HOMM3 Tomes for AP Mini-Expansion Alpha now Available for Download!

[Sir Whiskers]

FYI, I stumbled across an interesting situation with your mod. If your hero is defeated, the game restarts her in Debir with her starting army. Because your mod randomizes the starting troops, she restarts with a random selection equal to her current leadership, with all five slots filled.

Not sure if this is really a problem or not. One could theoretically lose dozens of battles to recruit a large number of troops, keeping the best three in the castle. But the large number of options makes it difficult to spawn the same type of troop. Still, it was quite a surprise when I accidentally bumped into a stack I couldn't defeat and respawned with a much larger army.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Very good point, but I don't think it'll be a problem.

I have a parameter in LOGIC.TXT (releadmax in the difficulty_k section) that specifies the max leadership allowed for rebirth based on difficulty level.

Here are the current values per difficulty level:

1. Easy = 10,000
2. Normal = 5,000
3. Hard = 2,000
4. Impossible = 1,000

These values are easily changeable, but I think those are good first cut values (I could also (roughly) halve them, which I've heavily considered).

By the way, as an aside when it comes to my modding (if you haven't realized this already) I do my best to put limits on a feature that I implement, if it's possible, and add knobs to turn to adjust that feature accordingly.

The deal is, though, that even though the maximum Leadership is higher than it was originally, there was nothing preventing you from doing this in the original game and since you always got the same army, it was in fact much easier to do even though you got fewer troops.

You could easily set up a place where you can travel to rapidly, die, pop your rebirth troops into the Debir castle and then run to any enemy stack and die again to repeat and build your forces.

The only thing negatively affected is your score if you do this, but if you don't care about that then you can use this strategy.

Now, with all the variability that you've mentioned, it will take much more effort to garner an army with a consistent set of units. Just take the unit list and the number of slots and you can get a good idea of what the probability of getting a certain unit type is.

Here are the number of units available for each class:

1. Warrior: 73 (66 if playing on impossible due to all the level 5's (except Ogres) being over 1000 Leadership)
2. Paladin: 42 (36)
3. Mage: 48 (41)

The Warrior has the most unit choices and the Paladin the least so the Paladin would be easiest. Here is the chance of getting a particular unit for the Paladin: 1/42 + 1/41 + 1/40 + 1/39 + 1/38 = 100/799 ~ 1/8 (1/36 + 1/35 + 1/34 + 1/33 + 1/32 = 85/577 ~ 1/7 on impossible). So playing with the Paladin, you have about a 1 in 8 chance of getting 1 of the armies you'd like to grow (or 1 in 7 chance on impossible) with each successive death. However, if you'd like to get the same 5 units to grow, your chances now are (note that probabilities are now products instead of sums): 5/42 * 4/41 * 3/40 * 2/39 * 1/38 = 120/102,080,160 = 1/850,668 ~ 0 (5/36 * 4/35 * 3/34 * 2/33 * 1/32 = 120/452,339,040 = 1/376,992 ~ 0 on impossible) with each successive death.

These are very low odds for getting all 5 troops (and they drop even more for Mages and Warriors). While I think it may be possible to grow 1 or maybe even 2 troops with successive deaths if you have a lot of patience I think trying to build an army of the same 3, 4, or 5 this way is going to be a lesson in futility.

So I'm pretty sure this is going to be okay, but thanks for pointing this out!



/C\/C\

[Sir Whiskers]

Originally Posted by MattCaspermeyer

Very good point, but I don't think it'll be a problem.

I have a parameter in LOGIC.TXT (releadmax in the difficulty_k section) that specifies the max leadership allowed for rebirth based on difficulty level.

Here are the current values per difficulty level:

1. Easy = 10,000
2. Normal = 5,000
3. Hard = 2,000
4. Impossible = 1,000

These values are easily changeable, but I think those are good first cut values (I could also (roughly) halve them, which I've heavily considered).

By the way, as an aside when it comes to my modding (if you haven't realized this already) I do my best to put limits on a feature that I implement, if it's possible, and add knobs to turn to adjust that feature accordingly.

Interesting. I didn't know you had put in a cap. And I agree - even without a cap, the sheer variety of potential troops makes this a sub-par strategy. As a test, I quickly lost a half dozen fights. Keeping the best of each respawn, I ended up with 11 griffins, 7 druids, and two ents - not exactly a dominant army to restart with.

Besides, if someone really wants to use certain troops, there's already a mod allowing all troops on Debir.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Yah, I guess I didn't do a good enough job describing the changes - I've updated the original post to include mention of the leadership cap variable in LOGIC.TXT.

I'll try to mention things like this that are "under the hood" in the future so that people know about them.

Thanks for your comments!

/C\/C\

Originally Posted by Sir Whiskers

Interesting. I didn't know you had put in a cap. And I agree - even without a cap, the sheer variety of potential troops makes this a sub-par strategy. As a test, I quickly lost a half dozen fights. Keeping the best of each respawn, I ended up with 11 griffins, 7 druids, and two ents - not exactly a dominant army to restart with.

Besides, if someone really wants to use certain troops, there's already a mod allowing all troops on Debir.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Please find attached the next alpha release of the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Tomes mod!

There is still a lot of work to do, but this mod is playable (in Armored Princess at least) and gives out tomes so that you can at least see this part of the implementation. Unfortunately, I'm not sure why, but the mod crashes Crossworlds when starting a new game. I'm investigating this problem, but have no idea why it works in AP, but not CW. It may be related to having fewer resources in CW (possibly ITEMS.TXT or SPECIAL_PARAMS.TXT). I'll work on getting it working in CW down the road, but if you figure it out, then let me know how you got it to work!

I've implemented about 75% of the spell stuff, but a lot of the Tome bonuses for spells currently don't work because I have not implemented the LUA code as yet.

I also have not implemented any of my H3B TL functions (for the most part) and so most of the game should behave the same as it has before.

Here is what has been implemented, and it has been a tremendous effort to get to this stage!

• 180 New Tomes!
• New Tome item that is a combined Artifact / Regalia
• Each Tome has 4 upgrades, but you have to do some manual file editing to get it to work. This means there are technically 900 new items! See below...
• Detailed Descriptions for each Tome
• New item labels
• New item label icons for certain stat boosts
• Variable egg containers
• New Bill Gilbert portrait that gives you a new Tome after a certain number of battles. The portrait just needs to stay in your backpack for it to work. The current tome victory progression is: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, ... battles to give a new tome. The tome groups are listed in H3_CONFIG.TXT. This progression allows you to get a lot of tomes early in the game to try them out. The actual tome progression will be every 15 to 20 victories after I finish this alpha stage of development and move into the beta phase (which probably won't be for a long while).
• Unification of the spell power and description functions. Not all spells have been unified as yet (like most of the new AP / CW spells), but the plan is for all of the spells to use a common function for their power and descriptions. This makes this part of the coding much easier than coding each spell individually since it minimizes code duplication and errors.
• H3B spell bonus system - this system worked really well in TL. There will most likely need to be some tweaks to it for AP/CW.
• Most of the stuff from the previous alpha releases should be there as well, including the variable starting army and items.

There are a lot of other changes here and there that I just have not had a chance to list. Note that if you want to upgrade your tomes, you need to first get a tome (or some tomes) and then copy their level upgrades from H3_TOMES_UPGRADE.TXT to H3_TOMES.TXT. Note that you can't add all the tomes because the game will crash when trying to load too many items so you have to only add the ones that you'll use in your game. Also you'll need to remove some of the Level 1 tomes towards the end if you want to level up all your tomes, since there is only about room for 53 or so items beyond the 180 (I think that was in CW, there may be more available in AP). This is an experiment, I prefer not to do this, but I see no other alternative right now. To make it easier to do this, you'll need to extract H3_TOMES.TXT and H3_TOMES_UPGRADE.TXT from MOD_H3T.KFS (7Zip can extract from KFS without renaming to ZIP) so that you can readily edit them after you save and exit. Once you've made the changes you can go back into the game and continue from your save.

There are probably going to be a lot of bugs, since I've only played it a tiny bit, but as far as I can tell you should be able to start a new AP game and start playing. You can also just start a new game and use the cheat code "item TOME_NAME" to add a new tome to your inventory to check out the bonuses. To find the TOME_NAME just look in H3_TOMES.TXT, for example if you want to add Fafner, then issue "item tome_fafner" (without the quotes) from the cheat command line and then go check your inventory. If you don't have a new item, then check your spelling! Also, you'll see that some Tomes have CW only content and you'll see NF after the label name (this is with units and spells that aren't in AP). I think I'll at least add the CW spells to AP in the future, but I'm not sure about the units - we'll see how it goes...

There are a few tomes that are meant to be transformed into another (i.e. Feanora <-> Frog Feanora), but I have not implemented this yet (don't really know how to currently implement it, actually, but I think i'll be able to figure it out in the future) so certain tomes are technically not available.

Also if you see a Tome with a bonus of "gives your hero ... after x victories", note that I have not tested this at all yet. So it may or may not work. The good news is that if it doesn't work it is an LUA fix. As far as the tome bonuses are concerned, they are all implemented and so you should not have to start a new game with successive updates, although I wouldn't get too attached to the game you're playing right now as there may be changes down the road that will require you to restart.

Also note that the Tome Level 1 to Tome Level 2 upgrade battles are probably way too easy right now (I think you might be able to beat them with Amelie's starting army)! I'll look into making them tougher down the road...

I'm going to keep working on AP for now (technically it should work with CW, since I'm actually using the CW file for those files that are common between the two games, but I'm apparently exceeding CW's resources).

I also may have broken some bonuses on the normal items, since I commented some of them out and have not updated ITEMS.TXT - I'll fix those in the near future...

Note that I auto-generate quite a few files from my design spreasheet. This helps keep me sane, and also provides a lot of flexibility with respect to bonus implementation. The following files are autogenerated: H3_TOMES.TXT, ENG_H3_TOMES.LNG, ENG_H3_ITEM_LABELS.LNG, H3_SP_EFFECT.TXT, H3_SP_LEAD_GROUP.TXT, H3_SP_LEAD_RACE.TXT, H3_SP_LEAD_UNIT.TXT. I then manually comment out resources I'm not currently using since they are very precious as well as cut the Level 2-5 tomes out of H3_TOMES.TXT and paste them into H3_TOMES_UPGRADES.TXT!

At this stage nothing is set in stone with respect to bonuses, and so if you think a bonus seems too high or too low or there are too many or too few victories to get a gift from certain tomes we can change it for the most part. To keep resources low, I have a spell counter for each spell, but intend to set the actually bonus based on the level of the counter. So for example, sp_spell_lightning is set between 1 to 5 to indicate its level. I'll then scale damage, shock, etc. based on the level identified by the bonus. This is a lot different than what I did in TL where I had many different counters for each spell. Since I simply don't have the counter resources available in AP/CW I had to be a lot more judicious with their usage. So if you look at the various H3_SP... files you'll see that I have commented out all counter resources I'm currently not using.

Note that the forum is still messed up with respect to posting files and so once again I've split the download into 4 parts. After downloading, remove the trailing .zip from the end of each file and use 7Zip (or equivalent) to extract MOD_H3T.KFS and place it in either:

1. <DRIVE>:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\VirtualSto re\Program Files (x86)\1C Company\King's Bounty. Armored Princess\sessions\addon
   1. <DRIVE> is your drive letter for your Windows install
   2. <USERNAME> is your Windows login account name
2. AP_DIR\data\mods
3. AP_DIR\sessions\addon\mods

I'm not sure which location is better, but I had to place it in 1 above for it to work since I have been messing with the Editor - it would not work properly in 2 or 3 for me. I'm thinking because the folder in 1 above was added and is now being used by AP? Not sure.

As always, please provide any comments and thanks for trying out my mod!



Here are the files to download: