Warlords II [Modular] 2.7
- Thread starter vincentz
- Start date
First of all, sorry to the folks who downloaded V1.4 yesterday. It had some bug, where you couldnt capture a city with later warlords. Therefore a new version : Warlords II v1.5
Added bonus req (See spoiler in 1. post)
Added tech req (see spoiler in 1. post)
Added combat bonus (see spoiler in 1. post)
Removed citycapture BUG
Removed Barb ethnicity on Chief (Since it didnt work with always hostile/hidden nationality)
Added Bonus production (10% each) from Gold,Silver,Gems,Pearls (Thoose Warlords are some greedy bastards)
Added bonus req (See spoiler in 1. post)
Added tech req (see spoiler in 1. post)
Added combat bonus (see spoiler in 1. post)
Removed citycapture BUG
Removed Barb ethnicity on Chief (Since it didnt work with always hostile/hidden nationality)
Added Bonus production (10% each) from Gold,Silver,Gems,Pearls (Thoose Warlords are some greedy bastards)
strategyonly
C2C Supreme Commander
i_diavolorosso
Prince
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2008
- Messages
- 446
OMG
Modmodder here is very active
Thanks for all of your work
Sarkyn
Warlord
Some feedback
Thank you for a very entertaining addition to the game!
It's definitely staying in my mod for the forseeable future.
I played a full Monarch game with them, with settings prone towards a war-heavy game (Revolutions, Raging Barbs, Aggressive AI, I also hand picked a few particularly narky leaders), and this is what I found:
+ I adore them, they're a real interesting choice. And gaming is supposed to be about meaningful interesting choices.
+ the AI adores them. There was rarely a stack of doom without a general/warlord, and sometimes in his bigger attacks I saw 2-3 of the damn things.
+ I love the way they retain their general graphic. I had quite modern units being led by a guy in deerskins with a cape. That made them unique. So much so that I started giving them names "General Steel", "Colonel Hill", "Leiutenant Shabash", etc. It really added to the game in a great way to have such identification with the units.
I'd have General Steel leading his pikemen in to defend the capital from a surprise attack by the Ottomans, instead of just moving x of y pikemen. It's an extension of what I'd always done with very highly promoted units (I'd use the in-game rename feature to rename anyone who got to Combat-5 "Elite..." for example).
Overall, the addition of this flavour was excellent.
I don't have much to say in terms of balance - I almost never used them as private armies on their own. At the technology level they appeared at, there was almost more military advantage to adding them to an existing unit, for reasons of promotion synergy mostly.
- AI did seem to fairly consistently use them as they were, not adding them to units, though. Bug/feature, or limitation of the game structure possibly. In the past, the AI had quite regularly used Great Generals attached to units, so there clearly is code to do so. Perhaps giving them strength/abilities and xp made the AI treat them like UNITS instead of GREAT PEOPLE.
- Whereas, on the other hand, after dabbling with one or two as armies, I started using them ENTIRELY the other way, as additions to an existing unit.
Because (a) there was a limit on the number of army units you could use, and (b) there were better synergies to be achieved by ROM's many various over-promoted base units, and (c) the benefit of free xp with general promotions was just too good.
Which got me thinking - I think there are two units here, not one.
There are Army units - which have a place in the game, as leaders of stacks of doom with different promotions. Flexible units that can reduce walls, raid, and so on.
And there are Commander great people - like half-a-great-general that get added to units because they can't be added to a city.
I'm not sure of the value of Army units, I think they'd need to be rebalanced according to their cost and rarity. Make them DAMN GOOD, but make them damn expensive as well, so that at comparable tech levels, the AI won't just build entire stacks of them.
But the Commander units are awesome enough to be a mod on their own.
What I did find was that I was farming XP for my best "Generals" though. The mechanic for adding xp to the entire stack means that I could:
- make 2 production-heavy cities.
- build units in the main one with the great generals (bonus xp)
- build warlords in the other one
- move warlord and unit to the same tile
- meet them there with an existing general I wanted to "boost"
- click "Add to unit"
- the 5/10/whatever xp that gets divided onto the stack then would go HALF on the newly Warlorded unit, and HALF on the general being boosted.
This mechanism is infinitely repeatable, but expensive. I could have been building twice the number of non-warlord units for the same amount of hammers after all. But in a game where the "Increased Unit Maintenance Mod" was kicking me around financially, I was doing anything I could with my ample supply of hammers to create SMALL ARMIES of very effective units.
Exploit? Perhaps. Expensive enough to be fine as is? Maybe.
What my thinking led me to, was that possibly the best way to handle this would be to split these two functions into two separate units.
Maybe make an "Armies!" modmod and a "Commanders!" modmod.
The commanders are buildable great generals, the armies are combo units with general promotion accessiblity?
Just a thought!
Final bits of feedback -
- the promotion tree for generals is a bit "muddy". It's got all sorts of various unequal options, making some promotions a "must have" and others a very dubious choice at best. I think some time could be spent cleaning it up a bit to make it a logical tree of equally valid choices, with rewards for specialisation.
That's not something to do with this mod really (unless you decide to make it to do with this mod). But it does distinctly impact the effectiveness of this mod, so I thought it worth mentioning.
And one final bug - I had a lot of normal GP great generals - as I played on Aggressive AI, with August Caesar (Imperialistic). A few of my "normal" great general pops came out as Warlords. This was always a bit of a let down, as a great general is worth more overall. Is this intended that you sometimes get one of your Warlords from normal Great General generation?
Thank you for a very entertaining addition to the game!
It's definitely staying in my mod for the forseeable future.
I played a full Monarch game with them, with settings prone towards a war-heavy game (Revolutions, Raging Barbs, Aggressive AI, I also hand picked a few particularly narky leaders), and this is what I found:
+ I adore them, they're a real interesting choice. And gaming is supposed to be about meaningful interesting choices.
+ the AI adores them. There was rarely a stack of doom without a general/warlord, and sometimes in his bigger attacks I saw 2-3 of the damn things.
+ I love the way they retain their general graphic. I had quite modern units being led by a guy in deerskins with a cape. That made them unique. So much so that I started giving them names "General Steel", "Colonel Hill", "Leiutenant Shabash", etc. It really added to the game in a great way to have such identification with the units.
I'd have General Steel leading his pikemen in to defend the capital from a surprise attack by the Ottomans, instead of just moving x of y pikemen. It's an extension of what I'd always done with very highly promoted units (I'd use the in-game rename feature to rename anyone who got to Combat-5 "Elite..." for example).
Overall, the addition of this flavour was excellent.
I don't have much to say in terms of balance - I almost never used them as private armies on their own. At the technology level they appeared at, there was almost more military advantage to adding them to an existing unit, for reasons of promotion synergy mostly.
- AI did seem to fairly consistently use them as they were, not adding them to units, though. Bug/feature, or limitation of the game structure possibly. In the past, the AI had quite regularly used Great Generals attached to units, so there clearly is code to do so. Perhaps giving them strength/abilities and xp made the AI treat them like UNITS instead of GREAT PEOPLE.
- Whereas, on the other hand, after dabbling with one or two as armies, I started using them ENTIRELY the other way, as additions to an existing unit.
Because (a) there was a limit on the number of army units you could use, and (b) there were better synergies to be achieved by ROM's many various over-promoted base units, and (c) the benefit of free xp with general promotions was just too good.
Which got me thinking - I think there are two units here, not one.
There are Army units - which have a place in the game, as leaders of stacks of doom with different promotions. Flexible units that can reduce walls, raid, and so on.
And there are Commander great people - like half-a-great-general that get added to units because they can't be added to a city.
I'm not sure of the value of Army units, I think they'd need to be rebalanced according to their cost and rarity. Make them DAMN GOOD, but make them damn expensive as well, so that at comparable tech levels, the AI won't just build entire stacks of them.
But the Commander units are awesome enough to be a mod on their own.
What I did find was that I was farming XP for my best "Generals" though. The mechanic for adding xp to the entire stack means that I could:
- make 2 production-heavy cities.
- build units in the main one with the great generals (bonus xp)
- build warlords in the other one
- move warlord and unit to the same tile
- meet them there with an existing general I wanted to "boost"
- click "Add to unit"
- the 5/10/whatever xp that gets divided onto the stack then would go HALF on the newly Warlorded unit, and HALF on the general being boosted.
This mechanism is infinitely repeatable, but expensive. I could have been building twice the number of non-warlord units for the same amount of hammers after all. But in a game where the "Increased Unit Maintenance Mod" was kicking me around financially, I was doing anything I could with my ample supply of hammers to create SMALL ARMIES of very effective units.
Exploit? Perhaps. Expensive enough to be fine as is? Maybe.
What my thinking led me to, was that possibly the best way to handle this would be to split these two functions into two separate units.
Maybe make an "Armies!" modmod and a "Commanders!" modmod.
The commanders are buildable great generals, the armies are combo units with general promotion accessiblity?
Just a thought!
Final bits of feedback -
- the promotion tree for generals is a bit "muddy". It's got all sorts of various unequal options, making some promotions a "must have" and others a very dubious choice at best. I think some time could be spent cleaning it up a bit to make it a logical tree of equally valid choices, with rewards for specialisation.
That's not something to do with this mod really (unless you decide to make it to do with this mod). But it does distinctly impact the effectiveness of this mod, so I thought it worth mentioning.
And one final bug - I had a lot of normal GP great generals - as I played on Aggressive AI, with August Caesar (Imperialistic). A few of my "normal" great general pops came out as Warlords. This was always a bit of a let down, as a great general is worth more overall. Is this intended that you sometimes get one of your Warlords from normal Great General generation?
Wow! This feedback/info is worth gold 
Thanks. I really appreciate it.
I thought a lot about this. An alternative could be to give them "modern" look in modern times, but they could easely be confused with Warlord Generals. So I'm gonna stick with "General Steel", "Colonel Hill", "Leiutenant Shabash"
In v1.5 I gave them some more strenght/bonuses which should bring them to at least an equilivant opponent. Might have to up their strenghts even more. The new stats are updated in Spoiler in the first thread.
I started make warlord (1) before the update to 3.19. One of the reasons why I made Warlords II was that the AI wasnt happy about building them as single Warlords. So I added the private army and vupti, the AI builds them. The AI should be "fixed" in 3.19 making it better at joining vanilla Generals with units, but already in 3.17 they were pretty good at using the captured Warlords for leaders (nothing else to do with them).
My biggest problem is the way the Warlords are now. They can be exploited by human players. When I uploaded 1.5 I actually thought about making an optional patch taking away the Warlords (Army) ability to <Join Unit As Warlord>. That way the only way human players could attach them was with captured Warlords as the AI does, making them more valuable (have to give them bigger xp bonus). On the other hand : the xp bonus the Warlord gives when build now, is so small that it would propably be a better strategy to build something else (examples : 1 Chief (str6/100
) or 2.5 axemen (str5/100) / 1 Captain (Str12/200) or 2 macemen (str10/170). Later when the xp becomes better its still an expensive way of boosting the armies. When that said, I actually had Warlords on all the major cities by the medieval era. Which is why I will make them not able to join when they have their private army (in v1.6), but make a patch with the second for those who still wants warlords all over the place.
The problem is the AI. They cannot see the huge advantage by building the Commander type, which means they wont build them at all.
I tried to balance them by giving them some bonuses (+against mounted or melee etc), and I dont know which version you used, bet they have been boosted to fit their era. Might give them more,
I'll make a small optional patch, but I dont think the AI will build it, making it unbalancing.
Damn. With the 20+xp from the vanilla Generals plus the 15xp from the Warlord General. Would have made som SoD
. I too spammed Warlords, giving my city defense good bonuses and making upgrades cheaper (At least they are not for free anymore, Thanks Zappara )
I agree on this one too. And not only for the generals (IMO), I usually end up giving my units the starpromotions (at least until they have 3 stars and can get some interesting promotions) Unfortunately the new WoC standard makes it nearly impossible to change existing values, so that changing the promotions couldnt be done modular.
In warlord (1) I made an alternative leader promotion for my Warlords. Unfortunately the sideeffect was you could join BOTH a warlord and a general to the same unit. So I skipped it.
And again : Thanks for you very valuable information/view. I'll see it will be put to good use
Thanks. I really appreciate it.I thought a lot about this. An alternative could be to give them "modern" look in modern times, but they could easely be confused with Warlord Generals. So I'm gonna stick with "General Steel", "Colonel Hill", "Leiutenant Shabash"
In v1.5 I gave them some more strenght/bonuses which should bring them to at least an equilivant opponent. Might have to up their strenghts even more. The new stats are updated in Spoiler in the first thread.
I started make warlord (1) before the update to 3.19. One of the reasons why I made Warlords II was that the AI wasnt happy about building them as single Warlords. So I added the private army and vupti, the AI builds them. The AI should be "fixed" in 3.19 making it better at joining vanilla Generals with units, but already in 3.17 they were pretty good at using the captured Warlords for leaders (nothing else to do with them).
My biggest problem is the way the Warlords are now. They can be exploited by human players. When I uploaded 1.5 I actually thought about making an optional patch taking away the Warlords (Army) ability to <Join Unit As Warlord>. That way the only way human players could attach them was with captured Warlords as the AI does, making them more valuable (have to give them bigger xp bonus). On the other hand : the xp bonus the Warlord gives when build now, is so small that it would propably be a better strategy to build something else (examples : 1 Chief (str6/100
) or 2.5 axemen (str5/100) / 1 Captain (Str12/200) or 2 macemen (str10/170). Later when the xp becomes better its still an expensive way of boosting the armies. When that said, I actually had Warlords on all the major cities by the medieval era. Which is why I will make them not able to join when they have their private army (in v1.6), but make a patch with the second for those who still wants warlords all over the place.The problem is the AI. They cannot see the huge advantage by building the Commander type, which means they wont build them at all.
I tried to balance them by giving them some bonuses (+against mounted or melee etc), and I dont know which version you used, bet they have been boosted to fit their era. Might give them more,
I'll make a small optional patch, but I dont think the AI will build it, making it unbalancing.
Damn. With the 20+xp from the vanilla Generals plus the 15xp from the Warlord General. Would have made som SoD
Could also be done with the vanilla generals, but another good reason not to be able to join the built warlord, but only the captured ones.
Exploit for sure. I dont like when the human player can use the system in an unfair way giving a huge advantage. It should be our strategy not the "BUGS" that makes us victorious
. I too spammed Warlords, giving my city defense good bonuses and making upgrades cheaper (At least they are not for free anymore, Thanks Zappara )Its actually only a couple of 0's being replaced by 1's in a single file that makes the difference. If people wants warlords in every stack (and I have to say I kind of liked it, having feudal warlords guarding every major city, and I guess realistic enough) then they can dl the "patch". No sweat.
I agree on this one too. And not only for the generals (IMO), I usually end up giving my units the starpromotions (at least until they have 3 stars and can get some interesting promotions) Unfortunately the new WoC standard makes it nearly impossible to change existing values, so that changing the promotions couldnt be done modular.
In warlord (1) I made an alternative leader promotion for my Warlords. Unfortunately the sideeffect was you could join BOTH a warlord and a general to the same unit. So I skipped it.
I had a slight suspision about that, and it was confirmed in a test game I just made, where a Warlord General (Army) was born in the middle ages. I'm almost sure where to locate that BUG (I used the great general as a template when I made the warlords). It will ofcourse be removed from Warlords II v.1.6
And again : Thanks for you very valuable information/view. I'll see it will be put to good use
Endwar 005
The lolrus
Hey I think some files are somehow misplaced for me. All the Warlord units show up as red blobs, which as I understand means the art files couldn't be found. This installs right to Rise Of Mankind/Assets/Modules right?
The Warlord Folder should be in
....\Civilization4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Rise of Mankind\Assets\Modules\Projects\Vincentz
I put all my mods in 1 pack, and changed the directory, so its easier to uninstall those you don't want.
....\Civilization4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Rise of Mankind\Assets\Modules\Projects\Vincentz
I put all my mods in 1 pack, and changed the directory, so its easier to uninstall those you don't want.
Well, I havent seen a "bastard general" being born by AD 1 in my testgames, only vanilla generals. So I think I fixed it. But if one is popping up, let me know. I also fixed the exploitation glitch, though some might not like it. The Warlord can only join another unit in his single (captured) state now.
being born by AD 1 in my testgames, only vanilla generals. So I think I fixed it. But if one is popping up, let me know. I also fixed the exploitation glitch, though some might not like it. The Warlord can only join another unit in his single (captured) state now.
Endwar 005
The lolrus
Huh I downloaded the packed version and the bug was fixed for me, must've been patched. However, now I can't attach my warlords to units. It seems like it might be intentional, but I want to be sure. Great job on all your additions
Intentional. It might have been the reason for "bastard general" births (could also be another thing I changed), but could also be used as an exploit, since the AI would never use it.
I uploaded a file that brings back the <Join unit as Warlord> for the built ones, though I cut the XP bonus severly (1xp for chiefs to max 5 xp for generals).
If you use it, let me know if the "bastard general" births BUG is still there
Endwar 005
The lolrus
By "Bastard General", do you mean that when a Warlord is built in a city, it shows up as a great person? I had that happen without JOIN.rar . I took a screenshot but about 80% of my screenshots corrupt.
With "Bastard general" I mean when a normal general would be born (after getting enough great general points by combat) it would sometimes be one of my warlords (army) that was born instead of the vanilla general. I only noticed it once myself, but that one was a Warlord General (Army) being born in the middle ages. This bug should be fixed in the Vincentz Mods install.
os79
Deity
Hello,
You may want to update your signatue because with all your acitivities recently, your sig is outdated *lol*. Not a must but wanted you to know.
You may want to update your signatue because with all your acitivities recently, your sig is outdated *lol*. Not a must but wanted you to know
.Sarkyn
Warlord
By the way, Vincentz.
I modmodmodded this, so that BUILT warlords could JOIN as General, but did not give any free xp.
That seemed an equitable balance for me - if you spent all those hammers to get an army unit, then gaining access to the general promotions was a fair reward for all that production. That way I could still make myself a whole pile of "Named Men" to do specific jobs but without the potential for peace-time xp farming.
I modmodmodded this, so that BUILT warlords could JOIN as General, but did not give any free xp.
That seemed an equitable balance for me - if you spent all those hammers to get an army unit, then gaining access to the general promotions was a fair reward for all that production. That way I could still make myself a whole pile of "Named Men" to do specific jobs but without the potential for peace-time xp farming.
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