Mod: MA Skavenblight 1.15 hotfix

[BandarLover]

*Jaw drop*

Freaking.....



Awesome

[llamabeast]

Also very excited indeed about this.

About poison immunity: I haven't double checked, but I don't think there's any reason to think it doesn't work. Check the manual about how poison damage works. Essentially poison weapons apply a certain amount of "poison damage", 10% of which (rounded up) gets converted to real damage each round. So, lets say 10 poison damage is applied to two units: Unit A has no poison immunity, Unit B has 50% immunity. Both of them will start taking 1 damage per round, but Unit B will only take it for 5 rounds (total of 5 damage), whereas Unit A will take it for the full 10 rounds (total of 10 damage).

Hope that makes sense. So you can usefully give them poison immunity.

[Sombre]

I believe you're right when the poison damage is coming from weapons and is like 10 or so damage. It will slowly be dealt until it's all done.

But when it's a poison cloud that does very little damage, just several shots of 1 or 2 points, the immunity doesn't seem to be that helpful.

Anyway, I've been playing around with plague monks right now and I think I might have made them a bit too good. They get three attacks at the moment, which makes them excellent vs high def troops - that's something I may well have to change.

Here are the stats.

----Plague Monk

#newmonster 2146
#copystats 1010
#clearmagic#clearmagic#clearmagic
#spr1 "./Skaven/Plague Monk.tga"
#spr2 "./Skaven/Plague Monk2.tga"
#name "Pestilens Plague Monk"
#descr "Plague Monks form the bulk of Clan Pestilens' troops. They wear tattered robes and bandages to cover their disease ridden, sore-covered and horribly scarred bodies. So used are they to constant pain and disease that it appears to affect them not at all, indeed it is taken as a sign of their God's blessing and they must be hacked to pieces before they will cease fighting, such is their fanatical zeal. They are constantly surrounded by both putrid stench and clouds of flies which bite and distract their opponents; furthermore they have been exposed to so many toxins and poisons that they have become nearly immune to them."
#hp 13
#size 2
#prot 3
#mor 9
#mr 10
#enc 3
#str 9
#att 10
#def 11
#prec 8
#mapmove 2
#ap 15
#gcost 9
#rcost 1
#weapon "short sword"
#weapon 699
#weapon "Fly Swarm"
#poisonres 80
#stealthy 0
#maxage 30
#berserk 1
#siegebonus 1
#swampsurvival
#end

As you can see, they have 80% poison immunity. Most skaven have between 30-50%. The Globadiers have 70.

Flyswarm is a 1 AN damage capped weapon that counts as poison, so doesn't work on poison immune stuff like undead. Weapon 699 is 'pestilens bite' and is a -1 attack, -1 def, -1 damage (+ strength) bite which has the secondary effect of disease.

The Censer bearer is giving me trouble due to buggy mod commands. Basically I'm going to bite the bullet and just give them a perm poison cloud rather than aoe poison melee attacks ala snake bladder stick. They still whomp all kinds of *** with berserk 3 and great offensive stats (for a skaven) along with a high damage weapon that gets a bonus vs shields. Like the monks though, they do die quick if they get hit/shot.

Right now my favourite unit is gutter runners. They're expensive and pretty fragile, but they can kill the hell out of enemy elites with all that poison and skill.

[Sombre]

The latest cool thing in the mod is a change I made to the skavenslaves.

Now it's pretty clear in warhammer that routing skavenslaves should have no effect on the morale of clanrats, stormvermin etc - they are expendable chaff only expected to absorb fire and tie up units. The problem is that with the Dom3 morale system, which has your army rout once it's taken a set percentage of casualties, losing hordes of chaff to arrow fire etc is very likely to make your real troops scurry off the battlefield.

So faced with this problem I came up with a neat solution, which appears to have very few drawbacks. I made it so you buy the skavenslaves in sets of 3 - 3 of them counts as one monster for purposes of leadership and casualties in game. It has graphics that show 3 slaves standing together. Now when it takes damage, it changes into a set of 2 slaves together, with appropriate graphics. And finally when that takes damage, it turns into a single skaven slave on his own. The group of 3 and 2 slaves has a size of 3 to keep them a bit more spaced out - 2 slaves have 2 club attacks with ambidex to represent the two skaven swinging away, and 3 slaves have the same - 2 attacks because the third skaven isn't close enough to melee attack - just like if you had swarms of size 2 units really.

This causes a slight problem - as size 3, they can't be trampled by minotaurs, maybe some other things. A very minor problem though, I think.

The main goal is, I believe, a total success - you can field these chaff/useless milita which take time for the enemy to kill, but shouldn't end up routing your entire army.

[llamabeast]

That sounds very neat Sombre, nice one.

A couple of minor things: Normally if there are three size 2 units in a square, all three of them can attack (even though one is drawn further back). So your three-skavenslave unit should have three attacks I think.

Also with the sizes: If the three-slave unit is size 3, two of them will fit in a square, giving you 6 slaves in a sqaure, which seems a bit much (I assume skaven are size 2?).

Perhaps you could make them the following sizes:

Three-slave: Size 4
Two-slave: Size 3
Single-slave: Size 2

Then the most rats you could ever cram into a square would be 4, and that would be in unusual circumstances - mostly you would only get three to a square. The disadvantage is trampling though, like you say (although it doesn't affect many units). Also the three-slave and two-slave units will be a little better at arrow-dodging than they should be (since they won't fill the squares), but I think that is less of a problem. To make the arrow catching correct you should make the three-slave unit size 6, but that would make them elephant-immune, which seems much more wrong.

[Morkilus]

This sounds very cool, and the sprites are sweet. I'm looking forward to this!

As far as the rats being trample-proof: Aren't elephants supposed to be afraid of mice? I think it's an old cartoon myth.

[Sombre]

Well you can say that skavenslaves are somewhere between size 1 and 2. Skaven themselves are smaller than humans and slaves are generally the smallest of them and are pretty malnourished.

I had the 3slaves block with 3 attacks and because 2 of them fit into a square they got too many attacks and were a bit too good at killing things. If I keep them at size 3, they can surge forward and fill in a square with 6 skaven, but only 4 attacks can be made, so it's not much better than regular size 2 units. It is better though, slight advantage. You get the same number of attacks with 2 blocks of 2 slaves too.

I think I'll keep it as is (the numbers in the square can be accounted for by the skavenslaves surging forward/backward, keeping close together) and make sure they have crummy attack stats and can't do too much damage.

But in the future I may need to fiddle with it a bit more.

I'll try attaching a picture, just in case the attachments are actually working now. It will be a gif, so reduced quality in a tradeoff for small size.

[Sombre]

Damnit. I can't seem to get this picture uploaded anywhere. Anyway, in game the graphics look really good. I'm also very happy with the way the giant rat turned out - it's slightly bigger than it should be perhaps, but I didn't want them to be too crappy in stats, so I'm happy with the size.

Here's an image of the slaves that should hopefully work. .gif, so reduced quality as always. Shows them on the map, in battle, in recruit, the sprites,.... basic but look good enough.

http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.p...2ydwzj&thumb=4

[llamabeast]

Nice, that does indeed look very cool.

[Sombre]

And here's a little pic of my giant ratties. I might downsize them a touch, they're currently bigger than the skaven. A result of the dom3 wolf I used for a size comparison being very large.

http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.p...xg0y1n&thumb=4