that and someone suggested a military 8 opening science build. If you are saving up that much gold for military science 8 you are fucking up on a multitude of different levels. You are spending a huge portion of the era (that most people use to build up, like Halflings/Dwarves with mining sciences) with no economic sciences of your own. This is not as well known as it should be, but these days a lot of the best players opt to go Mining 3 openings pre-OOP as opposed to mining0 military first builds even if they dont plan to get mining science very high. Why? Because that 20% boost to your economy gives you an advantage that keeps compounding over time at the cost of 1 maximum science level in another category (usually military).

If you go a mining0 military8 build on any race you will lose horribly to a player who does the exact same thing as you with mining3 military7.

Assuming everyone on a map is really bad (this happens sometimes on lesser worlds) and you are somehow able to factor out the element of relative timings, how you would actually have to reach endgame sciences, etc and you were able to just look at ideal end-game science priorities for races, most races would look like this:

(Non-AOTD):Military>Mining>Medical>Magic4>Farming>Forestry

(AOTD-Capable):Military>Magic6>Medical>Mining>Farming>Forestry

Troll has very unique 'ideal sciences'. Let's compare them to a more straightforward race like Dwarf that only has 1-3 ideal playstyles if you factor out AOTD/Dwarf Mage

Ideal Endgame Dwarf Science Priorities:

Standard: Mining>Military>Medical>Magic4>Farming>Forestry

Alternative1: Military>Mining>Medical>Magic4>Farming>Forestry

Alternative2: Military>Medical>Mining>Magic4>Farming>Forestry

Dwarf is probably the only race in which sometimes Mining is actually more valuable than Military science (despite how highly most players value mining science military science is almost always more valuable), and that's because of Dwarf Mining Bonus/Cavemasters moreso than playstyle,

Ideal Endgame Troll Science Priorities are as follows:
Ideal(NOT VIABLE): Medical>Magic6>Military>Mining>Farming>Forestry

Viable: Magic6>Military>Medical>Mining>Farming>Forestry

Standard: Military>Mining>Medical>Magic4>Farming>Forestry

Pretty much everyone realizes that access to AOTD, high military science, and high medical science are ideal on Troll, even Troll players! The issue is that reaching any of the 'ideal sciences' on Troll is hardly viable if you are playing against Halfling/Orc players who are doing any kind of build that isn't terrible. If you are able to farm in total seclusion for military 8 as your first science then you probably could have gotten away doing a similarly late-game oriented strategy on a different race like Elf.

Disclaimers regarding AOTD:

Some people like to argue that you can just have someone else AOTD you on X race, but if you do this you lose out on a huge portion of the utility of AOTD like being able to 100% an army on your city that is technically 3 times your size (thus allowing AOTD to basically 9x the effectiveness of your army, very balanced spell! IRONICALLY BERSERKERS CANNOT FULLY ABUSE THIS)

Some people like to argue things like 'You can't AOTD on X race or X unit'. Again, not true for good players. Someone like Binh on a world like GvE Round 2 has AOTD'd a 250k+ unit Halfling Army that (purposely?) lost to on 80% to higher military science Berserkers multiple times. AOTD is such a ridiculously good spell that it's technically cost effective to AOTD anything worth 300~ gold yet people seem to think you can only AOTD Nazgul, Archmages, and Berserker. AOTD on Halfling Pony Rider is extremely important to be competitive against the best players right now, and Halfling is a very competitiverace for various reasons.

10:12:18 Feb 3rd 15 - Mr. Barny:

Alright, now back to Ideal Builds vs Viable Builds.

Look above at some of those builds like 'Ideal Endgame Dwarf Science Priorities' and then 'Standard: Mining>Military>Medical>Magic4>Farming>Forestry

That's actually very practical, isn't it? It's perfectly viable to achieve those endgame sciences by literally just leveling your sciences in that order! If you aren't pressured OOP you can go something like 'Mining 9, Military 8, Magic 4, Medical X, Farming 4, Forestry 1 (Because of the nature of being an economic science that is usually leveled last, AND being for a resource that peaks in value early-mid era it's almost never worth leveling Forestry past 0-1). You could go mining 10-11 but doing so is usually not worth it, not only for economic reasons but also because doing so will limit the potential for your military science/medical science/magic. If you are pressured early on you can open with mining 3-6, pick up military 6-8, then backtrack for mining 6-9.

Despite being potentially extremely useful it's often not viable to achieve magic 6 on dwarf unless it is your opening science, which presents an enormous opportunity cost unless you are a mage. Dwarf magic sciences are an orger of magnitude more expensive than any other race and magic science is the most expensive science by far as well.

For most races if you arent looking to get magic 6 because you suck (or you get forced into OOP combat) the most appealing way to achieve something close to ideal endgame sciences would involve picking up Military Science first and leveling it to the ideal level because it's the most important non-magic 6 science and some people actually do that which is fucking awful.

The only good reason to open with Military Science is if you are either going MilitaryX into Magic6 (extremely viable) or MilitaryX into MedicalX into Magic4. If your plan is to forgo getting magic 6 (which you should usually only do if you are fighting OOP or all-ining early-mid era) then you will almost always be better off getting Mining3 into MilitaryX-1 into MiningX-1 than MilitaryX into MiningX-2

If you are playing Halfling technically your 'ideal' science build would involve Medical 8, because it's very important in the super-lategame and it's the only science that you can't find with adventurer. It doesn't take a VU Veteran or strategical mastermind to realize that there isn't a viable Medical 8 build for Halfling on competitive worlds.

Think again about 'ideal science priorities' for a Dwarf who doesnt get Magic 6, you want to get your mining science really high and it's perfectly viable to do so by opening with mining. Dwarf has the cheapest mining science in the game. You want your military science really high as well, you can pick it up right after mining science and Dwarf has one of the the cheapest military sciences in the game.

Now think about 'idea endgame science priorities for Troll'. You should actually prioritize Medical Science more highly than any other science, including military science. In fact, you would be better served in the lategame having slightly lower military science than your enemies so that you cause a higher ratio of injuries as opposed to AOTDable deaths and this is especially true if you have very high medical science and are self-AOTD-capable.

Realistically it's not viable at all to do a build where you open with super high Medical Science on Troll because doing so leaves you with too long a period in which you have no economic sciences on the only race in the game to lack some sort of economic racial advantage and also leaves you with an extended period in which you have no military sciences.

Normally the only viable way to get away with having no military sciences on competitive worlds (which only happens if you go miningX into magic6 builds) is to compensate by having access to Magic Weapons (spell/utility scroll).

The most viable opening science builds in the current version are as follows, note that all builds end with farming 2-4 and Forestry 0-1:

Mining3 into MilitaryX into MiningX-1 into Magic2to4 into MedicalY
MilitaryX into Magic6 into MiningX-2 into MedicalY
Mining3 into Magic6 into MiningX into MilitaryX-2 into MedicalY
Magic6 into MiningX into MilitaryX-1 into MedicalY
(Not very good)Magic6 into MilitaryX into MiningX-1 into MedicalY
(AWFUL)MilitaryX into MiningX-1 into into Medical4to5 into Magic2

Believe it or not there is a huge portion of the VU playerbase that still opts into some of the worst possible science builds that leave them without economic sciences for huge periods of time.

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