Answered here:

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...50&postcount=2

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Damn, my last post was on worng tread. I tohught was here :-(
So :
- in robber2.atom there is error in longattack
They have 8 charges for special attac, with 2 reload time. Intentional , or ???

- entangle for royal thorns not working :-( Tryed it in melee range, click on icon in unit many nothing happening .Have to right click to cancle it and choose other action. Did you make it owrk in your game ?

The number of moves on longattack is a bug - I had experimented with having reloading abilities run out after a certain time, but then went with disabling reload during long combats instead of charged reloads. I must have forgotten to remove that from the Marauders.

I'll check all the ATOM's for this bug in case there are others as well...

As far as the Royal Thorn's ability it was working the last I checked so make sure you're using the latest version or the update I'm planning on putting up this coming weekend...

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Any news for fix for frenzy skill Mat?

Found couple strange things :
in eng_homm3_babies_neoka.lng jenova and gelare have [gold350] instead [estate1] like other bonus gold giving kids,
same for rina kid nagash ,
rina / vidomina have -9%lds for bonedragon twice, as do death_haart twice bonedragon -lds% (but he have special bonus for bonedragons so maybe he`s ok)
xeona / dace ... weird choice of bonuses for him :-( In original it`s bonus for minotaurs, why not transfer it into demon unit bonuses,

I'm cranking away, hoping to get something out soon. I had a pretty good session last night - I've actually made some subtle changes to a lot of the LOC files, but am still working on getting Drahha to sell stuff.

Since that requires a restart, I'm trying to get it done with all the other restart stuff. If I can't get it to work, though, I'll release what I've got right now since it is a lot of changes and then continue working on it.

Since I've been playing in Windows 8 now, I've been finding bugs here and there that I didn't know about when I was developing in Windows 7. So this release is predominately a bugfix release.

That's valid - some of the heroes had the Estates skill and then some of them had the +350 gold / day bonus, so it is kind of like a super-charged Estates.

Sometimes I do that if the bonuses come from two different skills (i.e. one gives +9% and another gives the same bonus) and I leave them separate (I could easily combine them, but it doesn't matter). I'll double check them, though, to ensure I haven't accidentally listed the same bonus twice.

Yah, Dace was an interesting choice to choose what to do with him. There are no Minotaurs in the game, and maybe Demons would have been a good choice, but Marius does the Demon bonuses. I've tried not to duplicate, so I decided to give him all Warriors. The bonuses (since there are so many units that are warriors) are reduced due to that. His bonus is kind of like Pyre's (Ballista, original bonus) who has the same type of bonus, but to all Ranged units instead. Both of those could have different bonuses, but I thought it'd be nice to have some children that had bonuses to a lot of different units in case you wanted to add Knights or Horsemen, for example, to your Xeona babies and get some bonuses for them.

Kind of like Diana's Piquedram who gives bonuses to all plants, Mirabella's Christian who gives bonuses to all female troops, Mirabella's Roland who gives bonuses to Footmen, Guardsmen, Knights, and Horsemen, Neoka's Dracon who gives bonuses to all Mages, Orcelyn's Gurnisson who gives bonuses to all Orcs, Orcelyn's Krellion who gives bonuses to all Melee Orcs, Feanora's Arlach who gives bonuses to all Animals, Gerda's Ordwald who gives bonuses to all Dwarves, Rina's Sir Christain whose bonus is the same as Pyre's, or Xeona's Mutare Drake who gives bonuses to all Dragons. All these kids bonuses I tried to make unique since their skills applied to units that didn't exist in TL or were for the Ballista or other objects that didn't exist either.

I haven't gone through and re-aligned the bonuses for AP / CW, yet, but since there are more units available some of the bonuses may extend to new units or others might completely change. For example, Ordwald is a prime candidate for bonuses to Droids in AP / CW.

I may start working on posting all the changes since the list is long so you can see what changed and fixes that I've made so far...

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Damn :-(
Run into weird thing. That paladin game i started long ago, and now trying to finish i updated with latest mod version and now when i play 10 battles with Orcelyn and time for first baby game just drop to windows :-(
I had Rina, Feanora, Gerda, Mirabela and 4 kids with all of them no problems at all. Then i updated mod marry Orcelyn and got stuck. Weird thing is that even if i return previous mod version in what i started game (i saved it just in case) problem is still there. Any idea what to do ?

And idea how to add more moral lvls? With Gerda i had +4 for all dwarf units and +5 for giants (got Synca). I hound unit_morale.lua and morale.txt, anywhere else to look for change this feature.

I thought I fixed this problem already...
 

I thought I had fixed this problem! Hmmm... make sure that you're using the latest, the version with just mod_h3b.kfs - delete any other files in your mods folder if you got them.

If you think you have that, then what you need to do is look at WIFES.TXT and ORCELYN_BABIES.TXT. Go to Orcelyn's children= line in WIFES.TXT and then make sure all the kids listed (i.e. kid_crag_hack, kid_kilgor, etc.) exist in ORCELYN_BABIES.TXT. I did this in the latest update so they all should be there. Then go to ORCELYN_BABIES.TXT and make sure that your Gretchen has the same number of open braces ({) as close braces (}).

The error that I fixed (that you should have) was that she was missing a brace at the end of her fight section (just before her mods section) that caused all the other babies below her to become invalid.

Bad:

Good:

So check that you have at least this, if you have this, then there is another problem in that file that I need to find and fix, but the technique to use is the binary search technique where you delete half of her babies at the end of her children= line (pick the second half so remove from kid_saurug to the end of the line and don't forget the trailing comma), and then have that baby and see if it works. If it does, then add back in half of what you removed, and see if it works. If it doesn't then remove another half of her children until it works. Keep doing this until you find the child that is bugged.

If that is too much, just send me the save game and I'll track it down.

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Any idea about my moral question Mat ? I changed wife for Mirabella and got even more crazy thing (picture) - note that if i took regular swordman unit they`ll have +1 more because of `commander` guardsman talent.
I thought to make moral +/-6 lvls maybe , for each lvl 8% increase/decrease in unit stats. In this mod it`s very easy to get high moral for army, and in longer battles moral drop very low. So wanted to make it meaningful to got over +/-3 lvls.

Something to think about...
 

This is certainly something to think about. I want to be careful about short-circuiting too much of the in-built code.

For example, on the Hero Attack / Defense bonuses, the way it works now is that I manually adjust each unit's Critical Hit / Resist All. I need to find a better way to do that (especially for AP/CW since Critical Hit is shown on the Unit Cards and can't be short circuited) and if I did anything with letting Morale go higher than the ±3 rating I'd want to use the current system if I could extend it.

The other thing would be to rethink the baby Morale bonuses, but really Mirabella is the wife with the easiest chance to exceed the +3; however, as you state, you lose 1 Morale for each extended phase of long combats.

Right now, if a HOMM3 Baby has the Leadership Skill, they give +1 Morale for each level of that Leadership Skill.

When I implement such things in AP/CW, I may do things slightly differently with having that bonus work more like the Diplomacy skill works now. Not sure, but Catherine's Leadership skill, for example, would give +1 Morale to all human troops. That would be with her item level at level 1. Then as you level up Catherine's item level up to 5, the bonus would give +1 Morale to other races (i.e. Elves, then Dwarves, or maybe a couple of races together) until at Level 5 it was +1 Morale to all races.

For TL, since the children don't have levels it might make sense to have Leadership Level 1 babies give +% to Leadership and then Leadership Level 2 babies give +% to Leadership and then +1 Morale to all, but Mullich is the only Leadership Level 2 baby so then there'd pretty much be no baby Morale bonuses.

The way it works now might still be the best way, plus if you go into combat with +6 Morale, at least you can suffer 3 extended phase Morale penalties and still have max Morale. Plus don't forget about the new Bone Dragon Dread skill which is -3 Morale for Level 1-2 troops, -2 Morale for Level 3-4 troops, and -1 Morale for Level 5 troops. I may give other units -Morale capabilities now that it is easier to get it higher.

So this is something to think about - I need to do more research into the game's Morale system and where it is implemented...

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Almost forgot : Mirabela isn`t only way for high moral. You changed battle cry so it gives moral to units. My swordman got +11 moral with 2lvl battle cry spell :-)

At least I found out a way to get you to use Swordsmen!

:grin:

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Well with Sorsha, they are logical pick :-) And with low lds, they are great unit in high numbers.
On side note, i played with rage spirit files, and got to lina/gizmo. What dmg type is it`s attack ? For ice thorns, you make it physical , for slime there is poison type and physical for fishes. But for gizmo no dmg type ?

And rage spirit skills prevail physical dmg, and fire dmg not at all. Zerroc 3 phy skills, Sleem have 2 poison/1 phy , Lina 2 phy (orb and now ice thorns)/1 magic (i think gizmo is magic type), Death 2 astral, and soul rip i have no idea dmg type.
How about make falling rocks 50% phy/50% fire dmg ? Rocks falling from sky, burn chunks of lava ... ? Quake is pure phy dmg, and it makes sense , but how about making at least 1 rage skill part fire ?
And is there any way to make destroying rock wall and thorns to regain rage ? As it is now there are lots of situations i want to spend rage to get at least some exp for spirits, but without dmging enemy units i keep at bay before finishing battle. So my choices are rock wall/glot armor/frozen orb/time return. Only rage skill I as player can attack are wall and thorns, but as it is now they give absolutely no rage in return (as it is in Ap/CW). Idea is this possible.

Yah, Sorsha's great for Swordsmen / Guardsmen. :)

I thought Gizmo was Astral. In fact I just looked at it's not listed because they set it to Astral in SPIRIT_LINA.LUA. So it is Astral damage - that's why it's so good at attacking everyone.

Believe it or not, I tried making Spirit Abilities multi-damage types and it will end up showing the damage of only the first type listed. I played around with that quite a while back and never figured out how to get it to list both damage types so I gave up.

I'm not sure - these type of things are "pawns" and so they are treated like destroying barrels, etc. which don't give any rage either. I can see why they shouldn't generate rage though as they are just barriers and it'd be an easy thing to exploit.

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Does not reduce the negative moral the attack, defense, critical hits. This bug?

It should...
 

It should - I don't think I changed any of this. Can you show or describe an example, if possible?

Thanks!

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I tried to save a picture, but I do not know where to save the print screen button.
For example: If you are undead and people in the military, did not reduce the attack, defense, critical blow when poor morale. Nothing changes.

Let me investigate this further...
 

Screenshots are saved to:

C:\Users\<Your User Name>\Documents\My Games\Kings Bounty\screenshots

I'm not sure if I fully understand what you're saying, but here are some Morale comments:

• Undead do not have Morale
• The AI troops do not use Morale
• As I understood the game behavior in the original TL, I assumed that if your Morale changed during combat that the unit's values would change.
• There are quite a few units that give +Morale to other units in the original TL, but I have not checked to see that if they die, whether their bonuses disappear.

So I'm not sure if the actual Attack, Defense, and Critical attack values are changing (I think this is what you are saying) when your Morale changes during combat. The text tip on the happy / frowny face says that it has changed, but I haven't checked to see if the values actually have changed - I thought they were.

So let me investigate this further, I assumed that this part of the game was working in the original TL, but maybe it's not and I'll have to do something about it if possible...

Thanks for pointing this out!

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Thanks! Screenshot:

Wow - Morale Bonuses / Penalties not updated during combat
 

You know, it's kind of funny, but I never thought that part of the game would not work.

I never bothered to check whether your Attack, Defense, and Critical Hit were decreasing during combat as your Morale changed - I assumed it worked since this is part of the original game.

I guess the point is that now I have to fiddle with Attack, Defense, and Critical Hit when a unit's Morale changes.

Should be fun - not!;)

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Aside from a bit of a confusing name, it seems like you've created a really nice mod (and definately more than just a micro-expansion). I was just planning on playing through both Legend and Crossworlds once again. Might as well install your mod to spice things up. Is it compatible with the interface mod by the way (or does it include similar tweaks)?

Unfortunately, I do not have the interface mod, but I'm pretty sure it's not compatible.

It'd actually be nice to be able to look at that mod to be certain, so if you have it, could you please post it to this forum topic as it is no longer available - thanks!

I do have some improved information, especially on the spell hints, and new children, but not as extensive as the interface mod, which does sound like it has some good stuff (like listing the item sets and other things like that).

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One place i found interface mod (and some other old mods) available is:

http://spammmods.narod.ru/kb

The files with eng in the name are for english version.

Edit: posted the link in the other thread too.

After no idea how long playing this mod, and hoping for kids i need to be compatible with units/items i have at disposal in my playthrough i finally got idea how to get kids i want :-)
It`s hard spoiler , but it`s nice way to test ALL kids in 1 game for functionality and bugs.

I play paladin game, and with high lds gain/lvlup i want unit specific kids, not some intellect/spell bonus and with Orcelyn i got Merist, Bogarius, Crag Hack and Tiva. Great kid is Crag Hack , Boragus, and Merist noting special, but Tiva was total miss :-(

SPOILER : after getting some kid you dont like simply edit that kid with one you want in 2 mod files. So in orcelyn_babies.txt i just replaced names for Tiva and Gurnisson , and did same in eng_homm3_babies_orcelyn.lng . Game will replace mechanic for those 2 kids in already started play , and you can do this with all 4 kids to make your dream team :-D

For fun i changed to Diana, and took Piqueram , Thane , Dracon and Kalt. Play with 2x4000 thorn archer/thorn warrior , and 60 royal thorns with black thorn crown is interesting like hell. Only problem is i have no idea how to defeat Xeona with her fire rain spamming :-P

Have fun ppl :-)

You're bad!
 

Well that's just cheating (shakes head disapprovingly)!:evil:

For that matter, you can do that with items, skills, and spells.

You know, there's an even easier way if you're restarting: Just edit WIFES.TXT and remove all the kids from the wife's baby list except for the 4 that you want! Remember, you didn't hear that from me, though...:-P

Your way is a good way to try out different kids if you're already in game though:), but this all sounds a bit like Gattaca to me...:(

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P.S. Who are your wife kid dream teams?
P.P.S. Which kids have your favorite pictures? I always liked Shiva, Solmyr, Jenova, Adelaide, and Sandro.

Why cheating ? I already finished that play, and have save file with every wife with 4 kids. Just wanted to see how high bonuses can go for each wife/kid combo, for brute force or high spell dmg and so on.
In Ap part of forum on one tread impy played 100% spell dmg game, and got his intellect around 90+. So i wanted to see what tomes would be interesting to have when you finish mod ToMM for Ap/Cw. And from there just started playing with babies files and checking different combinations.

As for mechanics for cheating i know about items/spells/runes etc , but when you already get kid in game it impossible to change it from IN game, you have to changed files outside. And for your idea to get desired kids by deleting all others, it`s OK for starting new game, not one already playing.
Again i finished your mod with all 3 classes, on imp with 0 losses with no cheating, and now i wanted to see what are possibilities for Ap/Cw without losing to much time with starting new game and hoping to get what i need. Just load my save with certain wife and start cheating my end game stats to see what would be possible :-)

And as for my wife/kid dream team for paladin play (because huge leadership and ridiculous army size), either :
1) Neoka + Aeris / Monere / Pasis / Josephine. All sprite team with anga`s ruby + poison dagger/whip of pain dmg, and druids/inquisitors + ancient ents for support.

2) Diana + Piqueram / Thane / Dracon / Kalt. Thorn, thorn warrior, royal thorn, ancient ent and dryad dryad with (my modified - i changed it so it gives 80% dmg to 1st lvl plants, 30% to 4th lvl and 15% to 5th lvl so it help plant team, not just thorns) blackthorn crown as main dmg item :-) (with my end game stats i had when finished paladin play i calculated i would have 8500-9000 thorns , 150 royals and 40 ancient ents :-) Dmg is hilarious.

3) Mirabella + Sorsha / Tyris / Roland / Catherine. Swordman, guardsman, horseman, knights and inquisitor/archmage for support. Moral +5 to all humans (crit% is very high), huge number of physical troops (this is both good and bad), good physical resistance for melee clashes.

This is just some idea. But ofc for mage wife/kid dream team would be different.
Surprisingly best wife combo for mage class is Diana , who can give you kids with total 108% spell bonus, which is ridiculous :-)
Rina have worst kids for mage class :-(

Just expl what would be doable in Ap/Cw with good luck in tomes department (this was with Xeona + Zydar / Malekith / Ash / Xyron combo and 92 intellect hero , i cheated for testing purposes) :

Rrrrrinaaa's got a Dream Team!
 

Well, I was mostly kidding - mostly! ;)

Yep - your way is the way to go to see what's possible, which is quite fun to see how good it can get. I still disapprove! ;)

I'm not sure if it will be any easier with my AP / CW H3T mod since the heroes of HOMM3 are now grouped by their class and you'll cycle through picking from each group. Depending on how many battles you fight, you may only get 24 or so tomes a game - that's 2 to 3 heroes per group. But on the bright side, you'll be able to combine tomes from any group.

Those are some pretty good ones!

Yep - Diana can be super awesome with mage (that's why most of her babies are Genies and Elementals in HOMM3).

Yah, I think that is partly because she has the lowest level modifiers. I'm not sure if I'll be able to implement it, but after I get my AP / CW H3T mod done, I'll understand a lot better how to do the upgrades (maybe even add Morale) to the children so that their bonuses can increase if you decide to stick with them after a certain number of fights. That would level the playing field and also reward you for sticking with the earlier wives.

The Rina Dream Team would be: Death Haart, Vokial, Tamika, and Moandor if you're Pally because of -Leadership, etc. to Bone Dragons, Vampires, BlackKnights, and Necromancers. You also get the +24% to Spirit and Battle experience from Moandor (which is awesome for such an early child), +6% Melee Damage and +1 Poison Damage (awesome!) from Tamika, +24% Damage to Ranged Damage with Vokial for your Necromancers, and an additional -6% Undead Leadership Requirement with Death Haart.

So she's still got a dream team! :)

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I agree wth statement that Rina got dream team, but NOT for mage or paladin class :-( She have only 4 available kids intellect/spell oriented (Aislin, Nimbus, Sandro, Septienna ), and all off them give less bonus then 2 kids from Diana/Xeona. Also on that note Nimbus(18% intellect) and Nagash (24% mana , 84% gold) have to low bonuses :-(
And as you said paladin have highest leadership now and it`s great, but neither glory nor holy rage works on undead, so he have high lds, but need to spend lots of magic runes to get to necromancy and utilise undead army, and lots of might runes for dark commander to make them movable.
My thought is that warrior would be best class for all undead army. Dark commander easy, and magic runes he get only thing he needs is really necromancy skill, no need for to much upgrading other magic tree skills.

As for best kids Moandor is great if necromant rise undead is permanent like necromancy spell (if not then you dont need huge number of them, only 1 will be enough to cast plague on start of battle and that`s it for them. Death Hart and Vidomina are great -15%lds for all and -21%for bone dragons, but i would pick Vokial over Tamika regardless how crazy it seems (that +6%dmg and +1poison dmg would be great if you lead thousands of skeletons and spiders, but for leading bone dragons, 2*vampires, black knights, necromants that +dmg is not so much). And Vokial gives +24% attack for necromants not 24%dmg = 3 dmg for 1 unit in army.
With Haart, Vidomina, Vokial, Moandor and 3rd lvl necromancy you`ll have -31% for all undead and more reduction for vampires, necromants and bone dragons. All in all nice team build But to limiting, since only bonus you get next to lds reduction and little boost for those 4 troops. No hp bonus, resistances, moral etc like for living units with other kids.
All in all Rina is interesting for playing, but you get her on start when there are no undead available, and even those you can find are total crap (some zombies, and skeletons in Marshan swamp with no way of keeping them alive). If there`s way to upgrade Rina or something like that once you get to undead lands beyond Elven territory it would be great to keep her, beyond that she`s not much of a keeper :-(

Hello Mat :-)
I`m back after disappointment WotN turned out to be :-(
Currently spend more time checking how you modded certain things, instead playing, and found some weird things.
1) for rage spirits Lina Devatron skill, in lina.atom and eng_spirits.lng
codes dont match. In eng_spirits file you made code for your new dmging/freexing ice shards, but in lina.atom there is old code for upgrading passive shards that only block (lowering rage cost, and rest time). There is nothing connecting exploding/freezing shards to make them work on lvlup. And i cant make them work at all in my game :-(

2) you added some new lvls , mostly for lowering rest on certain skills death - rage gain/black hole, in their .atom files, but forgot to add same lvlup code lines in eng_spirits.lng file.

Hope to see/play some rough version for Ap/Cw and help bug proofing at least :-)

Do you have the latest mod?
 

Yah I stopped before the spider fight because I didn't want the game spoiled by playing with all the bugs. Now I'm worried that they won't fix all the issues and just gave up since there hasn't been an update since January it seems like.

Hmmm... not working for you? I checked all this stuff out and it works.

Here's what I got for LINA.ATOM, devatron:

Does your LINA.ATOM have this?

Here's ENG_SPIRITS.LNG for devatron:

lIs this what you see? You can see that the levels, rage, and rest all match.

Did you start a new game? If you loaded an old save then that might be the problem since I'm not sure what would happen.

Are you sure about this, too? I tested all this - I used the cheat codes to level the spirits all the way up and it all worked fine.

For Death:

1. Reaping
   1. 7 levels
   2. 3 rage level ups
   3. 4 rest level ups
2. Rage Gain
   1. 8 levels
   2. 2 rage level ups
   3. 4 rest level ups
3. Time Return
   1. 5 levels
   2. 2 rage level ups
   3. 4 rest level ups
4. Black Hole
   1. 5 levels
   2. 2 rage level ups
   3. 4 rest level ups

Both my DEATH.ATOM and ENG_SPIRITS.LNG are matched here.

You might want to re-download the 5-part update and re-extract it and check with the above.

Yah, that makes two of us - I'm working on the Tomes right now and just need to finish the Fight and Mod sections. I don't have anything to put up right now, but hoping to get the Fight and Mod sections done.

Once I get that done, I should be able to complete the *.LNG for it and then hopefully I can release another alpha. I'm still working on getting the bonus sections down, but I have the codes for all the upgrades as well as the functions needed to have the Tome morale work.

I also got the groups defined and the Bill Gilbert picture works at handing out a random tome. So we'll see how it goes...

Back to the H3B mod, the only thing I can suggest is to double check that you got the March 18th version and you probably should restart your game if you haven't as there are too many changes for it to work properly with an older save I'm guessing...

Let me know how it goes...

Matt

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Yea, i had version from February , and there was source of problem for devatron, and lvlup missing lines for death spirit :-(

And now remembered this :
- did you change something in quest part where you exchange dragonfly wings for magic crystals in Greenworth, in village near castle. In old game was 3 wings for 1 crystal, and now i get 3 crystals for 1 wing.

- do you know where is formula for spirit exp gain in battles? I`m testing lvlup for some skills on start with this lineup 2x1 inquisitor - rage generators, 2x1 dryad - enemy controlling (got them random on game start), 1x1 marauder - gold digging unit, (i got gift spell early so i use search on every dead unit, and with weak dryad plant summons i`m 8lvl hero, with 350k gold in Greenworth/Verlon forest :-) My total army leadership is 270, and when i battle enemy that are marked as invincible and have total leadership of 2000+ i use rage spirits all time and keep whole enemy army asleep and kill stacks 1by1. Even though enemy is 10x stronger leadership wise and my rage skills exp gain should be nominal value from .atom file x10. But i get only nominal value listed after each rage skill use. Any idea where/how to change this?

Here's the spirit experience detailed info
 

Ok, glad you got that sorted out! :)

Yep, I sure did - now you can get rid of all your dragonfly wings and it helps get you more crystals, which you still won't have enough of anyway.

Yah, Dryads are very powerful vs non-mind immune level 1-3 units, especially early in the game.

As far as the spirit experience gain, it is all done internally. The only thing that can be done is to scale the base spirit experience, which you see in their ATOM's or increase the sp_addexp_spirit counter via items / skills. If you look at SPIRITS_COMMON.LUA you'll see the function spirit_after_hit where it computes the base spirit experience from the spirit's ATOM (this is exp_add) and then modifies it with sp_addexp_spirit (this is exp_bonus) and then it uses the Attack library function add_exp to take the exp_add * exp_bonus and determine internally what the actual experience rise is.

The internal spirit experience gain formula is listed in the King's Bounty user manual, which can be downloaded somewhere here on the forum. I implemented this formula (and this is the exact same formula you see in CW for the spirit experience during battle), but found that it doesn't quite give you the same experience from this formula so there's something going on internally that is slightly different than what is described. That is why you see that I list an experience range during combat because I don't know exactly what the add_exp Attack library function is doing in the C++ code. Some of this variability is also related to whether you are using a "static" versus "dynamic" spirit ability. Static abilities are ones that don't do any damage while dynamic abilities are ones where you do. Since the experience gain formula factors in unit deaths when using it I can't know beforehand (except maybe for mass damage abilities) how much damage you're going to do. So for static abilities I should know how much experience you should get, but found that it could be off by 1, hence the range (i.e. 4-5 experience) for even static abilities.

Well, anyway, that's probably too much information, but that's what's going on there.

Matt

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Hello. Thanks for the great mod. I just want to share some impressions.
The good part:
-the babies are a really good idea. Now it's actually good to have babies.Before I always used the slots for artifacts.
-the wife companions give really good bonuses and you can try the game with a different approach. Before the good wifes were just 2 or 3.
-many changes add a different experience
the bad part:
-The spirits are way too powerful. I don't know if thats normal ,but my evil shoal did 900-1100 dmg at lvl 4.
-Generally I found the game very very easy and got bored at some point,no real challenge.
I even played harder then you intended. I have changed the impossible difficulty to 300% and the bosses to 500% and also the money income from 0.6 to 0.4 . But nevertheless it was very easy. Killing the Turtle with 10 000 hit points was very easy. The idea for difficulty changes I've got,because previously I played a russian mod called : "grandmaster" - it is really a big challenge . Also the spells in your mod are with really high prices ,but there are so many that can be found and sold that it just makes aquiring money faster.
Some bugs I encountered :
-The werewolf hero in Darion crashed always my game, I had to edit him and remove his spells in order to finish this quest. He had 3 spells,I don't know which is responsible for the crashing.
-When my hero is in a castle and I have 5 armies and click an army in the garrison ,it just vanishes, then I discovered it was added in my reserve slot,but I haven't access to it yet.
I stopped playing after clearing the Pirate Islands. Maybe later the game will be more difficult , if it is please share :)
Thanks one more time for the mod.

Hi jorko80 :-)
First of glad you joined this group in HoMM3 experience.
As for your notations :
- Spirits - you had luck with random upgrading Sleem, with 4 skills, and many more lvls for each (max spirit lvl is 48 now) it hard to get lvlup choices you want/need. best worst thing in this game is randomness and you had good pick this time, and next time you could have horrible lvlup choice item/unit distribution and so on. Only thing i can say is that it changes throughout game.
- I agree in this mod, start is rather easy, even on impossible for those with a bit more experience in KB series. Money never was much of a problem in this game, so higher price of spells is OK. Changing enemy army and bosses early might be fun, but later you`ll have very hard time, because with further location all enemy units get % bonuses for their stats : more hp, more att/def/speed ... And resistances so higher dmg for rage spirits will be welcome in late Hadar, elven/undead lands and demon realm. For me hardest challenges in this mod are enemy heroes, because Mat made them so they give their units bonuses same as you with skills/items. Expl : enemy hero with highest attribute intellect will have higher magic and cast 2 spells per turn, for 2/4/6 turns in battle depending on hero lvl. Those who have intellect above 30 will cast 3 spells/turn. Enemy with highest attack will lower your unit initiative/speed in first 2 turns and give crit% to their units(i`m not sure about this), and high defense hero will give more resistance to his units, or lower you own units. You have time to get to Sonya in elven islands , but she have high intellect, and defense so she lowers you units magic resistance -40% , and cast 3rd lvl lightning spell 2 time/turn with devastating effects to your troops (Mat added bonuses to spells shock effect with working +turns with every 15 intellect , i say working because this didnt apply in original game settings). So trust me, later in game normal enemy stacks will be just something to try new tactics, but real fights wil be with enemy heroes. All up to dwarf lands are rather easy , but elven/undead/demon land heroes are horrible on impossible difficulty lvl :-)

For bugs, i hope Mat will check what problem is, i didnt encounter that with werewolf hero. Just go through dwarf areas, and you`ll have much more fun after that :-)

Great Comments!
 

Thanks!

By the way, which version are you playing? V2013-03-18?

I worked a lot on this and am currently working on this part for my AP / CW version of the mod. I'm taking a slightly different take this time around, but I think it will greatly add to the flavor of the game like it has done here with TL.

Well, one of the issues that I had with the original game was that the spirit abilities were too low in power. So I bumped up their abilities so that you have a good rise in their damage, but I did it so that it was in line with what you might be doing damage-wise with your units and spells at that point in the game.

I also did my best to make each spirit ability useful. I think you'll find that they are all pretty useful now. The toughest one to make useful was Poison Cloud, but I think I got it such that you can do some serious damage with it if you decide to level it up.

Can you do me a favor and post a screenie of your hero screen at a certain point (or points) in the game so that I can get a feel for what your army lineup was, etc.? Maybe you can also tell me which spells you were using a lot, general strategies, etc.

Well, I'm sorry to hear that - can you go into more detail as to how it was too easy and boring?

For example, do you skip battles and save fights for later so that you can get easy victories for tallying victory counters for items. Or do you clear an area as you get to it. Do you go into each battle with full rage, etc.

Well, I don't think the Turtle is supposed to be that hard and once you survive its area of effect attack without taking losses you can pretty much finish it off no matter how many hitpoints it has (well at least until you run out of mana). Did you experience the rage / mana gain decreasing effects, yet as the combat goes longer?

By the way, I did not do anything to change the boss battles, they were left alone. So I don't think you'll see much difference from the Kraken and Spider, either.

Have you tried any item suppression fights, yet? You should note that they are more challenging.

This is certainly true, and you can buy lots of stuff early if you sell early, but it may make sense to not sell those spells until you get your trade skill up to level 3 since you'll probably want more money for later...

Okay - I will look into this problem and see if I can find what is crashing the game. Also, if memory serves, I may have fixed this in a recent update if you're not using the latest version.

Hmmm... I don't think I've seen this problem, but I've had a problem where I'm in the castle screen and it will stop showing me the item hints. I wonder if this is related...

If I reload from the autosave when you enter the castle it is okay. I'll see if I can recreate the army garrison problem you're having and try my best to fix it. The item hint problem I've only seen twice in my entire play-through and so I haven't been able to track it down.

Once again, your version of the mod here will be helpful...

Some of this may be related to the changes I made to some of the *.LOC files so I'll try to track these down, but they're tough to repeat so it makes it really hard for me to fix them.

Can you do me a favor and keep playing? I'd like to hear if it gets difficult at any stage for you.

Plus, you'll have to share with me some of your strategies for why it is so easy early. Which class are you playing? Any opinion on the skill tree changes? It sounds like you're playing on impossible.

Did you try to fight any heroes too early in the game and lose to them? There are plenty of heroes that should be really challenging early in the game, so I'm guessing you bypassed them until you were higher level. For example, the Ghost in Verlon Forest is usually too hard until you are about her level. I find that most heroes are hard to dispatch when you are a lower level than they are.

For me, personally, I find the game challenging during the hero battles throughout on impossible, but when I play I fight as few battles as possible until I get Rina and then I fight 40 battles to get her children and then switch to Feanora and do the same, switching every 40 battles to a new wife so that I can ensure that the children work properly as I debug-play my mod. So I get a bit of a reset on the bonuses every 40 battles (although I'll put items in those slots if I got them) and I tend to not sell spells until I get my Trade up to level 3 so that I can maximize my cash earnings since I end up spending the money on Crystals and Runes later.

I do mow through "normal" battles pretty easily, but since you can always bypass battles that are too hard until later, there is really not much I can do about that. The hero battles, though, I find tough and Xeona is especially difficult if you try to get her as soon as possible as you probably can't beat her without losses on impossible until you are at least her level or possibly higher.

Anyway, it'd be great to hear some of your strategies in more detail to give me a feel for how you're playing the game and I also have a game change idea that I'm probably going to implement with my AP / CW mod that will make the "normal" battles harder, but since you can bypass them for the most part anyway, I'm not sure how much good it will do.

By the way, do you use the units that you get bonuses from with each wife / their children or do you just use your favorite units available?

Questions, questions, but the more information you can provide the more useful it will be for me if I make changes in the future or I can use this information to help me with my AP / CW version of the mod.

Thanks again for you great comments and please keep them coming as that's really the only way I can improve this mod! :)

Matt

/C\/C\

This is somewhat true - I'll revisit the spirit level ups and if it looks like you can get levelups that are too powerful for your level I can always increase the level requirements. I'll leave it alone for now, but it is certainly something that can be looked at...

I think if you're an experienced KB player you won't have any money problems because you don't lose many (if any) troops early in the game and you don't waste your money on stuff that you know isn't worth it.

It's funny, though, I end up whittling my gold down so that when I divorce my wife she gets nothin'! ;)

There is the fine balance between making it too hard / easy for veteran / new players. If you've done no loss blahbitty-blah challenge this and challenge that then you know a lot of the ins and outs of the game and making it hard for you would make it unduly hard for a new player. So the idea is to bring you along slowly (maybe too slowly if you're experienced), but by the time you get to the mid- and end-game you are fighting battles that are challenging, but ones you've also been trained for by playing the earlier part of the game and noting that it is starting to get harder and harder.

Actually I used the hero's level as criteria #1 - see LOGIC.TXT, ehlvldbc in the difficulty_k section and the hero's mana pool as criteria #2 (also in LOGIC.TXT, ehmanadbc). For impossible, heroes >= level 25 get +1 cast and then heroes >= 200 mana get +1 cast. If the hero has both then they get +2 (for a total of 3 casts per round). The 2/4/6 turns are for your mage hero with Higher Magic - enemy heroes get it for the entire combat, but they usually pick the expensive mana spells and can't continue to cast that many because they run their mana pool down.

Enemy heroes have classes of Warrior, Paladin, and Mage just like you and so what Fatt_Shade is getting at here is that the enemy Warrior and Paladin "skill" bonuses reduce stats of your troops such as initiative and speed, for example. Mage enemy heroes get -resistance to your units with their "Destroyer" skill equivalent since you cannot give enemy heroes mod bonuses (i.e. such as bonuses to fire spells).

If you want to see the exact enemy hero "skill" bonuses I posted exactly what they were here. This shows the exact system that I used for generating the enemy hero "fight" section bonuses based on skills that were from your skill tree, but modified per the restrictions of what could be implemented.

I thought this was a really important aspect to include because it allowed the spell casting of both you and the enemy heroes to be increased. What is really nice is that you have total control over which spells this affects and which ones it doesn't as specified in SPELLS.TXT. This is an "under-the-hood" improvement that is very subtle, but I think makes the game a lot more enjoyable.

Yep, just like you get much more powerful with lots of skills so do the enemy heroes and they become very tough during the mid to latter part of the game.

Even early game heroes such as Egirra (the level 7 Ghost with Evil Book) will kick your tail if you're not ready for them (she is in Verlon Forest sometimes, close to the entrance). Not that I've tried really hard, but I haven't beaten her when I've been lower level than her, yet as her Evil Book's (even though they're only level 1) will tear you up!

Of course Fatt_Shade mentioned Sonya, but even Book of Evil @level 23 will give you a very hard time if you're not level 23 yet because it has enhanced Evil Books @level 3 and not to mention level 27 Ambrosius, level 23 Xeona, level 25 Raab Sotten, and level 27 Baal. So get ready for those hero battles!

Also we haven't even mentioned the item suppression fights, which can be very challenging as well since the Tower's spells are based off of the units you use (so for example if you attack with Dragons, then Friendly Towers will cast Dragon Slayer or if you have plants, then Evil Towers will cast fire spells).

I'll see what I can do here - I'm pretty sure that the Werewolf Hero bug I fixed a while back because I think I ran into the same problem that @jorko80 mentioned. I think it was a misspelling of a spell name or something like that, but I'll still double check it to be certain.

Thanks for your comments!

Matt

/C\/C\

I'm trying out the latest version and have run into two bugs so far.

1. When using Griffin eggs, if I use multiple eggs, I only receive 1 griffin per two eggs, rounded down. If I use one egg at a time, I get 1 griffin per egg.

2. I have a fatal crash to desktop (no error message) when fighting Butory (the bandit leader in Marshan Swamp). It occurs as soon as he can act in the battle, which suggests it may be a spell issue. I tried to attach my save file, but the website keeps giving me an error when I do so.

(Note: I modded hero.txt to add a lot of creature containers - eggs - for testing, but otherwise made no changes to the game files.)

Sorry ,my post is a little messed up, my messages start with 2 dashes beneath yours.

Whoops - I see my error on the eggs!
 

Whoops! I see my error on the eggs - my bad! I'll fix that right away. (The Dragon Eggs are messed up, too).

I'll look into Dirty Butory. You're probably right about it being a spell. Hmmm... his spells are Shroud, Berserker, and Ghost Sword. @jorko80 mentioned he had problems with Martin Vodash and his spells are Berserker, Pain Mirror, and Shroud. So the two common spells are Berserker and Shroud. I'll see if these spells are the problem.

I'll try to get an update out to at least fix the egg problem this weekend and we'll see what I can find out about the crash to desktop problem...

Thanks for reporting these issues! :)

Matt

/C\/C\

P.S. By the way, the forum has been messed up since about the middle of March with respect to posting files on the forum. I did message @Nike-IT on the problem and a ticket was issued to fix the problem, but it still persists. I'm not sure what to do at this stage, but you can email me your save game file and I'll see if I can find the problem (my email is in the readme file for my mod) straightaway.

Hello ppl :-)

Warrior is probably first class to upgrade `Master of spirits` skill and upgrade rage skills faster, but trust me later in game enemy heroes with high intellect will devastate you with much more powerful spells then your rage skills are. Wall is useless against enemy range units and flyers, so it`s not overpowered, it`s just you didnt get to strong enough enemy. Placing it in front of enemy dwarf army with alchemist/cannoners/giants wont mean much. Or vs demon(demoness swap, and wall you placed to block enemy, become obstacle for your unit escape)/dragon army. Also piranha shoal is pure physical dmg skill, it will be much less in power vs demons/dragons/ghosts/black knights/... I`ll repeat myself and ask you to try a bit further to check elven/undead lands.

Spells are changed in mechanics and gain with intellect, and work great. Warrior is not class that should rely to much on spellbook to finish his battles (haste/slow/stone skin etc all bennefitial spells are his to use, but you should forget dmg spells with warrior class). With high enough intellect even weakness become great spell : fighting vs Misticus in undead lands, i had Dryads, 2xFairies, druids, Inquisitors. He cast mass weakness and all my fairies gone from dmg 4-5 to 0-0, and druids/inquisitors to 3-3. So it`s not only make your unit do minimum dmg, but even lowers minimal dmg unit make, with higher intellect. As for sacrifice it`s % is low on first lvl, but on higher lvls and more int points you get insane numbers (with 3rd lvl, and 52 intellect you make 10k dmg, and 365% increase). Mana shield gives 250% defense bonus, and +40mana for 6 hits. Precision give +400%dmg for range units mass effect ... And so on, spells are supposed to work great on high intellect, not for warrior with less then 10 points in it. But on other hand warrior have his own perks.

That +1 speed is allot in beginning, but later you`ll can use slow/have kids that give -1speed to all enemy units/lvlup tactics skill/or fight enemy units that +1speed means nothing (dragons,fairies,archdemons,demoness ...), or vs enemy heroes that use teleport spell. So that +1 speed is nuisance at start, later you`ll simply except it as normal.

Simple increase in `meat %` as you said it, means nothing in tactical approach to battle. In Red sands mod for Ap/Cw they made something similar but every stack you fight along the way have different increase of stats by random generator. Bad thing they did there is minimal increase in low number stats : speed for slow units, and hp for weak units. So later in game on Elon for example you find 10000 fairies 10th lvl with 35hp each. Or thousands of barbarians with speed 6 and initiative 12. Increase is good, but not in absolute numbers, but percentages. I agree that +1 speed is allot when you have no units/items/spells ... but that lasts only for a little while(first 3-4 areas).

Try some higher lvl items. Fighting with 1000hp towers, that have initiative 15 and cast horribly strong spells is a test :-) I fought marshal baton upgrade, and towers cast 4000dmg fire rain, lightning that shock my units for 5 turns, and summon 500+ bowman/swordman. It was interesting fight.

My advice is to save game before you change wife. Just so you can see how different is tactical approach to battles with different lineups with different wife/kids. here both wife and kids are much different then in original the Legend ,and i like change and unique buffs you get with each kid :-)


In the end, about crash with Dirty Butory and Martin Vodash, berserk is my bet. Probably enemy hero cast it, and get in loop trying to control that unit, but cant because it refuses to act. Weird thing is, when i cast berserk on some of my units. it make no problems :-(

EDIT : As for rage spirit exp gain, i checked spirit_common.lua file in the Legend (600B), and compared it to similar file in Ap/Cw exp_pet_hint.lua (6kB) around 10 times larger file. In the Legend only is listed base exp from each spirit , with addexp_spirit in case of master of spirits skill, or some item/kid that gives bonus exp for rage skills. But in Ap/Cw there is code line added for current enemy/ally leadership ratio, and that is great bonus in case of small army fighting larger enemy. i mentioned couple posts before i try lvling spirits with 3x1 inquisitors (rage generators) and 2x1 dryads(sleep - control enemy stacks). This works great for first couple areas because dryads control all 3rd lvl enemy, and i use rage skills every turn. What i didnt expect is that spirit exp gain have absolutely no connection with your army total lds in the legend :-(
In Ap/Cw i had battles where in first turn use some pet dragon rage skill and get 700 exp for it. But here with spirits up to 48th lvl , it will be pain getting them up there :-( New lvls and added effects are great (stun/bleeding for Zerock, freeze for Lina) and i like them. Only problem is later in game when you pass 20 lvl for hero, getting spirits from 35 to 36 lvl takes at least 10 long battles with using mostly rage instead your troops. And as Mat mentioned, changing base exp gain in spirit .atom files might be only solution for now. At least until we get full mod for Ap/Cw and start bug proofing it :-)

These are great comments!
 

It is good to finally see some discussion! So please keep it coming! :)

With respect to increases, the way it works is it is always a percentage.

So if you have units with a speed of 2, you need a 50% increase to get them up to 3. I like the rounding approach (i.e. 2.5 will get you up to 3 so you can just have a 25% increase in stats). I'm a big fan of stronger units and leaving the impossible 170% leadership increase alone because I think it gets a bit boring when you give the computer insane numbers, but that's me. Why not set this value to 1000 if you really want a challenge? That just seems tedious to me, though, and so I left alead at 170 and decided to make the game harder in other ways. So to that end I created the new bonus modifiers in the difficulty_k section in LOGIC.TXT to implement this design philosophy:

eunit - this is the statistic scaler (or gain) per difficulty level. You'll note here that for impossible it is set to 1.25. So you can scale alead like you've done (to 300%) or you can leave alead alone and change this value. It is your choice.
maplocden - this scales units based on their map location. Smaller values (divisors) give a larger increase to enemy unit statistics that is additive with eunit based on far into the game you are. So for impossible the divisor is 4 so that will give you an additional +25% (100 is the maximum map difficulty value and I think either 0 or 1 is the minimum, so 100/4=25) to enemy unit statistics when you are in the last area (or hardest areas as I think both Murock and the turtle's back give you +25%). When starting in Greenwort, this is only +1% so it scales nicely throughout the game. So with this, the enemy unit statistic bonus scales from 1.25 to 1.5.
releadmax - this is the maximum leadership (in units) that you'll get when you lose a battle and restart outside the castle with the regenerated army.
minstatinc - this specifies the minimum increase in a unit's statistic from the eunit and maplocden bonuses. For impossible this is set to one, and so is why you see units with +1 speed and initiative always. I put this one in as mentioned above, but it is really needed to give units with 1 in their statistic category a bonus as they wouldn't get it until the last area (if at all) with the 1.5 total bonus from eunit and maplocden. But you can set this to 0 and rely on eunit and maplocden by themselves to increase the enemy unit's stats if you'd like.
ehlvldbc - level at which enemy heroes double cast, mentioned previously.
ehmanadbc - mana at which enemy heroes double cast, mentioned previously.

For the 2 above you may be wondering why I don't use the enemy hero's intellect. Well guess what, I can't get their intellect where the double cast bonus must be applied, so I use mana as a pseudo intellect instead.

roundmrgk1, 2, and 3 - these set the rounds where your mana and rage gain change to only 50%, then 25%, and finally 0%.
roundehero, tower, and boss - these set additive rounds to roundmrgk1, 2, and 3 when fighting enemy heroes, towers, and bosses.

So you can see that I've added quite a few knobs you can twist if you find the game too easy / difficult. So I encourage you to play around with these knobs if you're finding my mod to not be satisfying as I think you can see here that you can literally make it impossible if you give too much bonus to enemy unit statistics or shorten the number of rounds where you have nominal mana and rage regeneration.

@Fatt_Shade pretty much brought up all the points about the spirit abilities and really there is not much I can do because of the game's nonlinearity with respect to skipping things that are too difficult and returning to them later.

Case in point: Sleem's level requirements for getting level4 fishes (where you are doing 900-1100 damage) is level 7 (Sleem's level, not your hero's). I could increase this level higher if you'd rather struggle with 475-625 for a bit longer, but you'll find due to the nonlinear gameplay that languishing at this amount of damage can make Evil Shoal pretty useless. And this is pretty much the only skill you can use to level up Sleem rapidly due to the Spirit Experience game mechanics. Also, since Evil Shoal can damage your own units you are mostly limited to using Evil Shoal on round 1 after that it becomes harder to use it without damaging your own troops so the damage needs to be high otherwise you're not going to use it.

Since you're playing Warrior, I think you can appreciate that you can actually now do damage with your Spirits whereas before you pretty much were stuck with Black Hole and using spells. So maybe this will grow on you as you play the game further...

Okay, I'll look into the crashes - Berserk is my guess, too, although I know it has worked in the past. So I'll see if I can track down this problem...

I've already fixed the Griffin / Dragon Egg problem and will post a new update shortly...

Thanks again for the feedback and keep the comments coming!

Matt

/C\/C\

Hi Matt , Fatt Shade!


Ok, I understand that,but that means that later in the game units with just 4 base speed will get to my side on the first turn if they have +2 speed boost ability and if they are combined with good shooters and fliers and it becomes impossible to stop them. That's only an estimate ofcourse,because I didn't played the game to that point. And I guess that dragons and some other creatures will have speeds of 11-12 ,making them absolutely unstoppable. I think that just +1 speed bonus to a creature is more then enough to make it much harder,but I guess I'll try your version and see what happens :).

I like this idea.


Those knobs are really nice.Thanks for the explanation also.

The nonlinearity is something good in my opinion. I don't want to fight everything I meet in the second I meet it, I want to be challenged and to have to think harder. I like to compare it with HOMM games ,when you see a difficult army you return later for it. But still I'll try playing with a different approach to see the overall feeling. I think I will start a new game with 170% or 200% max as you intended it to be,because later such high number of creatures with such speed will be awful. And ofcourse I need to finish one game to the end to be able to make more complete comments .
And about sacrifice, it is of little use in late game,because the player already have access to many different creatures ,almost always in unlimited numbers, so it is usable in early game, when you find some creatures that are not enough to fill your leadership and with carefull planning you can increase them to the number you like with sacrifice, I just think the initial % should be higher.

I agree percentage increase is better. I played version 1.8 of red sands(russian) and with Grandmaster on top of it. It is really well balanced ,provides much challenge and the levels of the units are well thought. I never saw a barbarian with 12 init, or maybe when they use their special they receive 12 ,but thats normal. I don't know which is the latest english version, but maybe it is not balanced so good.

P.S. Can you guys tell me how to find a specific hero in order to edit him? It was a lot a of searching in order to edit the werewolf hero and now if the game crashes when I fight Butori , I have to search again. I know the numbers are area related somehow,but if you know some specifics I will be thankful.

Great Discussion!
 

Your statements are true, but now you may have a use for the Slow Spell and it becomes mass at level 3 and so it is something to consider with respect to strategy. I think you'll end up liking it as you now think about how can you slow the enemy down, and then the Black Dragon's Magic Immunity really comes into play so they get a bit tougher, but not too much.

There are other strategies, too, like you mentioned the Wall and then there's the new improved Ice Thorns that can damage and block your enemies now (although these are more for ground troops) as well as other strategies to slow them down (including flyers), which you'll discover.

We're in agreement here - that's why I've done what I've done to accommodate the variability in play...

I'll look into Sacrifice and see if it merits an increase, but one thing you'll learn as you play is that your spells continuously improve throughout the game because there are quite a few extra bonuses that you get from my mod that weren't included in the stock game (for example, for every hero level you get a +1% increase in spell power).

So like Fatt_Shade mentioned spells can get pretty potent towards the end if you're a Mage. Since you're playing Warrior, you can't expect it to be as good as the Mage's and so perhaps Sacrifice is not the best strategy for a Warrior to boost rare troops early in the game. Plus I did try to pepper in some of the more obscure troops by editing the *.LOC files. If you get plants (i.e. Royal Thorns and Ents later) you can grow their numbers by using Thorns / Thorn Warrior's Gift of Life Skill.

Plus, I'm not sure if you've noticed the containers (i.e. eggs, sprouts, coffins, etc.), but they are now variable and that provides another way to replenish troops. So for example, Spider Eggs produce all the spider variants (it is random) and the same with Snake Eggs. You can get either Skeletons or Archers from Skeleton Coffins and Vampires or Ancient Vampires from Vampire Coffins. You can get Royal Thorns from Sprouts if you have enough and the same is true with getting Ancient Ents from Ent Seeds if you use enough.

I edited the *.LOC files to increase the chance of finding these containers in the various shops throughout the lands. For example, there is now a chance that a Ghost ship can sell Skeleton or Vampire Coffins or the Royal Thorn in Greenwort may be able to sell you enough Thorn Sprouts so that you can get a Royal Thorn for your army.

These are troops that aren't used as often, but offer a path for increasing their numbers when it is hard to find them in shops.

Sounds interesting, I didn't really know about the Grandmaster that you mentioned, but it sounds like they did a great job from your impression of it.

I found the error (Shroud) and fixed it in a new update so you can download it. :grin:

I do have an Excel Spreadsheet with the *.HERO file references and their original statistics as well as my enemy skill design sheet and the new hero designs. I'll snap out the HERO file reference worksheet and post it on here for reference...

Once again, thanks for your comments - they've really been interesting and helpful...

Matt

/C\/C\

You make it sound as the slow spell was useless, but that was the first spell I wanted to aquire before ,especially in GM . And now in the beginning it's a bit useless and later we'll see :)

I discovered that yesterday, I like it a lot, finally some use for these things, I like it when all the things in the game are usable and make you think harder what to choose to do with them ,not just sell them.

About that mod, it aims to remove all abusive strategies in the game, not just increasing the meat% . So there are a lot of changes to creatures,abilities and everything. For example the mage can cast double only 3 times at expert level. The balancing is amazing. You are thrown in the game and seeing the armies, you wonder : LOL how the hell can I kill that? . But knowing that the russian guys did it, means that there is a way :). The first thing is realizing the truth that you are not ready to fight right away,so you start thinking : can I perform some quests in order to become stronger, what is possible without fighting and etc. Also when you are a bit familiar with KB , the original impossible difficulty really feels as normal, absolutely easy.

Thanks :)
Thank you very much for this .

So yesterday, I started your mod again, this time at 170% with a mage hero. Only 2 changes in logic.txt , the money income is 0.4 and so far it is good. And the boss attack and hp is 500% and the turtle was a bit easy,but I guess next time I will make it 1000% as in GM. As I think of it now, your mod makes my creatures even stronger then in the original game and the bosses suck big time, leaving them with no changes makes them something quite ordinary and they shouldn't be. And also the name "impossible" should stand for itself.
So far I managed to clear Darion without the swamp, then cleared the turtle and got to the pirate lands to see if there is something interesting and performing 2-3 not fighting quests to hopefully raise 1 level. Now the feeling and the challenge with the mage is quite better than with the warrior. The spirits are hard to use every battle as it should be with a mage, my shoal does only 250-350 so it's completely normal. So my thoughts about that are that the shoal must be balanced somehow. It's like having a chain lightning that costs 10 mana and does 1000 damage to 5 units in the beginning of the game with a mage for example.
Two questions :
- I've read that the ghosts have 80% might damage resistance, but in my games they have 95% ,is that supposed to be in "impossible" ? Anyway I managed to kill the undead armies, but they are quite a challenge compared to the other armies and the feeling is different. Maybe 90% should be enough. I will see what happens in the late game.
- On level 4 with the mage I was offered 72 leadership and took it. Then on level 6 I was offered 76 leadership , that was a bit shocking, is it normal ? Can you give me the chart by which the mage receives leadership ?

P.S. Just found a really unpleasant bug. The heroes I fight in castles don't appear in battle, it's just the army without any hero bonuses. That applies to Baron Norge, Frogus Bagaba and Enemen. I tried to fight Lucky James and there everything seems normal. The first three I did not find in your xls-description so maybe you didn't changed them ,but something prevents the game from using their original .hero files.

Slow is not useless on start, just not strong enough. As i mentioned before, now all spells work as described in original game, but didnt work like that. Now with every 15intellect you get +1 turn for spells that have lasting effect. So for 1 lvl slow and 15 intellect you`ll have -2 speed for enemy units. For 3rd lvl slow and 30 intellect, you`ll have -4 speed to all enemy, which is great. And as Mat said, spells are suposed to be mage`s best weapon, now warriors.

Since here we have only 3 boss fights (Turtle, Kraken, Spider) and each is a bit easy for time you`re supposed to fight it. When this mod goes to Ap/Cw i expect to have a bit more fun in Droid and Gremilion battles, not to mention Baal and Ktahu end game bosses, with huge summoning stacks and strong AOE attacks.

As for your questions, i`ll try to help as i can :
1) Ghosts resistances - ghost have nominal 80% physical res, but for impossible difficulty they get 25% of that, so it`s 80% + 0,25x80% = 100% but since max resistance for some dmg type is 95% then it`s capped to 95%.
And they have vunerability to magic -100%, and they gain 25% of that for impossible diff settings, so it`s -100% +0.25x100 = -75%. So they gain resistance compared to normal diff lvl.
Same goes for plants and fire vunerability , or some human units and physical dmg.

2) Here all is random, and that includes lvlup rewards. Try to get near lvlup, and go to some are and save game. Fight 1 battle to get lvl and see choices, save after that. Load before battle and change area and fight to gain lvl. You`ll get different reward choice. I`m not sure how this is calculated, but as i figured it out, harder areas give higher rewards. So if you gain lvl 5 in Greenwort you`ll get lower reward then in Marshan swamp, because swamp have harder battles to fight and therefor give higher rewards on lvlup.
SPOILER :
Simple test for this is just on start (begin new game to try it). Right on start after talking to king go to swamp, and take quest to blow up alchemist cauldron, and receive stinky potion form witch but dont go to alchemist. Save game. Open inventory , and use potion (right click on it, and `use`) it should give you some exp points 150 for paladin, 100 for warrior, and 200 for mage class and that should be enough for you to lvlup), and you`ll see what reward you get for 2nd lvl in swamp. Load game, go to Greeworth use potion, and see reward for it, load game go to Arlania/Verlon forest ... I think you get my point. For tactician with enough nerves this can give significant bonuses on start of game. Later 15+ lvl it become difficult to calculate how much battles you need to make this happen , and in areas you cleared there are no enemy stacks for you to lvlup on. For this i always have some high lvl item to suppress.

Hope i helped :-)

Excellent Points!
 

Okay, sounds good - I just wanted to point out that increased speed can be countered...

Glad you like them!

I set out to do this a well, but only with the most abusive strategies and I don't like to limit spells except by their power and your mana. For example, Invisibility is limited to level 4 units so you can no longer do the single Emerald Green Dragon strategy, but you're only limited by the number of crystals you get to get it as high of a level as you need and then the mana that you have during combat.

Also the mana_rage_gain_k that reduces and prevents mana and rage regeneration during combat eliminates strategies of going 100 rounds to rebuild your army for no losses. Also, you'll note that your troops become tired during extended combat and they'll begin to lose their effectiveness.

I'm not sure what you mean by the double spell (unless you're referring to Phantom), but these types of strategies are mitigated by the fact that a lot of the enemy heroes have the Dispel spell and so that spell is easily dealt with by enemy heroes (as well as the aforementioned mana_rage_gain_k).

Most of the starting units were left untouched so it is possible that it is due to other changes.

I'd probably be more apt to make the Turtle's powers stronger rather than just give it more health. But you have to remember that this is a gate to other areas of the game and making it too hard would just turn people off. So perhaps with you changing its health it's then a personal choice for you to make it harder. I think you can see that there are probably enough knobs in my mod to make it really challenging for you, but since I didn't touch this area of the game I'll think about possible changes here. For the Kraken and the Spider there's really nothing I can do there as no matter how hard I make it you can just skip them and do them at the end of the game (well, I guess if you want to marry Mirabella then maybe you have incentive to fight the Kraken earlier).

You'll note that there are greater differences between the hero classes now and so you saw how good the Warrior was with Rage Spirits early and conversely you're finding out how much less effective they are with the Mage.

I did make some slight level changes in the latest update to Evil Shoal requiring a higher Sleem level to get to the damages you were seeing so maybe it is enough, but it doesn't really affect the game in the latter part if you can maximize that spirit ability, which you haven't seen yet.

I think for the most part when it comes to the spirit abilities is that all of them are useful if you decide to put points into them, but due to the spirit level-up mechanics you'll want to maximize your mass damage abilities since they garner the most experience per use. So you'll find that the utility of the single or no damage abilities becomes second to leveling your spirits.

Fatt_Shade is 100% correct on this assessment - don't forget that all enemy unit statistics are modified by the difficulty level scaler plus the map location divisor.

The game used to use the leadtable in HERO.TXT, but it was changed I'm guessing in patch 1.6 or 1.7. Now the leadership increase is the range specified in the hero's level-up section times their level. For mage, that is 10 to 20 times their level. So you can see that you were pretty close to the max at level 4 (20 * 4 = 80) whereas level 6 you were a bit below average (15 * 6 = 90). Curse that random number generator at level 6, but praise it at level 4! :grin:

You know, I thought the same thing as you - didn't they partake in the combat? But then I looked for their *.HERO file and they didn't have one. I also went and looked up what was supposed to take place with this combat (I can't quite remember it was either in the *.QST or *.LOC files (or maybe both!)) and noticed that there was no hero listed so I thought I was simply mistaken and that these battles were always without their heroes.

Am I mistaken here? I can't find where I changed this and I don't find any reference to these heroes partaking so I think it was just that my memory (and perhaps yours) were wrong here and those heroes never partook in the combat.

Like you said Lucky James is there and you can see his *.HERO file in my list (you even see some heroes that are not in the game that I found in the *.HERO files) so this is how these battles go, I guess.

Well, thanks again for the comments. I can see that your level of play is pretty high and so it will be interesting to see how you do when you play the game further than you have and whether you run into any trouble...

Matt

/C\/C\

This mod is amazing. I've played the game for yet another 40 hours ever since I installed the mod. Absolutely brilliant.

I do seem to have run into an issue, though. I married Orcerlyn for her weapon slots (she has two of them), and everything was going fine for a while. I'm a mage but my archer army now does about as much damage as my spells. Nothing beats the Rage Spirits, though. I love what you did with them. Ice Orb is crazy now.

Unfortunately, I seem to have run into an issue. After my next fight, Orcelyn will ask my character to get her pregnant, and while I've seen how awesome the new kids are in this mod (Rina had 4 children before she was divorced), I'd rather not get kids since I don't actually use orcs.

The thing, though, is that I can't seem to say no to Orcelyn. The only dialogue options aren't actually dialogue. They seemed liked placeholders. And whichever I choose, she gets pregnant, with the first option making her expect it in 10 battles and the second in 5 battles.

Any help would be appreciated. I'd rather not wait until Xeona to get 2 weapon slots. Thank you!

Try talking to her prior to your next fight, and selecting the last option - something like "No, I don't need anything". My understanding is that you have to talk to your wife every so often (every 10-15 battles?), or she'll start nagging you about having kids. This should reset that counter, so she doesn't ask you to get her pregnant.

I know this works to keep Feona from turning into a frog, but I believe it also keeps her from asking about kids, which is why I think it will work with Orcelyn. Hope this helps.

And yes, this is an outstanding mod. :grin:

Thank you. I will try this. I actually ditched her for the River Fairy. I have been dominating Demonis with an army of fairies.

Thanks for the kinds words, I'll look into Orcelyn...
 

Thanks! It has been a lot of hard work!

Ice Orb is awesome now, until you start fighting lots of armies with fire damage - so look out in Demonis and when fighting dragons!

Don't forget that Orcelyn has plenty of children that apply bonuses to units other than just Orcs: Crag Hack, Kilgor, Erdamon, Dessa, Gundula, Saurug, Zubin, Aikin, Drakon, Merist, Rosic, Tiva, and Young Yog = 13. Her Orc bonus babies are: Gretchen, Gurnisson, Jabarkas, Krellion, Tyraxor, Vey, and Boragus = 7. So more than half her children (13 out of 20) don't provide direct Orc bonuses.

It's pretty much like this for all the wives - they have children with bonuses to the units of the wife's race and then other children with more generic bonuses in case you don't want to use units of the wife's race. Of course it is all random, but on average you have 1-2 (really 1.5 or so) babies with bonuses to units of the wife's race and 2-3 (really 2.5 or so) babies with bonuses to all units. Some wives are a little more biased than the others as it depends on the number of units there are in a race.

For example with Gerda, there are only 5 Dwarven units and I lumped Miners and Dwarves together and Alchemists and Cannoneers together plus 1 Giant bonus child for 3 babies with Dwarven unit bonuses, plus 1 more with an all Dwarf unit bonus for a total of 4 out 19 kids (so only ~1/5) with Dwarf only unit bonuses.

On the other hand with Rina / Zombie Rina there are 14 Undead units and 8 kids with Undead unit bonuses out of 19 kids (so almost half).

Yah I probably need to work on her dialogue a bit more. I forget which wife I patterned Orcelyn after, but like Sir Whiskers says they all pester you after a certain period of time to have kids. There should be a "no" path in the dialog that allows you to keep deferring the decision to have kids, but I'll double check it...

I think you'll love finishing the game up with Xeona and demons! She is my favorite wife and I love playing the demon units!

Thanks again to you and Sir Whiskers for your kind words about my mod! :grin:

Matt

/C\/C\

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.

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.

Okay, let me work on fixing this problem...
 

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:

Select choice 3 - exit, look at Orcelyn and it shows that she's not having any kids after x victories.

Select choice 1:

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:

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***

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\

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.

@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 :-)

Oh - let me look into this then...
 

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\

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.

No Restart Required!
 

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\

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.

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" :)

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.

Superb comments!
 

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

That makes two of us! :)

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...

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.

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

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! :)

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

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! ;)

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

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...

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...

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.

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...

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

I'll second the wife / kids question!

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.

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...

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...

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!

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! ;)

Fatt_Shade is right here...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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'm a huge fan of this system! :)

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

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\

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 :
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 :-)

Good Ideas!
 

Ha! That's funny!

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

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

Matt

/C\/C\

Bugs Update...
 

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...

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

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...

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\

I like that :)

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

Sounds good :)


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.



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 :)


We'll see about that :P

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...

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.

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.


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.

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.


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.

:) :)



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

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 :)

Very good points!
 

I got some ideas here...

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...

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...

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:

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

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

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

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.

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...

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...

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

I attached the GM mod to this message.


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 :)

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

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.


Sounds good

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.


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.

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.

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.

Thanks for GM and great comments!
 

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

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...

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...

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.

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.

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\

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.

;

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.


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 :)

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.

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 :)

@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

Glad you finished it - thanks for the comments!
 

I'm glad you persevered and finished it!

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.

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...

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...

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).

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.

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...

Okay.

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

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

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.

Okay, will revisit...

Okay, will revisit...

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...

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

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?

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...

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\

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.

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

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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

Thanks for the comments!
 

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...

That's too bad! ;)

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...

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

Perhaps you're right.

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...

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).

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\

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

Well in Ap/Cw there is `Voice of dragon` which will be easy to set to -lds for dragons or something like that.

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.

Thanks!
 

Thanks for the great comments!:-)

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.

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\

Blue Dragons are Coming!
 

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\

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

Good ideas!
 

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

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.

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.

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

Another interesting idea. Hmmm...

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!":)).

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 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\

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.

Edited: Wrong topic!

Implementing Summon Dragonfly for 1 Blue Dragon Ability
 

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\

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.

Found a bug - thanks! And interesting comments!
 

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

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...

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)

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.

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\

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.

@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.

Awesome comments!
 

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

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!

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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\

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.

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 ?

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 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...

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...

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!

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\

Blue Dragon Update...
 

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\

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.

Only so much time in the day...
 

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\

Blue Dragons Done!
 

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\

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\

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 :)