New Mod Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Babies!

[MattCaspermeyer]

Afraid I'll have to confirm the "you can't say no" bug for both Diana and Orcelyn. In the part of the dialogue where you would normally say yes or no, the first option will always act like you said yes normally, with the kiss your wife dialogue at the end and making your wife expect a child in ten turns.

The second option closes the dialogue but makes her expect it in FIVE turns O_O

Express pregnancy.

Wow, okay I'll have to fix this - thanks for reporting it!

***EDIT***

Hmmm... I can't repeat this problem - are you using V2013-05-18?

Dialogue for Orcelyn goes like this:

You're such a handsome man! What would like to discuss?

1. Have you ever thought about being a mother?
2. I'm sorry but I think it is time for us to split up.
3. Oh, nothing... nevermind...
Select choice 3 - exit, look at Orcelyn and it shows that she's not having any kids after x victories.

Select choice 1:

Yes, but I never thought that it would come so soon! I admit, I'm a bit scared, but I trust you my love.

1. Don't worry, I think you'll make a great mother!
2. You know, I'm a bit scared as well - let's wait...
Select choice 2: exit conversation look at Orcelyn's picture and it shows that she's not having any kids after x victories.

Select choice 1:

Okay, now what do we do again?

1. Oh don't worry, it starts like this... (Kiss your wife.)
You have to select choice 1 at this point and then the message box now says to await miracle. If you check Orcelyn's picture it shows that she'll have a kid after 10 victories.

So this is how it is supposed to work. Does it have a child anyway if you select the no option above and just not show it on Orcelyn's picture info? I haven't checked that out...

I tried the same thing with Diana and I don't see any problems there, either.

Hmmm... not sure what the problem is here, but it seems to work okay as far as I can tell. The only thing I can suggest is to ensure that you have the latest version...

***END EDIT***

I suppose I could just try reloading until she gets a child I like. (Does that even work? I'd assume what kind of child you'll get first is set in stone, like how reloading and using spider eggs will always give you the same spiders).

Also, talking to her before the battle doesn't seem to reset anything. Nice try, though.

Children are set in stone from game start. So you can't change who you're going to get (well unless you just don't marry that wife). So that is the random part of it, otherwise, everyone would just reload until they got the best kids.

Matt

/C\/C\

[Nevar]

I double checked. I do have that version.

Thanks for working so hard. I think there was a misunderstanding about when the bug happens. It doesn't happen when you talk to either of them manually to have a baby. It occurs during the event after a battle where they ask if you want to have one (without you initiating the conversation).

Reason I started talking about talking to her manually was because Sir Whiskers suggested that might reset the count before she asks me for a baby again. Doesn't work, unfortunately.

I imagine that makes it a little harder to reproduce.

Cheers and thank you.

[Fatt_Shade]

@Nevar

If you want to test this mod, and see all it have to offer (and dont mind little cheating) check my posts 223 and 225 in this tread. It`s about getting kids you want for specific wife.

As for regular play, NO cheating at all, every kid is already decided on start of game for each wife, same as items/units in shops, enemy units wandering around etc, with every new game all this is determined before you go out of training area. So if you marry some wife, game already knows your kids, only wait for you to kiss her and 10 battles later there it is, your little bundle of joy :-)

[MattCaspermeyer]

I double checked. I do have that version.

Thanks for working so hard. I think there was a misunderstanding about when the bug happens. It doesn't happen when you talk to either of them manually to have a baby. It occurs during the event after a battle where they ask if you want to have one (without you initiating the conversation).

Reason I started talking about talking to her manually was because Sir Whiskers suggested that might reset the count before she asks me for a baby again. Doesn't work, unfortunately.

I imagine that makes it a little harder to reproduce.

Cheers and thank you.

Oh - okay, so it is the conversation that they start. I have not checked this so I'll look into it - thanks!

***EDIT***

Okay, I found the problem! Thanks a million for pointing this out! I'll provide an update shortly...

***END EDIT***

Matt

/C\/C\

[Nevar]

That's great news. I look forward to it. Do you think I would have to start a new game for the fix you're making to take effect?

Thanks again.

[MattCaspermeyer]

That's great news. I look forward to it. Do you think I would have to start a new game for the fix you're making to take effect?

Thanks again.

Nope - no restart required!

As it turns out, it was just misreporting having a child as my baby hint didn't account for this possibility properly. So if you played those 5 battles, it would say "expecting baby in 0 victories" and then if you continued, -1, etc. never giving you a child until you spoke with her about it and picked the correct choices.

The *.CHAT files for the most part had the proper logic, but I didn't have the correct snap labels in the *.LNG file as you saw the chat_system_... label placeholders.

Thanks again for pointing this out so I could fix it as I thought I had coded this properly, but never tested it until now.

Matt

/C\/C\

[Nevar]

Excellent :D

Ah. I see. It did occur to me that it was possible nothing would happen after five matches, but I didn't really want to try doing 6 (I saved before the fight that would trigger it) fights in a row.

Thanks again.

[jorko80]

Hello Matt!
I didn't had much time to play in the last two weeks, but I have some feedback now.
In general I cleared the pirate lands and the dwarven lands including the subterrains and Mechgard. The game is interesting ,but the challenge is definately not like impossible. The pirates were like normal and the dwarves felt like hard at best, so maybe some meat% increasing should be done or creature stats changed if possible.
The hero vs hero fights are really interesting,very good job :) . I liked Duke Sov fight very much, he was a real pain in the ass.
When James is killed you can go to the dwarven lands. So going in the upper and lower Haddar is good,but then when you get to Taron mines ,you can without any problem bypass the creatures and access the Dwarven King's palace and then his sons palace and that is too much. You get many things too easily. So this is solved in the GM-mod, by making one immobile guard in Taron mines,so you can't get past it without fighting and I like it a lot.
In the standard version of the game it is also possible to continue even further - descend from Taron mines to the zone where the Demon world entrance is and enter bypassing the guards. And in the demon world there are so many precious things and experience that it must be not so easily done also. So the decision is another immobile guard in front of the entrance.
Another thing is the Gremlin castle that you buy from the dwarven king. Entering there gives you access to at least 2 black dragon eggs,which are easy to get again bypassing the guards. And again there should be immobile guards to the eggs, otherwise getting 2 black dragons so early means devastation of everything.
Next point : my favorite theme - the Spirits :) . Zerock seems to be ok so far,not overpowered and usable,the same goes for Slime. But then comes Lina. The Ice thorns are nicely changed, I like them so far, the ice ball seems to be ok, but I didn't developed it much so I cant really say. But the Chargers are seriously overpowered. Being able to cast them every turn replenishes everything way too easy even with the mage and I suppose with fighters is easier. They should be nerfed a lot. At least a bigger rest and lower their number.
Scroll prices - I think they are too high , I've got too much money selling them,that means I can loose much army and replenish it easily. At least in impossible you should make them 3-4 times cheaper.
Trade skill is useless - you spend so much runes to get it to lvl3 and you can never sell so many things so that you can buy your runes back. So with so high scroll prices I just leave it to lvl1 ,keep my runes and still get much money from selling scrolls to be able to buy army and some runes.
Meditation skill is also not comparable to the other skills so it just stays to lvl1 ,maybe it must give something more to give some incentive to the player to spend the runes on it.
You have increased the mana needed to cast many spells and also increased the mana that the hero acquires by leveling and skills. I think it's well balanced with one exception. You left the artifacts that give mana the same and that makes them useless. For example there is a picture artifact that gives 20 mana and that was a major artifact in the original game, now I don't even consider using it, it makes almost no difference and it's not competitive with the other arts. It should give at least 40-50 mana to be competitive. And the other mana-arts should be increased respectivly.
The spell sheep is too powerful because of it's duration , I think it should be with at least -1 base turn duration. Now when I cast it I don't think for that creature too long, that's too easy.
Spell Fireball is a bit weak, in the center it does less damage then the flaming arrow and in general it is not so usable, it should do 20% more compared to flaming arrow ,it is quite expensive ,so more damage is required.The same goes for Fire Rain, it is also a bit weak.
Unit Canonner - there is no logic that it has no melee penalty.
The hero Big Pato - he is supposed to be a super dumb warrior and you gave him the ability to cast spells. He was very challenging before anyway. So maybe you should remove the spells and make his creatures harder or whatever you think fits,but no spells :)

Now some bugs I encountered :
-Another 2 heroes that dont appear in battle : Zombie Noric and Thorny Dog
-Red Beard tries to cast something,maybe it's phantom ,but it just gives a writing on the screen and nothing happens.
-Drammina has the shroud bug . I removed shroud from her spells and left her with the other two. One of them was the ghost blade I think, but it was strange that she didn't cast anything for the first 2 turns of the fight.
-The Archmage's Telekinesis is not working correctly or maybe you changed it somehow. Sometimes it works and sometimes not, I couldn't figure it out.
-The Royal Thorn's Entangle skill works on ghosts ,no logic in that.
-You added a decription to the Giants that says they can't be frozen, but the Lina's Ice thorns did freeze them.
-I cast 2 flaming arrows on the first turn and set on fire two creatures. When their turn comes ,the first one burns and playies and then the second one doesnt burn. It burns on the next turn with full burn damage if there is no creature that burns before it. That applies to poisoning also or any combination between them, just the first creature takes damage.

I like the changed mechanics for burning and poisoning that the creatures take half the damage and so on :)
This is what I can say so far.

Now about the mod you work on for Armored Princess. I have a proposal.
Armored Princess has so many mods already. So many creatures,so many changes, it is flooded. So my point is that you can do a mod for Warrior of the north,instead of giving your time and efforts on the Princess. It has a good potential and desperately requires a mod to make it more challenging and balance many things.The way it is in the moment makes it absolutely boring to be played for a second time and so on. Please consider it :). If you do, I can give some feedback. And I don't understand modding so well, in case you ask "why don't I do this myself" :)

[Fatt_Shade]

Hello jorko80 :-)

Glad you stayed with this mod. As i said before enemy heroes fights are great part of this mod.

1) As for getting from Lucky James to dwarf king is how game is supposed to go, but after that is your choice what to do. Fight to free dwarf prince is hard to do below 10lvl hero, without losing 50% of army. And about kiting demon lands, it`s always players choice to do or not to do. But main game quests are locked with hard battles Free dwarf prince obligatory to continue, to gain access to Elven lands (Sonya, marauder hero in underground, wizard hero in entrance to valley of 1000 rivers), then clear undead lands (evil book hero, Mysticus(horrible), and couple others) then Karador battle (which is horrible in this mod) obligatory, after clear demons Baal battle (also big pain in ass) obligatory, and then it`s labyrinth 7 Haas battles and orc lands 3 hero fights there (main orc hero and lore keeper were tough). And ofc last battle vs army of 5th lvl creatures and high lvl hero. You can decide to go linearly and maintain story plot, but kiting is and always were players choice.
Comparing to Ap/Cw where you could kite with hero 1st lvl to Reha and get up to 17-20 lvl before first battle (if not counting training area) , the Legend is much better kite protected. because here are some battles thet you MUST do before going further.

2) Gremlin castle making it so you have to fight first before entering is good idea and i like it, which would make ppl wait before buying it. Because game is set so difficulty of item battles is determined on hero lvl in moment you buy/get item. This i figured out by accident when got 2 same items and suppressing them gave me different battle and different exp. So higher hero lvl = tougher item battle = more exp. So why buy gremlin castle as soon as you get to dwarf king, if you can w8 and get it 10lvl later and get bunch more exp for it, instead those 2 dragon eggs and some gold if you get it soon and kite around it.

3) spirits are better then in original game settings, i like them. But as you said some changes are due. I set some things weaker then in Mat`s settings and it`s not difficult, but if you`re not sure what you`re doing better ask for advice then make problem with game files. Making Lina chargers is fast and i could help you , or Mat could give you advice how to do it.

4) Trade skills/scroll prices etc ... Gold never was big problem in this game, and to me and i`m sure many other lvling trade is only because we want skills after it. But that particular skill really have low potential, and nothing better to do with it, so bear with it and lvlup other skills more useful.

5) items losing usefulness comparing to original game. I think this was main idea. Making you have kids with wife, instead telling her you should wait with family plans, and keep her as simple mule to lug items around. You can carry what ever you want in inventory, but leave your wife to rise children, and keep her busy :-) And randomness with kids is great thing, you can get great pick, or you can have shi.y luck and get battle oriented kids with mage hero or opposite spell kids with warrior/paladin :-) On this topic, what wife/kids you running in your build ?

6) spells, as you mentioned pure spell dmg is not main effect but burning/poisoning effects, and more attention is toward buff/debuff spells because here high intellect bonuses work as was described in original game but never implemented (blind,sheep,haste... all those spells work longer for high int bonus).

7) as for bugs
- Noric and Thorny werent there in original game either :-(
- Red beard , Dramina it`s spells bug i`m sure it`s fixable
- had no problem with telekinesis so far
- since ghosts are ,<4 lvl units entangle works on them, but i`m guessing you mean they are incorporal units and entangle shouldn`t be able to capture basically air, but it`s hard to make just one unit unentangleable (?) , same as it`s impossible to make one unit unable to be frozen (giants) but possible to shock (lightning) or some other post hit effect.
- also hadn`t problem with more then 1 burn/poison effect per turn. Lets wait for Mats idea on this.

In end, Ap/Cw mod is under develpoment for a long time, and i know lots of work is done on it to simply skip it and go to WotN. As WotN is still buggy and with problems/crashes and Ap/Cw is fully functional i vote for working mod for Ap then hasty mod for WotN. Imagine working this mod, with parts of Red sands, so your/enemy units have bonuses from tomes,heroes,and based on game difficulty and more form unit personal experience (as they lvlup depending on location in game). I agree there are lots of mods already for Ap/Cw but that`s because that release was done with more attention then latest WotN and had less bugs/problems to fix.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, I've inlined both @jorko80's and @Fatt_Shade's comments where appropriate and responded accordingly...

Hello jorko80 :-)

Glad you stayed with this mod. As i said before enemy heroes fights are great part of this mod.

That makes two of us! :)

Hello Matt!
I didn't had much time to play in the last two weeks, but I have some feedback now.
In general I cleared the pirate lands and the dwarven lands including the subterrains and Mechgard. The game is interesting ,but the challenge is definately not like impossible. The pirates were like normal and the dwarves felt like hard at best, so maybe some meat% increasing should be done or creature stats changed if possible.

I have some ideas to make the normal battles tougher, but I was saving them for AP / CW and then possibly roll them back into TL.

You know, when I play TL now, I do as much as possible without even fighting, I think the last game I played I got up to level 5 or 6 before I even fought my first fight.

There are quite a few quests that you can do before you go to the Western Islands without fighting - it sounds like you are also using this strategy.

When I first did my TL mod development, I was not nearly as good as I am now. Also, I didn't know how to edit the *.LOC files, etc.

Now that I've gained all this experience with not only modding and playing TL, I've got some even better ideas for making it harder.

So we'll see how it goes as I continue to work on AP / CW and eventually roll what I learn there back into TL...

The hero vs hero fights are really interesting,very good job :) . I liked Duke Sov fight very much, he was a real pain in the ass.

Thanks! This part of the mod works really well and you'll find that it is continuously challenging throughout the game.

The problem with the normal battles is that you simply have a huge advantage against them as they have no spell caster to help them.

When James is killed you can go to the dwarven lands. So going in the upper and lower Haddar is good,but then when you get to Taron mines ,you can without any problem bypass the creatures and access the Dwarven King's palace and then his sons palace and that is too much. You get many things too easily. So this is solved in the GM-mod, by making one immobile guard in Taron mines,so you can't get past it without fighting and I like it a lot.

I did not change this part of the game so everything is as it is.

In the standard version of the game it is also possible to continue even further - descend from Taron mines to the zone where the Demon world entrance is and enter bypassing the guards. And in the demon world there are so many precious things and experience that it must be not so easily done also. So the decision is another immobile guard in front of the entrance.

I do not currently know how to implement the immobile guards, but this sounds like a good idea. Although I think I'm a bit spoiled as I really enjoy running around everyone to get the goodies (plus it gives me a chance to get Gerda), but you are right about putting garrisons to make the game more challenging.

I'll have to learn how to affect the creatures movement paths as I have no idea on how to do this.

Another thing is the Gremlin castle that you buy from the dwarven king. Entering there gives you access to at least 2 black dragon eggs,which are easy to get again bypassing the guards. And again there should be immobile guards to the eggs, otherwise getting 2 black dragons so early means devastation of everything.

Wow, you know all the shortcut strategies. Immobile guards sounds like a good idea - looks like I've got more to learn! :)

2) Gremlin castle making it so you have to fight first before entering is good idea and i like it, which would make ppl wait before buying it. Because game is set so difficulty of item battles is determined on hero lvl in moment you buy/get item. This i figured out by accident when got 2 same items and suppressing them gave me different battle and different exp. So higher hero lvl = tougher item battle = more exp. So why buy gremlin castle as soon as you get to dwarf king, if you can w8 and get it 10lvl later and get bunch more exp for it, instead those 2 dragon eggs and some gold if you get it soon and kite around it.

This is a really neat idea! I wonder how to do it, though...

Next point : my favorite theme - the Spirits :) . Zerock seems to be ok so far,not overpowered and usable,the same goes for Slime. But then comes Lina. The Ice thorns are nicely changed, I like them so far, the ice ball seems to be ok, but I didn't developed it much so I cant really say. But the Chargers are seriously overpowered. Being able to cast them every turn replenishes everything way too easy even with the mage and I suppose with fighters is easier. They should be nerfed a lot. At least a bigger rest and lower their number.

Your Charger mileage will probably start to decrease when it becomes more important to do damage than replenish mana / rage. Also, you don't get much experience for Lina if you use them a lot, so I think you'll find that the Chargers strategy will put you at a disadvantage later, with a lower level Lina (which you'll need for her to get some levels otherwise you'll be in big trouble later).

So think of them as candy - they taste really good now, but later you'll be regretting that you ate so much! ;)

3) spirits are better then in original game settings, i like them. But as you said some changes are due. I set some things weaker then in Mat`s settings and it`s not difficult, but if you`re not sure what you`re doing better ask for advice then make problem with game files. Making Lina chargers is fast and i could help you , or Mat could give you advice how to do it.

I think all the Spirit abilities now have a place in the game, but you'll find that sooner or later ones that you thought were really awesome are now not doing it for you and you'll move on to other ones.

But if you really want to change values, then they are in:


ZEROCK.ATOM
SLIME.ATOM
LINA.ATOM
DEATH.ATOM


Scroll prices - I think they are too high , I've got too much money selling them,that means I can loose much army and replenish it easily. At least in impossible you should make them 3-4 times cheaper.
Trade skill is useless - you spend so much runes to get it to lvl3 and you can never sell so many things so that you can buy your runes back. So with so high scroll prices I just leave it to lvl1 ,keep my runes and still get much money from selling scrolls to be able to buy army and some runes.

All the scroll prices I computed via formula, They are based on how much the spell increases per level and stuff like that. You probably haven't spent any money on Tibold's Runes, yet, and so you're rolling in the dough. But you'll find that you won't get enough runes to get all the skills you'd like and then you'll be wanting more income and wish you hadn't sold them before you got your trade skill up.

I'm always out of money at the end of the game, because I'm buying crystals and runes. So we'll have to wait and see if you have excess runes at the end of your game.

I did have quite a few extra Mind Runes at the end of my last Paladin game, but this was the first time that ever happened with my mod so I slightly tweaked the Paladin Rune level up. Made me wish I had implemented the AP / CW Rune Exchange system since I wanted another level in Dark Commander since I was running with Demons and didn't have enough Might Runes, but plenty of Mind Runes. I think I might know how to do this and was planning on implementing it some time in the future...

So keep playing and we'll see how you're doing when you want some more Runes...

If you're playing no loss, you really only need a very small amount of money to buy enough troops if you stick with them throughout the game.

I like to trade wives and switch armies a lot so I end up spending a lot more money on troops than normal to take advantage of the wife / kid bonuses...

4) Trade skills/scroll prices etc ... Gold never was big problem in this game, and to me and i`m sure many other lvling trade is only because we want skills after it. But that particular skill really have low potential, and nothing better to do with it, so bear with it and lvlup other skills more useful.

This part of the game, I really didn't affect directly. I think the original TL you can get gobs of money, too, but can spend it on Runes really quickly as I mention above...

Meditation skill is also not comparable to the other skills so it just stays to lvl1 ,maybe it must give something more to give some incentive to the player to spend the runes on it.

Yah, meditation is a toughie to make useful, but the Runes aren't really that much, although I can see not putting much into it until you start using a lot of level 3 spells and find that you're low on mana a lot.

You have increased the mana needed to cast many spells and also increased the mana that the hero acquires by leveling and skills. I think it's well balanced with one exception. You left the artifacts that give mana the same and that makes them useless. For example there is a picture artifact that gives 20 mana and that was a major artifact in the original game, now I don't even consider using it, it makes almost no difference and it's not competitive with the other arts. It should give at least 40-50 mana to be competitive. And the other mana-arts should be increased respectivly.

Yah, well you can see that I left all the original items alone. You can actually get that artifact without fighting a single battle at the beginning of the game, so it is still useful early. You just out grow it quickly if you're a mage. It is still useful to Warrior and perhaps Paladin...

5) items losing usefulness comparing to original game. I think this was main idea. Making you have kids with wife, instead telling her you should wait with family plans, and keep her as simple mule to lug items around. You can carry what ever you want in inventory, but leave your wife to rise children, and keep her busy :-) And randomness with kids is great thing, you can get great pick, or you can have shi.y luck and get battle oriented kids with mage hero or opposite spell kids with warrior/paladin :-) On this topic, what wife/kids you running in your build ?

Right! Now you want to have children so you can get better items for your mage...

I'll second the wife / kids question!

The spell sheep is too powerful because of it's duration , I think it should be with at least -1 base turn duration. Now when I cast it I don't think for that creature too long, that's too easy.

Well, you'll be cursing it when it's used on you and it lasts that long! Plus, you probably haven't noticed, but a unit's resistance affects spell duration. Cast spells on troops with magic resistance and the spell duration increases if it is a bonus spell or decreases if it is a penalty. Fire resistance affects the duration of burn, etc.

Spell Fireball is a bit weak, in the center it does less damage then the flaming arrow and in general it is not so usable, it should do 20% more compared to flaming arrow ,it is quite expensive ,so more damage is required.The same goes for Fire Rain, it is also a bit weak.

This is by design. Think about it, why would you use Flame Arrow if it does less damage than Fireball / Fire Rain to one target? Mana may be one reason, but usually this relegates use of the spell to the end of the combat when you are more trying to surgically weaken enemies for recovery.

The purpose of single damage spells / rage abilities is that they will do the most damage to a single target, this round. The multi-target damage spells like Fireball / Fire Rain are meant to do more aggregate damage to targets, possibly for this round (depends on the number of units you can target), but should provide more damage in the long run.

Also consider Fireball / Fire Rain - how should these spells be different? You'll note that Fireball damages the central target more than Fire Rain, but the periphery less. So you can see that Fireball is sort of a mixture of Fire Arrow and Fire Rain in a way.

Also you'll note that all the demon male enemy heroes use Fireball and demon females use Fire Rain! ;)

So there is a lot more strategy to spell choice now as you have to consider whether you want to do more damage to a single target or spread it out and whether you want to maximize damage on this round or over many rounds.

Also, there is Greasy Mist that you can use as well to drop their resistance in hopes of doing more damage in the long run.

I think you'll find that there are a lot of subtleties like this that dramatically increase the strategy of how you fight a battle...

6) spells, as you mentioned pure spell dmg is not main effect but burning/poisoning effects, and more attention is toward buff/debuff spells because here high intellect bonuses work as was described in original game but never implemented (blind,sheep,haste... all those spells work longer for high int bonus).

Right, I think you'll find that you're really going to crave intellect now. Remember what the description for a mage says at the beginning of the game? It says that the Mage's armies are much smaller and so you're going to find that this is actually the case, but your spells will be potent if you can get that intellect up. And so will the enemy mage hero spells with their high intellect...

Unit Canonner - there is no logic that it has no melee penalty.

I didn't change this - but I think I can understand the logic. The cannonball actually might do even more damage if you were in front of it!

I don't think I'd want to stand in front of a cannon! ;)

I don't think Bugs Bunny can stick his carrot into the barrel and have it explode in the Cannoneer's face! Ha! That'd be funny!

The hero Big Pato - he is supposed to be a super dumb warrior and you gave him the ability to cast spells. He was very challenging before anyway. So maybe you should remove the spells and make his creatures harder or whatever you think fits,but no spells :)

That's what you think!

Big Pato has a skill tree just like you and he picked his level-ups just like you picked yours! So he decided to pick a couple of Mage School Skills and spent his hard-earned crystals on learning some spells!

So leave poor Big Pato alone! ;)

Now some bugs I encountered :
-Another 2 heroes that dont appear in battle : Zombie Noric and Thorny Dog

Fatt_Shade is right here...

-Red Beard tries to cast something,maybe it's phantom ,but it just gives a writing on the screen and nothing happens.

I don't think I've ever fought Red Beard - let me check his spells and see if I can find the problem...

-Drammina has the shroud bug . I removed shroud from her spells and left her with the other two. One of them was the ghost blade I think, but it was strange that she didn't cast anything for the first 2 turns of the fight.

This is fixed now, right? Shroud should work now - I tested it out with Dirty Butory and Shroud worked fine. I'll check her spells...

-The Archmage's Telekinesis is not working correctly or maybe you changed it somehow. Sometimes it works and sometimes not, I couldn't figure it out.

I haven't had any trouble with it, but I'll check it!

-The Royal Thorn's Entangle skill works on ghosts ,no logic in that.

This shouldn't be as ghosts are floating and Entangle shouldn't work on any floating units (this should be Ghosts, Dryads, Sprites, Dragonflies, etc.). So I will check this...

-You added a decription to the Giants that says they can't be frozen, but the Lina's Ice thorns did freeze them.

It's Resistance to Cold, not immunity, but I see that the comment is in there for Geyser and Ice Snake. I didn't consider this for when I did Lina's Ice Thorns.

I probably should change the description as Fire Immune creates can't be burned, but Fire Resistance ones can.

Technically, there are no Cold Immune creatures in the game, but the Resistance to Cold was meant to act like immunity.

So I'll think about this some more, but probably make it consistent with Fire / Poison Immunity / Resistance...

-I cast 2 flaming arrows on the first turn and set on fire two creatures. When their turn comes ,the first one burns and playies and then the second one doesnt burn. It burns on the next turn with full burn damage if there is no creature that burns before it. That applies to poisoning also or any combination between them, just the first creature takes damage.

This is one of my listed bugs. The way it works is that if effect kills enemy unit, then if the next turn is another enemy unit, then the damaging (any, i.e. burning, poison, etc.) effect is not applied. So if burning kills an enemy stack and the next turn is another enemy stack with burning (or poison) then it will not do anything. If the enemy stack is not killed then it always works.

I tried really hard to squish this bug, but I think it is a bug in the game as I noticed that in AP / CW the amount of damage will always attenuate such that it never kills a stack.

I'll still try to squish this one, but I haven't found a way yet...

I like the changed mechanics for burning and poisoning that the creatures take half the damage and so on :)
This is what I can say so far.

I'm a huge fan of this system! :)

Well, thanks again for the awesome comments! These are very helpful!

Now about the mod you work on for Armored Princess. I have a proposal.
Armored Princess has so many mods already. So many creatures,so many changes, it is flooded. So my point is that you can do a mod for Warrior of the north,instead of giving your time and efforts on the Princess. It has a good potential and desperately requires a mod to make it more challenging and balance many things.The way it is in the moment makes it absolutely boring to be played for a second time and so on. Please consider it :). If you do, I can give some feedback. And I don't understand modding so well, in case you ask "why don't I do this myself" :)

I hear you completely! I never played past the Spider in WotN because of all the bugs, and then I played a little last night and was fighting the Undead in the snow in Nordlig and it crashed after I fought 4 stacks and was going to go talk to Dorri (or whatever that drunk's name is that was accused of stealing the necklace). Sigh.

Well, with things the way they are with my current state of affairs of the too many tomes problem, it may actually be possible to mod AP / CW / WotN simultaneously.

It seems like there's going to be no more updates on WotN as far as I can tell and since I'm doing my best now to rename functions I modify (unlike TL where I just modded the original functions) and place them in new files it is easy to transfer them to a new expansion even if there are more updates.

I really like a lot of the game mechanics that I've added to TL and it has been a great learning experience. The developers have made the expansions a lot more robust with respect to modding in AP / CW (and hopefully WotN, too). For example, if you misspell a template macro in TL and highlight the item, the game just freezes! In AP / CW, the game says #NF so that you can go fix it!

So I'll see what I can do about modding WotN, too, but I've got to be careful not to spread myself too thin, otherwise I'll end up working on this forever and not get anything done! ;)

It'll be great to hear your comments as you get further into the game - thanks!

And, as always, thanks to @Fatt_Shade's comments, too!

:grin:

Matt

/C\/C\

[Fatt_Shade]

Just couple of my thoughts :

1) rename mod to Toddlers of Might & Magic for goofs :-P

2) about cannoners, i forgot to mention my idea (i already did it in my game files). I changed their special attack, so it`s aoe like druid/necromancer`s range attack. It seemed logical since they shoot salve of cannon balls in certain direction, so they make dmg to area not just single target. Their usual attack is same as before, hit 1 target, but i made it so salve hit 7 hex area with full dmg to central, and 50% penalty to nearby. Looks like this :
megathrow {
dontusenearenemy=1
class=throw
distance=7
reload=3
base_attack=0
mindist=2
penalty=0.5
animation=power/megatag/thtarget
picture=BA1_CannoneerFire_
picture_small=BA1_CannoneerFire_small.png
throw=cannonround
hinthead=special_rembo_head
hint=special_rembo_hint
framekey=x
7in1=0.5
damage {
physical=18,30

Bold text is only thing i added. This is great help in item battles, since in this mod towers are horrible to destroy in item`s 4-5 lvl :-)

3) after this discussion on spells and effects (burn/poison) , i remembered my old idea. Anything comes at your mind Mat about making spell for +poison dmg to units, like hell breath. Hell breath is great vs elves/undead since they have low tolerance to fire dmg, and giving hell breath to main dmg dealer is useful. So how about having similar spell to help against demons/dragons. I tried before to make new spell and just got lost in game files, since there is lots of files connected to spell mechanics.
So ppl pls vote spell you hate most to get rid off , and change it`s ingame settings to `venom touch` (my idea of naming it :-)

I`m off :-)

[MattCaspermeyer]

Just couple of my thoughts :

1) rename mod to Toddlers of Might & Magic for goofs :-P

Ha! That's funny!

2) about cannoners, i forgot to mention my idea (i already did it in my game files). I changed their special attack, so it`s aoe like druid/necromancer`s range attack. It seemed logical since they shoot salve of cannon balls in certain direction, so they make dmg to area not just single target. Their usual attack is same as before, hit 1 target, but i made it so salve hit 7 hex area with full dmg to central, and 50% penalty to nearby. Looks like this :
megathrow {
dontusenearenemy=1
class=throw
distance=7
reload=3
base_attack=0
mindist=2
penalty=0.5
animation=power/megatag/thtarget
picture=BA1_CannoneerFire_
picture_small=BA1_CannoneerFire_small.png
throw=cannonround
hinthead=special_rembo_head
hint=special_rembo_hint
framekey=x
7in1=0.5
damage {
physical=18,30

Bold text is only thing i added. This is great help in item battles, since in this mod towers are horrible to destroy in item`s 4-5 lvl :-)

I really like this idea! I'll implement it in my next update, giving you credit! :)

3) after this discussion on spells and effects (burn/poison) , i remembered my old idea. Anything comes at your mind Mat about making spell for +poison dmg to units, like hell breath. Hell breath is great vs elves/undead since they have low tolerance to fire dmg, and giving hell breath to main dmg dealer is useful. So how about having similar spell to help against demons/dragons. I tried before to make new spell and just got lost in game files, since there is lots of files connected to spell mechanics.
So ppl pls vote spell you hate most to get rid off , and change it`s ingame settings to `venom touch` (my idea of naming it :-)

I`m off :-)

Yep, I like this one, too. Just need a picture for it (could possible modify something already existing...

Matt

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Now some bugs I encountered :
-Another 2 heroes that dont appear in battle : Zombie Noric and Thorny Dog
-Red Beard tries to cast something,maybe it's phantom ,but it just gives a writing on the screen and nothing happens.
-Drammina has the shroud bug . I removed shroud from her spells and left her with the other two. One of them was the ghost blade I think, but it was strange that she didn't cast anything for the first 2 turns of the fight.

As far as I can tell, both of these heroes work correctly. Red Beard seems to cast all his spells normally and so does Drammina. Shroud was fixed in a previous update and so she was casting it normally.

I also had a min_score for spell casting to remove spells with really low probabilities, but it looks like certain heroes have very low spell scores. So I set min_score to 0 and will rely on low probability instead. This will be in the next update...

-The Archmage's Telekinesis is not working correctly or maybe you changed it somehow. Sometimes it works and sometimes not, I couldn't figure it out.

I tried 2 different saves and it worked both times. So not sure what the problem you're having is...

-The Royal Thorn's Entangle skill works on ghosts ,no logic in that.

Okay, I didn't know that Ghosts have their own movement type (-2, the only units that move like this). I have now added their movement type (1, which is for floaters was already there) to the logic to check for determining whether Entangle can be cast / work (i.e. Ent Posthit) on Ghosts. This will be included in the next update...

-You added a decription to the Giants that says they can't be frozen, but the Lina's Ice thorns did freeze them.

I added check for Freeze Immunity (freeze_immunitet) to Lina's Ice Thorns so that units with this feature cannot be frozen. This will be included in the next update...

Okay, thanks for pointing out the issues here! For the ones I couldn't duplicate, just keep an eye on them and let me know if you see them again in the future...

Matt

/C\/C\

[jorko80]

I have some ideas to make the normal battles tougher, but I was saving them for AP / CW and then possibly roll them back into TL.

I like that :)

You know, when I play TL now, I do as much as possible without even fighting, I think the last game I played I got up to level 5 or 6 before I even fought my first fight.

There are quite a few quests that you can do before you go to the Western Islands without fighting - it sounds like you are also using this strategy.


Yes. I use that. Usually when I get access to a new area, I try to get what I can and then start fighting.

When I first did my TL mod development, I was not nearly as good as I am now. Also, I didn't know how to edit the *.LOC files, etc.

Now that I've gained all this experience with not only modding and playing TL, I've got some even better ideas for making it harder.

So we'll see how it goes as I continue to work on AP / CW and eventually roll what I learn there back into TL..

Sounds good :)


The problem with the normal battles is that you simply have a huge advantage against them as they have no spell caster to help them.

That's why the creatures should be stronger and bigger in numbers to compensate for your spells and spirits. And the player must think hard what ability or spell to use,not just throwing armies at each other.



I do not currently know how to implement the immobile guards, but this sounds like a good idea. Although I think I'm a bit spoiled as I really enjoy running around everyone to get the goodies (plus it gives me a chance to get Gerda), but you are right about putting garrisons to make the game more challenging.

I'll have to learn how to affect the creatures movement paths as I have no idea on how to do this.

Wow, you know all the shortcut strategies. Immobile guards sounds like a good idea - looks like I've got more to learn! :)


The immobile guards are a very important part of the game. You should fight your way to the goodies , not just get everything for free, it feels more rewarding. And also make you think : Can I kill those guys now,what will I lose, does it worth it ,what will I gain and so on...
While on the subject - the guards for the book of the Dead in elven lands are also easy to bypass and that opens the way to dragons ,runes and quests too easily. In GM there are 2 guards of each book - 1 in elven lands and 1 in death lands,both immobile, it is way more challenging.
About Gerda - you have no problem with accessing her earlier ,because she is in lower haddar and the immobile guard should be in a narrow area when you enter Taron Mines. So enjoy :)


Your Charger mileage will probably start to decrease when it becomes more important to do damage than replenish mana / rage. Also, you don't get much experience for Lina if you use them a lot, so I think you'll find that the Chargers strategy will put you at a disadvantage later, with a lower level Lina (which you'll need for her to get some levels otherwise you'll be in big trouble later).

We'll see about that :P

If you're playing no loss, you really only need a very small amount of money to buy enough troops if you stick with them throughout the game.

Ofcourse I try to play always with zero losses ,but thats not an ultimate goal, I like to make calculations : what if I kill that army now, I will lose something, but probably gain more, do I have enough money to buy my army again, is there enough army in the shops and so on...

I like to trade wives and switch armies a lot so I end up spending a lot more money on troops than normal to take advantage of the wife / kid bonuses...



About the life change : it's a bit annoying when I changed my wife in elven lands and then 40 battles waiting for new kids. The first time it's ok, but now it make my hero much weaker,the battles are harder ,but still it is boring to wait so long. And not knowing what bonuses I'll have makes me reluctant to change the wife. I did it just to see what happens ,but if I play 2nd time I probably will not do it. Feanora did gave me good bonuses. A proposal : make a list of the possible babies that the wife offers, so the player can make at least some estimation,if it's worth it to make the change. And reduce the fights needed from 2nd wife onwards to 5 combats per kid.

Yah, meditation is a toughie to make useful, but the Runes aren't really that much, although I can see not putting much into it until you start using a lot of level 3 spells and find that you're low on mana a lot.

Maybe adding +1 intelligence will help, that goes also to Scouting, it just stays to lvl1 and currently I will not spend more runes on it.


Yah, well you can see that I left all the original items alone. You can actually get that artifact without fighting a single battle at the beginning of the game, so it is still useful early. You just out grow it quickly if you're a mage. It is still useful to Warrior and perhaps Paladin...

That doesn't sound good. If it is too hard to change the arts don't do it, but if it's not, then it's a must, because you leave a part of the game useless. After all balance is the most important part of the game. At least 50% increase to the mana arts is needed.

Well, you'll be cursing it when it's used on you and it lasts that long! Plus, you probably haven't noticed, but a unit's resistance affects spell duration. Cast spells on troops with magic resistance and the spell duration increases if it is a bonus spell or decreases if it is a penalty. Fire resistance affects the duration of burn, etc.

I noticed that right away,no worries :) and I like it. Still it's too powerful. It was cast on me and that's not much of a problem, the problem is ,that the enemy can't react always to it and the neutrals can't at all, so my opinion is that it is way unbalanced in the moment. Base duration for Sheep should be at least -1.


I didn't change this - but I think I can understand the logic. The cannonball actually might do even more damage if you were in front of it!

I don't think I'd want to stand in front of a cannon! ;)

You are not picturing this in your head clearly :) , there is no way in real fight that some swordsman army will sit in a row in front of the cannon and wait . All be involved in melee and it will be impossible for the canonners to operate the cannon ,henceforth the melee penalty.

I don't think Bugs Bunny can stick his carrot into the barrel and have it explode in the Cannoneer's face! Ha! That'd be funny!

:) :)



That's what you think!

Big Pato has a skill tree just like you and he picked his level-ups just like you picked yours! So he decided to pick a couple of Mage School Skills and spent his hard-earned crystals on learning some spells!

So leave poor Big Pato alone! ;)



It is a good fight again. But it is nice for a change to fight raw power and highly boosted units without magic. That's my point.


I really like a lot of the game mechanics that I've added to TL and it has been a great learning experience. The developers have made the expansions a lot more robust with respect to modding in AP / CW (and hopefully WotN, too). For example, if you misspell a template macro in TL and highlight the item, the game just freezes! In AP / CW, the game says #NF so that you can go fix it!

I think that is exactly what the game said when I fought Red Beard. Will recheck it later.

So I'll see what I can do about modding WotN, too, but I've got to be careful not to spread myself too thin, otherwise I'll end up working on this forever and not get anything done! ;)


No rush needed :) . But WotN needs far more then just the things you've done to TL. The only part thats interesting and balanced are the 4 initial Islands and then when you kill the spider it gets messy,boring,ultimately easy. I hope you will have the patience to change it,I have many ideas. The russian top modders are so disappointed in it ,that don't want to do it and for now it's frozen :( .

Thanks for your time :)

P. S. Really like the idea of Fatt Shade about the spell with poison damage boost :)

[MattCaspermeyer]

That's why the creatures should be stronger and bigger in numbers to compensate for your spells and spirits. And the player must think hard what ability or spell to use,not just throwing armies at each other.

I got some ideas here...

The immobile guards are a very important part of the game. You should fight your way to the goodies , not just get everything for free, it feels more rewarding. And also make you think : Can I kill those guys now,what will I lose, does it worth it ,what will I gain and so on...
While on the subject - the guards for the book of the Dead in elven lands are also easy to bypass and that opens the way to dragons ,runes and quests too easily. In GM there are 2 guards of each book - 1 in elven lands and 1 in death lands,both immobile, it is way more challenging.
About Gerda - you have no problem with accessing her earlier ,because she is in lower haddar and the immobile guard should be in a narrow area when you enter Taron Mines. So enjoy :)

Sounds like immobilizing the guards is the way to go - looks like I need to find out how to do this - is Grandmaster available for download somewhere? I can do a little comparison of the files to see how they did it...

Ofcourse I try to play always with zero losses ,but thats not an ultimate goal, I like to make calculations : what if I kill that army now, I will lose something, but probably gain more, do I have enough money to buy my army again, is there enough army in the shops and so on...

You know, I wonder how much the original King's Bounty factored into no loss for the new King's Bounty. I've read posts here where people complain if they can't do no loss.

But if you play HOMM, then you're losing troops all the time.

So it is kind of interesting how between KB / HOMM there are these two different paradigms...

About the life change : it's a bit annoying when I changed my wife in elven lands and then 40 battles waiting for new kids. The first time it's ok, but now it make my hero much weaker,the battles are harder ,but still it is boring to wait so long. And not knowing what bonuses I'll have makes me reluctant to change the wife. I did it just to see what happens ,but if I play 2nd time I probably will not do it. Feanora did gave me good bonuses. A proposal : make a list of the possible babies that the wife offers, so the player can make at least some estimation,if it's worth it to make the change. And reduce the fights needed from 2nd wife onwards to 5 combats per kid.

This was part of the game mechanics, but I'm not sure if you've noticed - you get higher level wives / children during the later game to compensate. For example, the wife levels are:


Rina / Zombie Rina - 1
Feanora / Frog Feanora - 2
Mirabella - 3
Gerda - 3
Orcelyn - 4
Diana - 4
Neoka - 5
Xeona - 5

And the children are the same level as their wife so you get better and better babies with the later wives.

Maybe adding +1 intelligence will help, that goes also to Scouting, it just stays to lvl1 and currently I will not spend more runes on it.

I like this idea and will consider +1 at level 2, and probably +2 or 3 at level 3...

hat doesn't sound good. If it is too hard to change the arts don't do it, but if it's not, then it's a must, because you leave a part of the game useless. After all balance is the most important part of the game. At least 50% increase to the mana arts is needed.

You know, I've been considering for AP / CW to change artifacts with -stats to either get rid of the -stat part or make them better so to your point, I probably should look at the original items and see if they can use a boost.

I think what I'll do here is if I make any changes to the AP / CW items I'll eventually roll those back into the TL items.

I noticed that right away,no worries :) and I like it. Still it's too powerful. It was cast on me and that's not much of a problem, the problem is ,that the enemy can't react always to it and the neutrals can't at all, so my opinion is that it is way unbalanced in the moment. Base duration for Sheep should be at least -1.

Well, unfortunately, Sheep duration is 1, 2, 3 - so it is already minimum with a minimum increase in duration for each level. Plus you're spending 22, 38, and 55 mana for affecting level 1-2, 1-3, and 1-4 troops. So a Warrior will spend 55 mana and if they are lucky, may get it up to 4 duration if they have 15 Intellect @Sheep Level 3. The Warrior's Mana pool is roughly half the Mage's (just like the Mage's Rage pool is roughly half the Warrior's) so expect them to have about 100 or so mana. At Level 3 Sheep, this would be 50% of the Warrior's mana pool for one Sheep cast. For mage, you can probably get it up to 6 turns if you get yourself to 45 Intellect and it would be roughly 25% of your mana pool. Don't forget that it is also adjusted by enemy magic resistance so it could get reduced if you cast it on an Elf troop (they usually have magic resistance), for example.

So I think you'll find that the cost / duration are appropriate...

You are not picturing this in your head clearly :) , there is no way in real fight that some swordsman army will sit in a row in front of the cannon and wait . All be involved in melee and it will be impossible for the canonners to operate the cannon ,henceforth the melee penalty.

Evidently not! Maybe I got hit in the head with the cannon!

Okay, all kidding aside, I didn't change this, but it sounds like you think that Cannoneers should have a melee penalty. So I will consider...

No rush needed :) . But WotN needs far more then just the things you've done to TL. The only part thats interesting and balanced are the 4 initial Islands and then when you kill the spider it gets messy,boring,ultimately easy. I hope you will have the patience to change it,I have many ideas. The russian top modders are so disappointed in it ,that don't want to do it and for now it's frozen :( .

Thanks for your time :)

P. S. Really like the idea of Fatt Shade about the spell with poison damage boost :)

Yah, that's the daunting task ahead of us for WotN - it needs a lot of work! I haven't even played it much, but I heard about Marshan Swamp and Demonis.

Okay, let me spill the beans on what is either under consideration or going to be implemented in AP / CW with respect to difficulty level changes.


Difficulty Level Parameters:

rndrecharge - round at which enemy units automatically have their charged attacks recharged. I might make it round at which they gain +1 charge, we'll see... The roundehero/tower/boss will be additive to this. So if you're fighting normal stacks, their charged attacks will be recharged every 5 rounds, if they have a hero, every 10.
espelldur - number of rounds to add to enemy bonus spell / ability duration and subtract from enemy penalty spell / ability duration. For example, I think Hard will be +1 and Impossible +2. So if enemy mage casts Shield, then it will last 1 additional round on Hard and 2 on impossible. Conversely, if you cast Slow on enemy units, they will have that spell for -1 round on Hard and -2 on impossible. This will require some good playtesting to see if it ±2 is too much on impossible, but at least it is easily changed.

eunit:

Will be additive to enemy unit's Critical Hit. Right now with it being a multiplier, it doesn't have much affect on a unit with 5% Critical Hit. So instead it would be +25% (on Impossible) + the map location difficulty modifier for a total of +50% at game end. When I was thinking of this, I thought that units on the harder difficulty levels should have a greater percent chance of critical strike, but the multiplicative modifier just wasn't doing enough...
I'm also considering making eunit be additive for resistances (right now it is multiplicative and so if you have 0% resistance then it is unaffected), but I think it probably will be way too potent. Can you imagine all enemies with +50% Resistance All at the end of the game! Yikes!
This modifier will apply to enemy hero spell power. So they will get base +25% power to spells on Impossible + the map location modifier. So it will be like they have a Destroyer-like Skill, but applying to all spells.
With espelldur above, I wouldn't need to modify duration, but if I don't implement espelldur, I could use eunit to modify spell / ability duration instead.
This will also apply to Boss damage / duration. So once again you'll get +25% Boss damage + map location modifier on Impossible and +2 effect duration.

For normal stacks:

The most powerful stack will be the group leader (sort of like a mini hero) and will receive additional bonuses, possibly bonus spells, and I might see if I can make its representation 10% bigger so that you know they are the leader. This might make normal stacks more interesting. I may make it use eunit as a percent chance at getting certain bonuses. These won't be dispel-able most likely - we'll see...
I may use eunit + map location modifier as a percent chance that starting units receive a bonus and possibly your troops receive a penalty.
Totem-like bonuses to enemy stacks where a random negative spell is removed from them / a random positive spell is removed from your troops. Or I could have a certain percent to drop Shaman Totems on the battlefield to help enemy troops and hurt yours.


So these are some of the ideas under consideration. Hopefully this gets the juices flowing about what to consider for future implementation.

The idea is to expand eunit + map location multiplier to other aspects of the game (like the enemy hero spells and boss abilities) and make it more potent if it is having minimal impact on a certain aspect of the game. The trick is that right now enemy hero stacks are pretty much perfect, but normal stacks are too easy for the most part. You can't expect the normal stacks to be as hard as the enemy hero stacks, but some of the above might go a long way to making the normal stacks more challenging.

Okay, thanks again for the great comments! :)

Matt

[jorko80]

Sounds like immobilizing the guards is the way to go - looks like I need to find out how to do this - is Grandmaster available for download somewhere? I can do a little comparison of the files to see how they did it...
I attached the GM mod to this message.


You know, I wonder how much the original King's Bounty factored into no loss for the new King's Bounty. I've read posts here where people complain if they can't do no loss.
They do "no loss games",because thats a way to challenge themselves . But for me it's a boring way. The game should be made harder with mods like yours for example :)

But if you play HOMM, then you're losing troops all the time.
Actually I am not loosing any troops ,except some 1st level units,that are not so important in late game anyway.

And the children are the same level as their wife so you get better and better babies with the later wives.
I have noticed that. At least a list with the possible bonuses of the babies when you you hover the mouse over the wife would be nice.


You know, I've been considering for AP / CW to change artifacts with -stats to either get rid of the -stat part or make them better so to your point, I probably should look at the original items and see if they can use a boost.

I think what I'll do here is if I make any changes to the AP / CW items I'll eventually roll those back into the TL items.



Sounds good

Well, unfortunately, Sheep duration is 1, 2, 3 - so it is already minimum with a minimum increase in duration for each level. Plus you're spending 22, 38, and 55 mana for affecting level 1-2, 1-3, and 1-4 troops. So a Warrior will spend 55 mana and if they are lucky, may get it up to 4 duration if they have 15 Intellect @Sheep Level 3. The Warrior's Mana pool is roughly half the Mage's (just like the Mage's Rage pool is roughly half the Warrior's) so expect them to have about 100 or so mana. At Level 3 Sheep, this would be 50% of the Warrior's mana pool for one Sheep cast. For mage, you can probably get it up to 6 turns if you get yourself to 45 Intellect and it would be roughly 25% of your mana pool. Don't forget that it is also adjusted by enemy magic resistance so it could get reduced if you cast it on an Elf troop (they usually have magic resistance), for example.

So I think you'll find that the cost / duration are appropriate...

I still don't agree. Sheep's duration should be 1,1,2 or maximum 1,2,2 and with the intel boost it will go up and ofcourse one of the babies of Feanora which gives -14% magic resistance to enemies increases the duration further. And that particular baby is like level 10 ,compared to the others.


Evidently not! Maybe I got hit in the head with the cannon!

Okay, all kidding aside, I didn't change this, but it sounds like you think that Cannoneers should have a melee penalty. So I will consider...

Sorry about that. I initially thought that you changed this unit to have no melee penalty. Maybe I remembered it wrong from GM where it has penalty. But it's not a big deal anyway,so don't bother. Sorry one more time, I thought it's just a bug in your mod.

I'm also considering making eunit be additive for resistances (right now it is multiplicative and so if you have 0% resistance then it is unaffected), but I think it probably will be way too potent. Can you imagine all enemies with +50% Resistance All at the end of the game! Yikes!

That will make the creature unbeatable ,so probably you shouldn't do it. Otherwise your ideas sound really good. I hope you will successfully implement them.

[Sir Whiskers]

You know, I wonder how much the original King's Bounty factored into no loss for the new King's Bounty. I've read posts here where people complain if they can't do no loss.

The original Dos-based Kings Bounty was very similar in many respects:
--"Kiting" was expected. The best strategy was to buy a boat, grab as many chests as possible (chests had upgrades to leadership, upgrades to spellcasting power, spell scrolls, and increases to your weekly income), grab the handful of artifacts and most importantly, get the maps to the other continents, so you could do the same on those.
--The creatures you could recruit were more powerful on the later continents than the first one. So were the chest rewards.
--Having a single really powerful troop was usually far better than a lot of low-level troops.
--Troop morale, including the nasty morale effects of having undead/demons in your army.
--Troops might be available in limited quantities, and they cost gold to recruit, so you couldn't ignore losses. That said, I rarely had problems finding enough of the troops I wanted.
--Spells could make or break a combat.

Some differences:
--You army cost you money each week, essentially troop maintenance. Though you could amass a huge army, it might bankrupt you if you weren't careful.
--Spells were important in combat, but army size and makeup mattered far more.
--Some spells had uses outside of combat. I loved the Town Portal spell and wish there was a way to add that to the new KB. (Something like that might address the issue where players hate to lose troops, given how long it might take to go back and get more...)
--The numbers tended to be hidden. For example, my dragons could take damage, but until one dies, I really don't know how badly hurt they are.
--Only 8 artifacts, which were automatically equipped when found.

To your specific question, I don't know anyone who played the original "no loss". Of course, that game came out long before the Internet was ubiquitous, so it's not like gamers could really compete for bragging rights back then.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I attached the GM mod to this message.

Thanks - I took a brief look; there are a lot of files so it will take me a while to go through them...

They do "no loss games",because thats a way to challenge themselves . But for me it's a boring way. The game should be made harder with mods like yours for example :)

No loss is nice if that is challenging for the player, although challenge takes many shapes.

For me, I think, it is simply to make the challenging journey more fun and interesting. It is up to the player to choose how they want to play, but my hope is that it is at least more enjoyable than it was before...

Actually I am not loosing any troops ,except some 1st level units,that are not so important in late game anyway.

This seems more HOMM-like as you would be very judicious with keeping your higher level units from dying, while you didn't mind losing lower level units here and there...

I still don't agree. Sheep's duration should be 1,1,2 or maximum 1,2,2 and with the intel boost it will go up and ofcourse one of the babies of Feanora which gives -14% magic resistance to enemies increases the duration further. And that particular baby is like level 10 ,compared to the others.

Fair enough, but know this:

Sheep does not work on the Undead, Plants, and Golems (because the unit needs to be at least animal like and living, not dead; Undead were included in all Sheep normal KB (TL/AP/CW/WotN)) and is second only to Hypnosis in Mana / Crystals cost for a level 1 spell. Hypnosis costs the most because not only does it neutralize an enemy troop, but allows you to employ them directly against the enemy. So Hypnosis > Sheep, at least at Level 1.

Now with that said, I have a formula for determining the increase in spell Mana / Crystal cost that is based on the increase in spell power. So for example, if Level 1 Sheep is 1 round and affects through level 2, then if Level 2 Sheep is 2 rounds and affects through level 3 then I use that for determining the Mana / Crystal cost for the spell upgrade. To keep it simple, I simply average the increase in spell power and multiply that by the Level 1 values. So for Sheep we get 22 * [ average( 2/1, 3/2 ) = 1.75 ] = 38.5, flooring gives us 38. Note that I did not average the level increase, but just the max level (either way would be valid, i.e. 1-2 is 1.5 and 1-3 is 2, which is 2/1.5 = 1.33 - this would give a smaller rise so my preference is to consider max level since I think it is more about the max level affected, not the mean). The same holds true for Level 3 Sheep: 3 rounds, level 1-4 - 22 * [ average( 3/1, 4/2 ) = 2.5 ] = 55.

Crystals are always half the Mana cost (floored).

So the spells are "automatically balanced" so long as the initial Mana cost is accurate. Currently, this is a bit more subjective, but a simple ordering of Level 1 spells by their power can help with the initial Mana / Crystal cost and this is what I've done.

Whether they are balanced from another perspective, i.e. whether 3 rounds is too high for a spell duration of this spell type is more of opinion, although I think you'll see that I like to increase all statistics unless the spell goes mass. In that case, the jump from single to mass keeps all statistics even and as it turns out (since it is like casting it 5 times if you have 5 stacks) mass spells are 5 times the Mana cost. With that said, if I used the values you proposed, the Sheep Mana / Crystal cost would come down to compensate for the Level 2 and 3 variants and so therefore the spell is perfectly balanced versus its initial cost, whether the values I propose or yours are used.

Incidentally:


Sheep Level 1: 1 Round, Units Level 1-2 - Mana / Crystals: 22 / 11
Sheep Level 2: 1 Round, Units Level 1-3 - Mana / Crystals: 27 / 13
Sheep Level 3: 2 Rounds, Units Level 1-4 - Mana / Crystals: 44 / 22

Those would be per your request, so if you would prefer those values then feel free to implement them in SPELLS.TXT.

I really like this system as it ensures that everything is truly balanced, since it is formulaic.

By the way, I used this system to balance the units in my Emperor of the Fading Suns Hyperion mod a long time ago and it was highly regarded by that community as one of the best mods developed for that game. EFS suffered from a serious imbalance in the units because (it seemed like anyway) that most unit statistics and resource requirements were haphazardly assigned. So I've had a lot of success using this approach in modding games before KB.

This touch is in a lot of the other areas of my mod as well, including skill abilities where I actually assign how much of the stat is increased by a Rune. For example, if a skill has +1 Attack, I usually require it to have +1 Might Rune for each point increase in Attack (+1 Defense / Mind Rune; +1 Intellect / Magic Rune). Once again this lends itself to automatically balancing it because every Rune is quantified.

This approach was mostly used in TL and I've been using it in the skill tree design of AP / CW.

Sorry about that. I initially thought that you changed this unit to have no melee penalty. Maybe I remembered it wrong from GM where it has penalty. But it's not a big deal anyway,so don't bother. Sorry one more time, I thought it's just a bug in your mod.

Okay, I'll leave them alone. In fact, unless a unit was seriously under-powered / useless I for the most part left them alone.

I did make changes to the Plants (they are now a lot better) and other units here and there that felt like they had certain under-powered abilities or there were notable gaps (like not being able to Resurrect Plants / Undead / Level 5 units). I also decided to drop the Ancient Vampire's Critical Hit avoidance to only 50% since if the enemy's Critical Hit is too high you could use invulnerable Ancient Vampires against them because of Death's Deception constantly avoiding damage.

That will make the creature unbeatable ,so probably you shouldn't do it. Otherwise your ideas sound really good. I hope you will successfully implement them.

Yah, you're probably right, although I am toying with an "experience system" except for the enemy units. It would really be more of a difficulty location system where this modifier possibly becomes more prominent. I'm kind of already doing this with the difficulty level + map location modifier so I don't know if I simply change the map location divisor if that would be the same thing, but it is just food for thought...

Thanks again for the great comments!

Matt

/C\/C\

[jorko80]

Hi Matt!
I finished the game today. As a whole it was a good experience and it was interesting,except those easy spots that I mentioned in my posts before. I will provide some more feedback and ideas,but first I will comment your last post a bit.

Sheep does not work on the Undead, Plants, and Golems (because the unit needs to be at least animal like and living, not dead;

This is a good logic,but makes the undead and especially the plants unstoppable ,because there is no magic that can eliminate them. Blind works at least to undead but the plants sometimes are a pain. Anyway I can't decide yet if there should be a spell that affects these creatures.


So the spells are "automatically balanced" so long as the initial Mana cost is accurate. Currently, this is a bit more subjective, but a simple ordering of Level 1 spells by their power can help with the initial Mana / Crystal cost and this is what I've done.

You've said it yourself - the initial mana cost must be accurate. So that's the problem with the sheep-spell . Maybe it should cost more,because the effect it makes is supreme. And ofcourse that is directly connected with the accumulated mana and the mana-regeneration rate,which are both highly increased in your mode. Otherwise your formula seems to be very good and you have experience from modding other games(Emperor of fading sun - which I never played by the way, is it good ?). I understand your system and it looks perfect but the initial costs and the effect of the spell are things that are valued subjectively and considering that I appear to have more experience playing KB ,my final feeling is that the spell should cost 22,38,55 ,but with reduced duration. Ofcourse that's just my opinion :)

I did make changes to the Plants (they are now a lot better) and other units here and there that felt like they had certain under-powered abilities or there were notable gaps (like not being able to Resurrect Plants / Undead / Level 5 units). I also decided to drop the Ancient Vampire's Critical Hit avoidance to only 50% since if the enemy's Critical Hit is too high you could use invulnerable Ancient Vampires against them because of Death's Deception constantly avoiding damage.

These are good changes, I like them. I like a lot what you've done with the Ents,finally they are usable and competitive. But that makes me think ,that there are so many creatures that are too weak compared to others and they could be tweaked also. In my game ,at some point I decided to take some knights in my army,they are available in the late game, they have good armor and bonus dmg vs dragons. But they sucked completely ,they were incapable of killing a single dragon and also died pretty quick,despite their fire resistance, completely useless unit. And even worse is,that there is a special ability in the skill tree for them,which doesn't worth taking.

Yah, you're probably right, although I am toying with an "experience system" except for the enemy units. It would really be more of a difficulty location system where this modifier possibly becomes more prominent. I'm kind of already doing this with the difficulty level + map location modifier so I don't know if I simply change the map location divisor if that would be the same thing, but it is just food for thought...

Adding experience system would be great. That goes to the wifes,children,troops and enemy troops also. WOG comes to my mind. It was super interesting and challenging. The troops gained not just stats improvement,but also new abilities with levels.

Now for the last part of my game. Clearing the elven lands,death lands and demonis was not so hard, I guess 20% harder would've been better. The hero fights were good and interesting. Karador was amazing and Baal also. Xeona was a nice surprise with these ultra powerful demon gates. Then comes the labyrinth and the seven Haas dragons ,they were good, then Bagud was super. Haas was a good fight,which I successfully did in the first try. Karador and Bagud I reloaded twice, they were really good.

But as always I did kinda lost interest after entering the grey wasteland. After that there is not much to develop in your hero and also there are no new units to discover and so it is not so rewarding to play. It's just the story left,but once you know it ,the game loses replayability in the late part. And that happens even earlier in AP/CW . And I just kill some heroes and go straight to the final,leaving a lot of enemy armies untouched. Also the skill that provides additional experience is a bit useless,it stays always to lvl1. I was lvl28 when I fought Haas and it was enough to defeat him. So my idea is that there should be some more units coming when you kill Karador,then Baal and in the Haas' Labyrinth also. It will be definately rewarding and encouraging. The units that come to my mind will blend super in your mod,ofcourse I don't have the slightest idea,how hard it is to make them. So destroying the crystal of darkness should allow you to buy crystal dragons,destroying Baal leads to Rust dragons-born in the sulfur of demonis, and Faerie and Azure dragons should be available in the magical Haas' Labyrinth. And in the late game there should be some special skills available for example when you are a veteran 28 level hero,so the player will be stimulated to fight until the very end of the game. Maybe adding something in the skill trees will help and extending the level cap to lvl35. Ofcourse these things lead to the increase of the power of the armies and heroes in the Labyrinth and Murock, but I suppose that's easily done. I hope you'll like the idea. And AP/CW needs something like that even earlier.
Some more thoughts :
- The art Eye of the storm is currently useless with just -1 speed,compared to the speed bonuses you provided to the creatures,it should have at least -3 or -4 to be competitive.

- the enemy heroes throughout the game use the spell geyser too much. I was even bored, I enter a hero vs hero fight and nothing new - geyser,geyser,geyser :) . There are other powerful spells please.

- Sacrifice. I mentioned earlier,that it is unusable in the begining of the game. So my opinion stays the same about that. But the new part is,that it is way overpowered in late game with mage. I was able to ressurect 250% army . Example : Killing Baal was hard and it costed me a lot of units. Then I only needed one ordinary fight in which I restored my army completely ,not spending a single coin. Maybe a cap of 120% will be enough.
- Book of evil lvl3 casts something like sleep on the enemy,but when I attack the creature it is dispelled. So I think the effect should be the same as when the Beholders put someone to sleep. Otherwise it is completely equivalent with blind ,just the name is different. Ofcourse it should have shorter duration then blind.
- Rage draining is also too powerful ,it must have bigger rest.
- Chargers. I finished the game now and continue to have the same opinion. I was able to replenish my mana and rage after every battle,no matter how hard it was. They should give at least twice fewer points. Lina was lvl25 when I was in Murock , lvl24 entering the Labyrinth and it was more then enough for a mage hero. Your doubts that she will be weak were false. The time spirit was lvl35 and the other 2 were 20. That's a lot compared to the original game with a mage hero.

Some bugs :
- Evil book makes sheeps out of undead :)
- The phoenix looses a big part of it's attack when it's shot by a dispel arrow from the skeleton archer.
- Dragon Arrows ignore just resistance,not the defense as it says . It is very weak and unusable.
- In the fight versus Karador, the crystal of darknes raised my death stacks to his side and most of them were fine,except that it raised bone dragons from my black unicorns. That was awful ,because they were the same number as my unicorns were- 106 , and that was impossible army to kill. So I reloaded tried again,couldn't step on time on the unicorn body and it happened again. In the end I had to change the unicorns with different army. I think Bone dragons should be raised only from dragons. I don't know if that's a bug in your mod or in the game itself,but that's the first time I see it.
That is all for now.When anything else comes to my mind I'll write again. I will rest from KB for a while trying if Shades of Darkness is any good and then maybe I'll try your mod with a warrior or paladin.
Thank you one more time for your great work :)

[Fatt_Shade]

@joro80
About knights - they are great for wife Mirabela, as human units and if you get kids Katherine and Christian they get really interesting in big numbers. You had them on end of game with Xeona i`m guessing so not so much of variety in their stats. With Mirabela i had them lineup with warrior (check my post 101 in this tread) and i didnt even had kid specific for them. But with Mirabela and some of her kids you can have +5 moral for whole army and unit specific kids can give you swordman/guardman/knight/horseman in sick numbers and stats (post #225 here).
So this mod is great for race/unit specific builds and in Ap/Cw it will be better because tomes wont be locked to companions and it will be possible to have tome for dragons and necromancers (just expl) if you lead dragon + undead army ...

WoG (HoMM3) was great idea, and lots of fun play for me. But alas it was so much bugged and problematic to function. But in Red sands (Cw) i think they figured out how to make it work and it was fun to play. And in combination with this mod mechanics it will be great challenge :-)

As was said hero battles later in game are interesting.

Some items really lost their purpose with this mod, but lets agree Mat did lots of work and some things had to come up as `could be done better`. I had some ideas for upgrading items, but as he said implementing to much items in game cause freezes/crashes so that idea went to trash :-(

Spells : Sacrifice i agree is to powerful , and for mage with high int on lvl 3 unusable (maybe if you want to create stack with to high lds and kill off enemy hero troops, and then leave that 1 easily controllable stack to revive rest of your army without worrying about enemy hero spells killing you anymore). And geyser is pain in ass, you just resurrected all you wanted and enemy hero had to cast it one more time before end of battle :-(
Karador - Crystal of darkness - necromancy. I agree here also. Had him in my game resurrect 1200 ancient vampires form my dead dryad stack. That was fun to watch :-D

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hi Matt!
I finished the game today. As a whole it was a good experience and it was interesting,except those easy spots that I mentioned in my posts before. I will provide some more feedback and ideas,but first I will comment your last post a bit.

;

I'm glad you persevered and finished it!

This is a good logic,but makes the undead and especially the plants unstoppable ,because there is no magic that can eliminate them. Blind works at least to undead but the plants sometimes are a pain. Anyway I can't decide yet if there should be a spell that affects these creatures.

Well, for plants any burning spell (well I guess save Greasy Mist) works exceptionally well at taking them out: Flame Arrow, FireBall, Fire Rain, Phoenix, or Hell Breath. I think that's the list...

For the Undead, I'm not sure if you used Holy Rain, but it is very effective against them and so is Heal for that matter. Pygmy is also effective against everyone - not sure if you've tried that one.

You've said it yourself - the initial mana cost must be accurate. So that's the problem with the sheep-spell . Maybe it should cost more,because the effect it makes is supreme. And ofcourse that is directly connected with the accumulated mana and the mana-regeneration rate,which are both highly increased in your mode. Otherwise your formula seems to be very good and you have experience from modding other games(Emperor of fading sun - which I never played by the way, is it good ?). I understand your system and it looks perfect but the initial costs and the effect of the spell are things that are valued subjectively and considering that I appear to have more experience playing KB ,my final feeling is that the spell should cost 22,38,55 ,but with reduced duration. Ofcourse that's just my opinion :)

It is a really good affect, but there are still quite a few spells that are better at level 3 than Sheep and cost more. Also, Fear is a poor man's sheep in a way (although they can retaliate) and costs a lot less.

I'll revisit this for AP/CW/WotN, but I won't deviate from the formula for increases so I'll see if I can devise a better system for initial spell cost, then the level 2 and 3 increases will already be taken care of...

These are good changes, I like them. I like a lot what you've done with the Ents,finally they are usable and competitive. But that makes me think ,that there are so many creatures that are too weak compared to others and they could be tweaked also. In my game ,at some point I decided to take some knights in my army,they are available in the late game, they have good armor and bonus dmg vs dragons. But they sucked completely ,they were incapable of killing a single dragon and also died pretty quick,despite their fire resistance, completely useless unit. And even worse is,that there is a special ability in the skill tree for them,which doesn't worth taking.

I like what Fatt_Shade said here - all the units get great boosts from the wives / children and so if you find a unit that you'd really like to play, you'll have to focus on the wife / children to make that unit better. The wives give nice group unit bonuses and so you can always make a certain set of units better by getting that wife and sticking with her.

With that said, I've rarely played the Knights because by the time you can get them you pretty much have been everywhere and can hire any units you want.

I did increase the possibility of more Knights earlier in the game, but that is only probability. I got pretty good mileage out of Knights / Paladins in my first AP playthrough, although the Paladin's Resurrection proved invaluable.

Someone created a unit power chart on these forums and I really didn't touch the units that much, but it may need a hand to see if there can be some better balancing done here. I may need to leverage that chart and do some analysis to see if improvements can be made here and there to underpowered units...

Adding experience system would be great. That goes to the wifes,children,troops and enemy troops also. WOG comes to my mind. It was super interesting and challenging. The troops gained not just stats improvement,but also new abilities with levels.

Yah - there has been a lot of work done here by other modders and so it at least serves as a basis to learn how it was done and see if there is a place for it in my mod.

I never played WoG, but I did download it at one point many years ago with intent to try it out. They really expanded on the best game in the HOMM series.

I've actually thought about giving the units "difficulty level" abilities for the AI. It would actually be very easy to do as you can give them a new ability and then set it to disabled and then enable it if you are playing a certain difficulty level / map location level (this is how Dragon Arrows works - it enables the Dragon Arrow ability for the archer unit when you cast it on them).

Now for the last part of my game. Clearing the elven lands,death lands and demonis was not so hard, I guess 20% harder would've been better. The hero fights were good and interesting. Karador was amazing and Baal also. Xeona was a nice surprise with these ultra powerful demon gates. Then comes the labyrinth and the seven Haas dragons ,they were good, then Bagud was super. Haas was a good fight,which I successfully did in the first try. Karador and Bagud I reloaded twice, they were really good.

Excellent! Did you happen to fight anyone else (i.e. Sonya, the level 27 Necromancer)? What about the Evil Book? Sonya's not in every game, so maybe you didn't get her in yours. Possibly the same for that Necromancer.

But as always I did kinda lost interest after entering the grey wasteland. After that there is not much to develop in your hero and also there are no new units to discover and so it is not so rewarding to play. It's just the story left,but once you know it ,the game loses replayability in the late part. And that happens even earlier in AP/CW . And I just kill some heroes and go straight to the final,leaving a lot of enemy armies untouched. Also the skill that provides additional experience is a bit useless,it stays always to lvl1. I was lvl28 when I fought Haas and it was enough to defeat him. So my idea is that there should be some more units coming when you kill Karador,then Baal and in the Haas' Labyrinth also. It will be definately rewarding and encouraging. The units that come to my mind will blend super in your mod,ofcourse I don't have the slightest idea,how hard it is to make them. So destroying the crystal of darkness should allow you to buy crystal dragons,destroying Baal leads to Rust dragons-born in the sulfur of demonis, and Faerie and Azure dragons should be available in the magical Haas' Labyrinth. And in the late game there should be some special skills available for example when you are a veteran 28 level hero,so the player will be stimulated to fight until the very end of the game. Maybe adding something in the skill trees will help and extending the level cap to lvl35. Ofcourse these things lead to the increase of the power of the armies and heroes in the Labyrinth and Murock, but I suppose that's easily done. I hope you'll like the idea. And AP/CW needs something like that even earlier.

Ha! We must think alike because (I'm not sure which post it is) I reference all the dragons you mention earlier in this thread! That would be really neat to implement! I need an artist on here to take the 2-D HOMM3 unit pics for the dragons you mentioned and either alter an existing 3-D picture or create new ones for those dragons! Wouldn't that be awesome?!

I guess I could implement the units and then maybe someone can do the graphics for me! I think I can do all the programming - the Faery Dragons would be similar to the Evil Book for their spell casting function and the Rust Dragon attack can be easily coded.

That would be really neat!

For the rest of the stuff you mention it just sounds like you're so experienced that you'd need a new game or new content there.

Someone on here mentioned joining the AP/CW maps with TL. That would be neat to have a way to go back and forth between the two worlds...

- The art Eye of the storm is currently useless with just -1 speed,compared to the speed bonuses you provided to the creatures,it should have at least -3 or -4 to be competitive.

Okay.

- the enemy heroes throughout the game use the spell geyser too much. I was even bored, I enter a hero vs hero fight and nothing new - geyser,geyser,geyser :) . There are other powerful spells please.

I usually get more variability there - maybe its something I changed recently, hmmm...

- Sacrifice. I mentioned earlier,that it is unusable in the begining of the game. So my opinion stays the same about that. But the new part is,that it is way overpowered in late game with mage. I was able to ressurect 250% army . Example : Killing Baal was hard and it costed me a lot of units. Then I only needed one ordinary fight in which I restored my army completely ,not spending a single coin. Maybe a cap of 120% will be enough.

I'll look at this spell's increases from level to level and see what can be done here...

- Book of evil lvl3 casts something like sleep on the enemy,but when I attack the creature it is dispelled. So I think the effect should be the same as when the Beholders put someone to sleep. Otherwise it is completely equivalent with blind ,just the name is different. Ofcourse it should have shorter duration then blind.

I think all sleep spells are dispelled on attack, even the Beholder's. Note, though, that the attack is always critical when attacking a sleeping / unconscious unit.

- Rage draining is also too powerful ,it must have bigger rest.

Okay, will revisit...

- Chargers. I finished the game now and continue to have the same opinion. I was able to replenish my mana and rage after every battle,no matter how hard it was. They should give at least twice fewer points. Lina was lvl25 when I was in Murock , lvl24 entering the Labyrinth and it was more then enough for a mage hero. Your doubts that she will be weak were false. The time spirit was lvl35 and the other 2 were 20. That's a lot compared to the original game with a mage hero.

Okay, will revisit...

Some bugs :
- Evil book makes sheeps out of undead :)

Okay, I'll look into this as this shouldn't happen. I've been trying to set it up so that if I make a change to a spell it also affects units that use that spell, but it looks like I didn't get this one here...

- The phoenix looses a big part of it's attack when it's shot by a dispel arrow from the skeleton archer.

Okay, this is not supposed to happen, either. I'll check the logic here as I think the arrow does an automatic dispel...

- Dragon Arrows ignore just resistance,not the defense as it says . It is very weak and unusable.

You know, I really tried to make this spell much more potent. Did you know that it can be used when adjacent to enemies? You also get a heck of a lot of the arrows and they do Astral damage, which no one has resistance to.

I tried it out and it seemed plenty powerful at a certain point in the game, but did not try them at the end of the game. But I think you can get something like 6-8 shots if you have an archer unit and can shoot anyone with them no matter if they are next to you or not.

I'll revisit, but make sure you know these things. I think I can set it up to ignore defense - should I?

- In the fight versus Karador, the crystal of darknes raised my death stacks to his side and most of them were fine,except that it raised bone dragons from my black unicorns. That was awful ,because they were the same number as my unicorns were- 106 , and that was impossible army to kill. So I reloaded tried again,couldn't step on time on the unicorn body and it happened again. In the end I had to change the unicorns with different army. I think Bone dragons should be raised only from dragons. I don't know if that's a bug in your mod or in the game itself,but that's the first time I see it.

Okay, that's not right. I know I tested this out, but I've made Necromancy work such that it just needs big animal bones to make Bone Dragons out of them; however, it should be the same leadership, not same number if I'm not mistaken. So lets see it should have been 106 * 150 / 1300 = 12.2 = 13 (I'm pretty sure I ceiling this - maybe I floor it?).

So I'll look into this...

That is all for now.When anything else comes to my mind I'll write again. I will rest from KB for a while trying if Shades of Darkness is any good and then maybe I'll try your mod with a warrior or paladin.
Thank you one more time for your great work :)

Well, that is awesome! You've provided me with great comments and I'll revisit these areas when I return to modding TL.

For right now I've been playing WotN (it seems a lot better with respect to bugs than my first playthrough of the 4 Viking islands) so that I can get a feel for what needs to be modded there as I let the AP/CW development stew for a little while.

Matt

/C\/C\

[jorko80]

Hi again,

Excellent! Did you happen to fight anyone else (i.e. Sonya, the level 27 Necromancer)? What about the Evil Book? Sonya's not in every game, so maybe you didn't get her in yours. Possibly the same for that Necromancer.

Yes,Sonya and the necromancer were both present. They were good opponents ,but not really so hard. Maybe because of the chargers,I did ressurected my entire army and replenished everything and just continued on to the next fight with full rage and mana. The Phoenix is a bit overpowered maybe, with it I ressurect much and kill many enemy units without problems, but in the fights with karador ,baal,haas,xeona and possibly 2-3 more ,if it wasn't so powerful I didn't stand a chance. So I can't actually say what should be changed in that spell. Maybe reducing the chargers is enough. I think you underestimate some abilities in the game,because you didn't tried them much. My first 2 games were similar, I was always about trying to do damage with spirits and magics,but the other abilities are even more powerful. Lina for instance is not about damage. The Evil Book was a good fight also.

Ha! We must think alike because (I'm not sure which post it is) I reference all the dragons you mention earlier in this thread! That would be really neat to implement! I need an artist on here to take the 2-D HOMM3 unit pics for the dragons you mentioned and either alter an existing 3-D picture or create new ones for those dragons! Wouldn't that be awesome?!
Yes it would :) , sorry that I can't help. I can't even draw a dog.

For the rest of the stuff you mention it just sounds like you're so experienced that you'd need a new game or new content there.

No ,not so much. Just some more hero developing, so that I can fight everything till the end and feel rewarded about that. Did you played Heroes6 - once you get to lvl30 ,you stop developing ,and then there are more missions and you are just stuck to the same level, it was so boring.
Maybe one or two new skills in the skill tree will be enough. Maybe a "Dragon master" skill,which allows you to control more of the H3 dragons or something else. If you are interested in the idea , I can think more about some skills.

Someone on here mentioned joining the AP/CW maps with TL. That would be neat to have a way to go back and forth between the two worlds...
Not sure that this will improve the game. That means one ultra long game,that needs much more hero developing and units to keep it interesting.
I like them separated. They look a like, but at the same time offer much diversity.


I think all sleep spells are dispelled on attack, even the Beholder's. Note, though, that the attack is always critical when attacking a sleeping / unconscious unit.

The beholder's sleep is not dispelled no matter the number of attacks vs the creature. But anyway this is not such a big problem,so it doesn't require more time put in it.

You know, I really tried to make this spell much more potent. Did you know that it can be used when adjacent to enemies? You also get a heck of a lot of the arrows and they do Astral damage, which no one has resistance to.

I noticed the adjacent perk, but let me give you the example of my game, I had 150 hunters(the only shooter in my army) and I cast Dragon arrows and the hunters do the AMAZING 150 dmg to black dragons :confused: , then I noticed that without it ,the hunters do 250 dmg, because the spell doesn't benefit from attack bonuses. It did good damage to lower level creatures,but there are other spells that affect those creatures anyway. And the Dragons ,Archdemons ,Cyclopes and other 5th lvl creatures are hardly affected by spells, Dragon Arrows was one of the few spells that made difference, but now it is useless. Maybe some defense removal will be nice. It sounds even better if it is spell lvl related, like 25,50,75 % defense ignoring respectivly
or 50,75,100% but that may be too much.

For right now I've been playing WotN (it seems a lot better with respect to bugs than my first playthrough of the 4 Viking islands) so that I can get a feel for what needs to be modded there as I let the AP/CW development stew for a little while.

The biggest flaw in WotN is that after killing the spider you get instant access to 6 areas. 3 areas in Darion ,2 pirate lands and the elven lands. That pretty much allows you to have everything in your army even before completing half of the game. And the wings that you get so early,allow you to see everything and get everything. There were so many people in the forums ,complaining about the wings especially. There were many proposals to alter them in some way or even to completely remove them. Also the part in AP/CW where you have to usually fight a stronger army to get to a new island is really good and rewarding. It makes you think ,how can I kill them,what will I gain on the next island to help me complete the quests in my current position,what will I lose. It is really good. Nothing of that is present in WotN, except in the first 4 islands. Also the fact that there are so many undead armies to fight gets really boring. I know they are the most important part of the big story,but still their number should be seriously reduced in some areas. Even on my first game in WotN , I was sick fighting the same undead guys over and over again. Enough for now :). When you decide to mod WotN ,we can discuss it more if you like.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hi again,


Yes,Sonya and the necromancer were both present. They were good opponents ,but not really so hard. Maybe because of the chargers,I did ressurected my entire army and replenished everything and just continued on to the next fight with full rage and mana. The Phoenix is a bit overpowered maybe, with it I ressurect much and kill many enemy units without problems, but in the fights with karador ,baal,haas,xeona and possibly 2-3 more ,if it wasn't so powerful I didn't stand a chance. So I can't actually say what should be changed in that spell. Maybe reducing the chargers is enough. I think you underestimate some abilities in the game,because you didn't tried them much. My first 2 games were similar, I was always about trying to do damage with spirits and magics,but the other abilities are even more powerful. Lina for instance is not about damage. The Evil Book was a good fight also.

I think I know what to do on the Chargers - the rest needs to increase more for each ball power increase.

Right now, I have Rest +1 for each Rage increase, but if it became +1, +2, and +3 and then the Rest decreases were -1 and -2 you'd only be able to use the ability once every 4 turns once it was maxed out. This would mean that you'd only get to use it at full power once for normal battles and twice for hero / tower battles before the Mana / Rage gain reduction kicked in.

This would reduce its power if you tend to use it a lot, which it sounds like you either use it as often as possible once you get it leveled up or you let the enemy hang around and use it to pump up your Rage / Mana at the end of battles before finishing off the enemy. I hadn't thought of that strategy, I guess, for when it was maxed out as you'd still get pretty good increases in Rage / Mana even when the 1/2 gain kicked in. It still would not be very effective when at 1/4 (at least for rage gain) as it stands now, but if I increase the rest like I mentioned above I think it will work out okay.

As far as the Phoenix is concerned you can see why it is so expensive to cast / learn. I'll be revisiting the Summoning spells for AP/CW/WotN to see what I want to do about this. I actually really like the Phoenix and their Sacrifice ability for resurrecting level 5 units as it makes using Level 5's more viable and not as reliant on Gizmo. In WotN I'm noting that the Phoenix does a heck of a lot more damage than it did in TL/AP/CW.

What I did here (same for Evil Book as well) is have the spell power modify all the stats of the Phoenix, including their resistance. And then you see that certain skills also increase their stats including the Destroyer skill for increasing their damage. I like this approach and was thinking of implementing similar in AP/CW, but might reduce the resistance increase by 1/2.

We'll see...

Yes it would :) , sorry that I can't help. I can't even draw a dog.

That's too bad! ;)

No ,not so much. Just some more hero developing, so that I can fight everything till the end and feel rewarded about that. Did you played Heroes6 - once you get to lvl30 ,you stop developing ,and then there are more missions and you are just stuck to the same level, it was so boring.

No, I haven't played any of the HOMM games since 3. I think my brother got me 4 and 5 through GoG so maybe I'll play them one of these days...

Maybe one or two new skills in the skill tree will be enough. Maybe a "Dragon master" skill,which allows you to control more of the H3 dragons or something else. If you are interested in the idea , I can think more about some skills.

I think the Skill Trees are pretty much filled up unless we modded an existing skill. It certainly sounds interesting...

Not sure that this will improve the game. That means one ultra long game,that needs much more hero developing and units to keep it interesting.
I like them separated. They look a like, but at the same time offer much diversity.

Perhaps you're right.

The beholder's sleep is not dispelled no matter the number of attacks vs the creature. But anyway this is not such a big problem,so it doesn't require more time put in it.

You know, I just looked at this in the code and I can't figure out where it's setting the unit to sleep. So perhaps this one is coded differently than the Dryad Sleep and other sleep abilities. So I'll look into this some more to better understand it as I had thought it used the same code as the Dryad's...

I noticed the adjacent perk, but let me give you the example of my game, I had 150 hunters(the only shooter in my army) and I cast Dragon arrows and the hunters do the AMAZING 150 dmg to black dragons :confused: , then I noticed that without it ,the hunters do 250 dmg, because the spell doesn't benefit from attack bonuses. It did good damage to lower level creatures,but there are other spells that affect those creatures anyway. And the Dragons ,Archdemons ,Cyclopes and other 5th lvl creatures are hardly affected by spells, Dragon Arrows was one of the few spells that made difference, but now it is useless. Maybe some defense removal will be nice. It sounds even better if it is spell lvl related, like 25,50,75 % defense ignoring respectivly
or 50,75,100% but that may be too much.

You know I just looked at this ability and for Archers and Bowmen the damage done with Dragon Arrows is higher, but when looking at Elves and Hunters it is the same as their normal damage.

I didn't change this part in the unit's abilities so it was like this in the original game as well.

Here is the Dragon Arrow ability for each unit compared to their normal attack:


Skeleton Archers:

Move Attack: 1-2 Physical
Dragon Arrows: 2-3 Astral

Bowmen:

Move Attack: 2-3 Physical
Dragon Arrows: 3-4 Astral

Elves:

Move Attack: 4-5 Physical
Dragon Arrows: 4-5 Astral

Hunters:

Move Attack: 8-10 Physical
Dragon Arrows: 8-10 Astral


So there is no damage increase for the Elves and Hunters. What I don't understand, though, is that it should be doing at least the same damage as their Move Attack since this is an enabled skill (the spell enables the skill and so technically it's not a spell) and since no one gets Astral Resistance, it should at least not be reduced by resistances. The Attack / Defense factor is set to 1 for this skill, but so is their move attack. The only difference is that the Move Attack has a chance to Critically Strike the target.

The Skeleton Archers get the highest percentage increase and then the Bowmen next. Now that I'm aware of this I'd probably just double the damage for their Dragon Arrow attack and set the Attack / Defense factor to 0.

That should make the spell equally useful for Skeleton Archers, Bowmen, Elves, and Hunters as right now it works the best on Skeleton Archers and then next Bowmen and not really so well with the Elves and Hunters (although you do get the shooting when adjacent bonus).

The biggest flaw in WotN is that after killing the spider you get instant access to 6 areas. 3 areas in Darion ,2 pirate lands and the elven lands. That pretty much allows you to have everything in your army even before completing half of the game. And the wings that you get so early,allow you to see everything and get everything. There were so many people in the forums ,complaining about the wings especially. There were many proposals to alter them in some way or even to completely remove them. Also the part in AP/CW where you have to usually fight a stronger army to get to a new island is really good and rewarding. It makes you think ,how can I kill them,what will I gain on the next island to help me complete the quests in my current position,what will I lose. It is really good. Nothing of that is present in WotN, except in the first 4 islands. Also the fact that there are so many undead armies to fight gets really boring. I know they are the most important part of the big story,but still their number should be seriously reduced in some areas. Even on my first game in WotN , I was sick fighting the same undead guys over and over again. Enough for now :). When you decide to mod WotN ,we can discuss it more if you like.

Yah, I know what you mean - getting a bit tired of fighting endless hordes of Undead, but I'll finish it up then we can discuss ideas for modding WotN. I'm really not sure what to do about the wings, though, since you really need to get to those Jotun houses due to the lack of available units on the islands. It seems like the maps would have to be modded to allow you to get to them without flying. Or, I guess, Jotuns / Trolls could be added to structures where you don't need to fly to get to them. It might be too long, but you could get your wings after rescuing Regina. I wonder how to change that?

Well anyway, stuff to think about and I guess we should start a WotN modding thread to discuss it more fully...

Once again, thanks for your comments on my mod - I think you've given me some good stuff to think about and I'm certainly going to approach the AP/CW/WotN mod design slightly differently since I've learned a lot from this mod and everyone's comments.

:)

Matt

/C\/C\

[Fatt_Shade]

About spells :
In Ap/Cw mage can easily go to 80+ intellect (highest in tL i got was 45). Phoenix will be indistructible with it.Same for evil book, it will be hard ot kill but also really hard to reload it`s casting in battle after using 3 on 3rd lvl. Some change in it will be needed.

Getting new unit in game, try to contact with bladeking77 who made Adventure mod for Cw, and got 3 new fully functional units in it : champion, azure dragon and archer.Maybe he`ll be able to help on this front.

Attacking any unit in sleep/snooze will woke it, i`m not sure what is happening in that item battle.

Changing rage skills is really thing of personal choice, and it can be optional. Since it`s not hard to mod them and set as player like. Make them anyway just functional. Rest is in our hands :-P

Maybe one or two new skills in the skill tree will be enough. Maybe a "Dragon master" skill,which allows you to control more of the H3 dragons or something else
Well in Ap/Cw there is `Voice of dragon` which will be easy to set to -lds for dragons or something like that.

[Sirlancelot]

Sorry for the double post (I also posted on youtube), folks, but I want to reassure Matt read my congrat message:

Wow, I take my hat off, either you did something really remarkable here or are a marketing genius. Seriously Matt, I admire your perseverance and enthusiasm. It seems you did a GREAT job here.

Wish me a good journey, I'm gonna try your mod right away. I feel compelled to. Heck, in fact, why isn't it far more popular?

Hope my feedback will prove to be useful for you. Just one inmediate suggestion, though: rename to something more noticeable and self explanatory, along the lines of "King's Bounty expansion: X, Y & N, Z rebalance and miscellanea improvements." "Heroes of M&M 3 Babies" sounds nice but confusing.

By the way, I have to reply you in a thread I opened years ago.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Sorry for the double post (I also posted on youtube), folks, but I want to reassure Matt read my congrat message:

Wow, I take my hat off, either you did something really remarkable here or are a marketing genius. Seriously Matt, I admire your perseverance and enthusiasm. It seems you did a GREAT job here.

Thanks for the great comments!:-)

Wish me a good journey, I'm gonna try your mod right away. I feel compelled to. Heck, in fact, why isn't it far more popular?


The number of downloads is possibly misleading due to the fact that I remove the previous version and post a new one. So every release resets the counter.

Hope my feedback will prove to be useful for you. Just one inmediate suggestion, though: rename to something more noticeable and self explanatory, along the lines of "King's Bounty expansion: X, Y & N, Z rebalance and miscellanea improvements." "Heroes of M&M 3 Babies" sounds nice but confusing.

By the way, I have to reply you in a thread I opened years ago.

You may be on to something with the name, however, I'm not sure if you've read why it is named as such.

But the "in" for me was the babies and having played HOMM3 all those years ago.

As I played TL for the first time I noticed that there seemed like areas that I could improve upon. I didn't really have much of an idea about what to call it, etc. until I had the breakthrough that the NPC wives of TL are the actual mothers of the heroes that you play in HOMM3.

So that's why I called it HOMM3 Babies, but maybe there's a better name? I'm certainly open to suggestions...

So as I started implementing it, I also thought of improving various aspects of the game that I had noted during my first playthrough. I spent a year on it before I released it here and as you can see, I've been sucked into the modding world ever since.

Coupled with the great comments I've received and the organic nature of modding, it seems like every time I play either TL or another game new ideas sprout.

I've also actually thought of doing more short videos to show gameplay that I'm working on or conceptual ideas, but just have not done it.

Anyway, thanks for the great comments...

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, I've been making a lot of changes with my latest unreleased version of the mod.

Now you can talk to Drahha and he's convinced that there must be more Blue Dragons out there somewhere! By the way, he now exchanges Runes for Dragon Eggs!

So now that I've added Blue Dragon Eggs (they look just like the Sapphire Egg you get from Ultrax and cost $25k) I've also added Blue Dragons.

So I'm open to suggestions on abilities. Note that I'm going to use Drahha as the 3D model and may also use his picture for the 2-D representation or may alter an existing one. We'll see.

Here's what I have so far for stats:

Attack: 60
Defense: 60
Physical Resistance: 20
Poison Resistance: 5
Magic Resistance: 80
Fire Resistance: 80
Initiative: 8
Speed: 9
Critical Hit: 25%
Fire Damage: 120-140
Health: 880
Cost: 20k
Leadership: 3k

These are meant to be very rare Dragons and hence they should have the best stats. Plus, I'm thinking this is why the other Dragons don't like them very much. Right now, I have placeholder talents of both the Red Dragon and Black Dragon abilities. However, these are just meant to be place holders for actual abilities that we think of. Think of Drahha when thinking about abilities.

One idea that I'm thinking about is that they may have an "aura of fear". Units within 1 hex have a chance of fear or something like that.

Anyway, those are just thoughts.

Also I've added the ability (so far) to exchange Snake Eggs for Crystals with Witch Helga, Spider Eggs for Crystals with Old Chvakha, and Ent Seeds for Crystals with Lady Beaulla. All containers will be enabled to trade for Crystals or possibly runes with some NPC. I have to look to see which NPC's still talk to you after you're talked to them and completed their quests (a lot just bring up their shop afterwards and so these aren't an option).

So I'm looking for NPC's to exchange the following still:

Griffin Eggs (I can only think of Harl, but it doesn't make sense - maybe governor Thompson? Seems like his motives wouldn't be good, though)
Dragonfly Eggs (Possibly Bogis)
Coffins (Skeletons) (Possibly the Necromancer that has you fight the Book of Evil - does he still talk to you after you give him the book?)
Carved Coffins (Vampires) (Possibly the Necromancer that has you fight the Book of Evil)
Thorn Seeds (thought of Milk Woman, Wilma, but she had such a bad experience with the first batch that she probably wouldn't want any more - maybe need to convince her now it's safe or something or possibly Bogis)
Bone Dragon Eggs (someone in the Land of Death, maybe the Necromancer that has you get the Red Dragon Eggs if he still talks to you afterwards (can't remember)).

By the way, the rough exchange rate is $10k of containers for 1 Crystal and $100k of containers for 1 Rune. So about 8 Ent Seeds for 1 Crystal, for example, or 5 Black Dragon Eggs for 1 Rune (of your choice). You can see that with these rates that you'd only be able to get about maybe 50 to 100 more crystals in a game and maybe 4-5 of each Rune, depending, of course, on whether you decide to use them.

Also, now when you fight Dragonflies you have a chance to get more Dragonfly Wings (chance is square root of the number of Dragonflies and the number of wings is square root of chance). This way you have a chance to find more Dragonfly Wings throughout the game to trade with Maria. You'll probably find on average, as a guess, 20 to 30 more wings so that'd be another 60 to 90 Crystals.

I'm also open to ideas for exchanging Crystals or Runes for something. It may be nice to bring the Rune Exchange stuff from AP / CW over to TL. I could probably have Torn Digor's son do the Rune Exchange...

Anyway, I'm still working through debugging the spell AI, but I've fixed quite a few crash-to-desktop problems and so need to do some more checking before the release is ready. There are also quite a few changes to LOC files that require a restart (for example, all the Blue Dragon stuff added to shops will require a restart).

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

/C\/C\

[Sir Whiskers]

Some random thoughts on abilities for Drahha:

1. Summoning dragonflies. Perhaps dragonflies hang around dragons, scavenging from their kills. For whatever reason, they like blue dragons better and can be summoned to help in a fight.

2. Other dragons don't like blue dragons not just because they are different, but because they have trouble controlling their abilities. Give blue dragons an Armageddon-like ability that damages all stacks (50% damage to allies?).

3. A Last Hero ability that only works on the blue dragon stack. Last Hero usually doesn't work on L5 creatures, so this might be overpowered.

4. Since emerald dragons can add mana, perhaps something that allows a blue dragon to add rage? Or, if a blue dragon is in the hero's army, anytime a dragon stack is attacked, it generates extra rage - something like the Paladin's ability against undead and demons. Or simply having dragons in the opposing army generates extra rage automatically between rounds.

5. Other dragons hate blue dragons, so when fighting a blue dragon, their Attack increases 25%, but their Defense decreases 50%.

You indicate that other dragons don't like blue dragons, so it's a good bet that you'll lower their morale if a blue dragon is in the hero's army. Are you planning to increase the blue dragon's morale in that case, similar to giants and emerald dragons?

I like the ideas on crystals. At first I thought $10K was too high, but Tibold's prices quickly go much higher, so it works out. (Tibold sells the first crystal for $5K, then $7.5K, then $10K, etc.) And it's nice to have something to do with the extra containers besides simply selling them. For convenience, I'd suggest having all the locations in or around Greenwort. Otherwise, it may not be worth the time and effort to trade some containers.

I also like the idea of exchanging dragon eggs for runes, and the high price ($100K) for doing so. It's less important to keep this in a convenient location, since I'm guessing it won't happen often. Perhaps the dragon caves in Montero?

SW

[MattCaspermeyer]

Some random thoughts on abilities for Drahha:

1. Summoning dragonflies. Perhaps dragonflies hang around dragons, scavenging from their kills. For whatever reason, they like blue dragons better and can be summoned to help in a fight.

I really like this idea - and it might make sense, too, since Drahha hangs out near the Dragonfly area in Arlania.

2. Other dragons don't like blue dragons not just because they are different, but because they have trouble controlling their abilities. Give blue dragons an Armageddon-like ability that damages all stacks (50% damage to allies?).

This also sounds neat! But I'd have to be careful otherwise you'd end up just not using it.

Other thoughts here:


Combine 3in1 with long attack 2 (so they could theoretically attack 6 targets: 3 hexes wide by 2 deep). I'm not sure if these two attack abilities would work together, though, so it might not be implementable.
They leave a wake when they fly - this might be part of the trouble controlling their abilities that you mention above.

3. A Last Hero ability that only works on the blue dragon stack. Last Hero usually doesn't work on L5 creatures, so this might be overpowered.

Another interesting idea. I've been drawing somewhat on the dragon abilities from HOMM3 - Armageddon's Blade. Here there is the Faerie Dragon and here's its description:

"Some say they are invisible. Some say they can cast spells. Some say Magic Mirror is one of their natural defensive traits."

So I like the idea of them having some sort of spell capability as a natural part of them. Invisibility may make sense since that's why they're rarely seen. Perhaps as a natural response to being attacked they have a certain percent chance of becoming invisible.

Going with the Magic Mirror motif (has a chance to reflect bad spells to the other side in HOMM3) this may also make sense - a spell cast on an enemy has a chance of being reflected (if bad) or stolen (if good). This may be really neat, although I'd have to think about how to implement it.

4. Since emerald dragons can add mana, perhaps something that allows a blue dragon to add rage? Or, if a blue dragon is in the hero's army, anytime a dragon stack is attacked, it generates extra rage - something like the Paladin's ability against undead and demons. Or simply having dragons in the opposing army generates extra rage automatically between rounds.

Sounds interesting. By the way, in my current update EGD's mana burn if they don't have a hero now.

5. Other dragons hate blue dragons, so when fighting a blue dragon, their Attack increases 25%, but their Defense decreases 50%.

Another interesting idea. Hmmm...

You indicate that other dragons don't like blue dragons, so it's a good bet that you'll lower their morale if a blue dragon is in the hero's army. Are you planning to increase the blue dragon's morale in that case, similar to giants and emerald dragons?

Yah, I'll probably make it -2 Morale or something like that (or maybe different colors respond differently). It'll then be offset by Tolerance. In my latest unreleased mod, Tolerance offsets the Morale penalty between EGD's and Giants (but Giants don't get the bonus any more either since I guess they know they're not allowed to eat them - "not very happy that I can't eat my EGD for breakfast!":)).

I like the ideas on crystals. At first I thought $10K was too high, but Tibold's prices quickly go much higher, so it works out. (Tibold sells the first crystal for $5K, then $7.5K, then $10K, etc.) And it's nice to have something to do with the extra containers besides simply selling them. For convenience, I'd suggest having all the locations in or around Greenwort. Otherwise, it may not be worth the time and effort to trade some containers.

Great suggestion here - or a short balloon ride away. Just searching for the right NPC's. I think I'm definitely going to have Bogis exchange Dragonfly Eggs and I may also have him do the Thorn Seeds (or I've been thinking that maybe Wilma can get advice from the Royal Thorn on the seeds). Perhaps the Dwarf Alchemist in Marshan Swamp could use the Coffins for something? He does need a new assistant after all...

I also like the idea of exchanging dragon eggs for runes, and the high price ($100K) for doing so. It's less important to keep this in a convenient location, since I'm guessing it won't happen often. Perhaps the dragon caves in Montero?

SW

I haven't even thought about where these exchanges would happen in AP / CW, but the dragon caves in Montero sound good if there is an NPC down there somewhere.

Alright - thanks for the awesome comments!

Keep 'em coming! :)

/C\/C\

[Sir Whiskers]

I haven't even thought about where these exchanges would happen in AP / CW, but the dragon caves in Montero sound good if there is an NPC down there somewhere.



Oops, you're right - I was thinking of AP/CW, not Legend. Hmm, I know there's at least one place in the Elven lands where you can always buy dragons, so perhaps there will work.

[Sirlancelot]

Edited: Wrong topic!

[MattCaspermeyer]

1. Summoning dragonflies. Perhaps dragonflies hang around dragons, scavenging from their kills. For whatever reason, they like blue dragons better and can be summoned to help in a fight.

I'm implementing this as one of their abilities. I've made the 4 buttons for the ability already.

I also have a picture of what they'll look like on their unit card (or actually 5). Tell me which one you like best - I like picture #1 the best so far. Let me know what you think.

I'm still contemplating other abilities.

I also have Wilma exchanging Thorn Seeds for Magic Crystals (she gives some to the Royal Thorn, I guess) and Bogis exchanging Dragonfly Eggs.

/C\/C\

[Kiras]

I'm not sure if this is the right thread, or the other one is. Anyways, I'm playing a mage. Near the end of Haas's Labrynth, and I have 45 int. I think a couple spells may be a bit unbalanced at this point.

Armageddon - does 0% damage to friendlies. They take 1 damage, and 1 burn damage/turn.

Stone skin - +80% phys resist for -1 init. Add in Tolerance + Slippery Cuirass or Twinkling boots, and everyone has 95% phys resist. Physical attacks might be a bit underpowered given this.

Battle Cry - +5 morale, mass. Thing is, between diplomacy and wife bonuses, it's easy to hit the morale cap anyways. So it doesn't seem very useful.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I'm not sure if this is the right thread, or the other one is.

I prefer this one (although I pretty much respond to either)...

Anyways, I'm playing a mage. Near the end of Haas's Labrynth, and I have 45 int. I think a couple spells may be a bit unbalanced at this point.

That's some really high intelligence. Let me list your bonuses:

sp_hero = 1.30 (assume that you're level 30)
sp_destroyer = 1.50 (assume you've got level 3 Destroyer skill)
int_power = 1.45 (you have 45 intellect)
int_pwr = 1.60 (45/7 floored is 6 so +60% total)
Your multiplier is a minimum of 1.30 * 1.50 * 1.45 * 1.60 = 4.52.

Wow! That is pretty high...

Armageddon - does 0% damage to friendlies. They take 1 damage, and 1 burn damage/turn.

At level 3 Armageddon, base PRC (friendly) damage is 100 - 20 = 80%; however you've got a modifier so friendly damage is 100 - 20 * 4.52 = 100 - 90.48 = 9.5% friendly damage. So you must have some more modifiers, maybe an attack bonus or a child bonus.

You are doing at least 100 - 300 damage times the 4.52 modifier and the +125% increase per spell level, which is 1 + ( spell_level - 1 ) * 125 / 100 = 3.5. So your damage range is 100 * 4.52 * 3.5 = 1585 to 300 * 4.52 * 3.5 = 4750. At the minimum, 9.5% of that is 150-450 damage. This is kind of what I was targeting for a really high level and powerful mage, but your bonus is 100 or over so that you get 100 - 100 = 0 on the friendly damage.

I just looked into SPELLS_POWER.LUA and I see that I have a limit for it, but I set it wrong - I'm limiting the value between 0 and 95, but since it works backwards, I should be limiting it between 5 and 100 (so that it does between 5-100% of normal damage). So thanks for pointing this out!:)

As an aside, the thought here was to limit Armageddon's friendly damage to 5% of total damage and so I'm not sure how much your damage actually is (but it is probably higher than I listed) so I was thinking a few hundred points of damage would encourage you to use it because there is no resistance to it. I'll fix this in my latest build - in fact I just did!8)

Stone skin - +80% phys resist for -1 init. Add in Tolerance + Slippery Cuirass or Twinkling boots, and everyone has 95% phys resist. Physical attacks might be a bit underpowered given this.

For level 2 or 3 (3 is mass so bonus is the same) spell power is 20. Your bonuses are probably:

sp_hero = 1.30
sp_healer = 1.30 (assume you've got level 3 Healer skill)
int_power = 1.45
int_pwr = 1.60
Your multiplier is a minimum of 1.30 * 1.30 * 1.45 * 1.60 = 3.92.

So Stone Skin power = 20 * 3.92 = 78 (so once again you may have another bonus somewhere). Once again that is pretty high and to your point, another item or two and you've got 95% physical resistance.

There are other factors, too, like other resistances that you get from skills and your Hero's Defense. If you've got your Tolerance skill up to level 3 you get another +6% resist all and then you get +2% resist all for every 7 Defense. So maybe you have another +10% resist all total.

This one is tricky to get its power right compared to Divine Armor. Incidentally, you'd probably have +60% resist all at Level 3 Divine Armor (since it is 15 * 3.92 = 59). The trick here is that Stone Skin has to be better than Divine Armor otherwise you wouldn't use it. Some of this goes back to when Stone Skin was not mass at level 3, so perhaps if I set the bonus to be 15 (just like Divine Armor is at level 3) the mass cast may be enough of a difference to get you to use it.

There are plenty of enemies, though, that do damage other than Physical towards the end of the game, so maybe it is okay. For hero battles, I'm not too worried about having it be that high because their damage scales very well.

So I'll think about changing Stone Skin's power progression from 10, 20, 20 to 10, 15, 15. This change will cause a decrease in the mana / crystals as well as its cost since I have all this linked via formula.

Battle Cry - +5 morale, mass. Thing is, between diplomacy and wife bonuses, it's easy to hit the morale cap anyways. So it doesn't seem very useful.

Well you only get +1 with Diplomacy and your wife bonuses only apply if you use her troops. It also can dramatically offset morale penalties if you decide to use intolerant troops together and haven't leveled up your Tolerance skill, yet. So it is still useful somewhat, in these types of situations. And although it might not make much of a difference, your morale gets pretty lousy if you play into the drudgery stages of combat so this can help boost morale then if you need it (although at this stage a player is probably just milking the turns to recover dead units). Lastly, It does provide a use during the early game, though, when you typically have no morale bonuses and since you can get the spell early, that's when it's use is encouraged.

Well thanks for the comments :) - feel free to post any other inconsistencies you feel are present since they just might be a bug like the limits I had on Armageddon!

By the way, I haven't played a Mage for a while, can you tell me what you're Spirit levels are? I'd like to get a feel for how high you can get them now with a Mage since I'm playing a Paladin. Thanks!:)

/C\/C\

[Kiras]

Beat the game. Ended at level 30 with 47 int.
Items that helped int: Old skull, dead skull, ancient amulet. Also consumed one of those +3 int rings whose name I forget.
Neoka - no bonus. Aeris is the only kid of hers I have with spell bonuses
Aeris, int sp +20%.
Scouting 3
Inquisition
Healer 3
Archmage 3
Destroyer 3
High magic 3

I think I took leadership only once on level up. Always went for int or sp bonuses when offered. Incidentally, my phantoms are 95% (didn't use that spell much though), Pygmy is -73%, Plague is -73%. Those are how I take down really strong stacks.

Armageddon is doing 1925-5780 damage. Incidentally, the 1 damage and 1 burn damage it does to me is actually helpful. Mana spring is giving me 43 mana at 8 duration, so casting that on someone and mana for armageddons is no longer an issue.

I never got a copy of divine armor in this run. Using a cheat code to get it in the book, it gives +72% resist all. Compare to stone skin's +80% phys, but divine armor isn't mass. Which leads to a really overpowered strategy that I never used: A single level 5 stack with mana spring and divine armor casted on round 1. After that, they'd take almost no damage, and I could spam armageddon.

I didn't go for a true spell power build. I wonder how broken this would be with that water nymph for a wife instead of Neoka.

Spirits are all ~level 20. Except the reaper, who is low 30s. I basically chose one ability on each to specialize on. Smashing sword (was actually aiming at underground blades, but the random number generator god did not like me), Poison cloud, Ice orb, and the Reaper was a mix of all abilities.

Late game, most fights went like this: My army was elves, hunters, druids, ancient ents, and dryads.
Round 1: Target on the ancient ents, plus magic shackles (if useful), mass slow, a mass slayer, ancient pheonix, occasionally mass helplessness. Sometimes kamikaze if I'm trying to kill a big black dragon stack.
Round 2: Magic spring on ancient ents, then start chucking armageddons.
Round 3 and beyond: More armageddons. Resurrection as needed.

Geyser was useful when I first got it, but I ditched it once I found armageddon was at 0% damage to friendlies. Plus, the physical resists made it useless against heroes. Well, I occasionally used it for the stun. The change to armageddon should help make other damage spells useful again.

A couple balance issues aside, it's fun to laugh at impossible armies as I squish them like bugs. Early game was way harder, but that's always felt true with King's Bounty. A number of dangerous heroes like Sonya, I had to retry the fights a couple times to have low casualties. With the dryad sleep thing, I literally prevented her from ever getting a spell cast.

[Fatt_Shade]

@Kiras Nice run man. Only question : what kids you had at end ? Maybe some screen of end game hero screen :-)

About this spell bonuses now isnt big problem, but it will be if this mod get functional for Ap/Cw where intellect can get to 80+. Some change should be done, but not linear if possible.
Suggestion : to make intellect bonus for some spells go in some formula until 30-40 int, above that lower bonus, above 70 still some bonus but again lower.Same as with plague spell there is cap for penalty to unit stats.Why not make stone skin/divine armor and rest?

[Kiras]

@Kiras Nice run man. Only question : what kids you had at end ? Maybe some screen of end game hero screen :-)

About this spell bonuses now isnt big problem, but it will be if this mod get functional for Ap/Cw where intellect can get to 80+. Some change should be done, but not linear if possible.
Suggestion : to make intellect bonus for some spells go in some formula until 30-40 int, above that lower bonus, above 70 still some bonus but again lower.Same as with plague spell there is cap for penalty to unit stats.Why not make stone skin/divine armor and rest?

I've played through this before honestly, but I was cheating this round on controlling which kids :-P Gelu, Ryland, Aeris, and Ivor. That basically gives me tons of elves and hunters. Ironically, it didn't end up being nearly as powerful as I thought it would be, because phys attacks weren't that good. Even though the hunters and elves almost always critted. With mass slow, pretty much any ranged heavy army could mow down the enemies before they reach you, especially if you start chucking pygmy or plague at the tough stacks. Plus, Phoenix are fantastic expendable tanks. The only scary enemies later on, besides heroes casting armageddon on me, were black and red dragons. They became a lot less scary when I noticed that my armageddon was doing no damage to me. My army didn't matter much at that point. I'm tempted to play again with a demon army, which would make the fire damage negligible. I miss my demonologists though, Crossworlds really has a better variety of units.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Beat the game. Ended at level 30 with 47 int.
Items that helped int: Old skull, dead skull, ancient amulet. Also consumed one of those +3 int rings whose name I forget.
Neoka - no bonus. Aeris is the only kid of hers I have with spell bonuses
Aeris, int sp +20%.
Scouting 3
Inquisition
Healer 3
Archmage 3
Destroyer 3
High magic 3

Ahh! That's where your additional bonus came from - another 1.2 times the amplifiers I mentioned above.

I think I took leadership only once on level up. Always went for int or sp bonuses when offered. Incidentally, my phantoms are 95% (didn't use that spell much though), Pygmy is -73%, Plague is -73%. Those are how I take down really strong stacks.

Armageddon is doing 1925-5780 damage. Incidentally, the 1 damage and 1 burn damage it does to me is actually helpful. Mana spring is giving me 43 mana at 8 duration, so casting that on someone and mana for armageddons is no longer an issue.

5% of 1925 - 5780 is 185 to 550 damage so that gives you a feel for what kind of damage you'd take if you maxed out the 5% friendly damage on Armageddon with the forthcoming update.

Pygmy and Plague are both amazingly effective at taking out stacks as they effectively reduce the stack by the percent of their power.

Going for the intelligence and spell bonuses sounds like a good strategy!

I never got a copy of divine armor in this run. Using a cheat code to get it in the book, it gives +72% resist all. Compare to stone skin's +80% phys, but divine armor isn't mass. Which leads to a really overpowered strategy that I never used: A single level 5 stack with mana spring and divine armor casted on round 1. After that, they'd take almost no damage, and I could spam armageddon.

That certainly would be a potent Divine Armor spell, although some enemy heroes have -50% of a resistance type so you'd be exposed to at least one resistance type depending on who you fought (for example, Sonya is -50% Magic Resistance or Xeona is -50% Fire Resistance). By the way, in my latest update I'm working on, Unicorns have a +20% Magic Resistance Aura and Black Unicorns have a -30% Magic Resistance Aura (or Curse). So this will make their use more interesting as they add / subtract Magic Resistance to your troops / enemies (or vice versa).

Also, a lot of the later enemy heroes have the Dispel spell and so you might find it getting Dispelled.

I didn't go for a true spell power build. I wonder how broken this would be with that water nymph for a wife instead of Neoka.

Diana certainly has some powerful magic babies. It'd be interesting to hear if someone stuck with her to see how they'd fare.

Spirits are all ~level 20. Except the reaper, who is low 30s. I basically chose one ability on each to specialize on. Smashing sword (was actually aiming at underground blades, but the random number generator god did not like me), Poison cloud, Ice orb, and the Reaper was a mix of all abilities.

For a Mage, it is hard to get the Spirit abilities leveled up, but 20 is pretty good.

I'm currently level 28 in my Paladin game and all the Spirits are at Level 35 or 36. I've been really diligent with keeping them balanced as I leveled them up. I really like how each Spirit now has at least 2 damage abilities that can give you a lot of experience when used, whereas before it was hard to level up Lina and Sleem. I still have the Labyrinth and beyond to do, so maybe I'll get them all up to level 40 - we'll see how it goes...

Late game, most fights went like this: My army was elves, hunters, druids, ancient ents, and dryads.
Round 1: Target on the ancient ents, plus magic shackles (if useful), mass slow, a mass slayer, ancient pheonix, occasionally mass helplessness. Sometimes kamikaze if I'm trying to kill a big black dragon stack.
Round 2: Magic spring on ancient ents, then start chucking armageddons.
Round 3 and beyond: More armageddons. Resurrection as needed.

Sounds like a really good strategy with the 1 damage that Armageddon was doing! Once I release the current version then you'll have to deal with more damage from this spell, but this strategy should still be fairly viable.

Geyser was useful when I first got it, but I ditched it once I found armageddon was at 0% damage to friendlies. Plus, the physical resists made it useless against heroes. Well, I occasionally used it for the stun. The change to armageddon should help make other damage spells useful again.

The enemy hero bonuses make fighting them really interesting. I think I've made it harder with the changes that I've made to the spell AI - time will tell after I finish debugging it and am ready to release it.

A couple balance issues aside, it's fun to laugh at impossible armies as I squish them like bugs. Early game was way harder, but that's always felt true with King's Bounty. A number of dangerous heroes like Sonya, I had to retry the fights a couple times to have low casualties. With the dryad sleep thing, I literally prevented her from ever getting a spell cast.

Sonya is tough with her -50% Magic Resistance and Lightning! I'm glad you had fun!

I'll probably end up changing the Dryad sleep to a charged ability, although there are mind immune units that aren't affected by it and it doesn't effect Level 4's and above.

@Kiras Nice run man. Only question : what kids you had at end ? Maybe some screen of end game hero screen :-)

About this spell bonuses now isnt big problem, but it will be if this mod get functional for Ap/Cw where intellect can get to 80+. Some change should be done, but not linear if possible.
Suggestion : to make intellect bonus for some spells go in some formula until 30-40 int, above that lower bonus, above 70 still some bonus but again lower.Same as with plague spell there is cap for penalty to unit stats.Why not make stone skin/divine armor and rest?

Yep - I'll certainly have to change how I do bonuses in AP / CW...

I've played through this before honestly, but I was cheating this round on controlling which kids :-P Gelu, Ryland, Aeris, and Ivor. That basically gives me tons of elves and hunters. Ironically, it didn't end up being nearly as powerful as I thought it would be, because phys attacks weren't that good. Even though the hunters and elves almost always critted. With mass slow, pretty much any ranged heavy army could mow down the enemies before they reach you, especially if you start chucking pygmy or plague at the tough stacks.

Did you try Dragon Arrows at all with your Elves? That spell gives them Astral Damage to their Dragon Arrow attacks. I'm going to change the damage on this attack for each unit it affects (Archers, Bowman, Elves, and Elf Hunters) such that it is double the damage of their normal attack since the damage increase is not consistent with each unit (for example, the Archers get a big percent bonus compared to Bowman and the Elves).

Plus, Phoenix are fantastic expendable tanks. The only scary enemies later on, besides heroes casting armageddon on me, were black and red dragons. They became a lot less scary when I noticed that my armageddon was doing no damage to me. My army didn't matter much at that point. I'm tempted to play again with a demon army, which would make the fire damage negligible. I miss my demonologists though, Crossworlds really has a better variety of units.

The Phoenix is very potent and the Dragon's fire goes against your weakness to Fire Resistance from using the Elves. Did you fight Xeona or how were your battles with Raab Sottan or Baal? Were you using Elves or some other troop combo?

Since when I play I marry each wife, have 4 kids, divorce her, and go to the next so that I can double check their kids, etc. I usually end up fighting Xeona with Neoka and her kids when I'm level 20 or so. That battle is usually extremely tough because she burns my Elven troops a lot. So that's where you need to get some Fire Resistance to help. My current game, I fought her at Level 23 and she was a bear with Elven troops! I then marry Xeona after defeating her and finish the game with her and her kids. I got a crazy kid combination with her this time around where each child has +20% intelligence spell power (I got Ash, Axsis, Inteus, and Deemer) for a whopping 1.8 modifier from just her kids! I've got 33 intellect and Stone Skin is maxed at 80% Physical Resistance!

I've still been playing Demon troops, but since I don't have any specific Demon troop bonuses (just Xeona's general Demon troop bonuses) I'm (when I get a chance to play next, after all these changes I'm adding here and there) going to get some Red and Black Dragons and swap out the Imps or Cerberi. Plus the Evil Book gave me trouble so I'm probably going to do the single Black Dragon stack thang because my Demon troops keep getting zapped by Lightning!

Anyway, thanks for the comments - it's fun to hear various strategies and how you've progressed in the game!:)

/C\/C\

[Kiras]

I tried Dragon Arrows only a few times. It actually made my elves do less damage than their normal attack. I think. It's been a few days and my memory of it is kind of fuzzy. Think I used it to try to kill a level 5 that I was barely denting. Hell breath was a better enhancement spell by far.

Xeona was the toughest fight in the game. I don't play no-loss anymore, so I didn't have to redo it over and over, but she still chewed up a big chunk of my army. Elves, hunters, dryads, ancient ents, and druids. She was actually worse than Baal.
One of the Haas' incarnations triple casted armageddon on his first turn. That was fairly nasty too. I ended up reloading and just tried to prevent him from casting.

[Fatt_Shade]

Also did 1 run with every class in this mod and had much fun doing it. After that i did as Mat said, go next run marry as soon as i could and try different combinations of kids to see what is strongest :-)
Each class have best pick for wife and preferred kids, but as this game have much randomness and it was always interesting to see that result of love you shared with your wife 10 battles ago. Damn did i had some dissapointments :-( But this is part of Kings bounty charm.

@Mat I didnt play your mod for some time, so i ask is there connection between enemy army size to yours and exp to rage spirits as in Ap/Cw. Or is it defined by spirit skill lvl ?

[jorko80]

Hi Matt , glad to see that you continue to work on your mod :) . I really hope to see the blue dragons in motion and the other dragons and changes ,that we've spoken last year. It seems you've canceled the mod developing for AP/CW ?

[MattCaspermeyer]

I tried Dragon Arrows only a few times. It actually made my elves do less damage than their normal attack. I think. It's been a few days and my memory of it is kind of fuzzy. Think I used it to try to kill a level 5 that I was barely denting. Hell breath was a better enhancement spell by far.

You know, I'm not sure what's going on with it, honestly. It seems like it was working better in the past, but now there seems something wrong with it. I'm going to investigate to see why it's not doing much damage.

The way it is supposed to work is that the damage is Astral, so since no units have Astral Resistance, the resistance is negated per what the description says. It also says that their defense is ignored, but the AD_FACTOR flag is 1, which means it *is* using the target's defense. So setting this to 0 may be in order, but then you won't get any bonus if your attack is higher, either. The funny thing is that it seems like it should be doing more damage than your normal attack, but maybe with all the bonuses this ends up not being the case.

At any rate, I'll look into it more because it is confusing...

Xeona was the toughest fight in the game. I don't play no-loss anymore, so I didn't have to redo it over and over, but she still chewed up a big chunk of my army. Elves, hunters, dryads, ancient ents, and druids. She was actually worse than Baal.
One of the Haas' incarnations triple casted armageddon on his first turn. That was fairly nasty too. I ended up reloading and just tried to prevent him from casting.

Yah, Xe is tough! Usually when you fight Baal, you're level 27 or so and your power has increased quite a bit from when you fought Xe.

I've had Haas triple cast Armageddon on my Demon troops on round 1 during the last battle! Ouch! This may happen more now with the spell AI changes...

Also did 1 run with every class in this mod and had much fun doing it. After that i did as Mat said, go next run marry as soon as i could and try different combinations of kids to see what is strongest :-)
Each class have best pick for wife and preferred kids, but as this game have much randomness and it was always interesting to see that result of love you shared with your wife 10 battles ago. Damn did i had some dissapointments :-( But this is part of Kings bounty charm.

Hopefully some delight, too! As always, certain kids are better than others, but I still think most of them are pretty good! The variation is awesome and you just can't predict who you're gonna get, which makes it so fun!

@Mat I didnt play your mod for some time, so i ask is there connection between enemy army size to yours and exp to rage spirits as in Ap/Cw. Or is it defined by spirit skill lvl ?

Yes, so it seems like the single stack strategy is better for spirit leveling. I now have an estimated experience text description to give you a feel for how much experience you will get (it is based on the AP / CW code). The spirit used during round 1 is (most likely) the most experience you will get for that spirit and so being able to cast a damage dealing ability on round 1 is paramount to leveling that spirit.

With the changes to Ice Thorns, Ice Ball, and Poison Cloud, now Lina and Sleem level much better. The fact that I've got all the spirits around the same level (even though I've focused on it) shows that it is much more balanced. When I tried to do this before, Reaper and Zerock would always runaway level-wise from Sleem and especially Lina.

Well, thanks for the comments!:)

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Here's what's going on with Blue Dragons...

Electricity is the name of the game with them when it comes to attacking / abilities.

They are going to have an electro-fire breath so that it does both Fire and (like the Phoenix) Astral damage with a chance to burn and shock troops.

Their special ability will be similar to the Bone Dragon's Poison Cloud ability except that it shock damages (100% Astral Damage) all targets around it, friend or foe (with a chance to shock again as well).

The reason why I'm picking Astral for the electricity damage is that it is different from the Magical Lightning damage and is meant to be more like an electric eel or even the Dwarven Thunder Cans. Plus it can then actually hurt Dragons.

They also will have a chance when being struck of this "Zap" ability accidentally triggering, which could be both good or bad (this is why other dragons don't want to be around them because they could accidentally get shocked - we all know that's no fun!).

Morale penalties are probably going to be -2 Morale for Green and Red Dragons and -1 for Blacks. Conversely, Dragonflies will get +1 Morale from them.

They will be able to summon 25-40% of their leadership in Dragonflies which reloads at the same rate as the Ancient Ent's Summon Greater Plant ability.

All this is subject to change, but I really like going with the electricity motif since blue is typically associated with lightning.

/C\/C\

[Sirlancelot]

A couple balance issues aside, it's fun to laugh at impossible armies as I squish them like bugs.

A couple balance issues aside squishing impossible armies like bugs??? I get you're being ironic, right? Now I feel rather discouraged. Great feedback, though.

To be honest, I wanted challenge level to be somehow simmilar to that of Ufo classic ironman, where no matter how good you play, you can lose. And sometimes, unexpectedly.

Good strategy and tactics should almost always a requisite to win, yet not a warranty. Otherwise it's just a complex and time consuming labour to accomplish before victory comes.

[Kiras]

A couple balance issues aside squishing impossible armies like bugs??? I get you're being ironic, right? Now I feel rather discouraged. Great feedback, though.

To be honest, I wanted challenge level to be somehow simmilar to that of Ufo classic ironman, where no matter how good you play, you can lose. And sometimes, unexpectedly.

Good strategy and tactics should almost always a requisite to win, yet not a warranty. Otherwise it's just a complex and time consuming labour to accomplish before victory comes.

Maybe I should have drawn a stronger distinction between hero armies and normal armies. Mages have always had the lowest leadership, so they run into more "impossible" foes, but they have the tools for dealing with them. It's not that hard to squish impossible armies with good spells. Heroes are a totally different matter, they're dangerous to the point that it's worth using dryads to sleep a chunk of their units, just so you can prevent them from casting on you. The armageddon fix will also help greatly at making armies more dangerous, as will things like nerfing mass stoneskin.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hi Matt , glad to see that you continue to work on your mod :) . I really hope to see the blue dragons in motion and the other dragons and changes ,that we've spoken last year. It seems you've canceled the mod developing for AP/CW ?

You're comments have been very helpful - and sometimes it takes me a while to sift through and find bugs and problems that people have mentioned.

Case in point, you had mentioned that a lot of enemy heroes were choosing Geyser and I had not seen it to the extent you had, but guess what? When I was making my pass through the spell AI, I found that I had an error there, where the probability of them choosing Geyser had a bug due to the misalignment of some variables on the output of the power function and duration was being set to the chance of stun! So you can imagine if you're supposed to be multiplying by a number from 2 to 6 and instead multiply by a number more like 40 to 80 making them 10 times or so more likely to choose that spell!

There was also the double casting of Mass Stone Skin sometimes, and I looked into there and found out that the Demon's Blood Rune was acting like a unit and causing a division by zero error that made the probably of casting Stone Skin infinity!

So this update that I'm working on has numerous bug fixes, and it just goes to show that debug, debug, debug new code you're working on as you add it. Just because things appear to be working, they might not be intended as you look under the hood. Some of these things, though, I need people to play and post comments to find - take a look at WotN and I&F and you'll see that it takes time to find errors and fix them and they are using many people!

The important thing, is that all comments, good or bad, are used to make this mod better and this should lend to making the AP / CW / WotN / I&F / DS versions of this mod better if and when I get to them.

I don't necessarily agree with everyone's comments, but I think we all enjoy playing a game that is challenging and fun and to that end, I work to make the King's Bounty world better.

Unfortunately, there is only so much time in the day, and between a normal day job that typically consumes at least 50 hours a week and then my second "job" creating King's Bounty mods you can see where time quickly runs out. I've actually not been able to play any games for about two months due to my continuing work on the H3B TL version of my mod (my poor Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls (I can't even remember the new Paladin class's name) character sits at level 4).

Nonetheless, I do hope to bring these ideas forward to the other KB games, but I certainly have to learn to deal with the intricacies of each (for example the item limit has forced me to rethink the Tomes aspect), and so taking a step back from the AP / CW H3T development has helped with giving me ideas going forward. I have no idea what awaits for WotN and beyond, but I'm sure there will be some fun stuff to learn along that path as well.

I can only hope by the time I'm done, I'm not the only King's Bounty player left...;)

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, I've finished implementing Blue Dragons!

Let me say, they are awesome!

I had fun doing their attack animation - I used the KB Editor to attach the particles to Drahha and then I copied and pasted them into my BLUEDRAGON.ATOM file. This is the first time I used the editor to edit the particles of ATOM's - it is really neat!

There are a ton of particles that start with TheRock and I imagine that there are all kinds of neat animations that I didn't even look at. Regardless to say, I came up with a combined Electro-fire breath attack, and then their zap attack animation is really cool, too! The 25% chance of accidentally discharging their zap attack as retaliation can be quite dangerous if a unit is in a surrounding hex!

My poor Dragonflies got accidentally zapped hanging around them. Ranged attackers especially can wreak havoc on your troops if they attack the Blue Dragon and your troops are around it and it goes off! Having Tactics is probably going to be a necessity to move them away from your troops if they get attacked before they can move to the enemy. Fortunately, they do have high initiative [8].

Their main attack is 60-70 Fire and 60-70 Astral with 50% chance to burn or shock and hits two targets (like normal dragons). Their Zap attack does 140-170 Astral Damage and has a 75% chance to shock targets (resistance is Astral, which means there is no resistance to it).

They are going to be very rare, but there will be at least two shops that sell them - Welbewooll's shop in Demonis (he has you go get the Sapphire Egg in Ultrax) and a Dragon Shop in the Labyrinth. Welbewooll sells 1-5 Blue Dragon Eggs and 1-5 Blue Dragons. The Dragon Shop in the Labyrinth sells 10 to 20 Blue Dragons so you'll have a minimum of 11 Blue Dragons in a game. There are a few other shops in the Labyrinth that have a chance to sell them or their eggs, but only a max of 50% chance (with most of the probabilities 33% or less).

Well, I have some more debugging to do, but I'm hoping to get a new update out soon...

/C\/C\

[Kiras]

I ran into something that seemed a little bit odd, but it might be present in the vanilla version of the game, or be intentional. An enemy skeleton archer dispelled hero summon bonus on my summoned phoenix.

Blue dragons sound fun, looking forward to trying them out.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I ran into something that seemed a little bit odd, but it might be present in the vanilla version of the game, or be intentional. An enemy skeleton archer dispelled hero summon bonus on my summoned phoenix.

Blue dragons sound fun, looking forward to trying them out.

Skeleton Archers have an ability that dispels spells on the target (this is stock TL) - it probably should not remove the hero summon bonus from Phoenixes / Evil Books so I'll have to add it to the exclude list.

I can't wait to share the Blue Dragons with everyone!

:)

/C\/C\

[jorko80]

Hi Matt ! Thanks again for your hard work. My thoughts about the mod are exactly the same - better polish and make it superb for TL first and then move on to CW and hopefully WotN. For me King's Bounty is the best up to date single player game,so you'll have at least one player left :). I'll try to start the new version of your mod today. I hope it'll be challenging. Will give you some feedback later :)

[MattCaspermeyer]

***BEGIN EDIT 2014-05-11***

There is a new update available, see this thread (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=659991&postcount=63) for the changes.

***END EDIT 2014-05-11***

Now that I've just released this major update, I thought it would be a good idea to keep track of changes as I make them before I release my next update.

So this list is meant to keep a running tally of changes in case you have a bug or crashing problem, you can check this post from time to time to see if your issue has been fixed or see what's coming in the next update.

The first problem with ITEMS_HINT.LUA deals with the variable text for containers. You only see an error message if you're running in debug mode, but the container text doesn't show properly if you talk to an NPC in a castle and when closing the conversation they add new container items to the castle shop and you cursor over them to see their description (a natural response for new items). I'm not sure why, but the Obj Library function get_param does not work in this situation. I tried various ideas to see if I could get the information some other way, but none of them worked. So I had to brute force generate the values when get_param returns empty strings.

The other changes so far deal with adding two new NPC's that will trade containers for Magic Crystals. Father Owein will trade 125 (Skeleton) Coffins for 1 Magic Crystal and Furious Paladin will trade 20 (Vampire) Carved Coffins for 1 Magic Crystal. This allows them to train their priests or recruits on actual Undead troops. Seemed like a good fit for both NPC's and it keeps them close to Greenwort.

So I just have Griffin and Bone Dragon Eggs left to find NPC's that might be willing to exchange Magic Crystals for those eggs. I'll keep searching, but I might pick Carl Leanard for trading Griffin Eggs. He'll say that he's getting ready to travel and would like to bring them along to help him and Martha in their travels. I can't remember, though, if Carl is not available after a certain point in the game, so I need to check that unless someone here remembers.

I'm thinking for the Bone Dragon Eggs it's probably going to be someone in the Undead lands. I need to find an NPC that still brings up the dialog before their shop. I have a couple NPC's I want to check to see if they meet this criteria - the first is the Necromancer that has you get the Red Dragon Eggs (he's going to experiment on them or something like that to make them stronger) or the Necromancer that has you get the Evil Book (same premise probably). I can't remember, though, if either bring up their dialog after you complete their quests, so I'll see...

***BEGIN EDIT 2014-05-10***
Well, it looks like both Necromancers that I mentioned above just show their shops after completing their quests. So I'm going to look for some other candidates... I may have to learn how to change NPC's from just showing their shops if I can't find anyone else. Maybe Foritop, the Dwarf in Marhan Swamp wants Bone Dragon Eggs. Hmmm... or maybe Welbewooll in Demonis. Hmmm... or maybe Dragon Atta in Verlon Forest. Hmmm...

I also implemented Carl Leonard as the one to trade Griffin Eggs for Crystals, although I may still consider Harl for trading Griffin Eggs for Runes if I decide to implement Rune exchange variants for the other containers like I did with Drahha exchanging dragon eggs for Runes. We'll see...

I added the capability to choose the path for the Black Dragon's Power of Fire talent, just like the AI uses! I basically used the Warriors of the North (WotN) functions and spliced the changes I had made to burn into the WotN ones as well as added a battle message to aid you in selecting your path. The reason why I added the message is that the first time I used the talent in WotN I had no idea what was going on, but then realized that I could select the path.

Can you select their path in AP / CW? I don't remember, and don't have a savegame handy to check - just curious...

I also made some changes to the dialogue text when you don't have enough of a container to exchange Magic Crystals so that you are reminded of the exchange rate in case you can't remember what it is.

Here is the file change list in the upcoming release...

Version Beta 2014-MM-DD (future date unknown, but certainly this year!)

*.ATOM

BLACKRAGON.ATOM

Added WotN functions to allow selection of the path of the Dragon's Power of Fire talent just like the AI uses


*.LUA

ITEMS_HINT.LUA

There's a situation when after talking to an NPC in a castle that they add a container (such as an egg, seed, etc.) and the Obj.get_param library function is unable to acquire the container parameters for displaying the container variant text. So I added code to brute force set the Obj.get_params if they are returning empty strings by setting the values to what they should be in ITEMS_MONSTER.TXT. The unfortunate part of this is that if I change something in ITEMS_MONSTER.TXT, then I have to change it here as well, but at least I've gotten around this problem now.


SPECIAL_ATTACKS.LUA

New WotN function special_blackdragon_firepower_attack for implementing the damage caused by Power of Fire (I integrated my changes of the function special_blackdragon_firepower (which is the original script attack) into the WotN function).
New WotN function special_blackdragon_firepower_calccells that is the new script_calccells for the Power of Fire talent (I added a text description to aid you in what to do)
New WotN function special_blackdragon_firepower_highlight that highlights the cells as you click your Power of Fire path (note that the original function has the same name so it has been commented out).
New WotN fucntion hint_dmg_blackdragon_firepower that shows the damage to targets as you layout your path of destruction when using Power of Fire

*.CHAT

920168865.CHAT (Priest Owein) - Now includes extra snaps and logic for selling skeleton coffins to get crystals!
1155319803.CHAT (Furious Paladin) - Now includes extra snaps and logic for selling vampire coffins to get crystals!
1422394811.CHAT (Carl Leonard) - Now includes extra snaps and logic for selling griffin eggs to get crystals!

*.LNG

EN(G)_BATTLE

Added bmsg_firepower_1 and 2 for aiding you in selecting the Black Dragon's Talent, Power of Fire, path.

EN(G)_CHAT_0002578364_1422394811.LNG (Carl Leonard) - added additional dialog for changes to *.CHAT indicated above
EN(G)_CHAT_0997083665_0920168865.LNG (Priest Owein) - added additional dialog for changes to *.CHAT indicated above
EN(G)_CHAT_1920750196_1155319803.LNG (Furious Paladin) - added additional dialog for changes to *.CHAT indicated above
These changes are just to give you a reminder of how many of the container you need in case you forgot and you don't have enough

EN(G)_CHAT_0814853819_0185019267.LNG (Lady Beaulla) - added reminders for the exchange rate to dialog options when you don't have enough to trade
EN(G)_CHAT_1000228560_0460900476.LNG (Frogus Bogis) - added reminders for the exchange rate to dialog options when you don't have enough to trade
EN(G)_CHAT_1056215454_1378754138.LNG (Old Chvakah) - added reminders for the exchange rate to dialog options when you don't have enough to trade
EN(G)_CHAT_1107629933_0248920890.LNG (Milk Woman, Wilma) - added reminders for the exchange rate to dialog options when you don't have enough to trade
EN(G)_CHAT_1237766457_0111145785.LNG (Witch Helga) - added reminders for the exchange rate to dialog options when you don't have enough to trade



***END EDIT 2014-05-10***

That's it for now! If you have any issues, check this list to see if it has been fixed. If it hasn't then please post the problem or issue so that I can see if I can resolve it - thanks!:)

/C\/C\

[Sir Whiskers]

So I just have Griffin and Bone Dragon Eggs left to find NPC's that might be willing to exchange Magic Crystals for those eggs. I'll keep searching, but I might pick Carl Leanard for trading Griffin Eggs. He'll say that he's getting ready to travel and would like to bring them along to help him and Martha in their travels. I can't remember, though, if Carl is not available after a certain point in the game, so I need to check that unless someone here remembers.


King Harl in Arlania (the griffin king who gives us the Griffin Crown quest) might be a good choice for griffin eggs.

[MattCaspermeyer]

King Harl in Arlania (the griffin king who gives us the Griffin Crown quest) might be a good choice for griffin eggs.

Yah, I've thought of him, too.

I wasn't sure if it would be weird for him to sell them and then ask for them in return, but I could have him say that there have been a lot of thefts of griffin eggs or something like that and that he'd like them returned to him for crystals.

/C\/C\

[jorko80]

Hi Matt! You can't select the black dragon fire path in AP/CW. But the russians have made a mod for that and I actually can't remember the last time when I played without it. I can give you a link if you think it'll help you.

[saroumana]

Hello Matt,

I tryed the last version with a new game, but the game crash (no message error even with the -dev :( ) at first battle with dragonfly and thorn. I'm 100% certain thorn are the cause. And specially archer one.

The crash don't start at the begining of the battle but during. This happened near turn 3, the thorn was moving away of my nearest unit and should have fire, but crash pop between.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hello Matt,

I tryed the last version with a new game, but the game crash (no message error even with the -dev :( ) at first battle with dragonfly and thorn. I'm 100% certain thorn are the cause. And specially archer one.

The crash don't start at the begining of the battle but during. This happened near turn 3, the thorn was moving away of my nearest unit and should have fire, but crash pop between.

Great to hear from you! Sorry about the crash - can you email me the savegame with instructions to repeat the crash? Then I'll have a good shot at debugging it - thanks!

***BEGIN EDIT***

Okay, I tried fighting some Thorns (both variants), but haven't had any issues so far so it might be somewhere else. I'll certainly need your savegame with instructions to be able to fix this it looks like. The only other thing I can suggest is make absolutely certain you're not running it with any other mods or you may want to go through your KB directories and ensure that you don't have any stray files that don't belong.

***END EDIT***

***BEGIN EDIT2***

Okay, Saroumana sent me the save and I can confirm there is a crashing issue if you are using Build 35,234. This is the GoG version of the game. There are no issues with Build 35,396. I have both 35,396 and 35,234 and so I'll see what I can do to figure out the crash.

For now I'm going to say that if you have Build 35,234 then you may have problems with this update. I noticed something curious that on turn 1, the first unit, Elves, showed damage as 0, although when I attacked it still killed a stack. I know that Build 35,234 cannot show all the rage abilities' damage properly as well as issues with using Logic.hero_lu_item in certain situations.

I emailed GoG before about them using Build 35,234, but I never got a response, but maybe it's time for us to press the issue with them to see if they can somehow get Build 35,396. I'm not sure if emailing 1CC would help either, but I'd rather not support two different builds of the game if I can help it.

Nonetheless, I will investigate this further to see if I can figure out what is going on here as maybe there is a way to fix it so that it works with both - it must be something new I've added so there may be a different way to go about doing something without sacrificing new features I've added...

I'll keep you posted with respect to the progress with this issue...

***END EDIT 2***

***BEGIN EDIT 3***

Okay, I discovered the issue and there is no easy fix. Go here for the latest updated version that provides a workaround for the issue... (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=659991&postcount=63)

***END EDIT 3***

/C\/C\

[saroumana]

Thank for looking about it.

Yeah it's a shame 1c tolerate 2 versions and don't offer an update to harmonise this. But i loose faith on 1c long time ago.

My version is a DVD retail (european), but it's normal you develop your mod on the last one. I don't know if we can't update the 35.324 to 35.396 by coping some files, but i doubt.

Katauri make a better job with Armored princess, as far i know there only one version.

[Kiras]

I started a warrior with the 2014-05-11 35.234 version. In the dwarven area now, haven't encountered blue dragons yet so I'll give an opinion on them later. I'm recording the number of dragon eggs I pick up and the amount I spend on them to see how many runes I get from turning them in. I'm curious to see how many runes total I get from that vs the cost. Obviously, the comparison point is the machine that makes runes starting at 150k/rune, which scales up by 50k for each rune you buy of a particular type.

I think the Horseman's charge! skill may be subtly broken. Here's numbers from several possible attack routes (mostly attacking different enemies, so don't directly compare the damage between the different sets, except 1 and 5). All in straight lines. Equipped artifacts/kids include +1 poison damage and +1 physical damage.

2 empty hexes:
Attack - 5395-7093 damage
Charge! - 5094-6782 damage

3 empty hexes:
Attack - 4755-6206 damage
Charge! 4855-6477 damage

4 empty hexes:
Attack - 5943-7771 damage
Charge! - 6269-8359 damage

1 empty hex: Same enemy as 5 empty hexes
Attack - 5083-6647
Charge!: 4905-6541

5 empty hexes: Same enemy as 1 empty hex
Attack - 6932-9064
Charge! - 7565-9953

Supposedly, attacking in a straight line is +10% damage per hex, and charge is 15% per hex. So why does attack do more damage over 1 and 2 hexes and charge do more over 3+?

[MattCaspermeyer]

This is just a difference in how the two attacks work...

The normal attack allows the horseman to back up to maximize distance with respect to action points, whereas charge is always in a straight line with no backing up.

The horseman typical speed is 5 and here is a damage summary based on number of hexes from the enemy (this assumes the horseman has adequate room to back up):

Adjacent: +20% (moves two hexes back for a total of 2 hexes away)
1 Hex: +20% (moves one hex back for a total of 2 hexes away)
2 Hexes: +30% (moves one hex back for a total of 3 hexes away)
3 Hexes: +30% (attacks from this distance)
4 Hexes: +40% (attacks from this distance)

Now for charge, it is only the number of hexes away from the target that matter as the horseman does not back up (it is up to you to position them for maximum damage since they can charge even with just 1 action point left):

Adjacent: not valid, must be a minimum of 1 hex away (note that you can backup manually to increase distance, more on this below)
1 Hex: +15%
2 Hexes: +30%
3 Hexes: +45%
4 Hexes: +60%
...

So you can see here that there are situations where the normal attack appears to be better, but the strategy of charge is that you can manually position the horseman for a minimum of ( AP - 1 ) * 15% if you have the room. With a speed of 5, you should always do a minimum of +60% damage if you have the room or at the very least attack from the same maximum distance as the normal attack.

Note that if you have higher speed for your horseman, then their normal attack will appear to be even better than the numbers above (so don't forget that you can manually position them with charge because the numbers are misleading you).

/C\/C\

I started a warrior with the 2014-05-11 35.234 version. In the dwarven area now, haven't encountered blue dragons yet so I'll give an opinion on them later. I'm recording the number of dragon eggs I pick up and the amount I spend on them to see how many runes I get from turning them in. I'm curious to see how many runes total I get from that vs the cost. Obviously, the comparison point is the machine that makes runes starting at 150k/rune, which scales up by 50k for each rune you buy of a particular type.

I think the Horseman's charge! skill may be subtly broken. Here's numbers from several possible attack routes (mostly attacking different enemies, so don't directly compare the damage between the different sets, except 1 and 5). All in straight lines. Equipped artifacts/kids include +1 poison damage and +1 physical damage.

2 empty hexes:
Attack - 5395-7093 damage
Charge! - 5094-6782 damage

3 empty hexes:
Attack - 4755-6206 damage
Charge! 4855-6477 damage

4 empty hexes:
Attack - 5943-7771 damage
Charge! - 6269-8359 damage

1 empty hex: Same enemy as 5 empty hexes
Attack - 5083-6647
Charge!: 4905-6541

5 empty hexes: Same enemy as 1 empty hex
Attack - 6932-9064
Charge! - 7565-9953

Supposedly, attacking in a straight line is +10% damage per hex, and charge is 15% per hex. So why does attack do more damage over 1 and 2 hexes and charge do more over 3+?

[Kiras]

What you say makes sense, however, there was no backing up in my experiments. I just tried this again: Walking a horseman forward one hex at a time and comparing charge vs normal attack. When he was really close to the enemy, he didn't have the movement left to back up, but normal attack was superior with 1 hex empty. I launched the attack and there was no backing up movement.

In any case, charge is useful for the no retaliation and being able to cross the map with almost no movement left, so I use both still.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I think in this case, your +1 poison and +1 physical damage may have been coming into play, as I'm pretty sure these damage bonuses only apply to base attack and not to talents (by the way, these types of bonuses are awesome on low level troops).

Horseman damage is 12-16, but with +2 your damage was technically 14-18 (+16.7% to +14.3%), while charge damage was still 12-16.

I checked some things out yesterday, and I couldn't get the horseman base attack damage to exceed the charge damage for the same hex distance, but I didn't have any bonuses.

Here are some numbers that seem to verify what is happening in your situation:

Base Attack Damage / Charge Damage: 14-18 (with your +2) / 12-16 (no bonuses)
+10% / +15%: 15.4-19.8 / 13.8-18.4
+20% / +30%: 16.8-21.6 / 15.6-20.8
+30% / +45%: 18.2-23.4 / 17.4-23.2
+40% / +60%: 19.6-25.2 / 19.2-25.6
+50% / +75%: 21.0-27.0 / 21.0-28.0
+60% / +90%: 22.4-28.8 / 22.8-30.4

So you can see that you only do more maximum damage with charge at the +40%/+60% and up cases whereas the minimum damage is always equal or lower unless you go to +60% / +90% (which would require you to have a speed bonus to your horseman). If you have other bonuses (sounds like you may have some additional melee damage bonuses) then the base attack will most likely always be higher damage because 14-18 might be 15-19 or even higher.

I'm pretty sure this is what is going on...

/C\/C\

What you say makes sense, however, there was no backing up in my experiments. I just tried this again: Walking a horseman forward one hex at a time and comparing charge vs normal attack. When he was really close to the enemy, he didn't have the movement left to back up, but normal attack was superior with 1 hex empty. I launched the attack and there was no backing up movement.

In any case, charge is useful for the no retaliation and being able to cross the map with almost no movement left, so I use both still.

[Kiras]

Yep, that explains it. Seems like skills systemically don't deal with the bonus damage items. I remember archers using their cold arrows doing less damage than their physical attack. I still love those items though.

I ended up abandoning my warrior run. Playing again as a mage. The warrior was plenty powerful, but I just find it more fun to play as a mage. Casting 2 spells a turn gives me much better control of the battlefield than having bigger stacks. So it'll probably be a week before I get to combat test the new dragons.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I'm pretty pleased with this last effort since the start of this year to update my mod to V2014-06-01.

I feel that I've implemented everything that I wanted to implement as I've improved the spell casting AI, added Blue Dragons, added options to trade containers for crystals or runes, added the rune exchange capability, added difficulty level and map bonuses to enemy hero spell power and enemy unit talents, most ability / spell / spirit ability durations are now affected by the target's resistance, and many other changes that I feel make the game more enjoyable.

So I'm going to be finishing up my current Paladin game (I'm level 29 and in the Labyrinth) and then probably take a break before I move on to modding AP/ CW / WotN / I&F / DS.

If there are any crashing bugs or bugs discovered, I'll work on an update to fix those as they are found.

I've also been updating the *.LNG files with grammar fixes found by @Dohi64 and me. There are a few grammar errors in a couple of *.LNG files in my mod (for example EN(G)_ITEMS.LNG) since I updated them before I fixed the originals. I'll probably wait for @Dohi64 to finish his current playthrough before I update my mod to include all the grammar fixes found in the *.LNG files that were updated after I modified them for my mod.

The next update in a few months will most likely (finally!) be V1.0.

Thanks to everyone's input for helping make my mod the way it is! This has been almost 4 years in the making and it is crazy to look back at all the time that has passed and how far the mod has come in that time!

:)

/C\/C\

[jorko80]

Hi Matt, thanks again for all the work you have done. It was a pleasure playing your mod :) .
I have a question - is it possible for me somehow to extract the blue dragon and implement it in other mods as well? I want to play with it in my other favorite mod for TL.
You've said "AP/ CW / WotN / I&F / DS " - what is the meaning of "DS" ?
Wish you a pleasant time working on the future mods :)
Thanks!

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hi Matt, thanks again for all the work you have done. It was a pleasure playing your mod :) .

Thanks for the kind words - glad you enjoyed it! :)

I have a question - is it possible for me somehow to extract the blue dragon and implement it in other mods as well? I want to play with it in my other favorite mod for TL.

It is possible, but it is not a drop in solution since my mod has many features that other mods do not have. There would have to be copying, splicing in of code, and then editing it - no small task and not easy to describe either.

You've said "AP/ CW / WotN / I&F / DS " - what is the meaning of "DS" ?

DS is Dark Side, which you see has a few posts down below in the main King's Bounty thread. I'm not sure why it doesn't have its own forum thread heading, but it is coming out soon and you can actually buy the game now and get in on beta development if you so desire...

Wish you a pleasant time working on the future mods :)
Thanks!

Thanks - it is going to be nice to actually play some games and take a break before I get back to it! :)

/C\/C\

[Fatt_Shade]

It was a long journey ,but many interesting and fun moments Mat :-)
I`m glad you concluded your mod, and you should be proud on your work.

Onward to future victories :-D

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hello i like this mod a lot , but i dont agree with mesing up so much with creature speed and initiative , i thin it destroys the game core of combat

I'm not sure exactly what you mean here - do you mean you don't like the creature speed / initiative bonuses that the children provide to your units or that the difficulty level (i.e. impossible) applies to the enemy units?

Both, in my opinion, are great features of this mod because 1) it encourages you to play a unit that you might not play and 2) it makes the enemy more challenging.

Mana is bugged , with mana flask you will exchange with mana , and also that quest where you have to be mage or level 15 , i am always left from 109 mana to 30 permanently

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, either. Are you talking about the Mana Potion that provides +30 Mana? Is your Mana limit decreasing by drinking a Mana Potion?

I've never seen that before with my mod and I did not even change any of that mechanic and so there should not be this problem.

So if you could be more clear with what you're thinking here maybe I can be of more help...

/C\/C\

[matod4]

Mine english is not so well so ill try explain once again , i had maximum mana auround 110 then i started quest where you have to battle those 3 altars in the map most left from start location.But when i finished quest i had only 30 mana maximum.And this happend also i think when i want rise mine mana cap in archamge tower , when you give archmage 2 manapotions. I have save games somewhere maybe i can send them to you. Hm?

[matod4]

Also i want to thank you for yours work done, its 100x better game than for example darks side or wont cause theres no real difficulty balance and i hope you will mod these games same way you did here, and i also wish you will do this to CW red sands or red sans extreme mod.. i like most on yours mod that you are changig attack and defense od creatures not thier numbers only.. Also is thomes for AP this good also? and do you need any help betatesting or something?

[MattCaspermeyer]

Mine english is not so well so ill try explain once again , i had maximum mana auround 110 then i started quest where you have to battle those 3 altars in the map most left from start location.But when i finished quest i had only 30 mana maximum.And this happend also i think when i want rise mine mana cap in archamge tower , when you give archmage 2 manapotions. I have save games somewhere maybe i can send them to you. Hm?

Hmmm... I've never had any problem with this part of the game before, but perhaps it is something that I did. If you can email the save games to me with instructions on how to repeat the problem then I'll do my best to see if I can find the problem and fix it (my email address is in the readme file for my mod that you downloaded).

Thanks in advance for sending me the saves and reporting the problem here in the forum!

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Also i want to thank you for yours work done, its 100x better game than for example darks side or wont cause theres no real difficulty balance and i hope you will mod these games same way you did here, and i also wish you will do this to CW red sands or red sans extreme mod.. i like most on yours mod that you are changig attack and defense od creatures not thier numbers only.. Also is thomes for AP this good also? and do you need any help betatesting or something?

Thanks for the kind words! :)

I've been playing Dark Side recently, but hope to get back to modding AP / CW soon.

I released just some basic alpha versions of my Tomes mod for those 2 games, but I ran into a snag with the implementation of my mod so I've been taking a break so that I can start fresh on the problem.

I hope to get back to modding them in another few months.

I do plan to mod the new games at some point, but there's only so much time in the day and I kind of needed a break from modding and so have been enjoying playing games again.

We'll see how it goes...

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hmmm... I've never had any problem with this part of the game before, but perhaps it is something that I did. If you can email the save games to me with instructions on how to repeat the problem then I'll do my best to see if I can find the problem and fix it (my email address is in the readme file for my mod that you downloaded).

Thanks in advance for sending me the saves and reporting the problem here in the forum!

/C\/C\

Just an update on this as @matod4 did send me two save game files, but I could not repeat it. One of the save games was before the problem happened and the other afterwards. I could see that his Mana was lower, but when I played from the save game before the problem and repeated the Magic Range and Staff quests, I had no issues.

So I'm just scratching my head on that one. For now, since I can't repeat it we'll just keep an eye out for it, but if anyone runs into this problem, please let me know - preferably with a save game that repeats the problem in only a step or two.

I do have some bugs that I've fixed, but haven't released yet. For example, with the WotN code, Black Dragons will still land on your troops occasionally. So I just set it to use the original TL code if the Black Dragon is controlled by the computer, otherwise it will use the WotN code to allow you to use the special ability to full effect.

There are 3 functions that this ability uses and so now the AI will use all the original TL ones and humans will use the WotN code. Before I had only 2 of these 3 functions doing this and now all, but it is more likely that the one I had originally excluded was the culprit so I may do some more experimentation with this in the future to see if I can use the WotN code for the other two functions.

I've kind of been taking a break from modding, but I have some other features that are going to be nice like displaying more information about your total Mana Recovery / Rage Drain rates when you cursor over those icons.

As mentioned previously, I pretty much have everything that I want implemented and so am mostly in the debugging / polishing phase.

I'm also experimenting with having Bless / Weakness affect all talents / abilities with a range. So for example, if you Bless a troop and they have a talent that causes damage, it will also be maxed or, for example, Demons will summon at the maximum of the range. With Weakness the opposite is true.

I kind of got this idea from Dark Side, but expanded it to include all talents / abilities instead of ones that just damage. Unfortunately, there are a lot of places in the code where I had to change this so I've been trying to debug them before I do any kind of release.

I'm also thinking of expanding Critical Hits (krit) to damaging talents so that there is no penalty for using them in this regard since krit is so important. We'll see as I'm still on the fence with respect to this from its implementation in WotN / I&F / DS.

/C\/C\

[SlickDragon]

An amazing mod MattCaspermeyer, my heartfelt thanks for your great work! :-P

I doubt you are still dealing with it, but just in case I will try to list at least some of the bugs I have come across, and if you need screenshot proof of them I will go the extra mile to make sure you fully understand the issues listed. This is only a partial list of the bugs I've encountered, but over the coming weeks or months as I replay with other Heroes on Impossible I'll add more bugs and clarify things If i discover more information.

Bugs Homm3 Babies-

Archmage- Range attack doesn't cause shock, whether in Fighting Trance or otherwise (melee attacks can cause shock). Going into Trance also changes the critical hit rate incorrectly (i.e a 22% critical hit rate in normal mode due to things like belt of luck which grants +10% total by itself, can then be reduced to 15% in trance, namely a 100% critical hit increase of base and not even counting crit bonuses from Hero having 7 attack multiples and ignoring everything else). Archmage as is is borderline unplayable barring his Magic Shield.

Critical Hit rate- Plenty of issues with this. For starters though the tooltip doesn't display the effect of morale on the critical hit rate (however as far as I can tell it is correctly applying the morale bonus to the total crit rate i.e if a peasant has a 30% crit rate and +3 morale for the 200% bonus it is correctly doubling the total to 60%), even in battle the critical hit number doesn't factor in morale. However if you cast morale spells like Battle Cry, or get morale lowered from battle going long or things like Necromancer's Curse, then the critical hit number will change, albeit it will still be incorrect.

Battle dragging long morale penalty- Reduces stats BELOW their norm. For example if a unit was at +1 morale normally, but then the battle dragged long for the first -1 morale, making the total neutral, the stats of the unit will still take a slight negative hit below neutral morale affect on stats (you can see a Red effect on stats that reduce it below the base). This bug does make it beneficial to have over 3 morale on units if battles go long. Also i believe that morale reducers like Curse variants from Undead Units like Necromancer/Undead Spider and the Bone Dragon ability have the same overally powerful negative effect that lowers stats more than it should be.

Bowman- Melee attack can cause freeze or extend freeze duration (perhaps mainly against high fire resistance enemies). Same with regular ranged shots as well occasionally causing freeze or extending the duration of freeze (again likely tied to high fire resistance units).

Cyclops- Can't be Burned, Frozen, and presumably most other status effects like Stun/Poison etc. Eventhough on impossible the resistances to the respective damage types are obscenely high, there is no immunity granted to these status effects by any of its abilities and it should be fixed. "Stone" and a Tier 5 unit should not grant it immunity to basically all status effects. Period.

Mirabella- Not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to Human Race units and , only working with the 3 units (griffin, pirate, sea dog) who are listed individually. My findings indicate that any wife that lists specific units under a Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus the benefit works for them, but any units that should be included under "Race" don't get the benefit properly. This radically weakens nearly all wives and is a monumental oversight.

Rina- Human form not giving the full 12% discount to leadership for Robbers/Mauraders, seems closer to a 6% discount like the Undead rina gives to undead units (i.e Robbers at 20 base leadership are only being reduced to 19, even though it should be at minimum 18 leadership. Mauraders at 30 leadership are only getting reduced to 28, eventhough it should at minimum reduce it to 27 .)

Rina- Zombie form not granting full 12% discount to undead (I believe only 6% leadership discount). Like all wives not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to anything listed under Race, in this case Undead. States that enemies get -6% poison resistance, but is giving them -12% poison resistance (which is probably as intended since just -6% would be even more pitiful a bonus than it already is, namely debately the worst wife resist/ - enemy resist bonus).

Gerda- Not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to Dwarven Race units. Presumably all wives that grant the Race variant of Unit Level bonus don't work.

Spellcasting Bug- Spells like Sacrifice or Phantom (presumably every spell can get this bug) sometimes you can't cast a lower level of it, and it automatically casts the highest level of the spell (even if you haven't learned the respective magic school to level 3). You can for instance cast a level 1 phantom for only 14 mana and get the level 3 effect (in terms of the % and the duration) early game/for cheap, which is technically beneficial albeit broken for the player, but with something like sacrifice this can be a real problem due to gaining to many units since it automatically casts level 3 sacrifice. Not sure how to replicate this bug, but a fair amount of battles seem to have the bug randomly (if the bug isn't active for the battle then it never will happen, if at any time it does happen then it automatically will cast the level 3 version of a spell for the rest of the battle, even if you don't have the total mana to be able to cast the level 3 version, as long as you can afford the level 1 version of the spell).

Combat Takes Place Underground Morale Bonus- Some units like the Cannonneer (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22MR%2B3CDGvYCzIh4l5k2TGx c#.VgA-Rt9Viko) get this undocumented Morale bonus, presumably due to its "Likes Dungeons" ability. However other units like Alchemist (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22Md3BQ82z9TX4h4l5k2TGxc# .VgA-Q99Viko) or Dwarf (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22MAWUm41PWcdYh4l5k2TGxc# .VgA-Vt9Viko) with the same "Likes Dungeons" ability are not gaining the Morale bonus. Also one can see the Red status from -morale due to the battle being long, which is a negative effect beyond what losing that morale should be.

Lina's Ice Ball- Not gaining critical hit bonus from the Hero Attack (i.e the +2% from 7 attack, +4% from 14 attack etc). Is properly gaining the bonus from items like Elven Belt or Babies like Ufretin with his +40% crit rate for all units. Also not gaining the Hero resistance bonuses from multiples of 7 defense (not sure about tolerance resist bonus but will check).

Tolerance Level 3- INCREDIBLY annoying bug, level 3 tolerance ONLY gives it's +6 resist all during the first turn. As soon as units finish their turn the entire tolerance bonus goes away for the remainder of the battle. However any summons/phantoms or whatever keep the tolerance level 3 bonus for the entire battle. Basically upgrading from level 2 to level 3 in Tolerance is pointless with the bug, since atleast the level 2 Tolerance works with it's +4 resist all throughout the battle without any hitches.. The biggest loss is the extra 2% resistance from the final bonus, but even the demon/elf morale penalty negation being "lost" due to it being foolish to upgrade to Bugged Level 3 Tolerance, is unfortunate.

Werewolf Elf, Vampire, Ancient Vampire- Using their transform ability causes them to lose the hero resistances from 7 defense multiples. Potentially many other things not properly affecting them due to transformation, will possibly update (albeit am ignoring them due to the bug).

Necro's Call or Necromancer Raise Undead- The units raised don't benefit from either Hero Crit boosts from 7 attack multiples, nor resistance boosts from 7 def multiples (not sure about tolerance).

Necromancer's Raise Undead- Devastatingly bugged beyond belief. Basically if using it to resurrect another undead unit or itself it will not end the necromancer's turn, allowing him to keep using for "free" and finish his turn as he wishes either attacking, moving, defending, using another ability, or using Raise Undead to actually raise corpses which atleast does end it's turn. The best work around for fairness sake if one intends to use it as a resurrect is to use it once and then necro's turn manually with either defense or walking back to that position with the final action point to prevent the cheap defense boost. Eventhat requires one to not use the Raise Undead ability for a couple more turns manually since it doesn't start the reload countdown on the ability since it didn't "really" use it.. One way or another the battle is likely to crash if you screw around with Raise Undead, especially if in a future turn you attempt to use it on another unit.

Skeleton Archers Magic Arrow- Actually removes the difficulty (i.e Impossible) bonus which is probably a bug (but a cool feature that gives the heavily nerfed Skel Archer more juice), but it actually only lowers base damage, with all other stats still boosted with the A.I bonus (even damage from talents remains). As a whole Undead have an outrageous amount of bugs starting from the Wife, plenty of babies, nearly all the units in one capacity or another, and they go from basically the best race in original KB The Legend w/ the best wife and the only Hero Skill specifically boosting them in the form of Dark Commander, to the absolute worst race for the player in Babies. Maybe later i'll go into depth chronicling their massacre in this mod as it stands.

Babies (So many bugs it's almost disheartening, and i'm almost too lazy to chronicle all the numbers that are off but i'll try..)-

Piquedram- Numbers are off for every plant unit benefited. I.e Ancient Ents get a 5% leadership discount and 5% extra health, not the 4% each as listed (even still the number should be higher AND he should get +1 initiative/speed/morale since as the slowest base unit in the game at 1/1 init/speed he can really use it). Royal Thorn numbers are off (believe it's actually 7% discount and health bonus, not 9%), same with the thorn hunters and thorn warriors who are getting even less of a bonus then listed (which is already behind par to other babies for level 1 units). In short he can use fixes and and buffs to make him not complete garbage.

Clancy and the other Unicorn Baby- Could REALLY use +1 initiative on top of the +1 speed/morale.

Cool Features that would add to the replay value-

When starting a new game having the option to exclude certain babies from wives (if you have already acquired some of the babies in a previous playthrough and want to guarantee all new babies to eventually experience most/all of them).

Critical Hit for Abilities/Talents- Featured in the newer games, would be cool in Babies as well (including things like bless affecting Talents). Only problem is that on Impossible enemies have outrageous critical hit rates as is (seemingly a minimum of 40, and many enemy units getting near outright 100%), so having to suffer constant crits with their Talents is not particularly exciting..

Enemy Morale like in future games- Would right away benefit 3 of the Undead troops which are weakened for the player; namely Undead Spider with his Cursed ability, Necromancer with his Cursed ability, and the completely useless Bone Dragon Morale Penalty ability. This change would make the woefully weak undead slightly more playable, and not quite as imbalanced in terms of being a strong enemy but terrible army for the player to use.

[Sirlancelot]

An amazing mod MattCaspermeyer, my heartfelt thanks for your great work! :-P

I doubt you are still dealing with it, but just in case I will try to list at least some of the bugs I have come across, and if you need screenshot proof of them I will go the extra mile to make sure you fully understand the issues listed. This is only a partial list of the bugs I've encountered, but over the coming weeks or months as I replay with other Heroes on Impossible I'll add more bugs and clarify things If i discover more information.

Bugs Homm3 Babies-

Archmage- Range attack doesn't cause shock, whether in Fighting Trance or otherwise (melee attacks can cause shock). Going into Trance also changes the critical hit rate incorrectly (i.e a 22% critical hit rate in normal mode due to things like belt of luck which grants +10% total by itself, can then be reduced to 15% in trance, namely a 100% critical hit increase of base and not even counting crit bonuses from Hero having 7 attack multiples and ignoring everything else). Archmage as is is borderline unplayable barring his Magic Shield.

Critical Hit rate- Plenty of issues with this. For starters though the tooltip doesn't display the effect of morale on the critical hit rate (however as far as I can tell it is correctly applying the morale bonus to the total crit rate i.e if a peasant has a 30% crit rate and +3 morale for the 200% bonus it is correctly doubling the total to 60%), even in battle the critical hit number doesn't factor in morale. However if you cast morale spells like Battle Cry, or get morale lowered from battle going long or things like Necromancer's Curse, then the critical hit number will change, albeit it will still be incorrect.

Battle dragging long morale penalty- Reduces stats BELOW their norm. For example if a unit was at +1 morale normally, but then the battle dragged long for the first -1 morale, making the total neutral, the stats of the unit will still take a slight negative hit below neutral morale affect on stats (you can see a Red effect on stats that reduce it below the base). This bug does make it beneficial to have over 3 morale on units if battles go long. Also i believe that morale reducers like Curse variants from Undead Units like Necromancer/Undead Spider and the Bone Dragon ability have the same overally powerful negative effect that lowers stats more than it should be.

Bowman- Melee attack can cause freeze or extend freeze duration (perhaps mainly against high fire resistance enemies). Same with regular ranged shots as well occasionally causing freeze or extending the duration of freeze (again likely tied to high fire resistance units).

Cyclops- Can't be Burned, Frozen, and presumably most other status effects like Stun/Poison etc. Eventhough on impossible the resistances to the respective damage types are obscenely high, there is no immunity granted to these status effects by any of its abilities and it should be fixed. "Stone" and a Tier 5 unit should not grant it immunity to basically all status effects. Period.

Mirabella- Not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to Human Race units and , only working with the 3 units (griffin, pirate, sea dog) who are listed individually. My findings indicate that any wife that lists specific units under a Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus the benefit works for them, but any units that should be included under "Race" don't get the benefit properly. This radically weakens nearly all wives and is a monumental oversight.

Rina- Human form not giving the full 12% discount to leadership for Robbers/Mauraders, seems closer to a 6% discount like the Undead rina gives to undead units (i.e Robbers at 20 base leadership are only being reduced to 19, even though it should be at minimum 18 leadership. Mauraders at 30 leadership are only getting reduced to 28, eventhough it should at minimum reduce it to 27 .)

Rina- Zombie form not granting full 12% discount to undead (I believe only 6% leadership discount). Like all wives not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to anything listed under Race, in this case Undead. States that enemies get -6% poison resistance, but is giving them -12% poison resistance (which is probably as intended since just -6% would be even more pitiful a bonus than it already is, namely debately the worst wife resist/ - enemy resist bonus).

Gerda- Not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to Dwarven Race units. Presumably all wives that grant the Race variant of Unit Level bonus don't work.

Spellcasting Bug- Spells like Sacrifice or Phantom (presumably every spell can get this bug) sometimes you can't cast a lower level of it, and it automatically casts the highest level of the spell (even if you haven't learned the respective magic school to level 3). You can for instance cast a level 1 phantom for only 14 mana and get the level 3 effect (in terms of the % and the duration) early game/for cheap, which is technically beneficial albeit broken for the player, but with something like sacrifice this can be a real problem due to gaining to many units since it automatically casts level 3 sacrifice. Not sure how to replicate this bug, but a fair amount of battles seem to have the bug randomly (if the bug isn't active for the battle then it never will happen, if at any time it does happen then it automatically will cast the level 3 version of a spell for the rest of the battle, even if you don't have the total mana to be able to cast the level 3 version, as long as you can afford the level 1 version of the spell).

Combat Takes Place Underground Morale Bonus- Some units like the Cannonneer (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22MR%2B3CDGvYCzIh4l5k2TGx c#.VgA-Rt9Viko) get this undocumented Morale bonus, presumably due to its "Likes Dungeons" ability. However other units like Alchemist (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22Md3BQ82z9TX4h4l5k2TGxc# .VgA-Q99Viko) or Dwarf (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22MAWUm41PWcdYh4l5k2TGxc# .VgA-Vt9Viko) with the same "Likes Dungeons" ability are not gaining the Morale bonus. Also one can see the Red status from -morale due to the battle being long, which is a negative effect beyond what losing that morale should be.

Lina's Ice Ball- Not gaining critical hit bonus from the Hero Attack (i.e the +2% from 7 attack, +4% from 14 attack etc). Is properly gaining the bonus from items like Elven Belt or Babies like Ufretin with his +40% crit rate for all units. Also not gaining the Hero resistance bonuses from multiples of 7 defense (not sure about tolerance resist bonus but will check).

Tolerance Level 3- INCREDIBLY annoying bug, level 3 tolerance ONLY gives it's +6 resist all during the first turn. As soon as units finish their turn the entire tolerance bonus goes away for the remainder of the battle. However any summons/phantoms or whatever keep the tolerance level 3 bonus for the entire battle. Basically upgrading from level 2 to level 3 in Tolerance is pointless with the bug, since atleast the level 2 Tolerance works with it's +4 resist all throughout the battle without any hitches.. The biggest loss is the extra 2% resistance from the final bonus, but even the demon/elf morale penalty negation being "lost" due to it being foolish to upgrade to Bugged Level 3 Tolerance, is unfortunate.

Werewolf Elf, Vampire, Ancient Vampire- Using their transform ability causes them to lose the hero resistances from 7 defense multiples. Potentially many other things not properly affecting them due to transformation, will possibly update (albeit am ignoring them due to the bug).

Necro's Call or Necromancer Raise Undead- The units raised don't benefit from either Hero Crit boosts from 7 attack multiples, nor resistance boosts from 7 def multiples (not sure about tolerance).

Necromancer's Raise Undead- Devastatingly bugged beyond belief. Basically if using it to resurrect another undead unit or itself it will not end the necromancer's turn, allowing him to keep using for "free" and finish his turn as he wishes either attacking, moving, defending, using another ability, or using Raise Undead to actually raise corpses which atleast does end it's turn. The best work around for fairness sake if one intends to use it as a resurrect is to use it once and then necro's turn manually with either defense or walking back to that position with the final action point to prevent the cheap defense boost. Eventhat requires one to not use the Raise Undead ability for a couple more turns manually since it doesn't start the reload countdown on the ability since it didn't "really" use it.. One way or another the battle is likely to crash if you screw around with Raise Undead, especially if in a future turn you attempt to use it on another unit.

Skeleton Archers Magic Arrow- Actually removes the difficulty (i.e Impossible) bonus which is probably a bug (but a cool feature that gives the heavily nerfed Skel Archer more juice), but it actually only lowers base damage, with all other stats still boosted with the A.I bonus (even damage from talents remains). As a whole Undead have an outrageous amount of bugs starting from the Wife, plenty of babies, nearly all the units in one capacity or another, and they go from basically the best race in original KB The Legend w/ the best wife and the only Hero Skill specifically boosting them in the form of Dark Commander, to the absolute worst race for the player in Babies. Maybe later i'll go into depth chronicling their massacre in this mod as it stands.

Babies (So many bugs it's almost disheartening, and i'm almost too lazy to chronicle all the numbers that are off but i'll try..)-

Piquedram- Numbers are off for every plant unit benefited. I.e Ancient Ents get a 5% leadership discount and 5% extra health, not the 4% each as listed (even still the number should be higher AND he should get +1 initiative/speed/morale since as the slowest base unit in the game at 1/1 init/speed he can really use it). Royal Thorn numbers are off (believe it's actually 7% discount and health bonus, not 9%), same with the thorn hunters and thorn warriors who are getting even less of a bonus then listed (which is already behind par to other babies for level 1 units). In short he can use fixes and and buffs to make him not complete garbage.

Clancy and the other Unicorn Baby- Could REALLY use +1 initiative on top of the +1 speed/morale.

Cool Features that would add to the replay value-

When starting a new game having the option to exclude certain babies from wives (if you have already acquired some of the babies in a previous playthrough and want to guarantee all new babies to eventually experience most/all of them).

Critical Hit for Abilities/Talents- Featured in the newer games, would be cool in Babies as well (including things like bless affecting Talents). Only problem is that on Impossible enemies have outrageous critical hit rates as is (seemingly a minimum of 40, and many enemy units getting near outright 100%), so having to suffer constant crits with their Talents is not particularly exciting..

Enemy Morale like in future games- Would right away benefit 3 of the Undead troops which are weakened for the player; namely Undead Spider with his Cursed ability, Necromancer with his Cursed ability, and the completely useless Bone Dragon Morale Penalty ability. This change would make the woefully weak undead slightly more playable, and not quite as imbalanced in terms of being a strong enemy but terrible army for the player to use.

Are you using the unofficial patch V1.7 Build 35,396 provided by Matt?: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?p=664873#post664873

[Sirlancelot]

Allright, Matt, I'm playing with a warrior the Gamersgate version of the game, that is, theorically, latest one. :)

Issues/bugs I have found so far:

- Critical percent rate doesn't take anger into account. At least the numbers says so (they remain the same regardless your current rage quantity)

- My hero has been defeated several times already and still gains a full army and money after losing. Is this intentional?

- Whenever a unit does 11x damage, damage output text is apparently incorrec. Higher than it should. Like ten times or so.

I didn't suffer a CTD or frozen screen bug yet. *Cross fingers* =P

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hmmm... Let me see if I can answer your questions...

Allright, Matt, I'm playing with a warrior the Gamersgate version of the game, that is, theorically, latest one. :)

Issues/bugs I have found so far:

- Critical percent rate doesn't take anger into account. At least the numbers says so (they remain the same regardless your current rage quantity)

Is that the critical percent on the Hero card? Where you cursor on his Attack? Or is it somewhere else? At any rate, I think if you cursor on the Hero's Attack, it is meant to show the increase in critical hit as a function of the Hero's Attack value. If it is on the Unit Card, then I probably didn't think to take into account adding the Anger Skill critical hit to their card.

I'll have to take a look at this (although I probably don't have the time at this juncture) and see what is going on here...

- My hero has been defeated several times already and still gains a full army and money after losing. Is this intentional?

Ummm, I'm not sure - what do you mean by the full army? Similar to what you started with or your current army? I remember that when I randomized the Hero's starting army, I actually saved it so that I could recall it later if needed. Now I can't remember what is going on here - but you should get either the same army you started the game with, or a newly created one up to your current leadership. So maybe it is intentional - I'll have to take a look. As far as money goes, I can't remember what happens here, either...

- Whenever a unit does 11x damage, damage output text is apparently incorrec. Higher than it should. Like ten times or so.

What is 11x damage? I did fiddle with this a little bit to get the Bless and Weakness spells to show max and min damage correctly with the +1 / -1 modifiers, but I think everything else should be okay, but I need to understand what you mean by 11x damage (and the scenario under which this occurs).

I didn't suffer a CTD or frozen screen bug yet. *Cross fingers* =P

Well that's encouraging! :-)

Man, I haven't fiddled with any of this stuff in years, so I'm a bit foggy with it. I'll have to get my head back into it to fully answer your questions...

At any rate - thanks for the post!

:-)

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

Hey Matt, how nice to see you around again! ^^

Hmmm... Let me see if I can answer your questions...

Is that the critical percent on the Hero card? Where you cursor on his Attack? Or is it somewhere else? At any rate, I think if you cursor on the Hero's Attack, it is meant to show the increase in critical hit as a function of the Hero's Attack value. If it is on the Unit Card, then I probably didn't think to take into account adding the Anger Skill critical hit to their card.

I'll have to take a look at this (although I probably don't have the time at this juncture) and see what is going on here...

Ummm, I'm not sure - what do you mean by the full army? Similar to what you started with or your current army? I remember that when I randomized the Hero's starting army, I actually saved it so that I could recall it later if needed. Now I can't remember what is going on here - but you should get either the same army you started the game with, or a newly created one up to your current leadership. So maybe it is intentional - I'll have to take a look. As far as money goes, I can't remember what happens here, either...

What is 11x damage? I did fiddle with this a little bit to get the Bless and Weakness spells to show max and min damage correctly with the +1 / -1 modifiers, but I think everything else should be okay, but I need to understand what you mean by 11x damage (and the scenario under which this occurs).

Well that's encouraging! :-)

Man, I haven't fiddled with any of this stuff in years, so I'm a bit foggy with it. I'll have to get my head back into it to fully answer your questions...

At any rate - thanks for the post!

:-)

Matt

You're very welcome.

Yes, the hint displayed when placing the cursor over the Attack attribute. It seems to overlook Rage quantity. I have not obtained Spirits of Rage cage yet, though. Maybe it's normal.

An army based on your level plus some gold. Approx 9000 gold first, then 2700. Also based on your level, I guess.

I think the number of units you get should be periodically reduced and lessen overall. Otherwise it's very difficult to actually lose the game. In fact, the mechanic can be exploited.

About the 11x damage output. Nevermind. My fault. The floating numbers show both the damage inflicted and the number of units killed mixed together. Hence my confusion.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hey Matt, how nice to see you around again! ^^

Thanks! I'm not sure how much back I am, but hopefully I'll be popping by more than once a year! ;-)

Yes, the hint displayed when placing the cursor over the Attack attribute. It seems to overlook Rage quantity. I have not obtained Spirits of Rage cage yet, though. Maybe it's normal.

Yah, so when you cursor on Attack, it shows the "krit" increase due to just your attack skill, cursoring on Defense shows the increase in resistance to all, and cursoring on Intellect shows the increase in damage / spell duration. None of these show any other bonuses to my knowledge.

An army based on your level plus some gold. Approx 9000 gold first, then 2700. Also based on your level, I guess.

I think the number of units you get should be periodically reduced and lessen overall. Otherwise it's very difficult to actually lose the game. In fact, the mechanic can be exploited.

I can't quite remember here if it is affected by the difficulty level (I should probably look it up, but it is possible that when playing harder difficulty levels that the number of troops and gold goes down) - I just can't remember right now.

At any rate, a counter could be used to divide into this value (for example, the first time, it is divided by 1 (so 100%), the second time 2 (so 50%), the third time 3 (or 33.3%), etc.). This would apply to both number of troops and gold. That way every time you die, the value diminishes.

I don't have any plans to do any update right now, but let me think about this...

About the 11x damage output. Nevermind. My fault. The floating numbers show both the damage inflicted and the number of units killed mixed together. Hence my confusion.

Okay, thank goodness!

I do actually have some unfinished changes that are in the works, but it has been so long that I'd have to get my head back into it to see.

The biggest issue was that when I added the Black Dragon code from the newer expansions to allow you to map out their fire path, the AI code didn't work properly with the Legend so that sometimes the AI would land on a troop. I changed it so that the AI uses the TL code (which of course works perfectly with the Legend) and then if it is a human player then you use the new code.

I also was looking at the bonuses for the babies and comparing them to the tomes and I thought that the tomes bonuses for various HOMM3 skills were possibly better so I was incorporating some of that into the TL baby bonuses. That was a lot of work, but I was working on some automation so that I wouldn't go crazy with manually entering in all the data.

There were some other things, that escape me, but hopefully I'll fiddle with it sometime in the near future.

Anyway, thanks for the comments!

:-)

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

Yah, so when you cursor on Attack, it shows the "krit" increase due to just your attack skill, cursoring on Defense shows the increase in resistance to all, and cursoring on Intellect shows the increase in damage / spell duration. None of these show any other bonuses to my knowledge.

Rage description in the Hero card states the characteristic increases the chance of criticals.


I can't quite remember here if it is affected by the difficulty level (I should probably look it up, but it is possible that when playing harder difficulty levels that the number of troops and gold goes down) - I just can't remember right now.

At any rate, a counter could be used to divide into this value (for example, the first time, it is divided by 1 (so 100%), the second time 2 (so 50%), the third time 3 (or 33.3%), etc.). This would apply to both number of troops and gold. That way every time you die, the value diminishes.

I don't have any plans to do any update right now, but let me think about this...

Sounds fine. Another good modification would be to revise conditions of victory. Whenever you're fighting and the opponent isn't able to win anymore, the combat should end. Otherwise skills like Gift of life and the like become exploitable.


I do actually have some unfinished changes that are in the works, but it has been so long that I'd have to get my head back into it to see.

The biggest issue was that when I added the Black Dragon code from the newer expansions to allow you to map out their fire path, the AI code didn't work properly with the Legend so that sometimes the AI would land on a troop. I changed it so that the AI uses the TL code (which of course works perfectly with the Legend) and then if it is a human player then you use the new code.

I also was looking at the bonuses for the babies and comparing them to the tomes and I thought that the tomes bonuses for various HOMM3 skills were possibly better so I was incorporating some of that into the TL baby bonuses. That was a lot of work, but I was working on some automation so that I wouldn't go crazy with manually entering in all the data.

There were some other things, that escape me, but hopefully I'll fiddle with it sometime in the near future.

Anyway, thanks for the comments!

:-)

Matt

No problem, I'm having much fun. There're little bugs scattered all over the place, but overall, the experience is fantastic. If you're interested I'll comment on issues later on. Many are neligible (like some typos here and there), while others could be more of a problem. For example, Enchanted Hero resurrection/random beneficial effect seems to always kick as long an unit takes damage, regardless the source of such damage. And fire or poison can make it trigger more than once.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Rage description in the Hero card states the characteristic increases the chance of criticals.

Does it? Dang, I forgot about this! I'll need to check it out and see what it says...

Another good modification would be to revise conditions of victory. Whenever you're fighting and the opponent isn't able to win anymore, the combat should end. Otherwise skills like Gift of life and the like become exploitable.

I could see no end to the cursing from people here if this were implemented, fortunately, it seems pretty hard to implement, plus the AI never gives up technically and I can see people would just change their strategy to account for it and still do what they need to do to exploit it.

There could always be a turn limit, though, I guess where you either lose the battle or start sustaining lots of damage.

Note that I took the other tact where I make your troops tired, and you can't regenerate mana / rage any more, etc. so I think this makes up for it pretty well...

No problem, I'm having much fun. There're little bugs scattered all over the place, but overall, the experience is fantastic. If you're interested I'll comment on issues later on. Many are neligible (like some typos here and there), while others could be more of a problem. For example, Enchanted Hero resurrection/random beneficial effect seems to always kick as long an unit takes damage, regardless the source of such damage. And fire or poison can make it trigger more than once.

I would love to see your comments as I can always use them to improve it if I ever get back into it. I also mean to check @SlickDragon's comments just to ensure that he hasn't found anything there, but I think he was using the wrong KB.EXE that you suggested and that's why he had so many issues.

I'm playing (or at least I was) Ice & Fire right now since I never played it all the way through. Unfortunately, I haven't played it in about a month since I have so many other things that are soaking up my time right now...

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

Does it? Dang, I forgot about this! I'll need to check it out and see what it says...

Yep. It textually says "the higher the rage, the higher the chance of a critical".

I could see no end to the cursing from people here if this were implemented, fortunately, it seems pretty hard to implement, plus the AI never gives up technically and I can see people would just change their strategy to account for it and still do what they need to do to exploit it.

There could always be a turn limit, though, I guess where you either lose the battle or start sustaining lots of damage.

Note that I took the other tact where I make your troops tired, and you can't regenerate mana / rage any more, etc. so I think this makes up for it pretty well...

Heheh. Yeah, perhaps some of them would swear. However eventually, everybody who install your mod is looking for new challenges and emotions, so it should pay off.

The turn limit is an interesting concept. Moreover, probably complementary with your current penalties approach. First time I saw the penalties in action I really like the concept and how it was implemented, by the way. It makes sense the troops get fatigued over time.


I would love to see your comments as I can always use them to improve it if I ever get back into it. I also mean to check @SlickDragon's comments just to ensure that he hasn't found anything there, but I think he was using the wrong KB.EXE that you suggested and that's why he had so many issues.

I'm playing (or at least I was) Ice & Fire right now since I never played it all the way through. Unfortunately, I haven't played it in about a month since I have so many other things that are soaking up my time right now...

Matt

To name a few:

Minor bugs:

- Polar bears critical percent chance bonus derived from Barbarian presence is apparently not applied. The morale bonus shows up/is displayed, and as a consequence attack and defence are improved, but the critical percent remains the same.

- Rockfall can frighten instead of stun. It feels ok, though. Watch meteors falling from the sky must be quite scary.

A typo:

- All bleeding creatures show up as attacked by a werewolf. I mean, when you place the cursor over their claw icon, the description always point to the lupines, regardless the source of the damage.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Yep. It textually says "the higher the rage, the higher the chance of a critical".

Oh, okay - I guess I just didn't remember that. I'll have to look into it in the future...

Heheh. Yeah, perhaps some of them would swear. However eventually, everybody who install your mod is looking for new challenges and emotions, so it should pay off.

The turn limit is an interesting concept. Moreover, probably complementary with your current penalties approach. First time I saw the penalties in action I really like the concept and how it was implemented, by the way. It makes sense the troops get fatigued over time.

Good points there.

To name a few:

Minor bugs:

- Polar bears critical percent chance bonus derived from Barbarian presence is apparently not applied. The morale bonus shows up/is displayed, and as a consequence attack and defence are improved, but the critical percent remains the same.

Okay - I'll have to check that in the future...

Rockfall can frighten instead of stun. It feels ok, though. Watch meteors falling from the sky must be quite scary.

Really? That's not right! Not sure what happened there - I must have broke something...

A typo:

- All bleeding creatures show up as attacked by a werewolf. I mean, when you place the cursor over their claw icon, the description always point to the lupines, regardless the source of the damage.

I guess I didn't realize that the bleeding text was so specific to werewolves. I'll have to fix that in the future...

Okay, sorry for the late reply - so many other things going on for me right now...

I have no plans to fix any of this stuff in the near term, but hopefully once my schedule frees up I'll get back to this stuff...

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

It would be possible to insert a countdown within combat? I mean, that you only have x seconds per turn to decide your next play/move.

I really miss such a feature.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Uhmmm I don't think so since I think it would violate the turn-based paradigm of the tactical combat system that is hard coded into the game.

It would be possible to insert a countdown within combat? I mean, that you only have x seconds per turn to decide your next play/move.

I really miss such a feature.

[Sirlancelot]

I've been playing my Warrior game for a while :) Some reflections:

- Gizmo feels overpowered. You can resurrect infinite units with it. Should be definitely nerfed, in my opinion.

- Sometimes Evil Beholders take control of their own companions instead of player's.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I've been playing my Warrior game for a while :) Some reflections:

- Gizmo feels overpowered. You can resurrect infinite units with it. Should be definitely nerfed, in my opinion.

Well, not infinite - it has a counter that counts down with each resurrection (or attack) and once consumed then it disappears; heals don't consume a charge (it actually indicates how many charges it has left in the battle log). The max charges are 9 if you are able to max that part of Gizmo out and it starts with just 1 (and each upgrade that increases charges increases it by just 1). Gizmo checks the power of your enemy versus yours and the percent of power to another determines attack percent vs heal / resurrect percent. So if your enemy's power is 75% and yours is 25% then there is a 75% it will attack the enemy versus 25% chance that it will heal / resurrect. So you can see that as the enemy's power depletes the higher percent chance that it will heal / resurrect your units and as the enemy's power rises the higher percent chance it will attack.

It is also smart and heals / resurrects higher level units (especially level 5's) before lower level units as well as prioritizes the removal of highly negative effects on your units / highly beneficial effects on your enemies.

Also, Lina has to be over level 40 to get the last two charges and so maxing her Gizmo out is difficult unless you work on her damage abilities (which is pretty much just Ice Thorns). Her other abilities are very potent, too (even Ice Thorns) and so maxing out Gizmo is often not a priority until later in the game since its starting single charge is usually a deterrent for other abilities until you are much later in the game / Lina is very high in level.

Gizmo can become very powerful towards the end game (mostly due to its intelligence that I added), but the enemy hero's spells are terribly devastating so in my experience it balances out in the end.

- Sometimes Evil Beholders take control of their own companions instead of player's.

Interesting - have you ever seen this in the unmodded game? I'm not sure if I made a change here, but this one is obviously a bug.

I wish I had the time / interest to come back to this and fix bugs like this and add features that I still want to put in (Haas unique spell for final battle: Summon Dragon, anyone?), but unfortunately, I've been so dialed out of King's Bounty and gaming in general that I doubt I'd ever get back into to it to research and fix something like this, but you never know...

Thanks for the comments and it is amazing that you're still playing! :-)

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

Well, not infinite - it has a counter that counts down with each resurrection (or attack) and once consumed then it disappears; heals don't consume a charge (it actually indicates how many charges it has left in the battle log). The max charges are 9 if you are able to max that part of Gizmo out and it starts with just 1 (and each upgrade that increases charges increases it by just 1). Gizmo checks the power of your enemy versus yours and the percent of power to another determines attack percent vs heal / resurrect percent. So if your enemy's power is 75% and yours is 25% then there is a 75% it will attack the enemy versus 25% chance that it will heal / resurrect. So you can see that as the enemy's power depletes the higher percent chance that it will heal / resurrect your units and as the enemy's power rises the higher percent chance it will attack.

It is also smart and heals / resurrects higher level units (especially level 5's) before lower level units as well as prioritizes the removal of highly negative effects on your units / highly beneficial effects on your enemies.

Also, Lina has to be over level 40 to get the last two charges and so maxing her Gizmo out is difficult unless you work on her damage abilities (which is pretty much just Ice Thorns). Her other abilities are very potent, too (even Ice Thorns) and so maxing out Gizmo is often not a priority until later in the game since its starting single charge is usually a deterrent for other abilities until you are much later in the game / Lina is very high in level.

Gizmo can become very powerful towards the end game (mostly due to its intelligence that I added), but the enemy hero's spells are terribly devastating so in my experience it balances out in the end.


Problem is, you can invoke Gizmo several times until your rage is consumed, which translates into tons of resurrections. In fact, you can even have more than one Gizmo floating over the battlefield.

It improved AI is moore than welcome, just keep in mind the exploits.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Problem is, you can invoke Gizmo several times until your rage is consumed, which translates into tons of resurrections. In fact, you can even have more than one Gizmo floating over the battlefield.

It improved AI is moore than welcome, just keep in mind the exploits.

Can't argue with you there, but the min turns for a max Gizmo is 5 (9 without any rest reductions) so you can get 2 max at a time (sometimes 3 if the first one is traveling or healing instead of using a charge); however, by the time you factor in its rage cost (min of 70 when maxed out vs 115 without any rage reductions), the rage / mana generation reduction due to the round of battle and you'd probably be able to cast only 4 max per battle towards the end of the game, possibly 5 if you play the Warrior when playing impossible difficulty level.

Since the Warrior's Resurrection spell casting is typically weak, you can see Gizmo being a big help for the Warrior class and since the Mage has a hard time getting a lot of Rage accumulation it is a lot harder to cast Gizmo a lot for the Mage, which offsets his Resurrection spell power.

So in my experience, things tend to balance out and if you're casting Gizmo, you're missing out on the other Lina abilities and so usually Lina's first casts are for offensive abilities (of which Gizmo is a possibility) and then Gizmo is cast after round 5 (no hero fight) or 10 (hero fight) to start resurrecting your fallen units.

Gizmo is a powerful ability of Lina's when maxed out, but I think it is more than made up for on the impossible difficulty level by the strength of your enemies.

Thanks for the comments!

:-)

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

Can't argue with you there, but the min turns for a max Gizmo is 5 (9 without any rest reductions) so you can get 2 max at a time (sometimes 3 if the first one is traveling or healing instead of using a charge); however, by the time you factor in its rage cost (min of 70 when maxed out vs 115 without any rage reductions), the rage / mana generation reduction due to the round of battle and you'd probably be able to cast only 4 max per battle towards the end of the game, possibly 5 if you play the Warrior when playing impossible difficulty level.

Since the Warrior's Resurrection spell casting is typically weak, you can see Gizmo being a big help for the Warrior class and since the Mage has a hard time getting a lot of Rage accumulation it is a lot harder to cast Gizmo a lot for the Mage, which offsets his Resurrection spell power.

So in my experience, things tend to balance out and if you're casting Gizmo, you're missing out on the other Lina abilities and so usually Lina's first casts are for offensive abilities (of which Gizmo is a possibility) and then Gizmo is cast after round 5 (no hero fight) or 10 (hero fight) to start resurrecting your fallen units.

Gizmo is a powerful ability of Lina's when maxed out, but I think it is more than made up for on the impossible difficulty level by the strength of your enemies.

Thanks for the comments!

:-)

Matt

Well, I'm restraining myself and reserving it against heroes.

What's annoying me now is the 0% chance to shock of my archmages. It was supposed to be higher and work sometimes, specially when the "frozen" condition is met, but I don't remember a single time it did.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hey, what part of the game are you in by the way, and how high is your hero level, your spirit levels, etc., etc.?

[Sirlancelot]

Hey, what part of the game are you in by the way, and how high is your hero level, your spirit levels, etc., etc.?

Ellinia- Death Valley. :)

23, if I recall correctly. My spirits are something like 32, 23,23, 27.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Have you tried the Blue Dragons, yet? Have you had to fight any yet?

[Sirlancelot]

Have you tried the Blue Dragons, yet? Have you had to fight any yet?

Yep. And they worked allright. No crashes nor any other inconvenience.

They're quite powerful, by the way. Took me one or two arrows to defeat them, heh heh.

[Sirlancelot]

Ok, this is serious It seems I cannot defeat Karador no matter the army. Five attempts and nothing. Already cleared Demonis and everything else you can do before the fight.

EDITED: Cyclops did the trick.

[MattCaspermeyer]

***EDIT***

Okay, I've delved into these issues more and I'm thinking pretty much all the issues I thought were game build ones are real bugs that I've probably added along the way - I'll provide more detail below...

***EDIT***

I've kind of been getting back up to speed on where I left off, but I wanted to address these comments to at least let people know that I've looked at these issues...

These comments also assume that you are using the proper game build and that could be part of the problems...

By the way, I'm not sure if I have the time to do all this, but if I do then that's what it means when I'll look into something...

An amazing mod MattCaspermeyer, my heartfelt thanks for your great work! :-P

Thanks! :-)

I doubt you are still dealing with it, but just in case I will try to list at least some of the bugs I have come across, and if you need screenshot proof of them I will go the extra mile to make sure you fully understand the issues listed. This is only a partial list of the bugs I've encountered, but over the coming weeks or months as I replay with other Heroes on Impossible I'll add more bugs and clarify things If i discover more information.

Ok

Bugs Homm3 Babies-

Archmage- Range attack doesn't cause shock, whether in Fighting Trance or otherwise (melee attacks can cause shock). Going into Trance also changes the critical hit rate incorrectly (i.e a 22% critical hit rate in normal mode due to things like belt of luck which grants +10% total by itself, can then be reduced to 15% in trance, namely a 100% critical hit increase of base and not even counting crit bonuses from Hero having 7 attack multiples and ignoring everything else). Archmage as is is borderline unplayable barring his Magic Shield.

I checked and double checked this - I did not make any change to the code here where it makes a difference.

Range attack should cause shock as the code where this is applied is the same and I didn't change anything in their Lightning Attack code, either. So I'm not sure what is going on here...

***EDIT***

Okay, I found out the issue here - when I added Blue Dragons, they shared the shock code with the Archmages and I added a new level= custom parameter to their ATOMs; however, I did not implement it properly for Archmages (I had only placed it in their melee attack, which was not right), but I have it fixed now (I needed to place this parameter in their ranged attack) and will provide a future update to resolve this issue.

***EDIT***


As far as Critical Hit, there are three ways about this:

1. Critical Hit modifiers are just + to the Critical Hit
2. Critical Hit modifiers are percent increases to the Critical Hit
3. Critical Hit modifiers are set to a specific value

I looked at the original code here and the code actually takes the Archmage's current Critical Hit and applies the bonus as the *difference* between the bonus from the Archmage's ATOM and their current Critical Hit. So, it is possible that it could actually reduce their critical hit, if the bonus is lower than their current value.

Since this is stock TL code, then this has always been an issue with the game, but probably not due to Critical Hit for Archmages now having quite a few modifiers in H3B.

It is most likely that the Skill description is not accurate in the original game and I inherited this functionality.

I'll see what to do here...

***EDIT***

I'm going to implement this differently so that it works properly.

***EDIT***


Critical Hit rate- Plenty of issues with this. For starters though the tooltip doesn't display the effect of morale on the critical hit rate (however as far as I can tell it is correctly applying the morale bonus to the total crit rate i.e if a peasant has a 30% crit rate and +3 morale for the 200% bonus it is correctly doubling the total to 60%), even in battle the critical hit number doesn't factor in morale. However if you cast morale spells like Battle Cry, or get morale lowered from battle going long or things like Necromancer's Curse, then the critical hit number will change, albeit it will still be incorrect.

Showing the unit's critical hit was actually not originally in the TL game at all, but it was added in AP. I've tried to create the functionality of adding it to my H3B mod, but it is possible that there are issues here beyond my control. I think I did list the issues previously; however, I will attempt to look into this...

***EDIT***

I think there is a bit of confusion here as to what the effect is meant to do. I'm going to revisit the descriptions and see if they are confusing (I remember a lot of them were). I will then see how I've implemented them in the game.

So I will attempt to make the descriptions for their implementation more clear and if I need to make any code changes because I implemented them wrong then I'll do that...

***EDIT***


Battle dragging long morale penalty- Reduces stats BELOW their norm. For example if a unit was at +1 morale normally, but then the battle dragged long for the first -1 morale, making the total neutral, the stats of the unit will still take a slight negative hit below neutral morale affect on stats (you can see a Red effect on stats that reduce it below the base). This bug does make it beneficial to have over 3 morale on units if battles go long. Also i believe that morale reducers like Curse variants from Undead Units like Necromancer/Undead Spider and the Bone Dragon ability have the same overally powerful negative effect that lowers stats more than it should be.

I'm not sure what is happening here - a lot of the modifiers use the LUA library functions to perform these tasks. It is possible that the way I've implemented features are beyond what the creators of the game originally intended and perhaps when bonuses are added and then subtracted it is possible that there are round off errors or other possibilities caused by how the bonuses add and subtract.

Barring an exhaustive search on what could be causing this, I'm going to chalk this up to being the nature of the beast...

***EDIT***

Okay, I think I may know what is going on here. When I originally implemented this bonus (well, er penalty), I think I thought that when I was modifying the morale that it wasn't changing the unit's attack, defense, and critical hit properly. I was probably mistaken here as I am double dipping dropping Attack, Defense, and Critical Hit as well as morale (which causes the Attack, Defense, and Critical Hit to drop all by itself).

I will double check this, but it looks like I can just comment out the double dipping code and it should then be okay.

***EDIT***


Bowman- Melee attack can cause freeze or extend freeze duration (perhaps mainly against high fire resistance enemies). Same with regular ranged shots as well occasionally causing freeze or extending the duration of freeze (again likely tied to high fire resistance units).

This could be something for me to check.

Since Cold Resistance is not an actual resistance category in TL, the game designers sort of used Fire Resistance as a pseudo Cold Resistance. I made a change such that effect durations are affected by the unit's resistance. So, for example, if a poison resistant unit is poisoned, then the duration is reduced by the resistance (so if poison lasts 3 turns and their resistance is 30%, then it will last just 2 turns). The opposite is also true if a unit has resistance less than 0. Since Fire Resistance acts as a pseudo Cold Resistance, Freeze duration is increased on units that have high Fire Resistance.

If regular shots are causing freezing on Fire Resistant units, then that is a bug that I'll will have to track down - I know that the shot code sometimes reuses the same function and so it is possible that I failed to check the type of attack being carried out (actually, I don't think there is a way to know the type of attack, but what the developers would do is look at the special values of the attack in the unit's ATOM and guess the attack from the values there). So I may need a way to discern appropriately between their 3 different attacks.

***EDIT***

I've actually gone through both Bowman and Skeleton Archers to ensure that I've implemented my changes here properly. The issues arose with the possibility of modifying parameters that the LUA code assumed would be a specific value.

I have implemented the use of the arrows= custom parameter, which was set to 1 when the attack was ranged and I now check that the attack is ranged (arrows=1) and only implement "throw" attacks if this is set to 1; otherwise, it is a melee attack (arrows=0).

I then discern which throw attack it is properly by the values set in its custom parameters section (by the way, this is normally the way the original developers discerned attacks via values in their custom parameters section) to make sure that it is casting the proper attack.

I've also performed a cursory check to ensure that I don't have errors with the other unit's special attacks and abilities and I think everything looks okay.

***EDIT***


Cyclops- Can't be Burned, Frozen, and presumably most other status effects like Stun/Poison etc. Eventhough on impossible the resistances to the respective damage types are obscenely high, there is no immunity granted to these status effects by any of its abilities and it should be fixed. "Stone" and a Tier 5 unit should not grant it immunity to basically all status effects. Period.

I think we'll agree to disagree from here. Cyclops in the original game are pretty useless and so by adding this capability to them (they are effectively magical stone creatures) they are a lot better. I took it that you can't really stun, poison, freeze, or burn stone - none of those effects made sense to me and so since you can't normally heal them either, they are able to last a lot longer in combat.

***EDIT***

Another thing to mention here is that the Cyclops is considered a "golem" and units with that feature are normally not affected by most effects (other golems are the Ice Ball, Phoenix, and Evil Book).

***EDIT***


Mirabella- Not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to Human Race units and , only working with the 3 units (griffin, pirate, sea dog) who are listed individually. My findings indicate that any wife that lists specific units under a Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus the benefit works for them, but any units that should be included under "Race" don't get the benefit properly. This radically weakens nearly all wives and is a monumental oversight.

If this is true, then this is simply a bug with the game; however, I remember explicitly checking these during my initial development and they did indeed work because I wanted to ensure that I was implementing the bonuses correctly. In WIFES.TXT, the bonuses are specified correctly as far as I can tell. Since you say they are working correctly for Griffins, Pirates, and Sea Dogs, they must also be working for Guardsmen, Inquisitors, Bowmen, Footmen, Priests, and Marauders because those units are grouped either with the Griffins or Pirates.

So if this is not working in your game, then I'm not certain what the problem would be...

Rina- Human form not giving the full 12% discount to leadership for Robbers/Mauraders, seems closer to a 6% discount like the Undead rina gives to undead units (i.e Robbers at 20 base leadership are only being reduced to 19, even though it should be at minimum 18 leadership. Mauraders at 30 leadership are only getting reduced to 28, eventhough it should at minimum reduce it to 27 .)

Rina- Zombie form not granting full 12% discount to undead (I believe only 6% leadership discount). Like all wives not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to anything listed under Race, in this case Undead. States that enemies get -6% poison resistance, but is giving them -12% poison resistance (which is probably as intended since just -6% would be even more pitiful a bonus than it already is, namely debately the worst wife resist/ - enemy resist bonus).

Rina has 6% on her Leadership bonuses - the tip must be wrong... Same with Zombie Rina. I'll have to check the descriptions as I tried to have these autogenerated, but perhaps something is wrong there.

Gerda- Not granting Unit Level- Atk/Def bonus to Dwarven Race units. Presumably all wives that grant the Race variant of Unit Level bonus don't work.

Same as above with Mirabella these should work. Check your game build is the only thing I can think...

***EDIT***

For all the children bonuses, I will revisit this and check them to ensure that they are correct and working, but as I mentioned above, they are implemented properly as far as I can tell and since they are grouped with ones that are working, the only way they wouldn't work is if I misspelled something.

***EDIT***


Spellcasting Bug- Spells like Sacrifice or Phantom (presumably every spell can get this bug) sometimes you can't cast a lower level of it, and it automatically casts the highest level of the spell (even if you haven't learned the respective magic school to level 3). You can for instance cast a level 1 phantom for only 14 mana and get the level 3 effect (in terms of the % and the duration) early game/for cheap, which is technically beneficial albeit broken for the player, but with something like sacrifice this can be a real problem due to gaining to many units since it automatically casts level 3 sacrifice. Not sure how to replicate this bug, but a fair amount of battles seem to have the bug randomly (if the bug isn't active for the battle then it never will happen, if at any time it does happen then it automatically will cast the level 3 version of a spell for the rest of the battle, even if you don't have the total mana to be able to cast the level 3 version, as long as you can afford the level 1 version of the spell).

The only thing I can think of here is if there is an error in the Enemy Hero casting logic where the game is confusing whether it you or the enemy hero casting a spell. I've never come across this, so I'm guessing it may be an issue with the game build you're using...

***EDIT***

This one I've given it some more thought and if this is a problem, it is probably due to creatures that have spell casting abilities and I tried to share code between the hero spell casting and the unit spell casting. I know that it is really hard to discern sometimes who is casting what and so it is possible that the code is confusing who the caster is.

I'm thinking that maybe this happens during enemy hero fights or during fights with enemy units that can cast "spells". I'm going to look into this more and for areas where the code is being shared, I may need to add a custom parameter to the unit to help identify it as a caster.

I know that Bone Dragons can cast spells at level 3, regardless of the spell level of the caster and both them and Arch Demons gain spell power from their hero and so it is possible that this behavior is mistakenly being used for hero spell casts instead of only for the unit spell casts.

***EDIT***


Combat Takes Place Underground Morale Bonus- Some units like the Cannonneer (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22MR%2B3CDGvYCzIh4l5k2TGx c#.VgA-Rt9Viko) get this undocumented Morale bonus, presumably due to its "Likes Dungeons" ability. However other units like Alchemist (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22Md3BQ82z9TX4h4l5k2TGxc# .VgA-Q99Viko) or Dwarf (http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=bbi8MiGk22MAWUm41PWcdYh4l5k2TGxc# .VgA-Vt9Viko) with the same "Likes Dungeons" ability are not gaining the Morale bonus. Also one can see the Red status from -morale due to the battle being long, which is a negative effect beyond what losing that morale should be.

This is probably an issue with the descriptions being similar, but different. Cannoneers get +1 Morale in Dungeons, but Alchemists get +25% Attack as specified in their ATOM's.

Lina's Ice Ball- Not gaining critical hit bonus from the Hero Attack (i.e the +2% from 7 attack, +4% from 14 attack etc). Is properly gaining the bonus from items like Elven Belt or Babies like Ufretin with his +40% crit rate for all units. Also not gaining the Hero resistance bonuses from multiples of 7 defense (not sure about tolerance resist bonus but will check).

Summons do not normally get any of the hero bonuses. Since Lina's Ice Ball counts as a summon, that's why, but it is probably something to think about as it is possible to modify its stats.

Tolerance Level 3- INCREDIBLY annoying bug, level 3 tolerance ONLY gives it's +6 resist all during the first turn. As soon as units finish their turn the entire tolerance bonus goes away for the remainder of the battle. However any summons/phantoms or whatever keep the tolerance level 3 bonus for the entire battle. Basically upgrading from level 2 to level 3 in Tolerance is pointless with the bug, since atleast the level 2 Tolerance works with it's +4 resist all throughout the battle without any hitches.. The biggest loss is the extra 2% resistance from the final bonus, but even the demon/elf morale penalty negation being "lost" due to it being foolish to upgrade to Bugged Level 3 Tolerance, is unfortunate.

I'm not sure why, but I somehow didn't implement this bonus properly. I will fix...

Werewolf Elf, Vampire, Ancient Vampire- Using their transform ability causes them to lose the hero resistances from 7 defense multiples. Potentially many other things not properly affecting them due to transformation, will possibly update (albeit am ignoring them due to the bug).

Unit transformations cause a complete loss of all spells, bonuses, etc; however, I can see where this is an issue and I need to do the same thing that I did with the enemy unit transformations that keep their bonuses...

Necro's Call or Necromancer Raise Undead- The units raised don't benefit from either Hero Crit boosts from 7 attack multiples, nor resistance boosts from 7 def multiples (not sure about tolerance).

Once again, this is due to the game treating them as summons and so I will need to think about this...

Necromancer's Raise Undead- Devastatingly bugged beyond belief. Basically if using it to resurrect another undead unit or itself it will not end the necromancer's turn, allowing him to keep using for "free" and finish his turn as he wishes either attacking, moving, defending, using another ability, or using Raise Undead to actually raise corpses which atleast does end it's turn. The best work around for fairness sake if one intends to use it as a resurrect is to use it once and then necro's turn manually with either defense or walking back to that position with the final action point to prevent the cheap defense boost. Eventhat requires one to not use the Raise Undead ability for a couple more turns manually since it doesn't start the reload countdown on the ability since it didn't "really" use it.. One way or another the battle is likely to crash if you screw around with Raise Undead, especially if in a future turn you attempt to use it on another unit.

There are no ENDMOVE=0 lines in the Necromancer's ATOM, which is the only way for this to happen, so I'm not sure what the issue would be here except a possible game build issue.

Skeleton Archers Magic Arrow- Actually removes the difficulty (i.e Impossible) bonus which is probably a bug (but a cool feature that gives the heavily nerfed Skel Archer more juice), but it actually only lowers base damage, with all other stats still boosted with the A.I bonus (even damage from talents remains). As a whole Undead have an outrageous amount of bugs starting from the Wife, plenty of babies, nearly all the units in one capacity or another, and they go from basically the best race in original KB The Legend w/ the best wife and the only Hero Skill specifically boosting them in the form of Dark Commander, to the absolute worst race for the player in Babies. Maybe later i'll go into depth chronicling their massacre in this mod as it stands.

I noticed this before, but I can't remember if I decided to fix this or not as the Dispel capability removes all unit modifiers. I'd need to look at this to see where I left it...

***EDIT***

Okay, I've added the special_difficulty bonus to the list of spells not removed by this attack.

***EDIT***


Babies (So many bugs it's almost disheartening, and i'm almost too lazy to chronicle all the numbers that are off but i'll try..)-

Piquedram- Numbers are off for every plant unit benefited. I.e Ancient Ents get a 5% leadership discount and 5% extra health, not the 4% each as listed (even still the number should be higher AND he should get +1 initiative/speed/morale since as the slowest base unit in the game at 1/1 init/speed he can really use it). Royal Thorn numbers are off (believe it's actually 7% discount and health bonus, not 9%), same with the thorn hunters and thorn warriors who are getting even less of a bonus then listed (which is already behind par to other babies for level 1 units). In short he can use fixes and and buffs to make him not complete garbage.

It is possible that the auto-generated description is wrong here. I would need to look at this.

Clancy and the other Unicorn Baby- Could REALLY use +1 initiative on top of the +1 speed/morale.

Unfortunately, the way it works is that the higher the unit level, the fewer modifiers they get. So only using 2 out of the 3 is how all the level 4 unit children bonuses work.

Cool Features that would add to the replay value-

When starting a new game having the option to exclude certain babies from wives (if you have already acquired some of the babies in a previous playthrough and want to guarantee all new babies to eventually experience most/all of them).

Implementing this is simply not possible.

Critical Hit for Abilities/Talents- Featured in the newer games, would be cool in Babies as well (including things like bless affecting Talents). Only problem is that on Impossible enemies have outrageous critical hit rates as is (seemingly a minimum of 40, and many enemy units getting near outright 100%), so having to suffer constant crits with their Talents is not particularly exciting..

I've made this change in the unreleased version of my mod that I was working on over 3 years ago...

Enemy Morale like in future games- Would right away benefit 3 of the Undead troops which are weakened for the player; namely Undead Spider with his Cursed ability, Necromancer with his Cursed ability, and the completely useless Bone Dragon Morale Penalty ability. This change would make the woefully weak undead slightly more playable, and not quite as imbalanced in terms of being a strong enemy but terrible army for the player to use.

Unfortunately, in TL the developers decided not to implement Morale for the enemy player. I experimented with changing the enemie's morale and it literally had no effect on their stats! So this is not possible in TL.

Well, sorry for taking forever to respond, but if I ever get back into modding this game I will see about fixing these issues. I actually looked at my change log from 3 or years ago and I have quite a few changes that I never released. So here's hoping that I can spend some time with this in the near future.

Thanks for your comments! :-)

Matt

***EDIT***

If I find out any more information about the above issues, I'll be sure to post here and hopefully I'll be able to find some time soon to provide an update that fixes the issues that I've already fixed.

***EDIT***

[MattCaspermeyer]

Ok, this is serious It seems I cannot defeat Karador no matter the army. Five attempts and nothing. Already cleared Demonis and everything else you can do before the fight.

EDITED: Cyclops did the trick.

Oh yah, Karador is a lot harder now isn't he?

;)

Matt

[MattCaspermeyer]

I checked and double checked this - I did not make any change to the code here where it makes a difference.

Range attack should cause shock as the code where this is applied is the same and I didn't change anything in their Lightning Attack code, either. So I'm not sure what is going on here...

I thought about this some more and it is possible that the common shock function that I created is not working properly for mages. I'll see if I can find out what is going on here...

Matt

[MattCaspermeyer]

Archmage- Range attack doesn't cause shock, whether in Fighting Trance or otherwise (melee attacks can cause shock).

Okay, I found the source of this bug - when I added the Blue Dragons, they share the features_shock function with Archmages and there is a level custom parameter that I added that breaks the Archmage's capability to shock targets unless it is melee!

This is a great find. I have to dig up the purpose of this level parameter for Blue Dragons and ensure that I don't break them by fixing the Archmages...

Matt

[MattCaspermeyer]

This could be something for me to check.

Since Cold Resistance is not an actual resistance category in TL, the game designers sort of used Fire Resistance as a pseudo Cold Resistance. I made a change such that effect durations are affected by the unit's resistance. So, for example, if a poison resistant unit is poisoned, then the duration is reduced by the resistance (so if poison lasts 3 turns and their resistance is 30%, then it will last just 2 turns). The opposite is also true if a unit has resistance less than 0. Since Fire Resistance acts as a pseudo Cold Resistance, Freeze duration is increased on units that have high Fire Resistance.

If regular shots are causing freezing on Fire Resistant units, then that is a bug that I'll will have to track down - I know that the shot code sometimes reuses the same function and so it is possible that I failed to check the type of attack being carried out (actually, I don't think there is a way to know the type of attack, but what the developers would do is look at the special values of the attack in the unit's ATOM and guess the attack from the values there). So I may need a way to discern appropriately between their 3 different attacks.

The way the "special_bowman" function was originally written, I can see where it may have some potential issues with some of the changes I made.

I think I'll have to add some checks to this function to discern properly between whether the attack is burn or freeze and whether it is ranged or melee (the original code didn't really discern this) - I think that's where it might be behaving strange with the changes I made...

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

Oh yah, Karador is a lot harder now isn't he?

;)

Matt

Perhaps too much. It seemed impossible without the cyclops.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Perhaps too much. It seemed impossible without the cyclops.

I remember it being harder, but I don't think I had any problem with Xeona as my wife with her Demon troops.

What kind of troops did you use before you resorted to the Cyclops?

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

I remember it being harder, but I don't think I had any problem with Xeona as my wife with her Demon troops.

What kind of troops did you use before you resorted to the Cyclops?

Matt

A human army plus elves and dwarves. Consisting on something along the lines of Archmages, Horseman, Inquisitors, Elves and Dwarves.

Then I left archmages, dwarves and inquisitors and switch to Black Dragons, Unicorns and Cannoners. And finally discarded dragons in favour of cyclops. Regardless the army composition, all units were slaughtered except the cyclops, who ended the battle with 200 attack.

[MattCaspermeyer]

A human army plus elves and dwarves. Consisting on something along the lines of Archmages, Horseman, Inquisitors, Elves and Dwarves.

Then I left archmages, dwarves and inquisitors and switch to Black Dragons, Unicorns and Cannoners. And finally discarded dragons in favour of cyclops. Regardless the army composition, all units were slaughtered except the cyclops, who ended the battle with 200 attack.

So can you tell me more about how you were losing?

For example, were you being overrun by the Dark Crystal summons or were the dead stacks being reanimated causing problems or was there some other issue?

Were you using your Phoenix, Ice Ball, etc.?

There is actually a strategy to this one and based on how you were losing, I could probably give you some tips...

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

So can you tell me more about how you were losing?

For example, were you being overrun by the Dark Crystal summons or were the dead stacks being reanimated causing problems or was there some other issue?

Were you using your Phoenix, Ice Ball, etc.?

There is actually a strategy to this one and based on how you were losing, I could probably give you some tips...

Matt

Totally overwhelmed by the enemies which were there already. The zombies and necromancers were specially mean. That's why I tried to counter effect with unicorns, whose increase magic resistance and horn of light could made a difference.

Yep, I used Ice Ball a few times. And Phantom. Not the best cannon fodder this time. Both were destroyed by a single skeletons attack. Same as Black Dragons.

Ice Ball proved to be useful later on, though. When my cyclops were agonizing, less units kept alive and the distance between them were larger.

My Mature Phoenix wasn't powerful enough to endure the fight.

Also employed traps and teleport to no avail.

[Sirlancelot]

Sigh. Now I'm struggling against Bagu. Any tip? It seems I cannot cope with his three spells per turn.

My army consist of Inquisitors, Black Dragons, Cyclops, Elves, Horsemen, Knights and Guardsmen. Two of them in reserve, obviously.

I cast Target on Horsemen (they have unlimited retaliation due to my son), but Bagu turns them into sheep or make them weaker through Pigmy. Things get worse when the orc boost his troops with Phantom or Berserk.

It seems key to get some of his units out of play, make them irrelevant. I try to do so through Ice Ball and Phantom, but haven't been very lucky so far.

[Sirlancelot]

Sigh. Now I'm struggling against Bagu. Any tip? It seems I cannot cope with his three spells per turn.

My army consist of Inquisitors, Black Dragons, Cyclops, Elves, Horsemen, Knights and Guardsmen. Two of them in reserve, obviously.

I cast Target on Horsemen (they have unlimited retaliation due to my son), but Bagu turns them into sheep or make them weaker through Pigmy. Things get worse when the orc boost his troops with Phantom or Berserk.

It seems key to get some of his units out of play, make them irrelevant. I try to do so through Ice Ball and Phantom, but haven't been very lucky so far.

I did it!! I defeated the bastard on my own!! Epic.

My tactic was to maximize damage output by using repetidaly Cloud of Poison, Black Hole even when such strategy implied sacrify some of my units. And put meanwhile the rest of my last troops at safe positions, boosting them with Enchanted Hero and Gizmo, and using Ice Ball as both a distraction and a weapon.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Glad you did it!

I think you're playing warrior, right?

Enchanted Hero is a very important spell to cast due to its autocast capability.

Could you not afford the Ancient Phoenix? What about getting your Evil Book to Level 3 or Summon Demon?

Glad Poison Could worked! I made that ability significantly better than the original. Also, I think Zerock's Wall can work really good for a Warrior as well as Lina's Ice Thorns for blocking troops, returning damage, etc. I'm glad Gizmo bailed you out.

As far as Karrador is concerned, it is important not to destroy his original stacks, but weaken them significantly so that the Dark Crystal summons new Undead troops that don't have the difficulty level bonuses applied to them; otherwise, if you destroy the original stacks, the Dark Crystal will just reanimate them.

Back to Bagud, I've never really had any trouble with him, either.

It is possible that since I like to end the game with Xeona and her Demon troops that they are just more powerful than some of the other troops. The ArchDemons are really potent with their Amalgamation ability and no retaliation and then Demons are really good with their summon and unlimited retaliation.

I actually haven't tried any other troop combinations since I like to cycle through each wife, having the 4 kids and then immediately moving on to the next wife (this works great for debugging, too). I find that when you can get each wife, that the troops she gives bonuses to are well suited to the area of the game you are going through.

My most difficult fight (where I usually can't do no loss) is fighting Xeona with Neoka's Elves. I find that Elves vs Demons is a poor matchup due to the fire vulnerability of the Elven Troops, but usually I have enough Ancient Ents to push through and since I'm about to switch to Xeona's troops, I don't necessarily mind losing most of my Elven troops during that battle.

Hey, by the way, did you run into any of the issues @SlickDragon mentioned, especially with the spell casting. I've been going through some of the code and I've never seen any issues before, but it is possible that there are some bugs lurking in there still.

Let me know how your fight with Haas goes! Also, what is your Hero Level and Spirit Levels now that you're at the end of the game?

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

Yeah, I beat Hass yesterday night with the warrior. Another epic fight, although surprisingly a bit easier than the others thanks to two factors: one, the sword you get from defeating Dreddho the Dragon in the tournament (+50% attack vs dragons); second, troops I bought specially designed to exploit Cloud of Poison. I purchased Royal Snakes and Shamans, to pair them with the cyclops and cast Cloud of Poison upon them when surrounded by dragons. He he, devastating.

And of course Enchanted hero, Gizmo, and the Reaper power to kill X% units from a troop (don't remember its name) were key again. First I went for the Ogres, then the dragons (tons of them) and finally face the Ancient ents (another +30 stack)

Finished the game with a level 30 character, 41 Zerock , 33 Sleem, 39 Lina and 47 Reaper.

Honestly I don't know if suffered all the bugs that Slick Dragon mentioned, I'm just certain about the archmages inability to shock and the weird critical percent calculations. I mean, some skills stated your troops would receive +30% to inflict a critical but only shown little increments in their related fields (tooltips)

Now started Armored Princess. =P I want to go with a ranged specialist this time, with Alchemists, Archmages and so on. What class would suit me better? =P I guess you didn't designed another version of your mod to AP, right?

[MattCaspermeyer]

Yeah, I beat Hass yesterday night with the warrior. Another epic fight, although surprisingly a bit easier than the others thanks to two factors: one, the sword you get from defeating Dreddho the Dragon in the tournament (+50% attack vs dragons); second, troops I bought specially designed to exploit Cloud of Poison. I purchased Royal Snakes and Shamans, to pair them with the cyclops and cast Cloud of Poison upon them when surrounded by dragons. He he, devastating.

And of course Enchanted hero, Gizmo, and the Reaper power to kill X% units from a troop (don't remember its name) were key again. First I went for the Ogres, then the dragons (tons of them) and finally face the Ancient ents (another +30 stack)

Finished the game with a level 30 character, 41 Zerock , 33 Sleem, 39 Lina and 47 Reaper.

Wow! That's pretty awesome! You got your spirits pretty high - for some reason, I try really hard to even out their levels.

That +50% attack vs dragons weapon is pretty awesome (I think you always get that from beating Dreddho, if memory serves).

I also presume you weren't able to do no loss - is that right or were you able to do no loss?

Honestly I don't know if suffered all the bugs that Slick Dragon mentioned, I'm just certain about the archmages inability to shock and the weird critical percent calculations. I mean, some skills stated your troops would receive +30% to inflict a critical but only shown little increments in their related fields (tooltips)

Yah, I've fixed the Archmages problem - I biffed the implementation of a parameter when I added the Blue Dragons.

I also messed up the Priests / Inquisitors - they couldn't use their Bless / Holy Rage skills and I've now fixed that, too.

I have some other fixes coming, too.

I haven't made a new release, yet, but I want to try to play a little and see if I can discover if @SlickDragon's bugs that I haven't been able to find, yet are real. I don't know if I have the time or inclination to play all the way through, but if I can at least play and double check all the bugs he's mentioned then I can feel better about putting up a new release (not that anyone's playing anymore).

Also, I think the Critical Hit issues are with the descriptions not being clear. I need to go back through them and ensure that they are clearer. Typically a lot of them work off of base and so one might say +30% Critical Hit, but it doesn't mean that it adds, but rather increases it 30%, and usually to its base. If the base is only 5% than it will only increase it 2% (rounding up). So I think that's where the confusion lies. I think when I first created those bonuses, I didn't realize how low some of the unit's Critical Hit chances were and so bonuses seem small, but I do remember comparing them to other stock TL Critical Hit bonuses and a lot of them worked the same way.

In the expansions, they are pretty stingy on Critical Hit bonuses like +3% and stuff like that.

Now started Armored Princess. =P I want to go with a ranged specialist this time, with Alchemists, Archmages and so on. What class would suit me better? =P I guess you didn't designed another version of your mod to AP, right?

Alas, I ran into a snag when I was working on my Tomes where I hit the limit of items that you can have in the game. With all the additional items they've added in the expansions, I don't have room for my additional stuff and so that took the wind out of my sails. Now I have no desire to spend a year plus working on a mod to that or any of the other expansions, because there is too much work play testing, etc. to iron out all the bugs.

There are still bugs in my H3B mod, apparently, and I've been working on that since 2010! 7 years is a long time, although I did take the last 3 years off away from King's Bounty.

I am going to try to see what I can do about fixing the current issues and would like to make things a little bit tougher for the Hard and Impossible difficultly levels.

Anyway, have fun with AP - I think it has a better engine than TL, but I still find that TL is my favorite!

Matt

[Sirlancelot]

Wow! That's pretty awesome! You got your spirits pretty high - for some reason, I try really hard to even out their levels.

That +50% attack vs dragons weapon is pretty awesome (I think you always get that from beating Dreddho, if memory serves).

I also presume you weren't able to do no loss - is that right or were you able to do no loss?

No, happily I couldn't. The mana and rage gain limitations work great against it. You really have to take money and supplies into account.


Yah, I've fixed the Archmages problem - I biffed the implementation of a parameter when I added the Blue Dragons.

I also messed up the Priests / Inquisitors - they couldn't use their Bless / Holy Rage skills and I've now fixed that, too.

I have some other fixes coming, too.

I haven't made a new release, yet, but I want to try to play a little and see if I can discover if @SlickDragon's bugs that I haven't been able to find, yet are real. I don't know if I have the time or inclination to play all the way through, but if I can at least play and double check all the bugs he's mentioned then I can feel better about putting up a new release (not that anyone's playing anymore).

Such are great news! Now that you're at it, perhaps might rethink about Gizmo. Its resurrection feature is really needed versus enemy heroes, but overpowered against regular armies. Remember it is even able to resurrect black dragons, cyclops and so on. (I hope this was intended!) :)


Also, I think the Critical Hit issues are with the descriptions not being clear. I need to go back through them and ensure that they are clearer. Typically a lot of them work off of base and so one might say +30% Critical Hit, but it doesn't mean that it adds, but rather increases it 30%, and usually to its base. If the base is only 5% than it will only increase it 2% (rounding up). So I think that's where the confusion lies. I think when I first created those bonuses, I didn't realize how low some of the unit's Critical Hit chances were and so bonuses seem small, but I do remember comparing them to other stock TL Critical Hit bonuses and a lot of them worked the same way.

In the expansions, they are pretty stingy on Critical Hit bonuses like +3% and stuff like that.

Yes, that was my impression, too. The target of the bonuses is not clear enough. Where it goes and how applies. The way it works in practical terms. Hence the confusion.


Alas, I ran into a snag when I was working on my Tomes where I hit the limit of items that you can have in the game. With all the additional items they've added in the expansions, I don't have room for my additional stuff and so that took the wind out of my sails. Now I have no desire to spend a year plus working on a mod to that or any of the other expansions, because there is too much work play testing, etc. to iron out all the bugs.

There are still bugs in my H3B mod, apparently, and I've been working on that since 2010! 7 years is a long time, although I did take the last 3 years off away from King's Bounty.

I am going to try to see what I can do about fixing the current issues and would like to make things a little bit tougher for the Hard and Impossible difficultly levels.Matt

Balance out a mod like this is never easy. There're so many novelties and modifications to keep in mind. Bug fixing also requires unusual playtesting, as sometimes some bugs only appear under x circumstances, where x is not your usual playing route.

[Sirlancelot]

By the way Matt, may I ask you a little question concerning AP? Does the hero has no choice when level up? I mean, in TL you can develop him the way you want, but in AP seems you always receive something fixed, like leadership upgrades or whatever.

[MattCaspermeyer]

No, happily I couldn't. The mana and rage gain limitations work great against it. You really have to take money and supplies into account.

I'm sure certain people can still do it no loss, but I'm glad it was a challenge for you as that was the intent! :-)

Such are great news! Now that you're at it, perhaps might rethink about Gizmo. Its resurrection feature is really needed versus enemy heroes, but overpowered against regular armies. Remember it is even able to resurrect black dragons, cyclops and so on. (I hope this was intended!) :)

Yep, resurrecting those creatures is the intent (I think I mentioned it in Gizmo's description that it can resurrect pretty much anything) and it focuses on level 5 troops first, since it "knows" that you cannot resurrect them.

The enemy heroes are much more powerful than the original TL and so I don't think it is possible to balance a non-enemy hero-led stack with an enemy hero-led stack (I have thought of the possibility of what to do with the gap since it widens as the game progresses), but I actually don't mind easier battles here and there since it helps take the pressure off and not make it so much of a grind and so the Spirit abilities (and Spell abilities for that matter) take in mind enemy hero fights (I treat them as Item fights) and so that is where the power comes from to help you push through those tough hero fights.

Plus, people will just kite around if things are too hard early (just like people do in the AP / CW / etc. and in WotN, I'd just fly around and snag all the goodies and purchase some good level 5 troops) and so it is nice that you don't have to do that too much (although it is nice to kite in Demonis the first time you get there to see what good troops and other goodies you can get).

I think with the mild increase in difficulty (actually hard is going to be closer to impossible, although not quite (say about 90% of what impossible currently is), and impossible is going to be about 25% harder than it is now) that the way I currently have things will work out - I'll see...

Yes, that was my impression, too. The target of the bonuses is not clear enough. Where it goes and how applies. The way it works in practical terms. Hence the confusion.

Some of this comes from me inheriting the descriptions from the original game, in which some of them were poorly translated to English. I think I just need to read through them again (and since I haven't read them in years, it will be like reading them for almost the first time!) and make them clearer if they are confusing. Some of it, though, comes from having to be choosy with the wording since I don't have much room in the description as well...

Balance out a mod like this is never easy. There're so many novelties and modifications to keep in mind. Bug fixing also requires unusual playtesting, as sometimes some bugs only appear under x circumstances, where x is not your usual playing route.

Yes, and sometimes when adding features, I break things accidentally, and although I do try to test to ensure that I haven't messed things up, sometimes I do miss things.

Balancing is tricky because it is different for every person. Make things too hard and then people don't want to play and the same with too easy. That's, of course, where the difficulty levels come in to play, but a one size fits all just doesn't exist and we, as humans, are very adaptable and often find strategies that are very effective compared to what the original developer intended.

So we'll see if I can squish some more bugs if I haven't found them, yet, and hopefully do a touch of refining, to what (in my biased opinion) is one of the best mods for TL!

Thanks again for all the comments!

:grin:

Matt

[MattCaspermeyer]

By the way Matt, may I ask you a little question concerning AP? Does the hero has no choice when level up? I mean, in TL you can develop him the way you want, but in AP seems you always receive something fixed, like leadership upgrades or whatever.

Yah - that's something I didn't like about how in AP it was just the automatic give you stuff on level up rather than have you choose.

I think since they scaled the hero level to increase more rapidly, they figured people didn't want to be bothered with having to choose something.

I like the TL way better, but I think it was a game engine choice, so I don't even think it would be possible to modify it - not sure.

Matt

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hey, everyone, hope you're all doing well!

So I've been sitting on some changes to my mod now for almost 4 years, with most of the changes done about that time ago, but with King's Bounty 2 out, I've had the itch to go back and see what I've done and then I've been able to add some new features within the last month.

Unfortunately, I only have one day a week to work on it and I've had only enough time to playtest a current change to ensure that it works as intended.

I'd like to release a V1.0 of my mod, which would quite possibly be the last release I do, but I was wondering if anyone was interested in doing some play testing for me to see if there are no game breaking bugs.

So either post here, or PM me and I can send you an unreleased version if you are interested in trying it out.

Matt

P.S. I am playing KB2, but I only have time to play it once a week as well (and usually I have to alternate between modding or playing KB2). I'll post some potential changes in the change list post so that you can at least see what I've been working on...