ExtraModMod continued

[Calavente]

I also noticed that balseraphs puppets didn't profit from the +1turn extension of "keelyn's summoner trait". this makes them alive on 1turn... no real use of the puppets for Keelyn... the only use I found is to artificially increase the number of casters for summoning skellies..
or getting +1 range for casting...

but that's the same use for Perpy or Keelyn.

if it stays like that (puppet 1 turn) maybe summons could get 3 turns instead of 2 to compensate.

/cheers

 

[kvaak]

These things probably shouldn't spawn anywhere near starting positions. Or maybe just tone down the strength bonus.

CHOO CHOO

 

[lfgr]

Is there any particular reason golems can't take items from other units? They still get the benefit of passive bonuses and can pick them up from the ground + non-golem units can take items from them, so as far as I can tell the only real effect this has is the fact you can't easily give a golem items outside friendly territory since dropping items is disabled, but if you want to pass Orthus' axe around while smacking an enemy stack with your own that still works as long as the previous holder dies, so there's no significant difference from other civs/units. In a pinch you can even disband the current holder since that circumvents the "has already cast this turn" / no-drop limitation.

I'm not sure. But if they can pick them up from the ground, they should be able to take them from other units. I will look into this.

Another quirk that has been around since at least Terkhen's EMM (it's been quite a while since I've played vanilla FfH2) is raging barbarians sometimes going absolutely bananas when spawning next to a barbarian civ, I just had my neighboring Calabim taken out 100-ish turns into the game, when I moved in to loot the spoils my two cities were assaulted by stacks of 2-3 barbs almost every single turn. 99%+ of the time sticking two warriors per city at the start basically makes it impervious to random barbs (directly anyway, protecting improvements / workers is an entirely different matter), this time I could barely hold the city itself with three.

Do you have a save where this happens? Otherwise it's hard to say what's going on.

I'm not sure but I've also noticed the AI seems to be overtly cautious with lairs now, it's certainly an improvement over the iteration where they basically treated dungeons as goody huts (and often promptly annihilated themselves, and/or me) but having ruins, barrows or goblin forts inside their borders, sometimes directly adjacent to a city, 200-300 turns into an epic game doesn't seem quite right either. Sometimes I even see graveyards and those have a very real chance of handing out free techs. In lairs' case there's at least a case to be made about slaves / exp, but that still doesn't explain the graveyards. I'm also fairly sure I haven't seen the AI touch uniques once in this version, although considering how even a regular high-level lair can spit out werewolves that's probably for the best.

Yeah, I noticed that, too. What I did is simply to stop them from using low-level units from exploring (taking into account how dangerous the lair is). It's possible that the AI doesn't consider exploring with higher-level units at all, for other reasons.

I also noticed that balseraphs puppets didn't profit from the +1turn extension of "keelyn's summoner trait". this makes them alive on 1turn... no real use of the puppets for Keelyn... the only use I found is to artificially increase the number of casters for summoning skellies..
or getting +1 range for casting...

This is an intentional balance chance made by Tholal quite some time ago.

These things probably shouldn't spawn anywhere near starting positions. Or maybe just tone down the strength bonus.

They should not, at least not near the original starting positions. Do you have a save game and/or wilderness.log?

 

[kvaak]

Do you have a save where this happens? Otherwise it's hard to say what's going on.

Unfortunately, no. I'll keep one around if this happens again in the future.

They should not, at least not near the original starting positions. Do you have a save game and/or wilderness.log?

Attached a turn 1 save and one 10-ish turns after capturing the thing. Unfortunately nothing between those, + it seems I forgot to re-enable logging after fiddling with the settings file. If the saves behave funny for some reason I removed all the extra barbarian leaders (except CoE since they're all barbarian anyway) and had Samhain tied to Omniscience (because it was the closest thing I could come up for disabling it without messing up the AI).

Oh, I also figured out the deal with the missing game options, ExtraModMod.ini has ForceGameOptions = 1 by default.

 

[DuskTreader]

Could tie Samhain to Seafaring or a religion-specific tech, both of which Illians don't get, right? Why would you want to disable it though?

 

[kvaak]

Could tie Samhain to Seafaring or a religion-specific tech, both of which Illians don't get, right? Why would you want to disable it though?

Unlike regular barbarians they appear out of thin air AND get to move on the same turn, so I end up losing a bunch of workers with no warning and there's no real way to avoid it. It's especially bad for good leaders who can't run slavery and I just find it incredibly frustrating in general. I didn't have the game open at the time so I just picked a single-word tech as far in the tech tree as I could think of (I wasn't sure if Future Tech was FUTURETECH, FUTURE_TECH or something else), and I wasn't sure how altering the other options would affect the game, e.g. AI might still try to build it if I gave it an obscene hammer cost.

I also feel it's mostly a waste of hammers for a human player, but that's neither here or there. I don't claim to be an expert.

 

[DuskTreader]

The only time I ever built it as Illians was to snap a bunch of units out of the Avatar of Wrath. Not sure why else I'd build it,

 

[lfgr]

I also feel it's mostly a waste of hammers for a human player, but that's neither here or there.

I agree, actually. The original plan for EMM was to have split the barbarians into multiple factions, among them a winter faction that would be at peace with the illians. I doubt that I'll ever get to that, unforunately.

 

[DuskTreader]

I do have python exceptions enabled and there aren't any BUT following the testing guide did yield some more interesting results. I replicated the Crash to Desktop and got a new log in addition to the one I attached last time: "initmgr.log". In addition I was able to get a full dump file. The full dump file is huge >1 gb, so I've attached a google drive link with it in a zip file and the two logs: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IBQsVzntjrLmi_Fw1h3PmNMkS168QxYr.

Hopefully this helps.

When I have time I'll do some testing to try to figure out which game option specifically causes the crash, but I don't have time to go through all of them rn.

Can I delete this crash dump and the others I posted? I'm trying to clear space in my Google Drive

 

[Calavente]

Hi, there is one balance aspect that I don't really understand :
- Crusaders are: 4+1(holy) + metal = 7) : (80Hammers) and "disciple" : no enchanted blade
- Paramenders are 4/6 + metal : (effectively 6/8) (120hammers) and "disciple" : no enchanted blade : they are weaker than champions but cost much more. (going SoK--> paramenders is : +50%cost, for +2defense & Heavy, and LOSING THE cause of SoK High cost: rush building)
- Diseased corpses are 4+2death+ metal : 8 str (90hammers) (melee : so they can get enchanted blade)
- Ratha are 5/3 + metal : (180 hammers versus chariot 120) normal-str chariots + blinding light + 50vs vs recon
- Radiant guard are 3/4 +metal : weaker more expensive axemen +25%vs recon
- Satyrs are 9/4 (+poison blade : 10/5)
- but stygian guards are : 6+4(death)+metal (200hammers) : 12 STR + march + water walking

I understand why Order is boosted : 7str unit for 80H versus drown/SoK at 6 str for 90hammers : Order's unit comes later and Order doesn't have a tier III unit.
I understand vaguely why Empy has low power units : the anti-recon and blinding light might be considered the appropriate cost, but I only ever buy 1 or max2 of those units.

but why are the OO so boosted ???
(remember going from 4 str axe to 6 str champion DOUBLE the cost for 2str..; here drown--> stygian is +6str for "barely more" than double cost : 2.2 times the cost).


and why are Rok so nerfed ? 50% more cost than Order crusader for same mean str, but much less attack (as defense is worth less than attack). 60% hammer cost of stygian guard for half str : 5mean versus 10 (without metal).
Paramenders are also 30% more costly than diseased corpse and have 2 less attack.
I'm not even comparing to stygian guards: stygian have +5str and are.. 80%more costly, not even twice the cost..


so my petition is :
crusaders --> 6str +metal ; 80H
paramenders --> 6/7 + metal, 120H (+30%/50% cost for heavy & +1defense is already a lot)
Stygian guards --> 4+4+metal : 8 + metal : 200H
Diseased corpses : 4+2+metal :90H
Radiant guard : 4str +40%vs recon +defendor

And please remember that while having 90H for a SoK or Drown is the same price as in vanilla... AXEMEN were dropped from 60H to 45H !!!
so SoK, Drown and Radiant guard are effectively twice as expensive as axemen... just for having access to a special action... it is expensive.

 

[lfgr]

Can I delete this crash dump and the others I posted? I'm trying to clear space in my Google Drive

Sure, go ahead.

@Calavente: As I indicated before, I'm not going to do sweeping balance changes like this. Besides that, IIRC, the main reason for religious units to have higher cost is because they allow sidestepping the entire melee tech line. Paramanders in particular are available with the same tech as Mines of Gal-Dur, which allows you to get iron much earlier than going the root to Iron working and champions (also, they get Medic I). Radiant guards were generally considered OP because of blinding light, I believe. I think most of these changes come from EitB.

 

[Calavente]

@lfgr
3 of my points still remain:
1) the higher cost of religious units always existed, but axemen were reduced in cost in EitB / Emm so religious units of tier II are proportionnaly much more costly (and champion also)

2) paramender being nerfed @ 4/6 + metal instead of vanilla 7
the upgrade from SoK to Paramenders is weak... (+2defense str, + loose the rush ability)

3) stygians being boosted to 10+metal instead of the former 6 or 7 +metal ... getting tsunami priests + 10 (no metal) str demons is stronger than shield of faith priests + 4/6+2 paramenders, even defending in cities.

I know that EitB proposed the changes a-priori, but I don't understand it. at all.

 

[DuskTreader]

Two very similar errors both related to loading Octopus Overlords soundtracks

 

[Tielby]

Two very similar errors both related to loading Octopus Overlords soundtracks

Of course I don't know WHY it's happening, but I can send you those files, if you need. Have you checked to see if they're missing or corrupted?

 

[DuskTreader]

I have them... How would I know if they are corrupted?

 

[omegaflames]

Since you have them and they are failing to load it might be because they are corrupted. I'd reinstall the mod and see if that fixes it.

 

[Tielby]

I have them... How would I know if they are corrupted?

They're just regular .mp3 files. If you try to open them in any media player, it will either work or it won't. If it doesn't, pretty sure they're corrupted.

 

[DuskTreader]

I tried that, but something seems to be going wrong with my Windows Media Player, because it can't play them, but it also can't play sample music in my music directory. If no one else can reproduce this error, it might be something to chalk up to my old computer having a senior moment rather than anything with the mod.

 

[omegaflames]

I'm tentatively going to guess that you might have some issues with your storage drive and assuming you are running a version of Windows do a chkdsk of your hard drive or ssd. I can give you instructions on how to do that if you are running Windows. I'm not good enough with linux/ubuntu and no idea what to do with a mac to be of much help on those operating systems.

 

[DuskTreader]

What happens if a hero mage unit (Hemmah, Govannon, etc.) casts Lichdome?