[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by jorko80

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

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

Originally Posted by jorko80

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.

Glad you like them!

Originally Posted by jorko80

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.

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).

Originally Posted by jorko80

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.

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).

Originally Posted by jorko80

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.

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.

Originally Posted by jorko80

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.

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.

Originally Posted by jorko80

- 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 ?

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!

Originally Posted by jorko80

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.

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\