Do you have Master of Mana (Xtended 4.1) installed? There are lot of good models here that can be utilized. For example they Iron Golem is much better looking.
I plan to install it in the future to check if mapscripttools works with it, but I don't plan to look through it for models. Feel free to post a screenshot here so we can discuss it
In the last released version, the chance of barbs spawning is always 50%. The level of the unit and the few exploration chance boosting promotions only affect whether you get good or bad non-spawn exploration results.
The strength of the non-spawn outcome, i.e. the risk/reward is determined solely by the wilderness value of the plot (plus a bonus if it's an epic lair). IIRC, the reasoning behind not letting unit level affect barb spawn chance was that the barbarians represented a risk/reward in itself, giving experience. I also thought I would be adding extra rewards for defeating bosses soon, but this hasn't been implemented yet, so overall I agree that spawns mostly feel like a bad thing.
I agree with that reasoning.
The exploration chance display really only means how much of the possible chance your unit has. I agree that this is misleading. I could change it to a simple Very High/High/Medium/..., but it also would be nice to be able to notice smaller improvements in exploration level e.g. through promotions. Any thoughts on this?
If we keep it like this I think that the percentage is fine, but the UI should be worded differently to make more clear that the success rate is only applied after the initial chance.
Aside from the gameplay perspective, and while the fact that more experienced explorers somehow come across more rewarding things isn't much more logical either, it feels much more an infraction of immersion to tie the chance of barbarians in the lair to the level of the unit exploring. What do you all think?
I tested 30% instead of 50% for spawns the last week and it seems to work better.
Also, the exploration chance display might be a bit off, I have to check that.
EDIT: removed a wrong statement about spawns occurring more often.
I believe it makes sense that a more seasoned explorer can find better rewards. The explorer may be able to overcome more obstacles and find a better loot than someone who only explores the easy parts of the dungeon.
open borders or perma alliance AI "unpolitely" explores "my" dungeons, destroys barrows, or - its workes "like " to build forts at my territory. Understandably, I do not like such behaviour.
I will look into possible solutions for the AI (or anyone else for that matter) being able to explore dungeons in the territory of other players. I believe that no one should be allowed to do this, but any comments are welcome. I have created an issue:
https://bitbucket.org/Terkhen/extramodmod/issues/343/ai-and-exploration
With regard to forts, do you mean that the AI is building them inside of your culture? If that's the case, that is definitely a bug.
I'd be cautious with hard-caps though, as I don't want it to be predictable for players who know how it works. Maybe starting with 50% and halving it every time a spawn comes out?
Also, the counter should reset when you leave alone the lair for some time. I'll probably make it 15 turns to forget one spawn outcome, so if you got 2 consecutive spawns it needs 30 turns to get back to 50% percent.
That makes sense. With regard to what I mentioned about improving the UI message, maybe it could display both the current dangerousness of the dungeon (I don't like that name for it, though
) without displaying any exact values, and also the exploration success rate.
[to_xp]Gekko;14427134 said:
Terkhen have you considered making Palace give 12 commerce instead of 8? it would mean a bit less boring warrior spam and make starts with lots of commerce less overpowered. Fall Further did this and it's a nice change.
I like the part about making starts with lots of commerce less overpowered, but I think this would change a lot how the beginning of the game plays. Given that we are still balancing barbarians properly, I prefer to not do a change like this one for now.
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Lately I have been mostly working on contributing fixes and features for MNAI; we will get those in ExtraModMod 0.6.0-beta1 once I merge MNAI into it. Besides that, I have also been working on improving the map selection included in MapScriptTools. The new Pangaea_mst that we will have in the next ExtraModMod version uses the terrain generator in MST, which IMO makes the terrain more natural, beautiful and interesting. The adaptation also allows Pangaea to remember map options between different runs, a resource balancer option, tubular wrapping, team start options and special terrain features among other things. Here are some minimap screenshots: