Final Fixes Reborn

[Joey Diamond]

Suggestion: Removing all Religions/conditions dependant units from Mercernaries hiring menu please. I found some good Demagog mercs so i hired them and forgot that they'll abandon non-crusade civ. As a result, i lost 1000 gold. Since i'm in a hotseat session with my Bannor friend so i pretended that those two guys are actually his turncoat spy that run away with my gold ^_^

EDIT* Another Suggestion about Mercernaries system: Can you allowed National heroes from Civs that currently not in play to appear in the hiring menu? Other way is to allow hero and unique promotions(ie. Carlson's trainer promotion) to appear in some mercernaries units. This'll make Merc system much more useful.

 

[Llewen]

A few observations from playing the hell out of AoE over the past six months or so.

1. The Illians could use a whack with the nerf bat. Their terrain auto transforms, and the bonuses they get as a result are a bit nuts. It's nothing to end up with Illian cities in the mid to high 30's while everyone other civ's cities are in the high teens, low 20's. Then there's that dragon. That dragon is fun, but it's more powerful than Asheron, and easy to create. All you need to do is research the divine essence tech and build it. I think it's powers should both be somewhat reduced, and the effort required to make it should be increased. I'm thinking that requirements for it should be divine essence, elementalism, sorcery, ice mana, and animal mastery. I also think it should not be able to move into any tile that isn't tundra or colder. As for the power reduction, maybe just a few points reduction in base str. The cost for the ritual should also be increased.

2. Beasts and animals are overpowered. They should not have access to the subdue animal and subdue beast promotions. I'm currently in a game where I have dozens, literally, of dragon turtles, mostly due to a sea serpent with subdue beast. Have you ever seen what happens to a city with a stack of doom on it that gets fire breathed on by a dozen dragon turtles? Let me tell you, the most powerful stack of doom can entirely eliminated in one puff. Anything that twelve firebreaths doesn't kill, will be easily mopped up by the summoned meteors. Beasts' mobility and power, combined with the subdue beast promotion, makes them completely out of whack.

3. And while we're on the topic of fire breath. Fire breath should either be the fire breath effect, or a meteor. Not both. I prefer meteors.

4. Hunter's prize is far too easy to abuse. It isn't necessary, it actually lessens some of the fun in hunting exotic beasts. At the very least it should only be able to be used once after a unit is subdued. And both hunter's prize and the leader's escape ability should make the unit disappear for a number of turns while it travels. I'm thinking one turn per 8 tiles distance from the capital it is returning to.

5. This is another thought, all the units with a unit limit of four, I'd rather see it prorated according to the population you control. I'm thinking something like one for every 80 population points rounded up, so you always can have at least one of each of the most powerful units. Which would lead us back to the Illians and why they could use a whack with the nerf bat.

 

[Nor'easter]

I certainly agree with allowing units from civs not in the game to be available as Mercenaries, but I wouldn't like having Heroes available as Mercenaries: I think that could be too unbalancing. Plus the Heroes are supposed to be leaders of their people in some sense, so I'm not sure that they should be hiring themselves out as Mercenaries. @black_imperator, if you do allow Heroes in the Mercenary pool, maybe make it an option, for those of us who don't want that? (Or an option to NOT have them in the Mercenary pool, depending on what the default is?)

@Llewen, some nice ideas there. I like your number 3 about the Dragon Turtles' fire breath, should be one or the other, not both. Number 4 is creative, but don't know how easily programmable it would be. Same with number 5. (I'm not a programmer, so don't claim any knowledge of how easy or difficult these would be to implement.)

 

[Llewen]

Another thing, the random discovery of resources is also a bit nuts. It's nothing to wind up at the end of the game with virtually every land tile having a resource on it. And this is with extra resources turned off. I'd like to see the chance of discovering a new resource at least halved. This would also make acquiring the mana (earth mana, nature mana(?)) that gives a bonus to resource discovery more meaningful.

 

[Llewen]

Number 4 is creative, but don't know how easily programmable it would be.

Shouldn't be anymore difficult to code than the old "lost" code that made a lost unit disappear for a number of turns.

 

[Rickie_Rain]

Hello!
Starting off with saying its awesome to see work continue on the FFH2 legacy, and this modmod has a lot of deliciousness to it.

So I wanted to ask about the Steam version mana icons problem. I've done some basic tinkering to see if I could get around it but no such luck. I understand that the simple
way of getting around this is to change beta settings to original_release however curious as I am, I wonder if the devs know whats up with this bug?
As a little thought-knot, Caveman2Cosmos is working with latest steam patch, so if devs are not sure (which I'm not assuming but not ruling out) maybe
poking those guys to get ideas on fixing it could be something. I understand if it isn't deemed a priority but if it would turn out to be a fairly easy fix it'd be real nice.

Nice for some of us at least, because swapping versions to swap mods is a bit of a pain in the butt, and scratch one step off of installation procedures.

Keep up the good work!

 

[Joey Diamond]

I completely agree with Llewen about animals shouldn't have 2 subdue promotions and about -breath abilities. One solution is to seperate breath into lesser and greater -breath, lesser are reserved for non-epic units such as drakes and dragon turtles. And put a damage cap on lesser breath just like siege and range attack. My suggestion is 70% cap due to how much collateral damage it does compared to siege/range. While retaining no cap on greater -breath abilities. Another solution is to put something like the "Winded" promotion after a unit used the -breath ability: Instead it prevents that unit from using another breath until the promotion automatically disappear. (2-3 turns)

However i kinda disagree on Illian's dragon ritual nerf. I'm currently playing hotseat with another 2 friends and i'm sure you can't just beelining the Divine Essence without everyone notice and steamrolling you, even in mid game. Oh and Divine Essence does require almost all Priests/Religions techline and you has to kill one civ for the ritual to be available. I actually even think it was either a tradeoff between summon a dragon or ascending Auric because when you get to either way, the game is already 90% in your favor.

 

[black_imperator]

@black_imperator , I'm not particularly fixated on trade with Barbs (trade routes, tech trading, resource trading), it was just something that occurred to me that I thought might add something different for those factions.

Yeah i got that, i'll keep it in my ideas doc, maybe i'll revisit it later on.

Suggestion: Removing all Religions/conditions dependant units from Mercernaries hiring menu please. I found some good Demagog mercs so i hired them and forgot that they'll abandon non-crusade civ. As a result, i lost 1000 gold. Since i'm in a hotseat session with my Bannor friend so i pretended that those two guys are actually his turncoat spy that run away with my gold ^_^

Hmmm i thought i had set up something to bypass that. Well i'll deactivate them till i get time to look into it deeper.

EDIT* Another Suggestion about Mercernaries system: Can you allowed National heroes from Civs that currently not in play to appear in the hiring menu? Other way is to allow hero and unique promotions(ie. Carlson's trainer promotion) to appear in some mercernaries units. This'll make Merc system much more useful.

Heroes i don't really want to add to mercs. You can already get units from any civs (apart D'Tesh). That seems enough. What could happens is specific mercenary heroes though (like the black duke for example)

A few observations from playing the hell out of AoE over the past six months or so.

1. The Illians could use a whack with the nerf bat. Their terrain auto transforms, and the bonuses they get as a result are a bit nuts. It's nothing to end up with Illian cities in the mid to high 30's while everyone other civ's cities are in the high teens, low 20's. Then there's that dragon. That dragon is fun, but it's more powerful than Asheron, and easy to create. All you need to do is research the divine essence tech and build it. I think it's powers should both be somewhat reduced, and the effort required to make it should be increased. I'm thinking that requirements for it should be divine essence, elementalism, sorcery, ice mana, and animal mastery. I also think it should not be able to move into any tile that isn't tundra or colder. As for the power reduction, maybe just a few points reduction in base str. The cost for the ritual should also be increased.

For the dragon, you also have to kill another player, but i'm willing to add an additional tech requirements ( ice mana wouldn't change much as they get it from their palace). For the rest, i do have some notes on the Illians and terraforming in general. At the very least, they wouldn't get their auto-terraforming from the start but would need a ritual to start it.

2. Beasts and animals are overpowered. They should not have access to the subdue animal and subdue beast promotions. I'm currently in a game where I have dozens, literally, of dragon turtles, mostly due to a sea serpent with subdue beast. Have you ever seen what happens to a city with a stack of doom on it that gets fire breathed on by a dozen dragon turtles? Let me tell you, the most powerful stack of doom can entirely eliminated in one puff. Anything that twelve firebreaths doesn't kill, will be easily mopped up by the summoned meteors. Beasts' mobility and power, combined with the subdue beast promotion, makes them completely out of whack.

i'll think about it.

3. And while we're on the topic of fire breath. Fire breath should either be the fire breath effect, or a meteor. Not both. I prefer meteors.

I didn't know it was both, that'll be fixed.

4. Hunter's prize is far too easy to abuse. It isn't necessary, it actually lessens some of the fun in hunting exotic beasts. At the very least it should only be able to be used once after a unit is subdued. And both hunter's prize and the leader's escape ability should make the unit disappear for a number of turns while it travels. I'm thinking one turn per 8 tiles distance from the capital it is returning to.

not having hunter prize makes it extremely difficult to gather some animals. i probably can have the unit held for a few turns for travel purpose, but making it disappear and reappear needs to set up additional structure that i'm not willing to do just for that.

5. This is another thought, all the units with a unit limit of four, I'd rather see it prorated according to the population you control. I'm thinking something like one for every 80 population points rounded up, so you always can have at least one of each of the most powerful units. Which would lead us back to the Illians and why they could use a whack with the nerf bat.

That's an interesting idea.

I certainly agree with allowing units from civs not in the game to be available as Mercenaries, but I wouldn't like having Heroes available as Mercenaries: I think that could be too unbalancing. Plus the Heroes are supposed to be leaders of their people in some sense, so I'm not sure that they should be hiring themselves out as Mercenaries. @black_imperator, if you do allow Heroes in the Mercenary pool, maybe make it an option, for those of us who don't want that? (Or an option to NOT have them in the Mercenary pool, depending on what the default is?)

Heroes as mercenaries is not happening. Units from other civs is already happening ^^

@Llewen, some nice ideas there. I like your number 3 about the Dragon Turtles' fire breath, should be one or the other, not both. Number 4 is creative, but don't know how easily programmable it would be. Same with number 5. (I'm not a programmer, so don't claim any knowledge of how easy or difficult these would be to implement.)

A variation on 4 is possible. 5 would be too but i need to think about it. (We have traits that decrease and increase national unit limits and thus i need to think on how to rework those if i go with that).

Another thing, the random discovery of resources is also a bit nuts. It's nothing to wind up at the end of the game with virtually every land tile having a resource on it. And this is with extra resources turned off. I'd like to see the chance of discovering a new resource at least halved. This would also make acquiring the mana (earth mana, nature mana(?)) that gives a bonus to resource discovery more meaningful.

Noted.

Shouldn't be anymore difficult to code than the old "lost" code that made a lost unit disappear for a number of turns.

If you're refering to what i think, the unit wasn't disappearing, it was teleported out of sight. it's a really ugly way to do it, since it

Hello!
Starting off with saying its awesome to see work continue on the FFH2 legacy, and this modmod has a lot of deliciousness to it.

So I wanted to ask about the Steam version mana icons problem. I've done some basic tinkering to see if I could get around it but no such luck. I understand that the simple
way of getting around this is to change beta settings to original_release however curious as I am, I wonder if the devs know whats up with this bug?
As a little thought-knot, Caveman2Cosmos is working with latest steam patch, so if devs are not sure (which I'm not assuming but not ruling out) maybe
poking those guys to get ideas on fixing it could be something. I understand if it isn't deemed a priority but if it would turn out to be a fairly easy fix it'd be real nice.

Nice for some of us at least, because swapping versions to swap mods is a bit of a pain in the butt, and scratch one step off of installation procedures.

Keep up the good work!

I'll see them to learn what they did to get it compatible. I assume they rewrote the parts that were changed in the steam release to make it compatible. If i can get a list of changes to make, i'll do them and set up an alternate version. I own only the original version so i cannot really test for the steam bugs ( and i can't have the mod being uncompatible with the original otherwise i can't work on it anymore ^^).

I completely agree with Llewen about animals shouldn't have 2 subdue promotions and about -breath abilities. One solution is to seperate breath into lesser and greater -breath, lesser are reserved for non-epic units such as drakes and dragon turtles. And put a damage cap on lesser breath just like siege and range attack. My suggestion is 70% cap due to how much collateral damage it does compared to siege/range. While retaining no cap on greater -breath abilities. Another solution is to put something like the "Winded" promotion after a unit used the -breath ability: Instead it prevents that unit from using another breath until the promotion automatically disappear. (2-3 turns)

adding the damage cap is probably a good point.

However i kinda disagree on Illian's dragon ritual nerf. I'm currently playing hotseat with another 2 friends and i'm sure you can't just beelining the Divine Essence without everyone notice and steamrolling you, even in mid game. Oh and Divine Essence does require almost all Priests/Religions techline and you has to kill one civ for the ritual to be available. I actually even think it was either a tradeoff between summon a dragon or ascending Auric because when you get to either way, the game is already 90% in your favor.

i won't do much more than add maybe elementalism and/or white Hand as a prereq.

 

[black_imperator]

ok, double post but i wanted to do a recap of what i'm doing these days.

so, in between bugfixing and interface updating ( by the way, please report any mechanic that you think is unclear or whose explanation doesn't match, or interface stuff you would like to see added),
i've been working on what i call the Underworld feature. The basic version has been up for a while and is basically a revamp of Resurrect :

-Any unit can be tagged for resurrection through a xml tag on the unit itself or a promo (at the moment all non-mechanical non-barbarian world units). when such a unit dies, it goes into a pool specific to the owner. When Resurrect is cast, the most recent unit added to the pool is brought back with xp and promos.

-In term of xml, there is a new tag on promotion to allow a unit to resurrect ( currently not used, in next commit, the Elohim will get a level 15 Spirit-Catcher promotion that will do that), and a tag that blocks a unit from joining the resurrection pool ( currently only used in one of Naxus-exclusive spells)



To go with that, i've recently added ( next commit) something i've wanted to do for a while. Make the netherblade work as described in the lore:

-any unit killed with the Netherblade (immortals included) are sent to a specific netherblade pool ( and not to their Resurrect pool if they can resurrect). That means the netherblade is the perfect tool to get rid of immortals and heroes and ensure they don't come back. That is, until you destroy the blade.

-Destroying the netherblade is an option when you have the blade and are not Sidar (i'm probably add additional requirements to make it more interesting though). What it does is distribute back the dead units to their resurrect pool, meaning you can bring back all your favorite heroes.

- Potential expansions of this will be very-hard-to-achieve rituals binding the dead units to you instead. (That'll make a nice quest)



In addition, i'm gonna tweak the Manes/Angel spawning to fit the lore a bit better. I'm not sure of the exact number yet but the idea is that a high ratio of evil units will turn in Manes but it will take a few turns, while a lower ratio of good units will turn in Angels but it'll be instantaneous. In addition to that, Purifying the Bradeline's well will cut the ratio of evil units turning into Manes.


Finally, if you have been hanging around the ffh reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/fallfromheaven/) you'll have noticed that Kael has offered us some new lore to do things with. Since some of it is in the Underworld theme, i'm gonna add that too/ So, pending Magister's authorization/some art, i intend to add the Clava Vindex (Basium's Hammer) that will work like the netherblade but on demons/Evil units and the Carcer Judicia, a wonder that will give a promo working similarly to all units built in the city. Destroying the hammer or the Wonder will release all captured units.


That's for the Underworld stuff, but i'm still working on bugfixing and cleaning up. I'm gonna cut the current guilds very soon, they don't really bring anything to the table at the moment.

I've also run a good number of AI runs recently and i've noticed a few outstanding issues.
1) The AI very rarely clears neighbouring lairs. It makes sense to avoid the risk of a bad result, but the side-effect is that the spawning barbarians are completely ruining them. So i'm gonna tweak the values to encourage them to clears spawning-lairs (if they aren't at peace with the spawning civ) and lairs that are on workable tiles.
2) there are still some teching fudge-ups, including a way loo large weight on religious techs. I'm gonna work on that too
+ continuing the magic AI work.


Finally, i'm looking for some help revamping the xml Diplovalues for leaders. I've written a guide on how to do it and i need help going through all the leaders. If everyone pitches in by doing one or two of their favorite leaders, that would be very helpful. (Also still accepting Pedia entries, diplo lines, any kind of help). I've also got reports of issues with multiplayer, if people involved could send me save files and logs that would be helpful.





PS: i've check what C2C does for the steam version. it seems they encourage installing the 3.19 patch over the steam installation. That might work for us too.

 

[Joey Diamond]

Superb addition! I'm always game for anything that'll give second chance for my beloved units. Ironic that in normal CIV i considred them cannon fodders while in here, every units has their own stories.

Will there be some change towards Death mana mechanic? My idea is that you can use Death 1 (raise skeleton) on the graveyard to brings units from this resurrection pool instead of Life 3 to recieve a heavily crippled/weaker/undead version of that unit(give him a minus strengh, minus heal or temporary active for X turns tag maybe). Kinda like a quick and sloppy way like what evil leaders would do. And due to how badly necromantic thing does to one's soul, that unit will also got booted to the last queue in the resurrection pool.(If it still allowed to resurrect/raise again)

Another question is: Credits and respect aside, So you actually don't have any problem with burrowing something from other modmods right? Didn't want to be rude or anything, I'm just asking because i was wondered why can't you just port the naval AI mod to AOE or some flavor texts and lore that Kael actually wrote himself to fill in some blank in the pedia. It could save alot of times.

 

[black_imperator]

Will there be some change towards Death mana mechanic? My idea is that you can use Death 1 (raise skeleton) on the graveyard to brings units from this resurrection pool instead of Life 3 to recieve a heavily crippled/weaker/undead version of that unit(give him a minus strengh, minus heal or temporary active for X turns tag maybe). Kinda like a quick and sloppy way like what evil leaders would do. And due to how badly necromantic thing does to one's soul, that unit will also got booted to the last queue in the resurrection pool.(If it still allowed to resurrect/raise again).

Not really. death mana in game is pure necromancy, it has little to do with bringing people souls back and more with animating their bodies for some use. Though i would like to introduce more ways of using it. (I'm thinking rituals asking a god for a soul to be sent back for example, which is basically what the Doviello did for Charadon), but i still need to think about them in details. I do have a mad idea or two about lorewise necromancy that i would like to explore though( would probably be restricted to an option as it would be quite unbalanced).

Another question is: Credits and respect aside, So you actually don't have any problem with burrowing something from other modmods right? Didn't want to be rude or anything, I'm just asking because i was wondered why can't you just port the naval AI mod to AOE or some flavor texts and lore that Kael actually wrote himself to fill in some blank in the pedia. It could save alot of times.

-The magic ai work i'm doing is actually adapting More Naval AI code to AOE. a direct port wouldn't make sense as the two codes are very different at this point.

-In term of mechanics and ideas, some of what Magister did is very interested and i would like to revisit it. I've also took some time a few months ago to read back old mod threads to see if there were good ideas to revisit.

-For the flavor stuff, it's mostly that i don't have time to go through the list of pedia we're missing, and then go through the lore forum and the pedia of the other modmods to fill it ^^.

something else i forgot to mention, i've set up an irc channel on freenode for Ashes of Erebus ##aoe . not sure it'll get much used, but it doesn't hurt. For people who don't have a irc client, here is a weblink : http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=##aoe

 

[Rickie_Rain]

Nice to see the positive response black_imperator.
I got right on attempting to patch up to 3.19 however it does not seem to work. Whether Win10 is the problem or something else I am not sure.
When I run the 3.19 patcher I get through agreement and the choice to register my civ copy and when I hit install the patcher freezes.

Edit*: Did try to run as admin.

 

[black_imperator]

the thread when i've seen that discussed mentioned to use explicitely the 3.19 patch found on civfanatics (apparently there's another one floating around that's slightly different or something).

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ4-beyond-the-sword-v3-19-patch-pc.12576/

 

[Rickie_Rain]

Same story freezing up. One mention is that the patcher tries to automatically look for civ4 in default installation places but I smell a registry issue.
If it is as I suspect then a correct registry key with path to Civ4, even if Steam and patcher could work. I don't expect you to dig into this idea, but
I'll put this on hold for the moment. I fear this might end up being one of those situations where a patchers criteria for installing were made daft, so
the only way to get around it would be to re-create a patch with new criteria. </brooding>
If you could toss in what registry keys a normal civ4 install use that'd be something to compare with at least.

What I'm looking at is
LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/WOW6432NODE/Firaxis Games/
____Sid Meier's Civilization 4
________@r: installdir
____Sid Meier's Civilization 4 - Beyond the Sword
________@r: installdir
________@r: default_language

Also got an uninstall part for steamapp 8800 and some I dont know what crap in "muiCACHE".

My reasoning is that it'd be pretty stupid if the patcher couldn't handle custom install paths of the game, but I could imagine a steam
install doesn't provide the same kind of registry info. I could be wrong but it'd be nice to just cross off, if somone with a box copy can look it up.

Worth mentioning is that the GameWatcher download link is corrupt.

 

[black_imperator]

i have DEFAULT_LANGUAGE and INSTALLDIR as keys in both the civ 4 and bts registry entries.

 

[Rickie_Rain]

Cheers for the check. =\

 

[Llewen]

Just a further addendum to the suggestion that firebreath should either be firebreath or a summoned meteor. Whether you choose to keep both, or just go with firebreath, firebreath should be limited to a limited number of targets on one tile. As I said, it is insanely powerful now. Give me a dozen lowest strength, green dragon turtles and I could sit next to multiple stacks of thousands of the most powerful units in the game and wipe them all out with one click. I currently have two stacks of over two dozen each that I'm just itching to use in the game I'm playing now. You might even want to lower their spawn rate or put a cap on the total number that can be in any game at any given time.

edit: Didn't see the reply to my post above. Sounds great.

 

[black_imperator]

i'll likely add a damage cap to it to prevent one-hit mass murders ^^

 

[Llewen]

 

[Llewen]

I realize the biggest issue with the "hunter's prize" is completing the Grand Menagerie. It's almost impossible to do without it. But a delay in transport, and making the hunter's prize a single cast per unit, would prevent abuse and make it a bit more lore friendly.