Hi Ecania, I have played for a while and can share some impressions and toughts. I cleared a large part of upper Debir and part of Kef Azisa cave.
First some adjustments I've made before starting the game on impossible :
- I've set alead=4.0 and the exp=4.0 in logic.txt, you left exp=2.5 and I think that leads to gathering too much experience.
- reduced the money to 0.4
- removed the deadmoney - 0.0 - no compensations for lost units in impossible
- increased spexp to 1.7 , otherwise the pet dragon is getting too much experience. Maybe it should be even 2.0.
- in logic.txt there is a parameter called rel_strength - I've increased the stats there exactly 3 times. They show the hints of the enemy army strength compared to my army strength. And when playing on 400% if you leave the old stats almost all armies on the screen are listed as lethal or impossible and by increasing the stats the armies are correctly described. In the normal Red Sands, you can kill almost every army that is described as lethal or impossible and now you can't
. Maybe you should increase these stats 2 times for the difficulties you provided.
The start was good and challenging , everything is well guarded and I only got to level2 before starting to fight. I really like the guarded shops and upgrade shrines you've made.
Some thoughts on the game :
-I think there are too many enemy armies on the map. I feel like they should be reduced like 3 times. That leads to too much experience for Amelie,asmadeo, the pet dragon and especially my army units experience. Amelie is now lvl8, asmadeo 11 , pet dragon 15 and units 7-8. And the enemy units are only around lvl3 . I think army exp. should be reduced 2 times. But for me it will be better just to reduce the enemies around the map 3 times. I'm starting to get bored fighting all those armies and started to avoid them. For example there is a really nice place on Debir with 3 shops and some power ups, I like that they are guarded on the inside, but on the map there were also like 4 armies or so. Also in Kef-azisa I'm already far too strong and all those weak armies are boring , I like how you built the cave with those halls and such , but there are so many armies I don't want to fight that I left the cave and couldn't explore it to the end.
-The changed creatures are awesome, most of them are really challenging. I'll just mention some that I didn't found logical:
Priest - too much leadership required almost like inquisitor and the unit is far weaker.
Pirate- resurrects like paladin. If he was some kind of a sea-priest I could understand if he could resurrect pirates and devilfishes
Rune mages are really overpowered with 3 charges of illusion , 1 is more then enough.
Some bugs I encountered :
-Medal Reptile Hunter doesn't count killed reptiles, it counts fights without losses. Two medals counting the same thing is not that interesting. I don't know if you made it on purpose.
-there is a map for Rusty Anchor on Scarlet Wind island and it's guard can be avoided. I don't know if it's intentional , I didn't used it so far. For example on Bolo there are 2 island maps that are guarded by immobile guards and that's good.
-the companion Jimmy Kraud can upgrade Royal thorns( I liked it very much
) , but it was done for 0 gold.
-the Inquisitor sounds are all like those of the orc-shamans , maybe because of the talent you gave them - it is not very important.
- The Medal Trapper says that all types of units count , but I've killed my own summoned units there and that doesn't count. Maybe it should say only enemy units count.
- The map doesn't show the real land I'm exploring. I tried extracting those files as you suggested but it doesn't work.
- One of my medals gives 10% damage bonus to crushing blow and ball of lightning ,but that bonus applies also to Dragon Dive.
- A chest in Kef-azisa gave me just an error message and nothing else.
I think you can adjust the difficulty on the start screen when starting a new game, because it is confusing when it shows the original game stats. It is located in eng_windows.lng which is in loc_ses.kfs.
That's all for now ,tomorrow will continue with some more gaming. I'm really enjoying much of the ideas and changes you've made
Thank you for the work !