ExtraModMod

If you are bringing in a massive amount of balance changes from EitB, then shouldn't this mod be moved to the EitB forum? I like MNAI because it's still basically playing the core FFH2 game. A drastic change to Flauros as Org/Cre is just too different. If anything I'd like to see you make him Agrarian/Financial for the ultimate aristofarm spamming leader. Buff the other civs to give them their own overpowered dynamics.
 
If you are bringing in a massive amount of balance changes from EitB, then shouldn't this mod be moved to the EitB forum? I like MNAI because it's still basically playing the core FFH2 game. A drastic change to Flauros as Org/Cre is just too different. If anything I'd like to see you make him Agrarian/Financial for the ultimate aristofarm spamming leader. Buff the other civs to give them their own overpowered dynamics.

Given that I base my work on More Naval AI while I pick up features from many other sources, in my opinion the mod thread belongs here. If the forum moderators think otherwise, I guess that it should be moved to the FfH2 Modmods, Scenarios, and Maps subforum. The EitB forums are not even at CivFanatics.

Even without taking into account the EitB changes and the modifications to leaders, ExtraModMod contains plenty of feature changes which alter the original game play far more than a trait change to Flauros, such as the many extra leaders, the extra spheres and so on. The goal of ExtraModMod is to add some features while keeping the changes to the lore at a minimum, but I never had in mind keeping the gameplay changes at a minimum. Those are More Naval AI goals and in my opinion MNAI is already doing a great job on it, and that's why I base my work on it :)

Having said that, I wouldn't mind undoing the Alexis <-> Flauros change if that's the consensus. I think that Agrarian/Financial (specially on Calabim) would be quite overpowered. That's why Mahon is Agrarian/Savage. By the way, Flauros is Philosophical/Organized, not Creative/Organized. Kane is Agrarian/Barbarian/Financial, he should be the closest one to what you suggest.

I prefer to tweak things that feel overpowered a bit than to "overpower" other mechanics. In my opinion the tweaking allows to keep the ModMod closer to the original game, while redefining all civilization behaviors would require a lot of thinking, design and coding and those require an amount of time that I simply don't have.
 
[to_xp]Gekko;12240711 said:
it's not as good as it is for others true, but half a trait? philosophical is still pretty damn good ;)

I don't think that the Elder Council issue is that big. I wonder if it is true anyways that Philosophical is not that great for the Calabim, though. It is not easy to follow a GPP economy when your citizens hate you because of all the feasting.

Without a cheap, early Elder Council, how are you going to generate GPP? A good bit of the power of Philosophical is being able to generate an ultra early Great Sage for an Academy. With no Elder Council, your options are to build a Market for Great Merchant points, a Carnival for Great Bard points, or a Pagan Temple for Great Priest points. Market is a relatively cheap building, and half price for Flauros, but what are you going to do with the Great Merchant? I usually use him to bulb Currency, but you need to research Code of Laws before that's possible. So, just settle him? Not to mention that Festivals is a good way down the tech tree.

Carnival (Drama->Sanitation double bulb) and Pagan Temple (early religion?) are both expensive buildings, and their specialists aren't particularly helpful to the early economy. I'm going to stick to my guns on this one. Philosophical is pretty heavily nerfed for the Calabim.
 
replying to Terkhen's post #80:

re: blinding light. why have it ingame if it does nothing? either replace it, or make it work a la charm person. held promo with 100% chance to expire for example. ( held atm does not prevent spellcasting, but it should because otherwise the cage lair outcome is useless. two more held promos need to be added: one that does not prevent spellcasting, for Acheron, and one that does not prevent spellcasting AND has 100% expire chance for blinding light and entangle ) you've already made it easier to resist so it should be fine. spores would be similar, with a smaller chance to expire so it has a chance of lasting multiple turns.

re: planar gates. 200 hammers seems just right :)

re: powerratio. it's blocked because Tholal dislikes being able to see it without an embassy. which is perfectly fine, but what if you're not using advanced tactics? ;) all I did was tweak so it works just like now with the option, and it's togglable via BUG options otherwise. right now if you're not using advanced tactics that BUG toggle thingie does nothing, you don't see them even when enabled ( which is actually confusing )
 

My first GP tends to be a prophet; I prefer the gold and hammers to the science. Then again I wouldn't be able to plan my games in the level of detail that you do :)

Your post makes me wonder about something, though. I've read many times in the forums that Flauros in vanilla FFH2 is one of the best leaders. Maybe Philosophical is better in the long run?

[to_xp]Gekko;12242137 said:
re: blinding light. why have it ingame if it does nothing? either replace it, or make it work a la charm person. held promo with 100% chance to expire for example. ( held atm does not prevent spellcasting, but it should because otherwise the cage lair outcome is useless. two more held promos need to be added: one that does not prevent spellcasting, for Acheron, and one that does not prevent spellcasting AND has 100% expire chance for blinding light and entangle ) you've already made it easier to resist so it should be fine. spores would be similar, with a smaller chance to expire so it has a chance of lasting multiple turns.

What's the difference between a hold promotion with 100% chance to expire and just giving the unit a turn of being immobile without the promotion as I'm doing currently? From what I see in the source code, the effects of both of them are exactly the same.

[to_xp]Gekko;12242137 said:
re: planar gates. 200 hammers seems just right :)

Okay, I'll include it.

[to_xp]Gekko;12242137 said:
re: powerratio. it's blocked because Tholal dislikes being able to see it without an embassy. which is perfectly fine, but what if you're not using advanced tactics? ;) all I did was tweak so it works just like now with the option, and it's togglable via BUG options otherwise. right now if you're not using advanced tactics that BUG toggle thingie does nothing, you don't see them even when enabled ( which is actually confusing )

Being able to know the power ratio without reason seems wrong to me too. Maybe it could be changed in games without Advanced Tactics to have a different requirement?
 
re: blinding light. you might be right here, not sure if the promo would expire at the beginning or end of their turn. so either a smaller chance, or a clever workaround that changes the duration if simultaneous turns is on? that would be best if possible.

re: powerratio. the info is already available if you check the power rating graph. all it does is save you the hassle of having to check it continously. BUG doesn't show info that would be unavailable in vanilla ;)
 
Great Generals are generated via combat and are only allowed to join units. This feature is not part of FFH and was added as part of the Advanced Tactics option.

Since Great Generals are only used with Advanced Tactics and I want to introduce many features that rely on this game option (such as the already included Imperialistic trait, merge of Great Generals and Great Commanders, changes to how Civics and Traits deal with the growth speed of Forts and so on), I'm just going to enable Advanced Tactics unconditionally for ExtraModMod.

[to_xp]Gekko;12242624 said:
re: blinding light. you might be right here, not sure if the promo would expire at the beginning or end of their turn. so either a smaller chance, or a clever workaround that changes the duration if simultaneous turns is on? that would be best if possible.

Since all temporal promotions are removed at the beginning of the turn, that would be the case for it too. Any workaround would require a DLL change to how promotions and held timers work. I don't know if it would be possible to do what you want via python callbacks or some other way.

[to_xp]Gekko;12242624 said:
re: powerratio. the info is already available if you check the power rating graph. all it does is save you the hassle of having to check it continously. BUG doesn't show info that would be unavailable in vanilla ;)

That makes sense. I'll include it.

EDIT: On the description I see that it just enables the power ratio when not using Advanced Tactics. Does it enable the power ratio unconditionally under Advanced Tactics too?
 
re: blinding light. k, seems like it should work like charm person then.. mind II has 20% chance to expire, 50% should do it for sun II and entangle, with spores at 33% I guess. Tasunke also had an idea for this, hopefully he can chime in with a suggestion ;)

re: powerratio. that's the description of the first version, the second one a few posts below leaves behaviour with advanced tactics on unchanged. basically the code now reads "show this info, unless using advanced tactics and not having an embassy in place " . it's just a couple lines changed and some edited indentation.
 
[to_xp]Gekko;12243629 said:
re: powerratio. that's the description of the first version, the second one a few posts below leaves behaviour with advanced tactics on unchanged. basically the code now reads "show this info, unless using advanced tactics and not having an embassy in place " . it's just a couple lines changed and some edited indentation.

Since I plan to enable Advanced Tactics unconditionally (as I mentioned in my previous post) your changes would never see use in ExtraModMod. Since it can be seen already on the power graph, I think that I'm just going to disable the embassy check.
 
re: blinding light
I really fear that blinding light would not work at all.
I prefer a 1 turn SP - 2 turn simult-MP spell than a 0 turn SP (or PBEM/succession), 1 turn simul-MP.
indeed a double efficiency in MP is better than an "infinite" efficiency in MP.

(IMO the 50% chance to expire is not good, unless you tremendeously reduce spell resistance to it:
a bit of math :
if spell resistance is 50%... and 50% chance to expire :
in successive play : My turn : 50 % stack resist, 50% blinded..
beginning of alternate turn (AI or your turn) : 50% of the 50% turn unblinded at beginning of turn.
thus, for me (caster) : only 25% of targetted ennemy units were blinded...
thus, the spell works like a 75% resistance : only 25% are blinded for 1turn.)

(In fact... with 50% chances to expire, it means that the effectual spell resistance is at least 50%....)

the balance is in-between IMO.

best regards.
 
keep in mind you can have a potentially infinite number of sun II casters, and any unit that gets blinded can't move away therefore it's going to get hit with the spell again next turn. it's still very, very good ;)
 
But with 50% chance to expire there will always be units stuck since it can last a long time.
 
What's imperialistic?

Uhh please don't make it compulsory - if you have to alter the mechanic entirely, but don't restrict choice from the player.

Mithril axes are overpowered in the same way iron warriors would be (and copper warriors arguably are) - they are too cheap for the strength that they outshadow their successor entirely.

Giving defensive a boost to archery units would hardly balance it IMO.
 
but with 50% chances to expire, there will always be 50% units that are NOT stuck, whatever the number of caster you have... (ie : all units get stuck due to infinite caster, but at beginning of opponent turn, 50% get un-stuck).
 
If you want to make some spells appropriate to multi-player, why not just make spells that are appropriate to multi-player? You could replace blinding light with a buff/enemy nerf of some kind AOE damage spell, or maybe some sort of reveal?
 
With regard to the hold spells, Kiech's suggestion makes sense to me. Maybe the Radiant Guards should get a replacement spell, while the other blocking spells (which IIRC are always casted by units with limited numbers) could just become easier to resist.

What's imperialistic?

https://bitbucket.org/Terkhen/extramodmod/wiki/ExtraLeaders

Uhh please don't make it compulsory - if you have to alter the mechanic entirely, but don't restrict choice from the player.

Since I love playing with Advanced Tactics (in fact, I have it enabled by default on local builds right now), part of my plans with ExtraModMod are to extend the features present in it and to support them in the game by letting Traits and Civics to affect them. This would help in integrating them better into gameplay, instead of being mere extras. For example, right now Great Generals are just a nice extra that comes after killing a certain number of units, but there is nothing that can be done to affect the rate and therefore it never matters in strategies.

This means that, in time, the Advanced Tactics features that I plan to extend will be so intertwined with the gameplay that they will need to be always present. In this specific case, not enabling Advanced Tactics unconditionally means that all leaders with Imperialistic will have a trait that essentially does nothing.

Are there any specific Advanced Tactics features you don't like? As long as it does not require a crazy amount of work, I would not mind moving them to their own switch if they are not something that I want to extend and are not vital for the features I plan to introduce.

I could let the switch in, but in my opinion having a switch that makes some leaders useless is not a great idea. Someone who does not know could disable it and he would find himself in a broken game. Mind that showing the switch again ingame only requires a minimal XML change.
 
Request to give Mahala slaver instead of Expansive?

That would make her quite similar to Weevil, and Duin is already Slaver. I'm wondering that maybe the new Imperialistic trait is more suiting for a Doviello than Expansive.
 
Advanced diplo in particular, but apart from self pillaging roads it all feels unnecessary.
 
Well, I can't compromise to not using any of the features included in Advanced Tactics :)

With regard to the specific problem we are discussing, I can adopt the following solution. As part of the Great Commander/Great General merge, I can make the Great General feature enabled regardless of Advanced Tactics. That way, you could enjoy all leaders in games without Advanced Tactics with only the Great General feature instead of all Advanced Tactics features.

Bear in mind that this is not a small amount of work and that it will take time. Since the next version is almost release ready, I don't know if this change will be included in it or not.
 
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