The glorious Evolution of Master of Mana - The Red Desert of Cruoris / First screenshot of standalone version / Feedback needed

Thanks for the feedback friends, every little bit helps :). What I ended up with is the rock texture from the left mountain, but I increased the normal factor to give it more sharpness and detail. The snow texture I picked from the right mountain. Currently I am adding some decoration to the mountain tiles. Small fir trees with snow on them, rocks, winter lakes, more rocks, and so on.

I made a gif how the new mountain changes over a day with the day and night cycle speed up very fast. This speed is not meant for playing, just testing. A full cycle takes only like 10 seconds.

Spoiler :

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note: the gif is a bit compressed. It might contain a few weird pixels that are not in the game.
 
That's super cool! Looks beautiful, fantastic work.

My two comments are that it took me a while to recognize that mountain lake. It looks like you were going for a crystal clear mountain lake, so you can see the terrain under the water, but it just makes the lake harder to identify. The reflection of the moon off the surface is pretty great, and it wasn't until I figured out what that was until I realized it was a lake.

Also, the portion of the tile toward the bottom of the image with the trees and lake don't really look elevated compared to the surrounding tiles, so it looks odd that they are covered in snow and the surrounding land isn't. Maybe just put snow on the highest half of the mountain.
 
It looks really fantastic what you are doing! :thumbsup:
The lake is a little bit difficult to identify as a lake on the first look, for me personally. But everything else: well done!

Maybe I have overlooked it, but is this about to become the graphics for Master of Mana, or a own mod?

I enjoyed FFH and ExtraModMod quite much, but sadly though other projects I didn't have time for Master of Mana (yet:crazyeye:)
 
It looks really fantastic what you are doing! :thumbsup:
The lake is a little bit difficult to identify as a lake on the first look, for me personally. But everything else: well done!

Maybe I have overlooked it, but is this about to become the graphics for Master of Mana, or a own mod?

I enjoyed FFH and ExtraModMod quite much, but sadly though other projects I didn't have time for Master of Mana (yet:crazyeye:)
He's making a new, standalone game.
 
That's super cool! Looks beautiful, fantastic work.

My two comments are that it took me a while to recognize that mountain lake. It looks like you were going for a crystal clear mountain lake, so you can see the terrain under the water, but it just makes the lake harder to identify. The reflection of the moon off the surface is pretty great, and it wasn't until I figured out what that was until I realized it was a lake.

Also, the portion of the tile toward the bottom of the image with the trees and lake don't really look elevated compared to the surrounding tiles, so it looks odd that they are covered in snow and the surrounding land isn't. Maybe just put snow on the highest half of the mountain.
Yes, I also noticed that the lake is hard to see on the gif after I uploaded the gif and improved that.
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I also agree that it would look better if the snow areas are all elevated, but there are some bugs with more complex heightmaps at the moment. I am not super happy with version3 of the mountains, but it is a huge upgrade from version1 and version2, so I will take it. The graphic engine gets updates all the time so maybe in the future there is possiblity for better mountains, who knows. I have still a lot of minor details I can improve. I would also love to have more terrains decorations like different kind of ruins, etc.

One thing that is quite nice is that cities in mountains are possible.
 
It looks really fantastic what you are doing! :thumbsup:
The lake is a little bit difficult to identify as a lake on the first look, for me personally. But everything else: well done!

Maybe I have overlooked it, but is this about to become the graphics for Master of Mana, or a own mod?

I enjoyed FFH and ExtraModMod quite much, but sadly though other projects I didn't have time for Master of Mana (yet:crazyeye:)
Thanks for the feedback. I know that feeling, there are so many great civ4 mods that I haven't had the time yet to enjoy. It would be great if we could put these mountains into civ4, but the graphics engine of civ4 would probably explode :lol:. The terrain on a screenshot has like 4 millions polygons. You need a modern graphic engine to handle that.
 
by accident I discovered a new way to make mountains ridges :lol: . Mountains version 4 are now features instead of terrain, so sadly no mountain cities. But they integrate much better into terrain and large mountain chains are possible.
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something like this for hills could also be interesting.
 
so nice to look at!
 
I have finetuned grasslands and plains textures and improved blending between terrains. Mostly done now with the terrain stuff

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The Wondrous Locations mechanic merges the worldwonder mechanic with the unique features.

Wondrous Locations​

Wondrous Locations are unique places onthe map that once hold great power. Some examples are the Sea of Dreams, the Bodoll Forest, the Fields of Ciggi or the Swamps of Garog. In total there are currently 14 wondrous locations but only a few will be available every game. The wondrous locations are larger areas that cannot be settled or terraformed. They are guarded by monsters and must be rebuild before their power can be harnessed.

Rebuilding​

To rebuild a Wondrous Location first you need to defeat the monsters guarding it. Then you need to claim it which costs a percentage of your population. Locations farther away from your cities will cost more population. Once you have claimed the location you can invest resources to increase the level of the Wondrous Location. Each Wondrous Location gives a bonus to a single skill and each level of the location increases the bonus. The math behind it is pretty simple. The rebuild cost is a flat number and thebonus is a percentage, so it's bonus usually scales with populationsize and rebuilding becomes useful in the mid to late game if youcan make use of the percentage bonus.

Competing for Wondrous Locations​

You cannot directly attack wondrous locations claimed by other empires. However you can use espionage missions to bolster the guardians at the location. If the owner of the Wondrous Location does not deal with the guardians he will slowly loose control of the location and it can be claimed again. The level of the Wondrous Location stays the same.

Integrating Wondrous Locations into macro strategies​

Wondrous Locations present you very important macro decisions. They offer potentially game changing bonuses like +100% or more gold from merchants or 70% less casulties in battle but require large investments. They really shine when they are part of a larger strategy. This is because they do not directly give a bonus but improve the stats of your leader. The Bodoll Forest for example gives a bonus to the hunting skill. The hunting skill gives a bonus to your hunters equal to the hunting skill times the wisdom stat of your leader. So a leader with a wisdom stat of 2 only gets a bonus of 10% from a level 5 Bodoll Forest, but a leader with a wisdom stat of 13 gets 65% from the same location. So if you play a leader with a high wisdom stat and you start near the Bodoll forestand your race has hunters you could decide to ignore other ways to gain food like farming all together and develop a more efficient hunting only economy. To make that work you would want to focus on techs that improve hunters. Since hunters also produce large amount of leather you would want to train mostly units that use leather armor. It would also help to expand first into areas that are good for hunting like forests.

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that mechanism seems fun.
the balance about "huge investment and helps only mid-late game" might have to be studied by gaming tests
 
yes, full balance will come over time with player feedback. In theory atleast it should work quite reliable because the cost is static (X resources) and the bonus scales with the size of your empire or the size of your population, so as turns go on at some point the bonus will always be higher than the cost. It could be though that you might find it more interesting to invest your resources into epic buildings. It should not be too difficult to balance though.

I am now working on the Visual effects for combat actions. 75 Combat abilities currently and nearly all of them need some effects. For buffs I usually make an icon appear for a short while. Here is an example for a defensive formation that halves any damage taken but also reduces all damage dealt by 50%.

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ignore the spears, they are at the wrong position. The gif is somehow much larger than the original ingame and it is much more difficult to see stuff. There is also a weird clipping effect at the right side of the shield which is already fixed.

In the background you can see the battle environment for caves. Well you cannot see much of the caves since its dark, there are just a couple torches. And the monsters with their loot. Each unit has a tier which is indicated by the amont of stars on the left top corner. This one is a caravan guard, which is a defensive tier 1 unit. The stars display should help to get a quick overview on how powerful the units/enemies are.
 
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