MarnokMod - (Explorable lairs)

Some oddities, intended or not:
- I just left my first game of this version to check the map via WB, saw a Privateer on a hill 3 tiles from water away & wondered how that ship managed to get there, looked neat anyway!^^
- My initional starting point was on a lair, was the best place for the city, so I was just lucky to raze it with my two free units in the first turn. I left ur settingsfile untouched, except setting 2% for starting barb cities per tile, almost had one in my BFC, those two earlyon challenges went well, but i wonder if u could implement a safezone for the startingareas.
- For some reason, Acheron spawned before Orthus.
- Theres an issue with Ice & coastal ground, isolated areas mass up with drowns/ships only reachable with flying units; Kael should make Ice passable, at least for drowns.
- It seems the Ai will just attack tribal villages, sometimes I have to protect them, but also dont wanna start a war early on.
- Theres some TXTKEY for the "Remove village" button of the tribal village.
- Might b my bad luck, but I only got heal/gifts/units/maps as rewards from the villages, never a treasure map/Famous Person/Metal upgrade/XP, but I only played about 200 turns.

The AI does pretty well with the dangers IMO, some just had bad luck & only two got wiped out. My neighbour Khazad amazed me, handling our Waterelement & Drown infested shared coast with ease.
I also installed Sureshots dragons (must b updated too, ppl might overwrite the updated files with its old files!) & that does work aswell, got a GoldenDragon with Systemmessage.

Thats about all with my feedback, Im happy you updated your modmod & continue to add such a nice dangerous flavour to FFH!
 
Thanks for testing everyone, I'll look into any issues raised. At least it seems to work, so I'll update the main file later and call this one live.

Regarding hawks/workers/etc. dungeoneering; I think I'll limit who can go into a lair, but put the options in settings.tcxt so if it feels like an exploit you can switch it off, but if it feels like a valuable strategy you can leave it on. (I always send my most heroic unit n - there's a bonus per unit level to the result!)

Regarding inaccessible areas - I suppose this is bound to happen, maybe I'll put a limiter in based on number of units in immediate area. So, if there are 6 units stuck somewhere, another 6 won't spawn there. I'll see what I can do about that.

Regarding randomness of results - yes sometimes you will get some big bad stomping the land! The AI often copes well, once in a while it is caught out and gets obliterated. The spawns scale somewhat, so you shouldn't get turn 2 balors like in the earliest versions, but the sudden appearance of something nasty is what makes a good story! Tribal villages (and other features) help slow these guys down, as the monsters tend to stop and settle there. (The superstitious villagers are worshipping the fire elemental!)
Results from exploring are deliberately random of course and you might get unlucky with none of the top results. That is of course intentional! Try sending higher level units in, they can find those hidden treasures more efficiently.

The landsailing privateer may have had Water Walking, I had this come up in a later test game! I will test this out when I get time.

I'll see about a safezone for starting areas. Of course "safe" is a relative term...

You only need to install Sureshot dragons if you want the extra couple of models. You can get 4 dragon types without sureshot's download from the mod itself; just switch them on in settings.py
 
Too many Drowns?

go in to settings.py, find marnokLairType = {

change
'IMPROVEMENT_SUNKEN_CITY': marnokBaseSpawnRate*3,
to
'IMPROVEMENT_SUNKEN_CITY': marnokBaseSpawnRate,

This will cut down the rate at which sunken cities produce Drowns. I found I ended up with drown-nations about turn 200 on distant continents.

You could also change
marnokSetupCoastChance
to a lower value to have fewer sunken cities, or alter the balance of sunken cities to buc's dens by changing the contents of
marnokSetupCoast
which currently places 2 sunken cities per buc's den.
 
I've run a few more test games now, trying to properly learn the finer points of your pretty complex mod, and I was suprised by just how powerful the Clan of Embers is now. Since razing a Tribal Village seldom kills the attacker, and spawns a bunch of barbarians that are friendly to you, one can get a tremendous edge in early game by pillaging every village you find (I easily had 200 gold in twelve turns).

Since the Clan can recruit the now very numerous orcish barbarians I can easily overpower any other civilization who had the misfortune of starting near me. And since I got so much gold to pump into "lair diplomacy" I get such a massive head start that it's not very funny.

So now I wonder if it would be possible to make razed, as well as angry, villages spawn "animals" instead of "orcs". It seems sort of silly that I burn their home to the ground, only to have the angry warriors take their revenge on another civilization.
 
Wauthan said:
I've run a few more test games now, trying to properly learn the finer points of your pretty complex mod, and I was suprised by just how powerful the Clan of Embers is now. Since razing a Tribal Village seldom kills the attacker, and spawns a bunch of barbarians that are friendly to you, one can get a tremendous edge in early game by pillaging every village you find (I easily had 200 gold in twelve turns).

Since the Clan can recruit the now very numerous orcish barbarians I can easily overpower any other civilization who had the misfortune of starting near me. And since I got so much gold to pump into "lair diplomacy" I get such a massive head start that it's not very funny.

So now I wonder if it would be possible to make razed, as well as angry, villages spawn "animals" instead of "orcs". It seems sort of silly that I burn their home to the ground, only to have the angry warriors take their revenge on another civilization.
Click to expand...

That sounds perfectly reasonable. What does everyone else think?
Seems possible to spawn hostile "animal-AI" angry villagers who want to attack everyone.
 
Spawning animals wouldn't make much sense either. Of course, you could give those units HN pretty easily, or make them AlwaysHostile (this would either require making them different units with that tag, or using xienwolf's modcomp)


Using the Animal AI would mean that they would never enter cultural borders to attack cities.
 
I'd say to give Any unit produced by angry villages the "Beast" or "animal" Promotion. then, they'll attack Clan units, while still appearing as Orcs...

Actually, give them a "berserk" promotion that lets them attack Barbarian leaders, as well as enter borders, which animal doesn't
 
OK, I put the previous "test" files in the marnok.rar for general use. Thanks everyone for testing (not all problems are fixed, but at least it works) Also rebalanced to reduce excessive Drowns.

I have uploaded a new test_marnok.rar which has Angry Villagers. These look like human warriors, will happily attack Clan. I was thinking maybe for atmosphere later I could have "human village", "elf village", "goblin village".. etc, but I'm not rushing toward that at the moment.

If anyone tests, please feedback on balance (and any problems). I may need to reduce the number of Villagers spawning, or reduce damage done by initial attack on village to attacking unit. But of course you guys can adjust that already in the settings.py file.
 
Hooray, I'm useful! - Dr. Zoidberg

Just tried out your test version (had a bugger of a time figuring out where you uploaded it, we newbies take a while to catch on). The change made all the difference to say the least. The Ember Clan still has an early edge over the other Civs, but now needs to decide if it should go for quick expansion *or* science, since you can no longer have both. And if you expand too fast the barbarians declare war on you. Balance restored and all seems well.

As for the idea of race specific villages is sure sounds nice, but it doesn't feel very "fluffy". From what I've read about the Fall from heaven setting humans are the only ones with the numbers to build villages. Orcs/goblins build lairs, dwarves are just emerging on the surface and elves are too few. Of course if you're making them a rare and treasured bonus (such as being able to recruit clay golems from a xenophobic dwarven delve) then that seems like loads of fun.
 
I haven't tried recently, but when I gave some ships flying a while back I found they couldn't enter some land terrains. They could easily move through peaks, but not through several passable terrains. Also, they couldn't enter land with cargo. (They would just unload them instead.)
 
If details help:
It was a Privateer with Flying & Hidden Nationalty promotions.
I got attacked on a mountainpass, flanked by peaks, with a river running from N to S.
The tile i actually stood on was a forested plain & I think I remember right, it attacked from another forested plain north of me, not from the surrounding peaks.
Nevertheless, it destroyed only one unit of my three & then backed off, never to b seen again (at the moment). Acted as mysteriously as the "Flying Dutchman"!
I was quite happy it did so, cause after my first post here I checked its movementrange & was scared to see it had five!!, I wonder why, cause it only had aboved mentioned promotions.
 
As long as I don't get loads of bug reports about it, I'll let ships get flying if they get it... I like unexpected interesting results like this. It's like the computer is acting as a mad DungeonMaster for us!
 
Next thing I am going to fix : after a few hundred turns, if I haven't spread over the world I find the "new world" lands look like a "Where's Wally (Waldo)" pic for Drowns. I'm just getting billions of them. It's not fun and slows the game down, so, I am going to limit them severely.

I plan to put a "hates" in the "likes" function. So I can tell Drowns to Hate all land. Then they will never want to occupy land-based lairs. I think that ought to do the trick. Also will be useful if I want other unit types to Hate terrain - it will override the normal "stay here and breed" by returning a False on the "likes Plot" function for Hated terrain, no matter what.

I'll test and see if it works.
 
Eventually I saw a wraith with the promotion aura, unwillingly to promote himself, havent checked if I have a promoted wraith in my current game, Im referring to Mondsemmels post in the bugthread of FFH. If its the case, its not your concern.

Playing the creation mapscript, much later in the game I get some nice funny barb masswanderings, ca. 25 Orcs went on a trail through my country from the S to the N with a target in mind (as I see it, the barbs like to stack in some of their cities, seen cities with like 30 barbs in there, or going on a raid for an easy AI city pick). Even my friendly AI neighbour came over for coffee with some of his hunters & we picked the stack off bit by bit, until it got smaller & the barbs went in a sort of panic disorder.
(There plan was going from S to N, when its stack got smaller, they made sort of a halfcircle, occasionally heading for an unprotected worker.)

Now, before I had to leave current game, I saw the same with drowns, massing up before my northern entrance, the Stoneskin Ogre that guarded the pass is already scouting ahead & passed my first city on his route. My guess is they all r heading for the Grigori to wipe them out, I feel like I should take a road tax or something, but its good xp, so Im rather more amused then scared.
Im playing on epic speed/monarch difficulty, so building up defences & everything else consumes much time. Eventually Im gonna block the pass' towards barb territory, now that the Stoneskin Ogre left his position, thats gonna be a much more easier task; I just hope that bugger doesnt go for a snackstop, I will see!^^

Edit: Well, this time it was a full scale attack on all fronts, two civs who couldnt get a foot into the door were wiped out, makes four outta 14 on a large map, I have a rather unlucky situated location with vast barbs regions to the N & S, lost a good amount of vet swordsmen (playing Lanun with OO & having bronzeworking, still a bit more then half way to go on the timeschedule).
Ogres & their bigger relatives r a real challenge, fast too; my ace is a villagepromoted Ironwielding Str 6, full promoted famous Swordsman, who was lucky enough to get immortality through a dungeonraid!

I like the healfunctions of the villages, might take a time until I finally get one, but seems to take away all bad promotions (only had some issues with "enervated" so far).
 
NEW TEST VERSION :

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong with Villgae Culture. It needed to go in the end turn function, not the beginning turn...

NOW : You can sit in a village gaining respect of the villagers, and once you are past the threshold, the tile it is in will gain your culture. It will be your village, which will stop other civs pinching it (unless you are at war).
Once you are past double the threshold, all tiles around the village will become yours!! Great for no-settlers games or just for expansion.

When you step out of the village, support will decay over time. You need a unit in the village to get the 3x3 culture. Culture in the actual tile will remain until support has completely decayed. Culture decays faster if a rival or enemy unit holds the village.

All this is switchable in the settings.py of course. If you don't want this, switch marnokVillageCulture to 0.

Now I have done some prelim testing on this, but mostly in artificial test conditions, so I'd appreciate feedback on how this works in actual play. I created a bunch of controls to help the AI decide what to do with these villages, so they AI ought to cope.
 
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