[MOD] Fall from Heaven II

First off, this is amazing. Thank you.

I had a couple of questions- are you all planning on releasing a 'manual' type readme? All the new features are amazing, but after spending a long time in the civilopedia, i sitll did not understand some of the mechanics until after I read the forums. I am sure there will be others later I dont understand.

Also, i really like the dwarf hammerer and orc animations- are there any plans to change the dwarf warriors to have the same 'body' as the hammerers, and the orc units to use the same spearmen model? Oh, and what do the malakim special units do (macemen etc) besides just looking different?

Finally, I was going to ask (i guess three questions) what do you mean by civs are being released later? In my first game, the dark elves were present- you mean they will be playable later?

Thanks- again, amazing. Great job guys.
 
ogredpowell said:
First off, this is amazing. Thank you.

I had a couple of questions- are you all planning on releasing a 'manual' type readme? All the new features are amazing, but after spending a long time in the civilopedia, i sitll did not understand some of the mechanics until after I read the forums. I am sure there will be others later I dont understand.

We do want to document better, but this is an early beta for playtesting. Documentation is pretty low on the priority list right now.

Also, i really like the dwarf hammerer and orc animations- are there any plans to change the dwarf warriors to have the same 'body' as the hammerers, and the orc units to use the same spearmen model?

Yes.

Oh, and what do the malakim special units do (macemen etc) besides just looking different?

They are just an art change. Agent009 posted them and they looked so Malakim to me that I just had to include them. They may get some special abilities in "Shadow".

Finally, I was going to ask (i guess three questions) what do you mean by civs are being released later? In my first game, the dark elves were present- you mean they will be playable later?

Thanks- again, amazing. Great job guys.

Yes, they will be human playable. All of the civs and leaders are in the game now, but a lot of their detail is missing. The civs that are speced for "Light" (this release) should have their detail finished by the time "Light" is done. And this is only the first beta of "Light" so we know they arent all there now.
 
Firstly, I would like to add my voice to the burgeoning choir in praise of an interesting mod which promises to be outstanding in its final release.

I have now played through a couple of games, so here are my initial thoughts:

The civics need a little work I feel, both in theme and in implication.
City states, for instance, was one which just seemed to offer very little benefit - the maintenence bonus more or less cancelled out by the 25% gold loss.
In terms of theme, sometimes the choices suffer from the same lack of conceptual distinction which I felt was a problem in vanilla CivIV e.g. nationhood and social order do not seem like competing ideals, sacrifice the weak and fend for themselves are very similar. Alpha Centauri is the design blueprint really for this sort of thing - distinctive ideologies, all more or less viable.

In terms of the spell system, I'm still coming to terms with it, but I very much like the idea. I'm not sure how the AI uses it though as I've never seen any overt spell usage from their adepts. I think there are a few too many spheres of magic overall. While variety is important, things become cluttered fairly soon with the number of unit promotions and abilities some units have.

A couple of notes specifically on the vampire civ who I have mainly played with: I seem to get hated by everyone in all the games I play with them, as most evil civs seem to. To help balance this out it would be nice if it was possible to get a bonus to diplomatic relations if you are sufficienly badass. Galactic Civilizations has something like this - if you are militarily superior to another civ they are keener to be on your good side.
Also, vamps can't feed on an ally in the field, only in a home city. Not sure if this is intentional, but it devalues the ability somewhat.

Finally, on one occasion three hill giants showed up randomly in one of my cities on the same turn. Again, not sure if this is a bug, perhaps its an unfinished feature simulating evil being drawn to me or somesuch, but it was a little confusing.

Overall top stuff, an no crashes yet either!
 
Wow!:goodjob: I didn't think you guys could improve upon FfH but so far this has been amazing. I'm so impressed by all the work you have put into this. Keep it up!
 
Why Does The Thing Keep Shuting Down After I load It
 
One quick question: What does spellstaff promotion do? And how to break it? (Sorry if it is stupid, but I couldn't get Archmage with Enchanting 3 to test it)

How much patches will we have, before we will have to download new version? I hope that I won't have to download 150 MB anytime soon ;) but FfH is worth it.
 
One quick question: What does spellstaff promotion do? And how to break it? (Sorry if it is stupid, but I couldn't get Archmage with Enchanting 3 to test it)

When you get the Spellstaff spell, you can cast it to create a spellstaff. You cannot cast it again until the staff is broken.
When you've cast any spell, and thus exhausted your casting power, you can break your spellstaff to regain the power to cast for that round. A quite powerful ability, as it can for example allow you to use Meteor Shower twice in one turn.
 
Patch 0.11b is out and linked in the first thread. It will invalidate save games.
 
Colin said:
Finally, on one occasion three hill giants showed up randomly in one of my cities on the same turn. Again, not sure if this is a bug, perhaps its an unfinished feature simulating evil being drawn to me or somesuch, but it was a little confusing.
I forget the name, but one of the wonders gives you 3 hill giants.
 
Colin said:
Finally, on one occasion three hill giants showed up randomly in one of my cities on the same turn. Again, not sure if this is a bug, perhaps its an unfinished feature simulating evil being drawn to me or somesuch, but it was a little confusing.
I forget the name, but one of the wonders gives you 3 hill giants.

Pact of the Nilhorn.
 
ah i was wondering where they came from,they were useful. oh well time to patch and restart.
oh and kael i am glad you found the bug in infernal grimore i accidently saved over the save it was in.:) other wise i would have posted my save.
 
Is there any reason why the dwarf hammerfists are weaker than there macemen counterparts?

It seems to be a slight disadvantage.....i normally make heavy use of macemen, and it seems strange that dwarfs are weaker at melee than humans. If anything, surly, beer chugging, skull cracking dwarvs would be better than their human counterparts at hand to hand fighting.
 
First the issues that we found on our next multiplayer game might not be bugs, but ill mention them to make sure you meant it this way. This is with version b you just posted.

You can't cast spring on a flood plain, but you can on an oasis, it might be cool this way because oasis arent nearly as common as flood plains.

2nd it seems like when you summon a skeleton with a vampire it gets the same combat promos as the vampire. Not sure if intended.

3rd on monarch the computer was acting vastly more ******ed then normal. One cpu had his cities defeneded by scouts around 200 turns or so into the game. The others seemed to be pretty backwards too but not that bad.

4th, an actual bug, I withered an axemen with death 1 and it made the game go out of synch instantly after i clicked the target on the targeting screen(btw that targeting screen is a sweet addition. Nice job).

Ok opinions on balance from this game.
Chaos 2 summon is too strong. Sure it turns on you but who cares, it usually turns on you in their territory, so it becomes their problem. With 3 movement it can easily be safely out of your harms way. This could even be a tactic used on purpose.

Vampire race seemed really strong too. That govenor you start with makes a huge deal. Its like compound interest. Having bonus production from turn one.... it propigates forward. Secondly the vampires themsleves are really strong. With a quick philsophy tech win you can have education around the time other people are getting their bronze hooked up. Now you have an 8 vs their 4s. And this guy has other perks too(haste, uber skeletons summoned, population control for sweet xp). The computers didnt seem to decalre war on me any more then normal.

Every time I play this i find more awsome stuff i hadnt seen before. This is such a great job you guys have done. I never would have dreamt you could have added so much stuff that isnt like anything thats in the normal game. Excellent work.
 
So, are the first-level abilities of caster units supposed to automatically bring the second-level ones at upgrade? Considering that I've got alltypes of mana in my continents/medium/prince game, that could be very interesting indeed... as an offside, death mana could use a warning sign.
 
kendric said:
4th, an actual bug, I withered an axemen with death 1 and it made the game go out of synch instantly after i clicked the target on the targeting screen(btw that targeting screen is a sweet addition. Nice job).

I'll second that- i think it did a quite apocalyptic crash a short time after using wither. Although my computer is feeling rather low at the moent so...
 
So, I wrote a little addon event manager co-opting some utilities I wrote for the Moon Mod and setting them up to be easily addable to FfH2. Hopefully, Kael et al won't mind... Even if they don't like my magic ideas 8).

So, to install these files, extract the zip into your Mod/FfH2/Assets/Python/ folder. If that doesn't make any sense to you, you should probably just stop now, and wait to see if a more user friendly version gets released 8).

Ok, once extracted you have to open up the CvEventInterface.py file in Python/entrypoints/ and change two lines as follows:

Code:
#import CvFFHSpellsEventManager
import CvAddonEventManager
from CvPythonExtensions import *

#normalEventManager = CvFFHSpellsEventManager.CvFFHSpellsEventManager()
normalEventManager = CvAddonEventManager.CvAddonEventManager()

The commented out lines are the old lines, the lines underneath them are the new ones.

And that's it. FfH should work as normal.



Ok, so what does it do? Well, a couple of things...

Ctrl-M allows you to play a user mark (an arbitrary sign). Ctrl-M where a sign is currently will remove it. (I think this was the music key, so I should probably change it sometime...)

Ctrl-Shift-B enables Barbarian marking which will mark all the barbarians you can see with a color coded marker indicating the highest mp of any unit present.

Ctrl-Shift-L enables messaging during Barbarian Marking. This will cause the marker to send out notifications which you can click on to get sent to where the barbarians are. You have to enable marking in order to receive the listings.

Ctrl-Shift-P enters City Placement mode. This allows you to plan out where you want to place your cities. Click to place a city spot. Click an existing spot to remove it. Ctrl-Shift-P again to disable it again.

Ctrl-K will display the city grids for your cities (I think potentials, not current ones, I wrote it a long time ago, so I forget).

Ctrl... mmm... P I guess will turn on 12Monkey's movement display code, to see where the currently selected unit can move. Note it doesn't work for stacks. That code was written by 12Monkey's, not by me, so I can take no credit for it :).

And that's it. I find these utilities to be great, maybe you will too.

Oh, you can't have City Grid and Barbarian Markers up at the same time. Too few display layers. I haven't written the sort of complicated infrastructure to layer the two together. This entire suite was written very much ad hoc one afternoon while I was playing around with the Moon Mod. Well, and the barbarian stuff which I wrote in the last few hours. There may be other bugs as well, but I haven't encountered them :/. Also, the sign implementation was changed in 1.61, and I haven't really tested the extent of the changes. Caveat Emptor and all that..
 

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Bright day
Good work, but is it just me or are leves just to much of an industrialists? The forest on every tile is a biiig plus.
 
The Demons absolutely rock everything!! i love their appearence, very nie one chalid! and attaching fire to the footsteps was one small but efficient trick ;)
 
kendric said:
First the issues that we found on our next multiplayer game might not be bugs, but ill mention them to make sure you meant it this way. This is with version b you just posted.

You can't cast spring on a flood plain, but you can on an oasis, it might be cool this way because oasis arent nearly as common as flood plains.

Yeah, we had this conversation and decided to let the oasis stay. I dont know that anyone was really passionate one way or the other about it so we just let it stay as a good thing to be able to cast spring on oasis tiles.

2nd it seems like when you summon a skeleton with a vampire it gets the same combat promos as the vampire. Not sure if intended.

Some promotions are passed on but not all of them. Your skeleton, for example, wont get the ability to summon skeletons (which would spinlock the ai).

3rd on monarch the computer was acting vastly more ******ed then normal. One cpu had his cities defeneded by scouts around 200 turns or so into the game. The others seemed to be pretty backwards too but not that bad.

Although this specific instance doesnt make much sense to me I know that there are Ai issues in the mod. First we get everything added, then we teach the ai to use it. If we try to teach the ai to use the stuff as is, then we change the base things get even worse.

4th, an actual bug, I withered an axemen with death 1 and it made the game go out of synch instantly after i clicked the target on the targeting screen(btw that targeting screen is a sweet addition. Nice job).

That is a known issue unfortunatly. Targeted spells are multiplayer friendly yet. Talchas is working on it.

Ok opinions on balance from this game.
Chaos 2 summon is too strong. Sure it turns on you but who cares, it usually turns on you in their territory, so it becomes their problem. With 3 movement it can easily be safely out of your harms way. This could even be a tactic used on purpose.

Good point, I will have to think about it.

Vampire race seemed really strong too. That govenor you start with makes a huge deal. Its like compound interest. Having bonus production from turn one.... it propigates forward. Secondly the vampires themsleves are really strong. With a quick philsophy tech win you can have education around the time other people are getting their bronze hooked up. Now you have an 8 vs their 4s. And this guy has other perks too(haste, uber skeletons summoned, population control for sweet xp). The computers didnt seem to decalre war on me any more then normal.

Im going to bump the vampires down to 7 for the next patch. We will see where to go from there (specifically the vampiric governor may need to be tuned down too). The Calabim are designed to "change gears" when they produce their first vampire. Up until that point they are a builder, after that (depending on how well they have stocked up) they can switch into a deadly war mode.
 
Misc Questions, Ponderings, Suggestions, general babble:

#1- What happens if you drink the Burning Blood with a Moroi and then kill Orthus? (just wondered if you had considered it)

#2- Are there going to be more "promotions" that are actually items and weapons and whatever? Because i really like this feature and think if you give heroes something valuable like this it will be worthwile killing them (other than to stop them romping you of course!)

#3- Love the magic, basically i would just like more of it!

#4- What do adepts get their random added Exp from? When more mana nodes are discovered?

#5- When does the "You use so-and-so magic" come into effect? Is it the first spell you use, which 1 you have used most, etc??

#6- To make magic better, maybe if you have 2 Spell Abilities (eg. Death I and Dimenional I) you would get an additional, combined Spell ,using both Death and Dimensional, eg Summon Daemon-Zombies or whatever

#7- Taking one sort of magic means you cant take the opposite of it (eg. if you take Death you cant then choose Life after aswell)

there are some ideas for now.

Absoluelt love the mod, think it is probably mroe played than the original on my comp already :goodjob:

mrkingkong
 
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