New Mod Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Babies!

[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

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

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

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

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

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

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

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

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

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

/C\/C\

[Kiras]

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

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

[Fatt_Shade]

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

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

[jorko80]

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

[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by jorko80

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, I've finished implementing Blue Dragons!

Let me say, they are awesome!

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

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

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

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

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

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

/C\/C\

[Kiras]

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

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

[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

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

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



/C\/C\

[jorko80]

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

[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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...

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

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

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

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

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!

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

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

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

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

Well, thanks for the comments!

/C\/C\