Retorts

A Retort in Caster of Magic is a special advantage held by a wizard.

Overview
There are a total of eighteen Retorts, and none are unique (ie. 2+ wizards may possess the same Retort). Each Retort costs the wizard an initial spellbook, or two for more powerful Retorts. This means that the more Retorts a wizard begins with, the fewer (and less powerful) spells they will be able to cast.

Retorts may also be acquired later in the game, by collecting them from Encounter Zones such as Ruins and Nodes. Wizards can obtain a maximum of six Retorts in this way. They are awarded randomly, and are extremely rare.

Retorts List
Retorts with an "*" after their name were new additions in Caster of Magic.

Game-Start Retorts
At the start of the game, most Wizards will possess at least one Retort, if not more, with a maximum of four. The exact number and type of Retorts they have depends on several factors, including whether they are player-controlled, and the current difficulty setting.

Default Player-Controlled Wizards
If the player chooses one of the default Wizard templates offered by the game when it is started, his/her Wizard will have a specific Retort (or none) depending on the chosen wizard:

Customized Player-Controlled Wizards
During the creation process of a customized Wizard, the player may pick individual Retorts for this Wizard from the list of all 18 Retorts.

Each Retort selected will reduce the number of Spellbooks this Wizard may pick for his starting repertoire by a certain amount. Thus, each Retort picked reduces the variety of spells this Wizard will be able to research and cast (barring any additional Spellbooks acquired during the game):

Note that initially wizards can only have 4 Retorts. They can later reach a maximum 6 Retorts through treasure from random encounters (see below).

Computer-Controlled Wizards
When the game begins, computer-controlled Wizards may discard default Retorts and substitute them with new ones. Additionally, like the player, they may acquire Retorts from lairs that have such treasure, as explained in the next section.

Retorts as Rewards
 NOTE: This section is copied from the Master of Magic wiki and may be inaccurate for Caster of Magic 

When a Wizard-controlled army defeats the monsters guarding an Encounter Zone, the Wizard receives a reward or set of rewards based on the difficulty level of the monsters he defeated.

Defeating the very highest-level encounters may result in the Wizard receiving one to two additional Specials — Spellbooks and/or Retorts for his profile — on top of the ones he already has. This is considered an excellent and very rare reward, encouraging players to try and be the first ones to reach heavily-defended encounters and win them.

The game will randomly pick any valid Retort that the Wizard does not already have, and add it to the Retorts list for that Wizard (visible in the Info->Mirror menu). The new Retort takes effect immediately, and will remain in effect until the end of the game.

A wizard may never have more than 6 Retorts. If a wizard already has 6 (whether from game-start or acquired as rewards) he/she will never again receive a Retort as a reward.

Valid Retorts
Retorts found in lairs ignore all prerequisites and restrictions. It is thus possible for a wizard to collect advanced skills without meeting their often-stringent requirements, possibly gain a mastery in a realm they have no books for, and even possess both Divine and Infernal Power (though the effects are not cumulative, so there is no benefit to doing so).

Only Myrran will never be awarded, on account of being a 3-pick retort. There is no opportunity lost on this, because the asset has no impact on gameplay after the game has started.

Specials are rolled randomly at the very instant a wizard conquers a Lair, and Spellbooks are significantly more likely to appear than Retorts. Expensive retorts are especially hard to find; they will only show up if the game rolls one first when sacking a 2-pick Lair. Base probabilities and odd circumstances are listed in the short table below.

Caster of Magic Dev Notes
''The process to create your custom wizard has been fine tuned to offer the maximal possible choices and replayability. For this purpose, most retorts can be chosen without requiring specific books, and have no limitations. However, two pairs of retorts, that support similar purposes, are each mutually exclusive (as stacking them would be far too obvious and efficient).''

''Likewise, there is no restriction on which realms and how many books in each you can play together - if you want, you can even play a wizard that has Life and Death magic at the same time! The same applies to enemy wizards, and the new algorithm to generate their choices increases the variance in enemies maximally, while avoiding to generate wizards that would be far too inefficient. Enemy wizards now pick their books and retorts first, then select the best matching portrait that is still available, so it's entirely possible for two or more enemies to use the same realms of magic, and the player selecting a portrait will not prevent a wizard using those realms from being generated. Finally, Myrran is also generated randomly (as long as the quantity of Myrran wizards matches the requirement) so it will not be the same person on Myrror all the time.''

''Guaranteed spells are reintroduced to encourage the strategy element and spell combos, and reward the player for picking a larger amount of spellbooks while simultaneously reducing the luck factor. Picking a larger amount of books leads to a slower but stable and reliable strategy, while picking a smaller amount of books spread over several realms and/or including many retorts maximizes the early game potential at the risk of having an extremely weak endgame.''

''For this same reason, Very Rare spells can't be guaranteed - you have to pick enough Spellbooks to ensure your randomly generated spells will contain at least a few options you can use effectively against your last remaining enemies. The required amount of books to obtain spells of each tier by trade or treasure has been increased to give greater relevance to picking your third and fourth book in the realm - which ensures any attempts to play 3 or more realms will have to involve some sort of tradeoff.''

''You can play 3 realms and have very rares in each but then that means sacrificing the option of picking any retorts. Alternately you can pick retorts, but then you won't be able to obtain very rare spells in some of your realms. Do note however that you can research one spell of the “unobtainable” tier by picking the previous book, you just can't trade or find more. So picking two books of Chaos will give you exactly one random rare Chaos spell, ensuring lower book counts still give you a taste of the next tier's power : you just can't expect to fully utilize it.''

''The fourth book however adds two very rare spells instead of the usual one, to ensure playing multiple realms doesn't result in too much disadvantage. This still leaves a dual to triple realm wizard with fewer very rare spells, but the difference isn't too high and the possibility to find and trade for more (assuming you did get the 4 books needed) will compensate for that.''

The system ensures each and every book you pick is a valuable addition, as your first 4 books unlock a new spell tier, books 5 to 7 enable picking guaranteed spells, one for each, book 8 enables the guaranteed first turn feature, and books 9 and 10 guarantee you get every rare and very rare spell respectively, leaving nothing to chance, as well as improving your casting and research capacity in the realm - as these books likely already encroach on your ability to pick all the retorts you want to.