Master of Myrror Fantasy Mod 2.0

[Dragonlord]

Started a new game as Ssra and found another little niggle with artillery after the mini patch:

The Fire Catapult only costs 15 shields now, though the pedia says 25. I guess while you were experimenting, you lowered the costs as well as the stats.
While I don't mind getting them cheaper it does seem a little too much help for the human player... better raise the costs again.
Better check the costs for the other artillery units as well..

 

[Drift]

@Dragonlord

Thanks again.

Edit: download the fixed patch two posts below.

 

[LeeT911]

I just got an error telling me the PediaIcons.txt is missing the "ANIMNAME_PRTO_Hellfire_Catapult" entry, and the game promptly kicked me out. I'm guessing this is related to the artillery changes somehow. I haven't built any catapults yet in my game, so it was probably the AI (building catapults? is that even possible?). I would've taken a screenshot but I don't know how.

I looked through the PediaIcons.txt, and there is no entry of that name, although the "Hellfire_Catapult" is referenced a few times. I'm not sure what unit this is. The Fire Catapult?

 

[Drift]

I swear, I spent too long a time away from modding, these mistakes are the stuff of amateurs. I'm actually pretty pissed off at myself.

So, here we go again.

Master of Myrror 2.0 Beta 2 - Patch 3 (0.4MB)

• Before installing, make sure you have Master of Myrror 2.0 Beta2 installed.
• Extract to Civ3\Conquests\Scenarios\. Overwrite existing files.

Teaches me to test my stuff instead of relying on it working just because "I've done it thousand times". Thank you LeeT911 and sorry everyone. Even though it's a beta, some stupidities have no excuse. Like forgetting ANIMNAME entries.

Edit:

And yes, the Hellfire Catapult is something of a placeholder. I thought it was a little confusing with the chaos/others versions of same unit so I gave the units different names and individual pedia entries. I'll probably come up with better units and names for finished 2.0 but for now, it's just chaotic versions of normal artillery.

Chaos artillery line:
Hellfire Catapult
Chaos Trebuchet
Hellcannon
Steam Tank

Artillery line for others:
Catapult
Fire Catapult
Trebuchet
Cannon

 

[clearbeard]

Hey Drift,

So, finally got around to registering to post on the forum, so I could comment on Master of Myrror. First off, great mod. I've been playing and re-modding it for a while now, and have a some additions I enjoy, and a bunch of other comments I thought I'd mention, offered with the greatest respect:

1. Upgradable wizard units. I really liked the Shogun upgrades in the C3C scenario, so I added an upgrade series for the king units in MoM. I'd be happy to send on the specific stats if you're interested in incorporating it. Basically, each faction has different unit abilities (so the stats for Oberic and Ariel are the same, but different than Rjak), with 6 levels, which upgrade at magic levels 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15.

2. I've been experimenting with incorporating the Sorcery faction (Kali, Horus, and Jafar), though it's a ways off from finished. Biggest flaw is that there is a max of 4 prerequisites for a tech, so all 5 can't be required for, say, Mastery.

3. In regards to whomever mentioned the Aiel units (can't remember, too lazy to search back), they would be ideal for use with a Nomads race, from the original Master of Magic.

4. One thing I'd love to see is Klackons. Granted, they are more powerful when they get starships and head to the Orion cluster, but... they were just so much fun, and such a challenge! Ah nostalgia.... I've worked up some decent stats for race units, and even have a resource icon, but no unit graphics. My skill is enough to probably pull out decent units_32.pcx icons, but not the animated dojobs.

5. Is there any way to make specific units immune to nukes? In regicide it just seems a shame that two hits on a civ's capitol destroys the entire civ, as the king invariably dies.

6. Okay, maybe I should go play 2.0 now, and get some more comments.

Cheers,
Clearbeard,
The 6'2" Dwarf

 

[Drift]

@clearbeard

Thank you for the feedback and welcome to CFC!

1. The reason I'm against upgradable king units is that the AI doesn't understand them. At all. Also, I don't like regicide so I'm not very motivated when it comes to modding the king units (the reason why all mages have an identical mage king unit instead of a customized king)
2. Good luck with adding it. I opted against it a long time ago as I deemed it too impractical, but I sincerely hope you can pull it off.
3. Actually the Aiel units are at the moment scheduled to be implemented as the Nomad race resource. Great minds think alike.
4. I have a hard time believing anyone makes units for Klackons, but I'd love to add them as a race resource. I could of course ask aaglo, but I don't think even he wants to take more on his plate. Also, bipedal ants aren't exactly easy to model and animate...
5. I don't think there is, but like I said, I'm not very familiar with modding king units.
6. Good to hear. It's nice to have more people playing and reporting about their ideas and findings.

 

[The Omega]

Darn you Drift! As soon as I start one game, you update it!

 

[BradRinWi]

hmmm drift your against regicide?? what victory conditions do you set when you play then??

I am curious and would love to know

im curious since regicide seems a logical way to go for MoM.. though i suppose Mass regicide might be valid too.

 

[Drift]

@The Omega

I see the smilie, but I still want to say that I'm really sorry about the storm of updates. I swear that barring game crashing bugs, Beta 2 with Patch 3 will remain the latest version for a while now. It's about time you people get to play the mod without running into my screwups or noticing that I updated the mod, again.

Edit:

@BradRinWi

I play with 'spacerace', cultural and domination (I think). Regicide just feels silly to me. Kill a king and his whole kingdom is destroyed. I want to take over my enemies, not burn them into ash by luckily getting their leader.

I've yet to finish a game of MoM ( ) so victory conditions have always been a little theoretic thing for me. Actually, I could start a good game of MoM during the holidays and do some playing for a change. Every time I've played the mod extensively, I've been in the middle of development and the mod has kept changing during my game, so eventually I've started a new game to test the new additions.

 

[rhialto]

I agree with the regicide thing. It just seemed silly that when their king died, the entire nation would smultaneously burn their homes to the ground and then kill themselves. If regicide turned the remaining cities into barbarian cities, it would make far more sense.

 

[Blasphemous]

I agree with the regicide thing. It just seemed silly that when their king died, the entire nation would smultaneously burn their homes to the ground and then kill themselves. If regicide turned the remaining cities into barbarian cities, it would make far more sense.

It would be coolest if each city just became its own nation, with no diplomatic contact available, and then if one such city conquers another that city becomes the nation that those cities used to belong to (and the rest stay in their independant state until conqeured, with no ability to build settlers.)
I wonder if that's been suggested to Firaxis yet for cIV. =X

 

[clearbeard]

Well, more actually minor errors and comments on past comments I've found so far.

1. "spaceship" screen, runes of moon and sun are under "elemental", switched with fire and earth.
aside--is there any historical/literary/linguistic source for those particular designs being those runes? Or are they original random sketches?

2. Playing as Freya this first run, with "accelerated production" or whatever it's called. Growth does seem to be very quick for the druids, even so. I'm actually able to match the emperor AI's settler production, unlike usual. Might need tweaks, but reasonably balanced so far.

3. New 4 mages' civilopedia entries are missing the "more" button for info on the faction they belong to.

4. Was the drop of beholders' defensive bombard intentional? Seems like a logical ability, for what they are. Perhaps make the chaos spider the normal unit, and beholders Lo Pan's UU?

5. As was mentioned earlier, some of the UU's seem underpowered compared to others, i.e. Freya's 6/4/1 --> 6/5/1 vs. Lo Pan's 1/4/1 --> 2/5(6)/1...WOW!

6. Some other minor unit balance issues occur to me, but those may be more personal preference than real issues. I'll post again if any of them seem really unbalancing.

Okay, well that's from the first couple of hours. More playing after dinner, probably, so more nits to pick. BTW, if I'm being TOO trivial, let me know and I'll hush up.

Cheers,
Clearbeard
The 6'2" Dwarf

 

[clearbeard]

Beyond making them gold in the .pcx file, any further thought to implementing enchanted roads?

Just because they're so cool, why not make the dragon shrines small wonders? That way everyone can be in on the fun! It still keeps us from the swarms of 100+ black dragons annhiliating everything in their path (like always seemed to happen in 1.0), but we can't have everything.

Cheers,
Clearbeard
The 6'2" Dwarf

 

[Drift]

@clearbeard

First of all... Aaarrgh! I've meant for the Dragon Shrines to be small wonders, but like you point out, they're not.

1. I meant to fix it, but must've slipped my mind. Will fix for next proper patch.
2. Keep me informed on how it plays. Nature mage early expansion has been borderlining on overpowering, especially with the player in reins, but I wouldn't want to touch it too much.
3. Hmmm, I meant to do that also, but seems I've forgotten it. I would also need to rewrite some of Klyden's stuff under "more" as things have changed. Too bad he doesn't hang around here anymore, he was a class tester.
4. I've stayed away from defensive bombardment so far. Chaos Spider is an experiment on that department. I'm reluctant to make it more common an ability. My view on it has always been that all it really does is add some variety, but also needless complexity for the combat system.
5. Chaos Spiders may be a tad too strong. Freya's Forest Spiders also get an additional hitpoint as well BTW. UU's are open to discussion and suggestions. Naturally there will always be differences in UU comparable strenghts. Some of them will be a better deal than others. However, I want to take care of the ones that are clearly too strong/weak when compared to others.
6. You don't have to be 100% certain of your own stance in the matter in order to post some balance issues. I'm interested in what units are the ones in question.

There's no such thing as being too trivial. (well, I guess there is, but you're not even close to it)

Enchanted roads are unfortunately out of the picture. The discussion about whether railroads should be implemented has occurred from time and again in this thread and always I've had to say no. If there only was a way to limit them instead of ending up with continents filled with enchanted roads... Infinite movement takes away most of the strategy and 'medieval' feel of the combat and makes attacking a lot more difficult due to instant reinforcements. It just doesn't feel right.

Thanks for the feedback.

But the dragons... I won't make a formal patch out of this yet, but here's an updated biq with Dragon Shrines as small wonders. I hope nobody ends their current game just because of this.

 

[The Omega]

Curses! Another update!
I'm just glad I've decided to wait until I'm sure there's no more updates before I start a new game.

 

[Drift]

@The Omega

I can't make any promises, but I firmly believe that now is a safe time to start a new game. I even started one myself. I'm playing Ungor and I'm almost through the first era. Should've picked Regent though, Warlord is going too easy so far, but it's been a long time since I last played the mod so I decided to play it safe.

 

[nullspace]

I'm playing a game as Minerva on deity on the latest patch, minus the updated for the dragon shrines.

Full price granaries are a good change. Nature mage expansion is a bit less insane, though still very good. Nature mages aren't particularly good at anything else, so their expansion has to be good. But now some other mages have the druid trait, and it might too good for them. It's kind of weird most mages have entirely different traits than they did before the expansion.

I fought against Tauron form a pretty bad tech disadvantage. I had beornings, catapults, and half-gnolls. He had devils, chaos warriors, and had just gotten the tech for chaos ettins. It was tough going when my borders were being flooded by the devils and warriors. I didn't have the tech for embassies and didn't think I was going to make any progress. But then Tauron was building ettins, and couldn't produce them quickly and I was able to wipe him out. I got a bit lucky when Kharan attacked Tauron from his back, but he would have been better off building chaos warriors, which are half the cost of the ettins. So I still think higher tech units should be stronger, though it doesn't seem like many people agree with me. Maybe its the cost of units that should be adjusted. There aren't any production boosters until death 8, so a cost of 60 for a chaos ettin, or 80 for an earth elemental is a lot.

Beornings upgrade to earth elementals, not ents. Is there a reason for that? By the time I get nature 5, I'd much rather be able to upgrade beornings than to still be able to build them for cheap. On a related subject, curraghs don't upgrade at all, but they should go obsolete some time so they're not always on the build list.

I captured spell of knowledge from Tauron, so I'm caught up in tech now. Just started building some hounds. An extra attack and move over centaurs is pretty amazing, but they do cost 10 more. I suppose they're the cavalry to the sorceror's musketman, so they're not that powerful.

And finally, is there any reason behind the way the dates are numbered? You're just using the same years/turn as unmodded civ, but starting at 0 AD, right? The only gameplay effect this has is the 1000-year culture doubling, so if there's a different scale that makes sense, you should use it.

 

[Drift]

@nullspace

The other mages with the druid trait don't have irrigate without fresh water though, but I do see your point. Agricultural is a very strong trait. As for the completelty new traits, yes, I pretty much built the system from scratch. Some continuity would've probably been nice there. New system just made it pretty difficult to achieve.

I think I'd rather adjust the cost than the stats of units that don't give enough bang for the buck. I did notice the problem of Chaos Warrior -> Chaos Ettin in my ongoing game. I've known of it, but this is the first time I really focused on it. I think the start of second era is the hardest part of cost balancing. Like you said, first production booster comes at Death VIII, but the new units that come at VI and VII need to be more expensive than their predecessors.

So, Chaos Ettin and Earth Elemental are definite candidates for a cost reduction, EE especially - it's cost was meant to be 70 so it's extra expensive at the moment. I believe there are others as well, for example Cursed Legionaries can't stay at 45 if Chaos Ettins come down to 50 (would 50 be enough BTW?). I'm open to suggestions on the matter.

Beornings not upgrading to Ents was part of giving the player an option of building cheaper units, but I believe that if you feel it's redundant, I can safely change it. After all, you've been a big fan of favoring cheaper, lower level units over more expensive high tech ones.

Curraghs going obsolete... Good idea, but I'm not sure how I would go about doing it. Is the unit really required BTW? Should naval expansion start with mages' first own naval vessel instead of the shared curragh? I don't play archipelagos so I'm a little biased, I guess the curragh is very useful when you start from a small island, but I've found myself starting the sea exploring with the Galley equivalents.

Great feedback, thanks!

 

[clearbeard]

For my money, curraghs can be dropped entirely. I've played about equally on the three land types, and usually build one on archipelago maps, to send a settler early to a nearby island, but that's usually not vital and could wait until the galley transports, which are rather early after all. Another alternative is to use a cyclic upgrade tree for the ships, i.e. curragh --> death galley --> chaos galley --> life galley --> dreadship --> cog --> caravel --> ghost ship, which I think is all the transport ships. Perhaps add a human longship --> caravel upgrade step, too, as they're not useful if you can build caravels or ghost ships. As with UU upgrades in base Civ3, if a race can't build a unit on the tree for whatever reason, the upgrade just skips it. I don't know of any way to just obsolete a unit though, without having something it upgrades into (like you could in Civ2).

Cheers,
Clearbeard
The 6'2" Dwarf

 

[Drift]

@clearbeard

I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think there's some hitch in using cyclic upgrade path for the ships of MoM. I'm not sure though and I'm in little bit of hurry right now. I'll check it out.

I think removing curraghs is the most attractive option at the moment. They are not a big problem, but they are somewhat redundant and hang around in the already crowded build list forever.