I finally got the city screen to correctly display all 24 religions in the games properly in 3 rows, with the gold boxes and stars in the right place. (I believe the last version used two rows but put the boxes for the second row on the first row. The hard part was finding where to adjust the panel to make the resources box not overlap the religion's 3rd row.)
What order to you think I should follow when organizing the religions?
At first I was just adding all the new religions to the end of the list after the original 7 religions in no particular order, although I had reorganized the original 7 religions in my modded years ago to go from most good to most evil.
It seems to me though that with the religions divided into 3 different rows that it makes more sense to have one row for good, one row for neutral, and one row for evil religions.
I liked the idea of arranging things so that opposite spheres would be on top of/below each other, but that doesn't work so well when some opposing spheres are neutral.
This screenshot shows how the city screen looks with the religions placed in the order that mostly follows how Kael listed each of the gods' vaults in
The Worlds of Hall from Heaven, from the Highest Heaven of Lugus to the Lowest Hell of Agares. The Dreamlands was listed last in that document but would be encountered after the Throne of Hell when ascending out of the hells in reverse order, so I placed the Council of Esus ahead of The White Hand. I placed The Ember Legion after the Ashen Veil instead of between Brotherhood of Wardens and the Ringgivers because Bhall is no longer among the good gods, as she fell down to Agares' hell and after awakening will usurp him to become the Queen of Hell, using their son Belphegor to bring on the Age of Ruin. Having 6 good 7 neutral, and 8 evil religions unbalanced things enough that I had to place the Cult of the Dragon at the end of the Neutral row (its alignment should depend on the type of dragon being worshiped, but neutral and evil dragon cults are the most common) and both the Matronae and Children of the One in the first row with the Good religions. It makes sense for the Matronae to fit between The Order and the Luonnotar, as their goals were inspired by the philosophies of Cassiel and the Luonnotar but their means was to use a genocidal fanaticism worse than The Order.
I am going to have to reassign the various disable religion game options to fit the new order, but figured I'd ask for advice to see if anyone has a more reasonable way to arrange them first.
I was sure I had responded to most of these already, but since I don't see a more recent post my me I guess I abandoned a draft before posting.
The Soul Shroud requiring Pass Through the Ether seems like an indirect nerf to the Sidar since it's such a lategame tech. But it is better than them having the Soul Forge. Does this mean they have access to the Tower of Necromancy now? If not, do they have no tower at all (and as such cannot get the Tower of Mastery)?
The change to spellstaffs seem like it would give the Amurites a significant boost. Even if the spellstaff lost any othe benefit and only gave double casting it would still be a strong buff for them i think.
Yes, the Sidar are able to build the Tower of Necromancy now so they are not blocked from also building the Tower of Mastery. I decided to make it so that the Tower of Necromancy also gives free promotion picks to Angels of Death and Tomb Wardens, so the Sidar have some use for it despite not being able to summon the Undead.
I decided that it was odd for the Tower of Necromancy to be the only tower that supplied mana, especially now that you can get death mana from either the Tomb of Arawn or the Soul Forge, so I removed that.
I also cut back the number of free promotion picks from the towers, making it so that the units should always get one promotion pick but that additional promotions depend not only on your effective mana supply but also on how many other units are empowered with free promotions from the towers. Without this change, the Dimensional 2 spell was way too overpowered as it made little sense to train an army when you could summon one with that many free promotions and keep them around indefinitely.
I decided that requiring Pass through the Ether was too much of a nerf, despite the Sidar doing rather well in most of my test games. I ended up switching it to Religious Law instead.
Yes, improving spell staffs is a significant boost to the Amurites, making them finally stand out as the best arcane civ rather than merely one civ whose leaders all have the arcane trait. It is also a buff to the Dispel Magic spell, since that can remove spell staffs fro rival casters.
I have a save where the spirit guide is not being transferred to a new unit on death of the original. Is this a bug? Do you wan the save?
I have made way too many changes since the last release to want to roll them back to make the game compatible enough to test an old save at this point.
Spirit Guide is supposed to transfer XP to an eligible living unit, excluding beasts and animals, not transfer the promotion to another unit.
By the way in the nest release Spirit Guide will be very much associated with the Eternal Cabal, as the Reliquary is now the temple of that faith. You can expect the Sidar to build a lot of reliquaries ad hve their dying units pass on their xp to other units, letting them level up enough to become Shades faster.
An example of some icons below ...
I can also try to suggest making an intro video for each of the new, relative to the original, religion
I honestly never play with any videos active and don't care enough about them to want to made the download size larger by including them.
The icon look already but the default icons they replace are good enough that I don't see any value in making the download larger in order to replace them.
The icon with which I am least happy and would most welcome a replacement is the one I made for Force Mana.
I'm also not a huge fan of the Empyrean symbol, as a lion might make sense as a totem of a desert tribe like the Malakim but it seems to have nothing to do with Lugus. Lions are mostly nocturnal ambush predators, the antithesis of what Lugus stands for. I always imagined the Emyrean symbol as more like an all seeing eye surrounded with rays of the sun (but definitely not with a pyramid like the Stewards of Inequity eye of providence symbol). That would fit better with how clerics of Lugus are canonically colloquially called Eyemen. We might need a new symbol for the Anointed if the Empyrean eye symbol was too close. The old Aeron's chosen icon does seem an odd color scheme for the blood god anyway.
I just got the event for a witch that has been found and that you can choose to execute, spare, recruit (as Sheiam) for a Mobius Witch, or as Balseraph, weigh her.
The last one gives you a Witch Hunter. I don't recall what they get in base FFH, but a Witch Hunter seems a bit unusual. This allow the Balseraphs to found the Matronae faster than any other civ, although they still need Fanaticism for Evangelist. Or is the Witch Hunter they receive specifically non-religious?
Canonically Witch Hunters were a big deal in The Order for generations before most of them abandoned Junil to serve Sarabride. Most did not tend to be especially devout, just fanatical about rooting out witches or anyone they could profit from accusing of being witches.
I am not sure how it was in the last release, but currently Witch Hunters have no religion type, despite having The Matronae as their religion prereq. You cannot train them en mass without the Matronae religion, but the unit's own religion would be determined at random based on the religions in the city where it is trained and it would have no religion when gained from that event.
Witch Hunters don't have the Divine promotion either, so the only way they can purchase the Evangelist promotion is if they get the Eremite promotion from a Malakim Desert Shrine or if they are assigned the Empyrean religion and visit the Mirror of Heaven. I wonder if I should change their unitcombat to something other than Disciple to prevent even that from happening.
This has been mentioned before, but there are quite a few broken maps/scenarios in the current version of MMM. As well as the below (which sounds very interesting!), The Black Tower, Wages of Sin, and the Splintered Court (at least) are broken. The Civ4 maps (e.g. Earth 18 Civs, Earth 1000AD, South America, Africa and Earth Ice Age) are also broken (note that they work on other FFH2 mods, e.g. EMM, by spawning civs randomly). I believe that Ozzys 19-Civ map is also broken.
Is there a way to fix this - something we can edit in the WBSave file that will make it compatible? Alternatively, would you be able to check these for the next release version? Thanks.
I fixed all of the scenarios in the PrivateMaps folder to be compatible with my modmod again a week ago. That is, I edited the CivBeyondSwordWBSave to eliminate anything that would cause it to crash upon loading and searched ScenarioFunctions.py to eliminate references to things that would clearly cause bugs, but I did not playtest every one of the scenarios long enough to make sure all of the triggers still worked the way they should.
I spent a bit more time on the Gift of Kylorin scenario, as it serves as a tutorial for some spells that don't work that way anymore. After losing a few times from miscasting the non-affinity versions of one spells, I decided to just go ahead and make that scenario grant affinities. The affinity Channeling 3 spells are way too strong though, so I deciced to change the player unit from an Archmage to a Wizard. I had to add a couple walls to prevent the Water affinity promotion's water walking from letting the player skip half of the maze. I went ahead and let the Relic of Leucetios grant Life affinity and Arawn Death Affinity, as life affinity has no spells that are useful in the dungeon (except for mass resurrection, which would require Channeling 3 and enable much too powerful spells in other spheres), although if you go for the optional relic of Barbatos first and get Undeath affinity you cannot get that promotion.
I did not touch the copies of the same scenarios in the Assets\XML\Scenarios folder, which I always through was a really weird place for Kael to put them. I guess he did so because he only wanted people to be able to access them through the custom scenarios screen that makes some scenarios prereqs for others, but I personally much prefer being able to launch them as custom scenarios at different speeds, difficulties etc.
How difficult would it be for me to retool the Totestra mapscript with some of the QoL and FFH specific settings from ErebusContinents (mainly thinking of the starting plot rules and smart climate features)? Totestra makes my favorite maps by far, but it's crippling to see civs like Illians or Malakiem spawn outside their biomes (or worse, having giant ice bands from toric wraps with no icey bois in sight).
edit: There's a bug with the serial killer event where if you recruit him as a crazed swordsman, he doesn't get the 10xp that the event tooltip suggests he will.
I am no expert on mapscrips. I wouldn't mind including a new "TotestaErebus" type script if someone else wrote it, but don't expect to spend much time making one myself.
EVENT_PSYCHOPATH_CAUGHT_3 appears to be entirely xml and is not something I ever touched, so I'm guessing that is a bug for lfgr instead of me. It may be the game thinks it is suppose to give the xp to a different unit for whom the event triggers instead of for the unit it generates.
Is it intended that goblin archers hirable from goblin forts can upgrade to longbows for free? That's one of the best gold to hammer conversions in the game, especially considering those longbows are stronger than regular as well.
They don't have a promotion that gives upgrade discounts, so I guess it is an effect of making their <iCost>-1</iCost>. I don't suppose any harm would come from changing their cost to match the normal Archer. I assume the same thing should be done to the scorpion clan chariot.
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spawns to your alignment? It's a bit weird playing a Good civ and getting a Great Sage who can summon Pit Beasts, for example.
