Monstrous Creatures

[Vehem]

news?

That's a natural part of FF. nothing to do with me.

I'm not entirely sure how it works though.

Every n turns after creation, an animal unit gains 1 point of strength to a limit of +5.

n is dependent on difficulty, ranging from 150 on Settler to 35 on Deity. Monarch is 67 for reference. The tag is <iAnimalEscalationTurnsElapsed> in HandicapInfos. All times are scaled with gamespeed.

The +5 limit is set by MAX_ANIMAL_ESCALATIONS in GlobalDefines.

 

[Valkrionn]

Is it possible to apply this to animals owned by a specific civilization *cough* Doviello *cough* without messing around with the DLL?

 

[Vehem]

Is it possible to apply this to animals owned by a specific civilization *cough* Doviello *cough* without messing around with the DLL?

If it's not applied already, I doubt it. Would need to speak to Xienwolf for the specifics, but I suspect it's based on CIVILIZATION_ANIMAL rather than the bAnimal tag (could be wrong). I think the rationale for this originally was that animals owned by civs would be tame and therefore not grow in strength significantly as they would when surviving in the wild. Obviously that doesn't quite work for the current vision of Doviello...

 

[Valkrionn]

Easy fix then... I'll add a promotion system based on age, like the Giantkin promotions. That way it still only applies to the Animal Civ, and the Doviello, even if it's handled differently for each.

 

[WarKirby]

I'm adding Greater Versions of a few Haruspex spells to Mother.

Added Greater Venomous Web Spell
15% damage
40% damage limit
30% chance to resist

Compared to the normal Venomous Web spell
10% damage
20% damage limit
50% chance to resist.

Greater Call Spiders
Summons 4 permanant baby spiders, instead of two

I need feedback on two things.
1. Is the 30% resistance chance overpowered for the web spell? should I make it 40%?
2. I need a better name for the spider summoning. Maybe "Call Spider Army", although that sounds silly. But something of that nature?

 

[The NeverTide]

Not sure about number 1. But for 2 what about Summon Brood? If not summon, maybe something like assemble, gather, or rouse? Rouse Brood might be nice. Not sure if that's what you're looking for but its a suggestion.

 

[WarKirby]

What about Spawn Brood?

I kind of imagine her spotaneously giving birth to an army of spiders, right there.

 

[The NeverTide]

That works, I actually like it, despite the undesirable mental image it leaves me with. Oh and I really like the work you're doing with the monstrous creatures, btw. It always seemed to me that in a dark fantasy mod, dragons should leave you with the feeling that something EPIC just lit all your favorite units on fire.

And as far as the wading through the water bit, I'm not sure if you've figured it out or just decided to omit it, but is there maybe a way to allow it and just make the monstrous promo give 1/2 movement penalty while in coast, and maybe make it to where they're unable to enter ocean? I haven't learned to code yet (though I do intend to at some point) so I'm not sure of the limitations.

 

[WarKirby]

And as far as the wading through the water bit, I'm not sure if you've figured it out or just decided to omit it, but is there maybe a way to allow it and just make the monstrous promo give 1/2 movement penalty while in coast, and maybe make it to where they're unable to enter ocean? I haven't learned to code yet (though I do intend to at some point) so I'm not sure of the limitations.

As far as I'm aware, to do this would need an autoaquire promotion which is aqquired when in water. But to "half" movement would require python, to find out the unit's current movement first. WIth xml, I think all I can do is absolute values.

But regardless, I'm omiting that functionality. I still may or may not add the shallow water walking, but if I do, it will just be at normal speed.

On a completely unrelated note, I never realized how many civ-specific versions of the War Elephant there are. I'm also having an issue, in that increasing the scale of a war elephant also increases the scale of it's rider, so it looks like a giant riding it. No way to fix this without some model editing that I'm not (yet) capable of. Might have to live with the wierdness.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

On a completely unrelated note, I never realized how many civ-specific versions of the War Elephant there are. I'm also having an issue, in that increasing the scale of a war elephant also increases the scale of it's rider, so it looks like a giant riding it. No way to fix this without some model editing that I'm not (yet) capable of. Might have to live with the wierdness.

Would it not be easyer to use the Balista Elephant units from BTS?
As far as I recall, they only have a Balista and no rider.

Another thing, if you want to increase the scale of elephants, you could use nifscope to simply increase the elephant in the model, and move the rider a little to the front. Combined with an enclosed basket, it would make it look like the ones in LOTR. With the small rider siting just behind the head.

In the long term, it would be best if you could fit a lot of archers on its back like in LOTR.

 

[WarKirby]

A ballista elephant? I've never seen such a thing....

As for doing that with Nifskope, it sounds like an interesting solution. I may give it ago.
For reference, though, the following civs have unique war elephant art

Amurites
Balseraphs
Bannor
Clan of Embers
Doviello
Elohim
Hippus
Illians
Khazad
Kuriotates
Lanun
Ljosalfar
Malakim
Sheaim
Sidar
Svartalfar


That's almost every civ in FFH.
So it's hardly a small job to undertake...

For the most part, they're all identical except from a different guy in the basket.

 

[The NeverTide]

Why not simply pull the LOTR multi-rider resizing and apply it to all civs for the time being? Its only a temporary solution, but I'm sure there are probably more pressing matters as far as the mod goes then making sure that the elephant rider national colors match (especially since these seem fairly rare to me, personally). Just throw a warning in OP change log for now stating the uniformity of the art?

 

[PPQ_Purple]

A ballista elephant? I've never seen such a thing....

Its the Kmer UU in BTS.

That's almost every civ in FFH.
So it's hardly a small job to undertake....

Its a routine job of: open file -> increase elephant scale -> Move rider -> save file.
Althou note that it could break the units animations, but only the part refering to the rider.

 

[Vehem]

A ballista elephant? I've never seen such a thing....

As for doing that with Nifskope, it sounds like an interesting solution. I may give it ago.
For reference, though, the following civs have unique war elephant art

Amurites
Balseraphs
Bannor
Clan of Embers
Doviello
Elohim
Hippus
Illians
Khazad
Kuriotates
Lanun
Ljosalfar
Malakim
Sheaim
Sidar
Svartalfar


That's almost every civ in FFH.
So it's hardly a small job to undertake...

For the most part, they're all identical except from a different guy in the basket.

Don't forget the Cualli/Mazatl

Yes, I know that should probably be a unique unit...

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Here is what I though of. Althou its a extremely rough 30 second version of it. And by no meens perfect.

 

[WarKirby]

Here is what I though of. Althou its a extremely rough 30 second version of it. And by no meens perfect.

I made an attempt at something like that, but I kind of dispaired when it came to the animation skeletons. The elephant's one there clearly isn't right, so I'd guess this wouldn't animate properly.

I'll give it a go later, perhaps

 

[PPQ_Purple]

I made an attempt at something like that, but I kind of dispaired when it came to the animation skeletons. The elephant's one there clearly isn't right, so I'd guess this wouldn't animate properly.

I'll give it a go later, perhaps

The trick is that you don't do anything but a move+scale job. The skeleton in the uploaded model looks to small, but it actualy acts perfectly with the animations. Let me upload them too (default civ vanila WE animations). And you can see for your self.

 

[Vermicious Knid]

The trick is that you don't do anything but a move+scale job. The skeleton in the uploaded model looks to small, but it actualy acts perfectly with the animations. Let me upload them too (default civ vanila WE animations). And you can see for your self.

How hard is that to do in reverse? I'd like to get a bigger rider to use as a Jotnar War Elephant. Giant riding a mammoth sounds fun.

What application do you use to manipulate the file?

 

[WarKirby]

I see.

It makes the little guy on top act very oddly, though. Is there a way to make him not animate? as is, he kind of slides around on it's back during some animations

 

[PPQ_Purple]

I see.

It makes the little guy on top act very oddly, though. Is there a way to make him not animate? as is, he kind of slides around on it's back during some animations

Yes, there is. But it looks bad.
The best choice would be to just move the rider around a little. My work was only an extremely rough 15 seconds work example. So, I did not even try to do precise positioning or adjustments.
The rider would have to be precisely positioned, that would take some work. The good thing is that once you get the corect coords for the position and rotation, they should apply to all elephants and riders. So you only have to do it once. The cheaper solution would still be to make an enclosed box for the elephant and be done with it.