Is there any way to do anything with mountains

[WarKirby]

Using the erebus map type, the game alays places mountain ranges all over the place, as natural barriers. While these are pretty good and add a unique dynamic to the game, they seem to be insurmountable as far as I've seen. It's kind of frustrating being forced to attack from the sea, when your enemy is on the same continent.

I'm thinking, it would be really nice to have some sort of way of dealing with them. Perhaps a third level Earth spell, Terraform, which could turn mountains into hills, hills into plains, etc.

Or even just some dwarf specific thing, perhaps ? It seems kind of odd that dwarves, who are known for living underground, don't have some way of at least making a path through a mountain.

 

[Isotope]

Well.
Try Kuriotates in FF. They have a cargo airship.

 

[Methuselah]

Well.
Try Kuriotates in FF. They have a cargo airship.

The airship for the Kuriotates is included in normal FFH.

 

[Switchblock]

Yea, Kuriotates become beasts on erebus maps now, I really like it.

 

[WarKirby]

well flying over them is nice, are there any other options though, like removing them ?

having a mountain or two in the city radius kind of limits development.

And personally, I think a spell to move mountains would be a lot more awesome then just another summon, for final earth magic

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

the AI would die if such a spell was made. they could never use it inteligently at all.

 

[Guale]

You could always park a stack of dwarven druids on them and crush any passersby.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I tend to like the idea of making Earthquake randomly move mountains/hills sometimes.


I just now realized that Crush would actually be a much better Force sphere spell than a spell for Dwarven Druids. I don't really think that Druids need unit specific spells, especially when you let them have more spheres. I already moved Entangle to the much more appropriate position of being a Guardian Vines-specific spell (right after making this unit once again be a Nature III permanent summon).

 

[Annex]

There have been suggestions to allow the dwarves to mine the mountains. Other than that I dont think anything needs to be done with them. (I have yet to play on the Erebus map, though)

 

[Guale]

When you finally release your modmod, Magister, will it be modular or an all or nothing deal? Because you have several ideas I love but quite a few I wouldn't want in my game.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

It definitely would not be modular. I change a lot of Python, which doesn't work so well with modular loading.


I'm not really sure when I'll finally release it. I think I was getting close to releasing an FF 0.43 before Ice came out, but have been dealing with Ice exclusively (in the past few days I've been modding the scenarios almost as much base code) since and don't really remember what I had left to do in that version. There are some things made possible by Ice adds that I'd hate to loose, but the same can be said for FF. People probably wouldn't want me to wait for FF 0.44 though. I only have 1 more week off from school, and would then be too busy to work on it. I'm taking fewer classes than usual, but they are hard ones with a lot of writing so I doubt I'll have much time for modding then. I should probably really be trying to get a head start on writing the first paper for one of those classes now instead of modding/playing.

 

[Rince Wind]

I think Giant Spiders should be able overcome mountains.

 

[odalrick]

About a mountain forming spell:

the AI would die if such a spell was made. they could never use it inteligently at all.

What if all it did was lower peaks to hills? I think many of the fears about AI terraforming is making passable tiles impassable.

The AI has no concept of choke points anyway, so it wouldn't accidentally destroy an advantage for itself. And making worthless tiles useful is already in the game as spring, a much greater effect.

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

What if all it did was lower peaks to hills? I think many of the fears about AI terraforming is making passable tiles impassable.

The AI has no concept of choke points anyway, so it wouldn't accidentally destroy an advantage for itself. And making worthless tiles useful is already in the game as spring, a much greater effect.

The Ai would still not use it inteligently. for example they would just erode away that mountain barrier blocking them off from their worst and most powerful belseraph enemy and thus be slaughtered. they wouldnt be able to judje where or when to cast it, and if the yDID cast it, they would cast it everywhere so then you would end up wit hno peaks anywhere.

regards making peaks, its even worse. if they actually managed to cast the spell they would make everywhere peaks, or block off half their empire from the rest by filling a mountian pass. the AI is artificial idiocy, not inteligence.

 

[Grey Fox]

The usual argument about peaks (hills could be considered everything from small hills to small mountains), and often deserts, being useless is that by them being less valued the other terrain become more valued. This makes you prefer to avoid having them in your city radius for example.

If every city location was perfect, then it wouldn't be as enjoyable to settle a perfect city location.

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

The usual argument about peaks (hills could be considered everything from small hills to small mountains), and often deserts, being useless is that by them being less valued the other terrain become more valued. This makes you prefer to avoid having them in your city radius for example.

If every city location was perfect, then it wouldn't be as enjoyable to settle a perfect city location.

amen to that.

(on a side note i love you DP Grey fox )

 

[Ghosts]

You can edit how the Erebus Map generates itself at the start of a match. Go to your public maps folder in your FFH2 mod directory. Before changing anything make a copy of the Erebus map(Erebus.py) and place it somewhere outside the folder that you will remember. Open the Erebus map (Erebus.py file) with wordpad and scroll down till you get to the section that say tunable variables.

The text instructions in the wordpad document basically explains itself. Go to
self.SoftenPeakPercent = 0.0
This basically changes your Peaks to hills so if you want to still have it nice and mountainous then change it to something like 0.10(basically meaning 10%of the peaks will change) or 0.25 (meaning 25% will change) I find 0.10 to keep it nice and mountainous with no real noticeable change, but most of the time you will have at least 1 passage between each valley. If you change it to 0.25 the map is little more open usually having at least 1-3 passages between each valley. Anything more then 0.25 kind of takes away from the feel of the map

Another option to change if you think there are too many hills is change
self.HillChanceAtOne = .90
change the 0.90 to something like 0.75 or 0.80 to keep the feel of the map and lessen the hills by a tiny amount

There are many other variables that you can change around. Read around the text instructions it basically tells you what each line does.

Once your done save document (click file and then select save or close the document and select save when it asks you if you want to save) and load up FFH2, start a new Erebus map and tada! Little less mountain (and/or hills if you choose)

To return back to the old settings basically change back the variables to the old setting if you remember what changes you did or click on that old copy of your Erebus.py file and put it back into your Public Maps folder copying over your edited erebus map when asked.

Hope this helps, take care and have a happy new year!!

 

[odalrick]

The Ai would still not use it inteligently. for example they would just erode away that mountain barrier blocking them off from their worst and most powerful belseraph enemy and thus be slaughtered. they wouldnt be able to judje where or when to cast it, and if the yDID cast it, they would cast it everywhere so then you would end up wit hno peaks anywhere.

The AI isn't able to understand chokepoints and similar, so it actually would be better for it if it could erase all peaks. It can't adapt to the circumstances, but with a peak lowering spell it could adapt the circumstances to itself.

As for natural barriers to enemy empires, does the AI actually understand that it can't be attacked from such a direction? If it doesn't it it wastes resources on defending unassailable positions.

(And, yes. raising peaks is bad.)

 

[zup]

I think the elevation should be more dynamic like in SMAC. As should terrain in general. And I love sky hydroponics labs and nessus mining stations and whatever-the-energy-thingy-was's. Social engineering >>>>> civics. CIV is so much worse in so many ways than SMAC. Hell, SMAC unmodded is awesome. But vanilla CIV is unplayable. And I love to design my own units from whatever parts I have. Though for the last Space Empires V is better.

(And no, I don't care about 'Space Empires IV is better' talk. The combat is too tedious.)

Sure SMAC has its downsides too. Such as the horribly overpowered Cloning Vats. I would not mind my Calabim cities guaranteed to grow every turn though.

EDIT: I probably won't get over not being able to play SMAC anytime soon.

 

[Keeper_GFA]

Why can't you play it? I just reloaded mine a couple weeks ago.