[MOD] MagisterModmod

[A Moon]

Last night I dreamed I was playing the MagisterModmod on multiplayer as the infernal. I have the best dreams.

When you complete the infernal pact, do you always summon Hyborem (assuming he's available), get a random demon lord, or do you get to choose which demon you summon? I think the latter option would be best.

Oh, and if anyone was wondering how the (non-existent) game went:

Spoiler :

I started as the Doviello, fmmphed around for a bit, switched to the infernal as soon as I could, took over my former-civ's cities, was DoWed by the Khazad to the south, destroyed their biggest city that had like, 5 wonders in it, made peace. The Sidar had been settling towards me since the beginning, but they collapsed into two separate civs due to rebellion. I had just started to get my capital city all full of specialists, and had also finished the Statue of Liberty (1+ hammer to each specialist, apparently), when the Illians turned everything into snow and the game crashed.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

When you complete the infernal pact, do you always summon Hyborem (assuming he's available), get a random demon lord, or do you get to choose which demon you summon? I think the latter option would be best.

Currently, it is random.

In response to your post, however, I am currently testing a change that gives the player a choice of which demon lord to summon. It will also give somewhat different units to different Demon Lords. (Hybrem gets more Balors, Judecca gets more Rituals and Mages, Lethe gets Assassins, Ouzza gets Chaos Marauders, etc.)

If I recall correctly, I wanted it to work like this when I first changed it to a ritual, but did not realize how to code it until now.

Edit: It seems to be working fine now. How does this way of choosing the Demon Lord look?

(Summoning demon lords this way also allows me to test it more easily while in worldbuilder, as I can trigger the event rather than waiting for the ritual to be finished. I'm not sure why, but it also causes the human player to switch before the AI has had a chance to move units, settle a city, change civics, etc, so I could remove the code that made them start immobilized. I set the Hyborem option as having double the AIWeight as the others, so Hyborem will tend to be chosen first by the AI.)

 

[A Moon]

Looks perfect to me.

 

[Red Boxer]

If you'd like saves with WoC issues. Here you go!

Keep up the good work! Thanks!

 

[The Flame8]

Great idea! Also, is there any plan for the minor leaders to become playable not only after rebellion? It'd be nice to be able to use them.

 

[maurcus]

What all disables spell-casting? In my current game as the Grigori it was disabled twice for 5-10 turns. The Illians weren't in this game fyi.

 

[Ghostslayer]

Amurites word spell disables spell casting.

 

[Ghostslayer]

I have discovered Gibbon in this mod. I think changeling is a new feature, but I do not play Esus frequently, so I may be wrong. Really fun indeed. Shape changing combined with upgrading turns promotion stealing in mass production. At level 6, I already have almost 50 promotions, without abuse (see below). Probably OP, but religious heroes are supposed to be, and Esus does not have so much advantages besides that.

However, there is a serious potential abuse that should be looked at.
- stand by an adept
- shape change to this adept
- pick the free adept promotion
- upgrade to mage
- pick the free mage promotion
- turn back shape to Gibbon
So for 65 gold, you can get every turn 2 free promotions. Probably by far too powerful, IMHO (and Gibbon does not need it).

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I'm thinking that I may make the summoning of each demon lord provide a different bonus to the summoner.

The way I'm testing it now is as follows:
Hyborem: increases the AC
Judecca: grants Twincast to all Ritualists
Lethe, Queen of Sorrows: increases the yields of all Demons Altars
Meresin: starts a Golden Age
Ouzza: grants Strong to all Chaos Marauders and Pit Beasts, but also causes the city completing the ritual to revolt for 6 turns
Duke Sallos: grants 2 free Succubi, gives all your Succubi the Fear Body 1 promotion
Statius the Redeemer: grants Command IV to all Ritualists

Great idea! Also, is there any plan for the minor leaders to become playable not only after rebellion? It'd be nice to be able to use them.

I used to have it set so that you could select any minor leader in an Unrestricted Leaders game but they would never be set randomly. I liked it that way, but Tholal changed the way that random leaders were chosen and broke it. I'm not sure how to work it now.

You can still add minor leaders to a game in worldbuilder, through the Game Data screen if you turn on the Unrestricted Leaders option there.

I have discovered Gibbon in this mod. I think changeling is a new feature, but I do not play Esus frequently, so I may be wrong. Really fun indeed. Shape changing combined with upgrading turns promotion stealing in mass production. At level 6, I already have almost 50 promotions, without abuse (see below). Probably OP, but religious heroes are supposed to be, and Esus does not have so much advantages besides that.

However, there is a serious potential abuse that should be looked at.
- stand by an adept
- shape change to this adept
- pick the free adept promotion
- upgrade to mage
- pick the free mage promotion
- turn back shape to Gibbon
So for 65 gold, you can get every turn 2 free promotions. Probably by far too powerful, IMHO (and Gibbon does not need it).

I changed this a few months back. Being a changeling fits his back-story better than being an archmage illusionist does.

Preventing free promotion picks when a unit upgrades is very difficult. That free promotion is granted when the unit is initialized, before the unit being upgraded has any of its data passed on to its upgraded form.

I just added add a line to the end of the shapeshift code to remove the free promotion pick from the shapeshift itself.

I also just made it so that Revelation will force a Changeling to assume its true form.

The thing that bothers me more about Gibbon is how it is possible to accidentally gift him to another player when he is in another form. I don't know that there is much I could do about that.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I decided to go ahead and release another update, even though Platyping has not yet released another worldbuilder update for it to include.

You may download the Installer here or the Archive here


The big change is, of course, that the Infernal Pact now triggers an event that lets the player choose which demon lord to summon, and for what bonus.

I also added an random event which can trigger in a city with a Temple of the Leaves and the Fellowship of the Leaves state religion, which lets the player spend some gold to get Guardian Vines to defend the city.

The two changeling related changes are implemented.

There are a couple of minor python bugs fixed.

 

[Maramros]

I haven't yet upgraded to the newest release, so maybe this was fixed as a byproduct of the two changeling tweaks, but I found that Gibbon was able to duplicate equipment, including unique items like the Netherblade and Orthus' Axe. If two of the same unique item were brought into the same tile, one would disappear, but as long as you keep the items separate you can have two of a unique item.

Also, can you explain how exactly the Revolutions game option works? I like it in theory, for it makes the game much more dynamic and interesting, but I found that my empire stability would, at some point in the game, invariably drop down to "dangerously unstable" even when I had only positive effects adding to both local and national stability, and hadn't built or conquered any new cities in many many turns. Citizens would also become suddenly unhappy with no explanation.

 

[lfgr]

I never got what empire stability is supposed to do.

 

[The Flame8]

I never got what empire stability is supposed to do.

Prevents revolutions if you have that game mechanic on (which I encourage).


Also I noticed something weird in the attached game file and many I play. The Malakim under Varn Gosam always seem to build a settler and then leave it in the capital, not using it. Use world builder on the attached save to see.

 

[The Flame8]

Same game, bigger problem.

The Illians aren't producing anything. I've seen this pop up before for no reason... what's the problem?

 

[lfgr]

Prevents revolutions if you have that game mechanic on (which I encourage).

Are you sure on this? I once searched through the python files and didn't found anything that actually uses empire stability (and AFAIK stability mechanics are all handled in python).

Maybe it's causing the unhappiness Maramros was talking about, though.

 

[Tholal]

Are you sure on this? I once searched through the python files and didn't found anything that actually uses empire stability (and AFAIK stability mechanics are all handled in python).

It's handled through the various revIDX calls (just search for revidx in python and you'll see all sorts of stuff). I believe that most of the actual revolutions happen through Revolutions.py. 'Stability' is just a text string.

 

[Maramros]

I get that empire stability is to prevent revolutions - the problem I had was that empire stability would suddenly drop, seemingly without cause.

For example, I was playing a game as the Sidar (the one my previous screencaps came from). I had conquered the Calabim early on, and was at a point in the game where not a single percentage of any of my cities was Calabim in nationality. I had God King as my civic for a long time, and GK has a national instability penalty. However, while I had GK my national stability level remained neutral, though it always said it was worsening.

Eventually I got to Republic, as well as Arete, and had dungeons in every city and the Pillar of Chains, which gives +10 national stability per turn. I had not had a single turn of anarchy in quite a while, to the point where the stability calculations considered me to have Unyielding Order as a stability factor.

Suddenly my capital has ten unhappiness from "We just feel like revolting" and my empire thinks it is dangerously unstable. I had not expanded since the initial conquering of the Calabim, and had never been invaded. Couldn't figure out a single cause for it.

None of my cities ever tried to revolt, however - my national stability may have been "Dangerously Unstable", but each of my cities had as stable a local stability as was achievable.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The only thing I can think of that I added (as opposed to what should be the same in MagisterModmod and plain MNAI) which could cause such instability is increasing the revolution index of a city that is owned by the Calabim when The Empyrean is present in it.

I wonder if instability in the Calabim cities before you conquered them could carry over into instability after you conquered them.


Unyielding Order and Pillar of Chains should both set the revolutionIndex of that city to zero, as well as prevent the Empyrean from increasing it locally. That benefit does not extend to other cities though.

 

[The Flame8]

Has anyone tried my second save? (don't worry too much about the first).

Why can a city literally start producing absolutely nothing for the entirety of the game?

 

[Akbarthegreat]

Great to see the IP changes
Unfortunately I can't play until the end of March, will certainly give it a go then.