Birthright Gorgon's Alliance game mechanics

[Question]

Here are some things that are not immediately obvious :

-When your regent dies, you get to resurrect them automatically. NPCs do not get to do this, and they will try to have a lieutenant take over. If no lieutenants are available, you can no longer conduct diplomacy with them, and they will not be able to collect RP, but can still initiate some realm actions that do require RP (e.g. contest). They just can't spend any RP to improve their odds.

-The AI automatically succeeds at all assassination attempts. This was easier for the devs to code, but gets really annoying for the player since the AI can spam it and theres nothing you can do to stop them. Honest Dealing does not block assassinations either. The AI will never target regents or lieutenants unless they are the only valid targets in the province, which is why its important to keep them with an army if using them on the front lines.

-The AI does not use assassinate on easy difficulty.

-When using auto battle, any casaulties for that stack are taken from the bottom of the stack first. Since characters are automatically shoved to the bottom of the stack after an adventure, this means they will be killed first.

-When obtaining lieutenants, the game will not correctly place them on the map if the regent is not the first unit in the stack. They will be hired and appear in your list, but their unit will not exist on the map.

-The AI can also cast realm spells without needing to know that spell, the RP to cast it or access to a wizard. They still need to abide by source level requirements however. It is important to get rid of level 5 sources before investing a province, as otherwise certain AI realms like Five Peaks can cast death plague.

-Death Plague and pillaging does not correctly increase the province's source level.

-Investing a province does not always correctly transfer the province's port to your control. So far, it seems the only way to 100% guarantee it will transfer the port is to make sure it is the last province they control.

-When using auto battle, the power of a unit is calculated this way :

// -- Your get points equal to your melee, charge
// -- added together plus 2 * your missile rating, 1.5 your defence,
// -- your magic level, plus 6 points for being regent/lieutenant and 3 points
// -- for being blessed

//Magic level for priests and bards are the same as character level, while wizards get 1.5 their character level.

Some calculations, im assuming the game rounds down partial numbers :

archers : 2 melee, 2 defence (3), 4 missile (8) = 13
elven archers : 2 melee, 2 defence (3), 5 missile (10) = 15
dwarf crossbows : 3 melee, 4 defence (6), 4 missile (8) = 17
cavalry : 3 melee, 5 charge, 3 defence (4), 1 missile (2) = 14
knights : 4 melee, 6 charge, 4 defence (6) = 16
elven cav : 3 melee, 5 charge, 3 defence (4), 4 missile (8) = 20
skeletons : 5 melee, 7 defence (11) = 16

What this basically mean is that archers are the most cost efficient unit that can be mustered. 1 archer is roughly equal to 1 skeleton. If money is no object, knights or elven cav are also good options.

Since The Spider, Rhoubhe and The Gorgon have insanely powerful unit stats and the latter two have high wizard levels, it is almost impossible to defeat them via auto battle, which is why they will overrun AI realms easily.

Notably, relics and blood abilities that increase unit stats do not appear to matter in auto battle.

-Gorgon will always teleport away to one of his provinces if he loses a battle with no way to retreat. He will only teleport to provinces free of enemy units however.

-Five Peaks, Rhoubhe, Spider and Gorgon get free units regularly as long as their realms exist. This number varies based on difficulty.

-Gorgon also gets a number of skeletons every turn, in the same province where he is located. If he is not located on the map, the game will bug out and cause them to spawn as Chaos controlled skeletons in odd locations, mostly in the Gorgon's Crown, but frequently in Deserain (Alamie) as well. The devs did not bother to check whether he was still on the map sadly. The number of skeletons he gets also varies based on difficulty.

-AI realms do not appear to pay for maintenance and they have a 20% chance of getting 50gb per turn. They also get extra gold each turn based on the difficulty.

-On turn 16+, the game has a 25% chance to fire the event to have the Gorgon absorb a random NPC realm. If the Gorgon's Crown does not exist, this will bug out and turn the realm into no-man's land. You will not be able to do enter those provinces because you cannot declare war or do anything with them.

There IS one safe way to negate the absorption however. On the turn the event fires, you need to save, load the save in the scenario editor, and have the absorbed realm absorb the Gorgon's Crown to get their stuff back. Unfortunately, this also absorbs the Gorgon and Kiras Earthcore if they are still alive, and there is no way to manually change which realm they are associated with.

-Quick attacks double the max damage you can deal but give you a +4 to hit penalty. Not very useful unless you have a tooled up fighter with lots of to hit bonuses.

-Attempting to use magic on either Gorgon or Rhoubhe in adventures outside of melee range will cause them to spam their stone gaze and chain lightning respectively, at very high speeds. This does not happen in melee, but Gorgon has 95% magic resistance anyway.

-Hellhounds "cast" a fireball when attacking, this seems to ignore fire immunity and possibly magic resistance. This makes them very dangerous even for characters with a low AC as it does not require a to hit roll.

-Certain spells have different effects from what their descriptions imply. In particular :

Magic Missile : Seems to deal 1d4 damage per missile, not 2-5.

Morelf's Poison Arrow : Seems to deal 1d4 per caster level.

Fireball, Improved Fireball and Meteor Swarm : Does not allow a save for half damage. The splash damage also ignores fire and magic resistance, but magic resistance is still checked for the main target so they do not work against the Gorgon.

Ice storm : Deals 1d6 damage, doesnt scale with caster level.

Gloves of Invulnerability (both versions) : Seems to do nothing as far as i can tell. It doesnt protect against splash damage from your fireballs.

Cone of Cold : Seems to deal 1d4 per caster level + casterlevel *2 damage.

Death Spell : does not appear to allow a save, but i do not think it affects undead.

Improved Fireball : Seems to deal 0d6 per caster level. Not sure (the code is not clear, theres two blocks of code for this).

Spell Immunity : Seems to add 100 magic resistance according to the code. Does not seem to do anything however, as Rhoubhe's lightning spam ignores magic resistance and the enemies cast magic normally.

Time Stop : Does nothing, they never finished coding this spell.

Power Word Stun : Ignores magic resist and works as a confusion spell but doesn't allow a save. Easily negates the Gorgon.

Power Word Blind : Similar to above, except that it gives them a +4 hit penalty and +4 penalty to AC. Also works on the Gorgon.

Power Word Kill : Does not grant xp when killing enemies with this spell. May ignore magic resist, but the 60 hp limit makes this useless anyway.

Meteor Swarm : Seems to create 4 meteors that deal 10-40 damage each, or at least its supposed to according to the code.

Turn Undead : Im pretty sure it only deals 6-36 damage instead of scaling based on caster level.

Holy Word : Seems to deal 10,000 damage for testing purposes, which they forgot to change to it's proper damage.

Firestorm : Doesnt appear to do anything when cast. Code looks fine though.

All instant kill spells such as Disintegrate, Death Spell and Power Word Kill do not give any xp to the caster.

Wand of Secret Detection and Detect Illusions : Does nothing as far as i can tell, although the code looks fine. Perhaps they never bothered to mark doors as secret.

Divine Wrath : Only gives +1 to hit and damage.

Stronghold : Only creates a level 1 wizard tower instead of improving the existing castle. Enemies do not need to siege it either to occupy the province, making it useless.

Summoning : Only lets you summon 1 unit of each selected type, instead of multiple units of a type based on your caster level.

Mass Destruction : You cannot target the Gorgon with this spell.

-Relics that increase your level only affect spells per day. They do not affect THACO, HP, caster level or add new divine spells to your inventory.

-The biggest contributors to realm strength are owning certain artifacts like the Emperor's Crown or Sword of Roele. Most other relics give 10 points, and you get a large bonus to realm strength for owning provinces that belong to Rhoubhe, Five Peaks, Spider, Markazor, Mur-Kilad and Gorgon's Crown. The Gorgon's banner also adds 100 realm strength.

-Despite what it's adventure description may suggest, Barazard's Tools only affects the build cost for a road, and does not affect the cost of building a castle.

-The odds of a new adventure being generated each turn is 24%. The comment suggests it should be 75% instead, so this is either a bug or they changed it at some point without updating the comment.

-On the highest adventure combat speed, there is still a delay of 6+ seconds at the start of combat before it will start rolling for damage. After that though, it will do damage rolls at a very high pace.

-Collision detection is broken in many adventure maps, letting you walk through cell doors and such. Some of these only allow movement one way though.

-Ports give trade at 1/province level, instead of half province level.

-You can make an infinite number of trade routes leading to the same destination province. E.G. You can have 8 other provinces form trade routes to Ilien, instead of only up to 3 trade routes.

-Bards receive 1/2 regency from guilds and nothing else.