Conceptual Balance Series (Mod)

[Peter Ebbesen]

Soapyfrog said:
Bloodthorn is just kinda foolish. I mean, its a knife. You have a big hulking Ice devil equipped with a knife... its silly.

Sir Rathergood the Knight approaches the bar. Sighting an Ice Devil, he slowly draws his fire sword...

Alerted by the rasp of steel, the Ice Devil slowly turns to face the Knight. From its side it draws its athame, its bloody emblem of power, the bloodthorn... "That's not a knife... THIS is a knife", it hisses to the Knight and combat ensues.

See? Perfectly natural explanantion.

[Arryn]

An athame is a ritual knife, not a weapon of combat. Nice try, Peter. I'll give you points for pretty imagery, even if you did rip off "Crocodile Dundee".

[Cohen]

You can't make units generating slaves, but you can give

#douze

To give them a blood hunting bonus.
I'm working too on a general balance mod ^^ so I'm taking lessons of/studying modding
__________________________________________________ _________
Life Drain is good because however make useless the 95% of things you can recruit.
Why someone could take production? 120 design point, for a +6% income?
And the 30% bonus ... it could be useful at the start to pump more troops out, but later it's damn worthless.

And Life Drain is all purpose ... equip your SC with Flambeau, here my army of anything sacrificable I can throw at ... and I'll kill you by swarming, fatiguing you out ...
Life Drain weapon make the work of 2 items:
A regenerating one.
A reinvgorating one.
1 Slot for 2 Items, with blood thorns.
And usually works far better than the other 2 items combined.

[Zen]

Ahah! Yes, Edi is right (DAMN THE EDITORS!).

But Blood ones are particularly easy to come up with. The Thorn and the Vessel are only 20 Slaves (10 normal gems) and the Armor is 40 Slaves (20 normal gems). It's not too hard to bootstrap up to make these things and then have access to the entire selection of blood because of it's nature.

Like I said (again!) the mod hasn't been released at all, so that means any and all decisions haven't been thoroughly tested enough for me to keep them or adjust them based on the limitations of nations and so on.

I may just end up changing the Damage of Lifedraining weapons so that even if a high strength unit is using them they arn't causing enough lifedrain damage to keep them alive (though out of fatigue).

There are alot of ideas out there and I only want to tackle one at a time. This may open up alot more if/when IW adds a few more modding tools (especially Rate of Attack) for the modding community to try to use.

Back to Pretenders: Anyone have a chance to comment on that?

[Cohen]

As modding commands there should be a lot to be implemented.

Especially for items, and spells.
Adding new magical forgeable items, or spells under certain categories, chosing an already existing animation, or allowing to summon new creatures is a good thing.
Giving all skill range to be modded (I mean giving someone Banefire Shield, or Flaming Weapon, or Astral Shield by default could be nice)
Adding global spellcasting bonus (Like enchantment bonus and such).
Well I could continue with the list but I'd prefer to stop here, not wanting to say a too much stuff that probably I won't never see realized.

[PvK]

Zen, you were mentioning (I guess in a related thread about the item mod that I didn't see tonight), changing the requirements to forge magic items? Is that possible? Is there a new modding manual? I don't think my modding manual has been updated by a patch since 2.12, and I don't see a way to change those things in there.

PvK

[Zen]

Since I overlooked (or perhaps was crazy and neverlooked!) the Shapechanged forms I have rereleased the Mod to 1.6. Find it with the attatchment or here www.techno-mage.com/~zen/conceptp16.zip

(I'd like to apologize to anyone who was planning on using the mod for a game to test things out and the massive rerelease of Versions. I didn't intend for it to be like this, but I am a slight perfectionist. Again, I'm sorry)

For those starting games that have Dragons in them, or the Serpent King/Smoking Mirror this will be a slight improvement to their shapechanged portions.

Also I have added in the name breaks. I guess Edi wanted that in there so other people could copy the mod better?

I'm sure Edi will have a Readme for it as soon as is convienent.

P.S. I still wouldn't try to use some of the shapechanged forms for combat purposes (like the Jaguar or the Serpent forms) though I had some interesting results when they hit the 'near death' stage in human form and converted over. In particular this change helps out the Jaguar who had terrible MR for some reason (I guess shapechanged Jaguars are none to fond of magic).

[Zen]

Yes there are ways to change Magic Items Pathcost and Forgecost, as well as their Construction level. But the Modding Manual has not been released and I haven't asked for the "Okay" to kind of maul the thing out to everyone. I do know that Psi has been working dilligently on a new Modding Manual so I definitely don't want to release any of the commands without the O.K.

This is a factor to why I have the Item Mod on the backburner.

[Edi]

Zen said:
Ahah! Yes, Edi is right (DAMN THE EDITORS!).

Well, it's the editor's job to make sure the facts are kept straight, no? And you DID name me as your official editor...

Zen said:
But Blood ones are particularly easy to come up with. The Thorn and the Vessel are only 20 Slaves (10 normal gems) and the Armor is 40 Slaves (20 normal gems). It's not too hard to bootstrap up to make these things and then have access to the entire selection of blood because of it's nature.

This is certainly true. The blood boosters all require just blood magic to produce, while many of the other path boosters require more than one type of magic and often in combinations that are not particularly plentiful.

• Skull of Fire is a death/fire combination, which aside from Machaka, T'ien Chi and Ermor (dusk elders) isn't all that common.
• Moonvine bracelet is astral/nature, which is a bit easier to get, and usually requires either one random pick or indie lizards.
• Bloodstones require the rare earth/blood combo, which is imo the hardest one to get at sufficient levels to make the stones.
• Armor of Twisting Thorns is blood/nature, so availability is usually limited to Pangaea and Mictlan out of the box. It makes for a powerful ritual casting boost, but is in other ways limited (not the least by being cursed).
• Crystal Coin requires the earth/astral (2/2) combination, which I've found to be annoyingly troublesome.
• The Staffs of Elemental Mastery are pretty hard to produce, because they require combinations of opposite elements. T'ien Chi, Arco and Atlantis are almost the only ones who have mages that can produce them out of the box (assuming proper random picks)

Besides blood, this leaves only air, water and death as paths where all boosts are producable without combo paths, and air has the limitation that you need 3 air to produce the first one. Ditto fire, unless you get the death combo.


EDIT: nevermind, you posted an answer to a question while I was typing it.

I'll get working on the readme. I can also comment the pretender mod file for you, if you like, so you can concentrate on the items for a while longer. Unless somebody else has something important to add in the meanwhile, of course.

Edi

[Edi]

Zen, one more problem with the pretender modifications: The ***** Queen's crone form actually has base hit point value of 16 in the unmodded game, so your mod just cranked them down by 4 to 12.

I suggest keeping the original crone form HP and removing Heal Troops, because otherwise there is no sense at all taking Crone for those nations that have BQ available. A cost difference of 15 points is a laughable price for the capability to heal injured afflictions. This would keep the crone and the ***** queen more in their thematic niches, instead of making the BQ a buffed up crone with two less misc slots and an armor slot (BQ crone has normal humanoid slots instead of crone slots).

I've made the appropriate changes to reflect this, and updated the readme according to those changes, so that the BQ crone and the real crone differ from each otehr in these respects. I've attached that mod as v1.65 into this post. Includes mod file v1.65, graphic file and readme v1.65.