My Shades, Why Are They So Fickle (Help!)

Psientist · #1 July 10th, 2007, 01:56 PM

OK, so in my next release of Mytheology (2.03), I'm going to have a series of ritual spells to create your own stonehenges. Each stone has its own special ability to benefit the province it's in. All the stones work as expected (with minor artifacts left from the limitations of #copystats and #clearwhatever) except for one.

I have one stone which is sort of a giant tombstone; it has fear (it's scary!) and can summon shades in battle because I #copystats from the Lord of the Gates. Everything works great... I've stripped almost all of the Lord of the Gates attributes / magic, and the shades appear in battle.

Except that they always immediately leave. Morale is high, they aren't being banished, but in the first turn of battle, they act like they are being routed (they aren't).

The stone has #poorundeadleader, and I even tried giving it death magic 1. It is, of course, inanimate and immobile.

Any ideas why those shades would keep bailing like that? My alternative would be to give the stone a domsummon of corpsecandles or other grave denizen, but I wanted something that would be cheap, not dominion dependent, and not unbalance gameplay (which the ability to create units with domsummon could potentially do).

Psientist · #2 July 12th, 2007, 10:00 AM

Well, fortunately I figured out the problem through lots of trial-and-error.

The stones had their #morale set to 50 (like undead). This also apparently made them mindless and unable to lead or be commanders, even though they were designated otherwise. Dropping the #morale of the stone that generated the shadows - changed the behavior of the shadows.

fyi.

PDF · #3 July 13th, 2007, 02:11 PM

Well thought ! If you still want an unroutable stone, try putting morale at 99, it's used by non-mindless berserk units, it *may* work

Kristoffer O · #4 July 13th, 2007, 06:04 PM

30 is standard morale for unbreakable units that are not mindless, like pretenders and stuff. 99 makes them go berserk I suspect.

Frostmourne27 · #5 July 13th, 2007, 07:08 PM

Quote:

Kristoffer O said:
30 is standard morale for unbreakable units that are not mindless, like pretenders and stuff. 99 makes them go berserk I suspect.

Are units with moral 30 actually unbreakable? I thought they still ran away occasionally... And they certainly autoroute when the time runs out.

Psientist · #6 July 13th, 2007, 08:01 PM

Look out! It's an enraged rock!

the 30 morale seemed like a workable compromise, I haven't seen them route in my playtesting.

PDF · #7 July 14th, 2007, 05:14 AM

Yeah, ok, berserk is maybe too much !

Kristoffer O · #8 July 14th, 2007, 09:28 AM

> And they certainly autoroute when the time runs out.

The alternative is dissolving (or in the case of berserkers, fighting).

I'm not sure if 30 is totally unbreakable (might be a miniscule chance of breaking, but so has any other number), but 30 is the standrad setting on not mindless unbreakables, immortals and such. So if there is a number that is not mindless, not berserk, and that will make the unit totally unbreakable (unless the army routs) it would be 30.

Frostmourne27 · #9 July 14th, 2007, 04:00 PM

Thanks for the clarification. I think you might be right about not breaking too - the times I've seen morale 30 run away, I think everything else did too.