New Mutations

deadliver

Loud Mouth Amateur
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One project i've had on the back burner for a while was an expanded set of mutations for FF. I was tired of the, what 6 they had and decided an additional 30 or so mutations would provide some variety. Originally I wanted to release a civ based off of mutations but couldn't design the units and balance them. But the mutation work would be easy to finish. Would this be useful for Warhammer Mod?
 
Absolutely! This is definitely something that I had intended to get around to designing eventually.

Basically I'd like to take a whole bunch of the mutations (ideally from Chaos sourcebooks, but anything that sounds fluffy would be fine) and figure out in-game effects for them.

Most of them should be positive, but a few should be negative. And most should be of minor value, with a few powerful ones.

Some random thoughts I had:
Extra arm. +1 first strike chance
Fiery breath. +1 fire strength, -1 defense strength (so net effect is +1/+0).
Robust constitution (50% poison resistance, immune to disease)
Demonic strength. +10% strength.

But a list of 10-20 would be great.
 
Agreed - how about some of these, taking advantage of FF tags?

Quadruped
Melee unit gains +1 move and changes to the Mounted combat type
<TempUnitCombat>UNITCOMBAT_MOUNTED</TempUnitCombat>
<iMovesChange>1</iMovesChange>

Swarm of Flies
-1 health in nearby enemy cities
<CityBonuses>
<bApplyRival>1</bApplyRival>
<iBonusRange>2</iBonusRange>
<fHealth>-1</fHealth>
</CityBonuses>

Disturbing Presence
-1 :) in nearby enemy cities
<CityBonuses>
<bApplyRival>1</bApplyRival>
<iBonusRange>2</iBonusRange>
<fHappy>-1</fHappy>
</CityBonuses>

Seductive Presence
spreads Influence in nearby enemy cities, supresses nearby Influence production
<CityBonuses>
<bApplyRival>1</bApplyRival>
<iBonusRange>2</iBonusRange>
<fInfectCulture>2</fInfectCulture>
<fCulture>-1</fCulture>
</CityBonuses>

Warp Conduit
Chaos Sorcerer gains +1XP per turn; +50% to miscast
<iChanceMiscast>50</iChanceMiscast>
<fCasterXPRate>1</fCasterXPRate>
 
I think changing unit type could be confusing; enemy sees a pikemen unit and so tries to use a crossbow against it, but fails because its actually a mounted unit?

I'm also unsure about a promotion that only works on mages.

Others sound interesting though.

Also: Orlanth, can you check into this thread http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=330839 and see what your take is? How should we proceed?
 
I think changing unit type could be confusing; enemy sees a pikemen unit and so tries to use a crossbow against it, but fails because its actually a mounted unit?
Yep, Tzeentch sure is confusing :p;) Being caught off guard by the occasional unit with a bizarre/unexpected property could be part of the fun.
Maybe it would also help for many mutations to have both benefits and drawbacks at the same time, to avoid save/reload or getting a "killer unit" from mutations alone.

check into this thread
I sent you a PM about it; with no one stepping forward to help do anything with the SDK/DLL/schema etc it's looking like using the FF code base is probably the only real option. AFAIK there were really not many new XML tags added by the old Ploeperpengel version, so it would definitely be a gain in tags to use updated FF. I think the old mod includes some C++ code pasted from the Influence Driven War and Animosity modmods (as well as the hated "paralyzed by fear" feature :p), those wouldnt automatically be in FF, but could probably be pasted back in at a later date if we can get help from a programmer since they don't affect anything re the XML modding.

It will still be a real #$^&* to try implementing all the new and revised content while working through any resulting bugs, so this mod definitely needs all the additional help it can get. Hopefully as a direct modmod of the current version of Fall Further, it can attract additional members from the larger modding community familiar with FfH/FF. Fortunately deadliver and french civ fan have volunteered to join in to help the XML modding; try to recruit Omegon as lead XML person & programmer if he's still interested, since I'm not widely experienced past the few files I focused on & really won't have the time to manage things very actively due to work.
 
Well, like I said, it seems like these are the most important things.

-added influence driven war
-removed somnium
-removed FFH specific gameoptions(like no Orthus, Archeron, scenarios etc.)
-added Technology affected buildings from xednix
-added check for workers to only build improvents with prereqciv if they actually belong to that civ
-added meteoric iron mechanic from WH 0.13

I definitely want influence-driven war, thats a big part of this mod.

Its probably worth though going through the files searching for Warhammer modifications, spending a brief amount of time figuring out what they do, and then importing them into the Fall Further 051 if desired.

Do you think you can manage this process? Once this gets done, I can try to manage the XML update process (and figure out how to do this myself). But we need to get to the new version first, with whatever extra tags there are and such.
 
cross posted from Need Help ad:

I've tried to sift through the WH changed files directory and it made my head spin.. Actually, we really don't have to keep all or most of the changes Ploeperpengel made, especially since we were planning to redo the units and techs XMLs basically from scratch. To make things much more straightforward to accomplish, would it be possible to take the latest version of Fall Further and simply graft on the following two publicly available modmods?

-added influence driven war
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=188007

-added Technology affected buildings from xednix
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=256362

The one issue is that the above modmods don't seem to have updated versions for BtS 3.19, so I don't really know how to go about merging them to the latest Fall Further.


Apart from that it seems like there's really not much in the way of unique tags or code we need to save. There are 2 largely cosmetic items re removing FfH-specific content; if someone happens to know where these would be in the files then they would hopefully be easy to remove, if not I really don't think they matter that much as long as leaving them doesn't cause errors.
-removed somnium
-removed FFH specific gameoptions(like no Orthus, Archeron, scenarios etc.)


The only other real game-changing modifications on Ahrimans list are below. I think the first one could be accomplished through the existing Fall Further XML alone, by using a civ-specific tech for the few civs that build civ-specific improvements. The last one is simply adding another tier to the bronze weapons -> iron weapons etc progression. I think this also could be done through XML using <PrereqBonusORs> and <PromotionReplacedBy> in Fall Further.

-added check for workers to only build improvents with prereqciv if they actually belong to that civ
-added meteoric iron mechanic from WH 0.13
 
Ok, I've spent a lot of time looking into it and trying to go over all those changed files. Between the current 3.19-compatible versions of FfH and Fall Further and the old 3.13-compatible WH based on an unknown version of old FfH, there are clearly huge amounts of complexly interrelated changes that have taken place in multiple points in each of several dozen separate files of the c++ source code. The bottom line is I just don't think it is at all realistic or desirable to try making a nonstandard modified DLL code base; if you want 3.19 compatibility and Fall Further tags by far the simplest way is just to stay based on standard Fall Further like P_L had started to do this year.

The good news is the majority of that feature list should be achievable in XML and python (check for workers to only build improvents with prereqciv if they actually belong to that civ, added meteoric iron mechanic from WH 0.13, removing somnium and FfH game options.)

The influence war modmod is not compatible with current Civ BtS and involves some C++ code also modified by updated versions of FfH; it's not at all clear how it could be adapted, but if you start XML work now it could potentially be added at a later stage if you can get serious help from a programmer, since it doesn't affect XML files. The technology buildings modmod is also not compatible with current BtS, and involves multiple fragments of code changes in each of sixteen files of C++ source code. If you can get someone to volunteer to get it working then great. New tags like this will probably be added to Fall Further in future; since FF uses trimmed XMLs, you should be able to add on new tags from future versions fairly flexibly if you want or simply leave them out if you don't.

Anyway, even if we were somehow able to accomplish a nonstandard DLL code base for the mod this would create a lot of drawbacks; principally that it would likely create untraceable errors that no one would be able to help us with, and that we would be left unable to update to future versions of the Fall Further DLL that incorporate bugfixes, AI refinements, available tags, etc. Anyway there's already way too much XML and bugfixing in store to add more work and complexity. Gotta keep it simple and put out solid playable XML content; in 6 months or so people are going to be modding on Elemental War of Magic instead :king:
 
So Orlanth; your recommendation (for now) is to not include *any* of the old Warhammer mod dll changes, and just start from Fall Further 51?

Can we try to find threads from influence-driven war and technology buildings and see if the authors are willing to update to 3.19 compatibility?

The technology buildings isn't that important I guess, we could redesign without it, though it is quite nice, but I think the influence war would be quite important to get in eventually.
 
didnt Xienwolf do the technology buildings mod? and i wonder if we could get a programmer from the programmers forum to updated the influence driven war for us. surely that would be easyer than updating warhammer itself :p
 
You could keep on trying to find someone to try and hack and modify DLLs for you, but it looks like no one's eagerly raising their hand.. The issue is not only updating BtS compatibility, but also integrating all the code fragments into the current DLLs for FfH and Fall Further, where there have been dozens of further interacting changes in multiple areas of code, etc etc. Definitely think twice about trying to create a nonstandard DLL; I think that has real potential to come back & bite you in the #$^ in the form of untraceable fatal errors where you would have absolutely no clue what's causing them. I'm sure there'll be enough of those just sticking with simple XML.

Anyway, stuff like animosity or the influence change on combat could technically be done just as easily by a straightforward python oncombat check as by making a hacked C++ DLL , if you get someone who knows enough python. Much simpler to just stick with the standardized stable FF codebase as P_L had been doing, and focus on making quality XML content with extra features to be added later in python when possible.
 
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