New Mod Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Babies!

[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 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\

[MattCaspermeyer]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/C\/C\

[Sirlancelot]

Originally Posted by Kiras

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

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

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

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

[Kiras]

Originally Posted by Sirlancelot

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

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

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

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

[MattCaspermeyer]

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