New Mod Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Babies!

[MattCaspermeyer]

Interesting comments!

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

4) in skills.txt for necromancy you listed skeleton/zombie/ghost per skill lvl, what does it do?

This is in the original game and I'm not even sure if the game actually uses it, but I left it alone when modding the skill.

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

5) in xyz_babies.txt kid`s bonus
filter {
belligerent=ally
}
pbonus=defense,0,6,0,-100,0,0
dbonus=
rbonus=
attack_on=
attack_off=
Missing units for +6 def bonus, Or you planed to give 6 def with every kid ?.

Here's what this means - this is very important if you're going to mod the game.

filter {...} - this means that you can make this apply to the units specified by the filter. If you do not have anything here, then this will apply to every unit on the battlefield.

Valid values:
belligerent = ally or enemy to apply bonus to
race = human, orc, etc. to apply bonus to
level = value or level <= value, etc. level of units to apply bonus to
unit = list of unit(s) to apply bonus to

pbonus=... - use this for increasing unit statistics
dbonus=... - use this for increasing unit damage
rbonus=... - use this for increasing unit resistance
attack_on= - I have not used this, but I'm guessing that you can enable certain unit's attacks with this (I'll have to experiment with this)
attack_off= - I have not used this either, but I'm guessing that you can disable certain unit's attacks with this (this could be very powerful if an enemy hero can disable certain of your unit's abilities).

Note that there are 3 values after defense, then -100, and then two 0's. Here is the meaning of this (for any statistic):

pbonus, dbonus, rbonus = stat_name, absolute, percent_current, percent_base, duration, delete_on_damage, priority

Where:

stat_name =
pbonus = attack, defense, krit, health, initiative, moral (note that there is no "e" on the end of that), hitback, and speed.
dbonus and rbonus = astral, fire, magic, physical, poison
abosulte = if you place a value here, then it is added to (or subtracted from) that statistic directly.
percent_current = if you place a value here, then it scales the current value by that percent.
percent_base = if you place a value here, then is scales the base value by that percent.
duration = how long the effect lasts, -100 means that it lasts forever.
delete_on_damage = true / false, whether to remove the modifier when the unit dies.
priority = the priority of this effect.

Reference: Attack King's Bounty Library

So in the case above, that child will apply a very modest +6% (multiply defense by 1.06) to all of your unit's defense. For example a unit with defense = 50 will have a defense = 53. I think you can see that this is a very modest bonus.

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

And why setting sp_unit_lead_archer 2 times in kid`s bonuses ? Every kid which gives -lds for some unit have it listed 2 times in mods{}. Exp galthran(first kid) gives bonus for archer/skeleton -3% lds, and then again on bottom of list -26% lds. So how much does it lower unit leadership (does it stack) ?

They do stack - the reason why they are listed twice is because Galthran has two separate skills that contribute to the Leadership Requirement - one applies to all Undead (which has to list each set of units separately for them to stack properly), the other just to Skeleton Warriors and Skeleton Archers.

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

4)With zombie_rina and 4 kids, you can get -34lds% for all undead (for some units even more), and with necromancy skill this can go to -50%. A bit OP ? Why does every rina kid give lds for all undead?

Rina's babies will only max out at -33% Leadership Requirement for the Undead and then Rina herself is another -6%

Nonetheless, I've been thinking long and hard about this and realized that there is a possibility of getting this although it is low. How low?

2/19 * 1/18 * 1/17 * 2/16 = 0.0043% so you'd have to play 23,256 times to get the best Leadership Reduction Requirement bonus to occur just once!

So this is pretty much a non-issue if you can get this game then enjoy the rarity!

By the way, here are the other probabilities:

2/19 * 1/18 = 0.292% or 1 in 342 games for best 2 of them.
2/19 * 1/18 * 1/17 = 0.00344% or 1 in 2,907 games for best 3 of them.
or
2/19 * 1/18 * 2/17 = 0.0688% or 1 in 1.454 games for close to best 3 of them.
but
2/19 * 1/18 * 3/17 = 0.103% or 1 in 969 games for somewhere between close to best 3 of them and best 3 of them.

Also, if you're wondering, the chance of getting -12% LR to Undead from Rina babies:

13/19 * 12/18 * 11/17 * 10/16 = 18.4% or about 1 in 6 games!

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

6) kid_voy from feanora should place to mirabela, sea battle bonus seems logical.

I put a lot of thought into wife and baby choice. Think of the Frogus brothers. Feanora is the only wife with reptilian / amphibian blood in her so she gets all the HOMM3 Lizardmen and Troglodyte babies.

Mirabella is human and so she's only going to have human babies. I put a lot of thought into which wives have which babies and I tried to make the combinations somewhat plausible.

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

kid_tazar holy s...t

Tazar has Expert Armorer and Feanora's wife value is 7 so 7 * 3 = +21% Defense to all units or times 1.21. Not +21 defense (absolute) to all units like you were thinking - that'd be absurd!

By the way if you see something like that let me know because it would be wrong!

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

kid_young_sandro wtf is he doing in feanora babies ???

Well, to include Young Sandro in the game, I couldn't give him to Rina since she already had normal Sandro. I thought it would be neat to represent every HOMM3 Hero from the normal game to Armageddon's Blade and Shadow of Death. So 4 (okay really 5) heroes appear twice (Sandro, Haart, Gem, and Yog, but their pictures are different from the normal versions) so I didn't want to have the same baby with the same wife even though their picture was different. Young Sandro could have gone to any of the other wives, but I thought Feanora was a good candidate since she is in Marshan Swamp near the Cemetary. For Haart, since he turns into a Death Knight in HOMM3 Shadow of Death he went to Rina since she's miss Undead baby. Normal Haart is Mirabella's baby. Gem went to Diana (not much of stretch). Normal Gem is Neoka's. Young Yog is the only one kind of out of place - he's a genie (Diana has the genie babies including normal Yog) but is a Barbarian in HOMM3 with the Orc town, so I ended up giving him to Orcelyn even though he's blue-skinned because his bonuses were for Orcs. So maybe the stork picked up the wrong baby with Yog! Oh well! She says he's yours!

Oh yah, and I forgot about Dragon Mutare. Mutare is Gerda's baby, but for Dragon Mutare she's Xeona's! I guess you and a demoness can have a dragon baby!!! Why not? Or maybe the stork mixed up that one as well!

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

7) diana babies
kid_ shiva why not make bonus to all draogns, instead mixing all units, and only EGD ?
kid_kalt/lacus did you plan to give 9% magic dmg, and 9% poison res? Why not same bonus. 9% magic dmg,res, and other kid 9%poison dmg/res

Mutare gives bonuses to all dragons since she becomes a Dragon in HOMM3! Shiva originally had Thunderbirds and Rocs in HOMM3. There was no equivalent unit in KB so I thought she would be good to give bonuses to EGD's (no HOMM3 Heroes give bonuses to Emerald Dragons in that game). Also, Rashka (Xeona) gives bonuses to Red Dragons (no Efreet in KB) and Kilgor (Orcelyn) (no Behemoths in KB) gives bonuses to Black Dragons.

Kalt and Lacus are PlanesWalkers in HOMM3. This wasn't too tough of a choice to decide which wife to give these heroes to because Kalt is an Ice Elemental and Lacus a Water Elemental and since Diana is a River Fairy it made sense. Both HOMM3 Heroes applied bonuses to Ice and Water Elementals. Unfortunately there are no Ice and Water Elementals in KB so I decided that they'd give bonuses to units with physical (ice) and magic (water) damage +9% and then also (water based) give resistances to physical (ice) and poison (water).

Why magic for damage and poison for resistance? Well normally I'd probably make it the same, but none of the units that Diana gives bonuses to normally have poison damage and so 0 * 1.09 = 0. So it would be useless, but Sprites, Unicorns, etc. do magic damage and so that's why.

So those are correct.

There are other PlanesWalkers as well and so the mother I picked makes sense for all those as well.

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

sp_power_inc=count,9 i guess this is bonus% for destruction skill
sp_power_mod=count,1 but what is this ???

These are new bonuses that I added. These are a bit tricky with respect to balance and so we'll have to note if they are too high when playing.

The way they work is sp_power_inc is the power to add to the +10% to spell power for every 7 Intellect. So this bonus would give +19% - wow! Now the sp_power_mod is divided by two and subtracted from 7 so it would be 7-0.5=6.5. So that would be +19% to spell power for every 6.5 Intellect. That's a nice boost and babies with these stack.

Chance of getting the babies to max this out (one baby has Advanced Scholarship, the other 4 Basic)?

1/19 * 4/18 * 3/17 * 2/16 = 0.0258% or 1 out of 3,876 games to get max.
1/19 * 4/18 * 3/17 = 0.206% or 1 out of ~484 games to get the best 3 of them.
1/19 * 4/18 = 1.27% or 1 out of ~86 games to get the best 2 of them.

This is a bit borderline here with getting the best two of them. Something to consider...

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

8 ) xeona babies for kid_dace in the mods set sp_lead_unit_horseman/knight/orc2, you miss _ in those lines.

Awesome - great catch there! There may be more of these so keep your eyes open for them!

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

9) wives.txt for mirabela no need for human lvl 5 unit bonus. No human 5th lvl TL

Right, but when I move to Crossworlds, I won't have to change it!

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

10) maybe scale differently -lds% for wives, for 1st lvl units 15%, 2nd/13% , 3rd/11%, 4th/9% , 5th/7% , and why feanora have lowest lds reduction ? She give bonus for so few units, at least should be useful with them

You're wrong about Feanora's bonuses they are right between Rina's and Mirabella's / Gerda's individual unit Leadership Reduction bonuses.

Also note that there is more than simply Leadership Reduction bonuses - Feanora's kids have bonuses that apply to more areas.

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

11) you completely missed griffins in any wife lds reduction/stats bonus

You missed both Mirabella and her son Edric. Griffins get a great bonus!

Every unit is represented with a child bonus somewhere - I was very sure about this since in the end I had a few duplicates and needed to come up with a unique bonus for babies that had similar unit bonuses to prevent too much stacking.

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

And in the end rina is seriously overpowered, all her kids give lds for all undead. Change it so every kid, gives -lds% for some unit, not all race.

You're wrong about this - you're not considering probability once again and the way the wives and children were designed was to give bonuses to playing a certain set of units.

I encourage you to play it and let me know what you end up with in regards to the total Undead Leadership requirement reduction from Rina's Babies. I'm guessing you'll be somewhere between -12 to -18% and if you're fortunate, you'll get 1 child with a reduction to a couple of Undead units.

Look at Feanora's baby Korbac: -27% Leadership Requirements to Dragonflies (both Lake and Fire) and +7% Defense to all units. That's 1% better than Rina's Galthran Leadership Requirement to Skeleton Warriors and Skeleton Archers and 1% better than his defense to all units. Also instead of -3 Leadership Requirements to Undead, Korbac adds +1 Initiative to all units. Which is better? -3% Leadership Requirement to Undead or +1 Initiative to all units? You'll see that Feanora's values are higher for every equivalent value of Rina's babies.

The areas I actually may need to look at are the Skill Leadership Reductions, because these have no probability - just get all the prerequisite skills and runes and you're good to go.

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

Xeona also with 4 kids all unis in your army could have +40% dmg bonus and +4fire dmg which is to much.

Probability of this happening: 4/27 * 3/26 * 2/25 * 1/24 = 0.005698% or once every ~17,550 games! Enjoy that game when it comes around!

Other probabilities:

2/27 * 1/26 * 2/25 = 0.0228% or 1 in ~4388 games
2/27 * 1/26 = 0.285% or 1 in ~351 games

By the way, the only way to know if something's overpowered is to try it out and see. As I was learning how to mod the game, I needed to shift my paradigm of thought from the original The Legend game because of how much harder I've made it. Looking at the values does not tell the complete story!

I've also perturbed the values both low and high when setting the values to get a good idea of whether something is too low or too high and have hit the sweet spot with most stuff since I've played it.

Probability is a huge player when determining whether the stacking bonuses can get out of hand and I encourage you to consider the probability for even getting two babies you'd like to get for a wife. The minimum probability of repitition for the wife with the fewest children having 2 children of your choice is a 1 in 342 chance!

Playing the game is the only way to find out for certain and I do think it is fun to have a game every now and then where you have the possibility of really good bonuses, but as you can see, only a few people will ever experience the opportunity!

Also, if you're understanding what I'm saying look at the replayability value! You will most likely get a different set of children every time you replay the game! You can replay over and over and over again and you'll probably never see the exact same 4 children from a wife - ever!

Nonetheless, I'll consider what you've said and we'll go from there - thanks for the comments!

By the way, I'm considering the following skill leadership reduction changes:

1. Glory - reduction does not apply to Undead. Since the skill is in the Paladin Tree I've considered removing Undead from the Leadership Reduction Requirements bonus.
2. Necromancy - change it from -5, -10, and -15% to -2, -5, and -10%.
3. Ranged Specialist - change it from -5, -10, and -15% to -2, -5, and -10%.
4. Archmage - change it from -5, -10, and -15% to -2, -5, and -10%.

From skills:
1. Skeleton Archer: -10% + -15% +-15% = -40%!
2. Necromancer: -10% +-15% +-15% = -40%!

Changes would drop both of these to:
1. Skeleton Archer: -10% +-10% = -20%
2. Necromancer: -10% +-10% = -20%

Which would be half of what it is now and probably a lot better.

I've made the fixes to kid_dace in xeona_babies.txt and that will be in my next update - thanks again for pointing that out!

Okay, feel free to provide any additional comments - I also hope you've learned a bit more about modding!

/C\/C\