Maximum Prayer Energy/Power/Mana, Question

[SLK]

I've decided to dust off the CD and give the game some TLC.  I'm surprised how well it holds up in terms of gameplay and complexity.

I was wondering about maximum prayer energy.  You read the signpost in Land One about placing artifacts, bushes, trees, and other stuff at the worship site to increase the maximum energy, but I've noticed that it caps off at 15,000 points (maybe coincidently) when most of the desires of your villagers are satisfied and you're pretty well-off (ie. One huge wonder, 350-500 villagers, the only desire flags up are expansion and breeding, 12 fully charged artifacts just sitting there with everyone dancing, massive forests you've planted around the villages to make it look natural, Lots of villagers 'chilling out', etc.). 

That being said, placing a bunch of objects at the worship site doesn't seem to increase the maximum value beyond 15,000.  This only seems to be different in Land Four when you send most of your villagers to the worship site to create large enough spiritual shields to protect your village from fireballs/lightning.  Your maximum prayer energy seems to be consistent with how many villagers your have/sent through the vortex from Land Three and changes as villagers are born or die or belief.  I've seen the villagers regenerate the prayer energy to 45,000 on their own without me shaking off miracle seed energy into the sacrifice bowl. 

I'd like to know how I can get the maximum prayer energy up beyond 15,000 and get the villagers to regenerate to higher values by themselves on other Lands.

Also, how do you prevent villagers from 'hiding at [the] worship site'?  Related to this is how when the prayer energy is capped at 15,000, and I raise the totem to 100%, most villagers seem to just hide instead of dancing around the sacrifice bowl/totems at the site.  Related to the cap, sometimes one or two villagers will come out from hiding and join the dancing, increasing the cap to like 15,260 or something which makes me believe that it is possible to increase the cap.

Other odd things related to the cap is that in Land Five, with the cap being in place for all the villages I've converted, I can somehow create 5 village-wide spiritual shields and keep them going indefinitely.  It's weird is all.

Thanks for any help for this old gem of a game. 

 

[Okapidragon]

Decorating the site also makes you accrue prayer energy more quickly. 

I haven't looked into the cap much, I will when I get home. As for people hiding at the worship site, I believe it is to do with population, but it isn't a direct relation... About 30%, it seems, will worship at once, but more if you have fewer villagers and less if you have more. But I'm not sure, that's just what it seems like. Also, people will come out of hiding when they need food or if you take someone out of the pattern of dancers.

Also, something I've noticed that might be intentional or a glitch, of all the tribes that have people dancing together in pairs the only which will have a pair of the same gender or of an adult and a child, it seems, is the Greek village.  :laugh2 Oh, ancient Greek jokes.

 

[SLK]

About 30%, it seems, will worship at once, but more if you have fewer villagers and less if you have more. But I'm not sure, that's just what it seems like.

Interesting.  That actually makes sense considering you start with basically nothing in Land 4 with only a handful of people and yet you can get maximum energy higher than 15,000 for shields and the like.  I'll try it out and see by killing off villagers.

I never noticed that you accrue energy faster with artifacts.  Good to know.

As for the Greeks, I think I vaguely remember seeing that too and silently chuckling to myself, remembering various myths, stories, and movies.  You gotta believe that was intentional if no other tribes do it, which I didn't notice or look for. 

 

[Okapidragon]

I've never seen another tribe do it, but that could just be coincidence.

I've never used artifacts to decorate the worship site, just things like singing stones and trees.

 

[SLK]

So killing off vilagers doesn't really help (pretty much figured it wouldn't).  I ended up destroying as many houses as I could to get the the lazy villagers off their asses and make them do something and for kicks (since I never seemed too interested in being evil before).  Nothing changed with the max prayer energy.  I'm starting to think it's just a bug or they simply programmed the caps on every other land besides land four, because on that particular land you need a village-wide shield.  From any random player, it would seem like a glitch.  I should be able to cast 4 megablasts in a row with a village of 550 people and a maximum prayer energy of 75,000 or something.  

I'm on Land Five and converted/built up every possible thing except Nemesis' last village and each village has an average of 500-600 villagers who are relatively happy.  The caps are still in place for the max energy though, capped at 15,000 or so.  And yet the peculiar thing is I can create 4-5 nearly village-wide spiritual shields over the various tribes and the prayer energy at the Greek bowl (since they have the shield miracles) will just regenerate back to 15,000.  It's as if I REALLY have like 75,000 prayer points and the game is interpreting the prayer points I have as being worth triple/quadruple.  I have a feeling it also has something to do with the 4 maxed out Tibetan wonders I have, but who really knows unless the programmer who actually created the formulas were to explain.  They make the shields 'last longer'/stronger against attack (meaning when something hits them, the prayer energy doesn't expend as many points), but the lasting longer thing only seems to make sense when you have zero prayer energy and the shield is basically on its own.  

I'll post screenshots of my villages for the hell of it.  Notice the weird seams in the textures on the ground as well as the messed up textures on the spiritual shields?  I'm on Win7x64 Ultimate which is probably the reason.  15,005 prayer energy:

 

[vezrilx]

The Tibetan wonder does a potentially HUGE amount for spiritual shield power in terms of 1: how much energy they take to sustain and 2: how much energy they lose to damage. You obviously have enough sizeable wonders there for a strong effect.

What this means is... your shields will drain far less on your prayer points, plain and simple.

I've had a village of ~35 people sustain 4 large shields over

Spoiler

... the 4 areas that Nemesis' megablast waves hit at when you have all but his last village converted, 2 to protect my towns and 2 just for kicks...

areas that would take lots of damage to the shields.

Neat thing I noticed is that wonders benefit miracles even if cast from a miracle seed.
-I had a large Tibetan wonder

Spoiler

plus the 2 small ones you get in Land 5

and used a spiritual shield miracle seed I made in the previous land. The shield I could cast from the seeds I had lasted quite awhile.. obviously less so scaling with the size of the shield I made. I didn't have any villages yet with a spiritual shield miracle.

In regards to the main point of the topic, I recall being able to have a cap higher than 15k at some points, though lower at others. I'll have to pay more attention to it and get back to you.

 

[Okapidragon]

I think I may have an idea of what may influence the caps, but I could be wrong, I'm not entirely lucid, and I don't have the stuffs I need to check this, but maybe land 4 has a global variable for a higher cap, and then otherwise the cap climbs as your village grows, but then has a cap it runs up against that is hard-coded as opposed to being based on village size, which is around 15k somewhere, like a wonder. And then, if you have more than one village of the same tribe, it increases the cap by the cap of each village but stores it in one altar. If someone else can figure this out, I honestly don't feel like playing Black and White for a while, I'm already two weeks (or 140 pages) behind on my writing due to Oblivion and getting kinda depressed to do much, but I think it might be the case.

 

[SLK]

I had one fully developed Norse village on Land Four and made another village center and developed it as far as it could go and the cap was still at 15K.  Tested this way before this topic was even made so I'm sure it doesn't work.  I'm sure the caps were put in place so that not anyone could just cast ten megablasts on an enemy creature/village in a row and other miracles. 

It looks like Land Four is only real exception with no cap until everything is built up where it becomes capped as you say Okapi. 

"and used a spiritual shield miracle seed I made in the previous land. The shield I could cast from the seeds I had lasted quite awhile.. obviously less so scaling with the size of the shield I made. I didn't have any villages yet with a spiritual shield miracle."

Yeah that's pretty much how it's meant to be. 

As for the Tibetan wonders, it's clear that their size and how many points are used to keep them going is less and less the more wonders you make (with a probable cap in there somewhere).  You still use the same amount of points with the miracle seed/gesture/clicking on the miracle when you cast it (7000 points or something), but the size of it and whether or not you can keep it up without the prayer energy decreasing at various speeds to zero and therefore taking the shield down is related to your Tibetan wonders only. 

 

[vezrilx]

Well.. you can achieve the desired effect anyways, though it requires more clicking. Just make miracle seeds, obviously you'll need a dispenser handy. AI Gods don't use them, but your creature might "use" them.