Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Hmm, I didn't read the whole thread but ... if the level of horror marking is applied like damage maybe you could make a copy of Horror Mark that does negative damage?

edit: Found a way to cure horror mark...

Get a unit horror marked 65536 times... :D

So if horror mark has some kind of damage setting that to 65535 would remove one level of horror marking...

2nd edit: how about chaining spells?
Will chaining horror mark to itself cause an infinite loop and can that be broken (if no more valid targets are on the field for example?)

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Without knowing the exact level of horror marking you would not be able to cure horror mark. And since there's no way to identify the level of horror marks for a unit, you haven't found the cure.

A cure is suggesting you have a way to fix any existing unit with different levels of horror marks with a single spell.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Wouldn't a spell that can reduce horror marks until you are no longer horror marked count as a cure?
I think I know of a way to do that.


Two questions:

What is the special effect number of the astral claw of horrors? :D
If a unit is horror marked in an assassination battle is there a chance that horrors start spawning during the battle?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

You can find the weapon numbers for the astral claw and its horrormark effects in the Dom3 DB.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Thanks.
I don't know that much about modding though. It sounded so easy but there so much details to it. I'm only getting to the point where I have one unit conferring insane horror mark levels and make horror weapons insanely strong. :(
Maybe someone can help me:


(newspell) Copy the spell Manifestation and let it summon a
(newunit) horror mark remover 1
no attacks or anything just

summons in battle (like moloch summons imps)
(newunit) 15 horror mark removers 2 (did that)

these have 2 horror mark attacks (like the doom horror) with 100 attacks per turn that always hit (I suppose they do anyway) and 1 with 57 attacks

Make them unhitable by normal weapons (very high def, prot, awe, etc) but die after 17 rounds...
(newspell) maybe autospell poison damage on them

Make some flavor text about this ancient ritual and the terrible risk involved (in case something goes wrong) - instadeath by doom horror.

I remember something in there is impossible (summon new unit or autocast new spell but maybe you could change old units/spells for that)


You get 17*15*257 = 65535 horror marks in an assassination battle that targets horror marked units. That means you remove 1 level of horror marking. Cast it on a horror marked SC repeatedly until horror mark is gone.

P.S.: Don't tell me I'm mad I know that anyway. :D

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Yes this would be cure.
I recall the developers saying you can have as high as 15 horror marks stacked. I can't find the thread, but that's what I remember which may help.

Edi answered the first one.

The second one would be an answer of NO, unless someone has casted a special spell or is using a special item.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

15? That's seems very little though it explains something. Thanks.

I have changed the setup and even got where I wanted.

Changed Swarm - 17 dragonflies with ranged horror mark attacks with 15 ammunition and negative reinvig so they are immobile after round 15, a commander with illithid paralyze that dies from fatigue at some time. When the leader dies, the dragonflies start dying, too.

Now I horror marked a dragon several times and cast that spell on him. His horror marks where completely gone (so maybe even remove all horror marks no matter how high) and he wasn't attacked by horrors.

Interestingly he was immune to horror marks after that.
Looking at the battle the following thing happened. First the dragon was paralyzed and then hit with horror marks. Horror mark icon is still there.
After some rounds horror mark icon was gone and the graphic of the horror mark weapon changed. It stayed away for some time and then it appeared again. So maybe there's a window that you have to hit, maybe it screws the whole game, but hey, that's wild magic. :D

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Haha, that's crazy but awesome!

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Just a guess - but probably the horror mark counter is a 16-bit integer with 2's complement arithmetic being performed upon it. Probably any value over 32767 (and less than or equal to 65535) is in "negative horror mark" territory, thereby giving the appearance of immunity until sufficiently horror-marked to wrap around into the positive values again.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Turn files?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Yeah, analitic_kernel you are right.

It should have been obvious but because of the accumulating fatigue the horror mark attack didn't work always leading to more and more randomness towards the end of the battle (and I think I used a doom horror attack that does 2 horrormarks). Removed the exhaustion and everything works (probably) deterministic and fine. Dragonflies horrormark until they run out of ammo go into melee and are killed.

I'll finish the mod and upload it here.

Some things that would be nice to have though - some way to copy the real horror mark weapons (as a.o.desolation has it). DomDB says just dmg special which I don't know how to get. So I'm using -999 damage aoe 1 attack with autoeffect horror mark.
Since it's possible to go into negative levels some way to make an assassination spell target only horror marked units (and never the caster, I'm using a copy of Manifestation for this, which is uncool because of that and the flavour text).

Maybe insanity can be cured the same way if someone finds an effect for it, about curse I'm really not sure (as it shouldn't be added but you never know).

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

It's done. :D

By coincidence I found a way to kill the leader at the right time by copying a spell from another mod. Don't know how it works but 5 castings were ok so I suppose it's always.

Erase Spell is Thau 7, Astral 4, costs 9 pearls and removes one level of horror mark. Cast it until the icon is gone. Casting it more often will probably have the effect that horrors avoid the caster. :D

If someone really intends to use it keep in mind that during the battle only one unit should be there (no guards, no autosummons) and that should not get close to the dragonflies (because they won't do their ranged attacks anymore) during the first round nor kill them by any means. After the first round the unit is paralyzed so placing it front and setting it to (hold)(attack) should be fine. Maybe there's some precision issues (don't know how to give a weapon 100 prec) so front is better than rear.

And back your turns up in case it screws something up but it shouldn't.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Wow, thats a lot of effort, and good job on figuring it out. I don't think this will get much use beyond SPers, but its still pretty cool.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Can't you make a ritual of it?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

It is a ritual already.
The ritual starts an assassination battle though. Don't know if there is another way to do it, the damage on horror mark seems to be hardcoded.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

This is a very cool discovery you have made. Good job :).

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Excellent job figuring that out. :D

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

well if it's damage and an attack you could probably just use it the way other damage spells work right?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

It's ~65k attacks, you can't just simulate that with "a damage spell". ;) This mechanic isn't implicitly intended, or someone else would have figured it out already.

So cool!

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Guess who! :p

Guess I'll be back every year or so because of this. ;)

It looks like there are weapon/spell effects listed in the database under Curse and Horror Mark (Twice for some reason,) couldn't you thus completely null the effects out of the game that way?

I'm not sure if that would effect events though. How would you get rid of cursing (And horror mark or insanity if they exist) events?

Man, what a lot of work though! Why can't the devs just add something so you can mod these effects? I understand that they don't want to change the base game, but that's no reason to undermine modding, is it?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Probably because 90% of the community doesn't really care. I wish they'd add more modding functionality though, or even open source.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Read post #112 within this thread.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Well yes, there's that, but that only partially addresses horror marks, and does nothing for curses or insanity.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

don't like insanity-> don't play w/LA Rlyeh and don't use dimensional rod or gift of kurgi

don't like curses-> its honestly a tiny effect, going bat**** over it is silly.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Yes yes, I've literally been hearing that for years, and I haven't gotten any less adamant about wanting it to go away.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

You can mod out the spells, items and magic sites so horror marks and curses are virtually impossible. You can even change the horrors into a single weak dragonfly. A little modding will make these extremely rare.

As TheConway says if you don't like insanity-> don't play w/LA Rlyeh and don't use dimensional rod or gift of kurgi. You can even mod the tartarians to drop their insanity and possibly remove it.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Personally increasing the battlefield turn limit and preventing AI oppoenents sending pretenders into the arena death match are much more important.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

What about events? The items I could live without I suppose, but surely there has to be a solution that doesn't involve removing an entire race from the game?

I don't see why it has to be either/or.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Zogundar - LA R'lyeh's dominion effect is unmoddable. Therefore there is no way to have them in the game without having their insanity dominion present.

Events also cannot be modded out. HOWEVER, you can use mod commands to set the chances of random events very low, particularly the ones that are rare in the first place, which would almost completely at that point remove horror marking from the game, period.

If you can play without LA R'lyeh (the only LA water nation anyway), events set to minimal, no items that cause horror mark or curse, no magic sites that do the same, or spells... then you will only be stuck with curses, on an extremely, extremely rare basis. And they'll probably never affect a unit that matters. If this isn't enough for you, you will never find this game playable because it's highly unlikely illwinter is going to spend the time changing things just for one guy so he'll be more likely to buy the game. They've done updates to the game for years, but at the moment, they're focusing on other things and updates of that nature are extremely unlikely.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

How do you remove weapons/armor/items?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

You mod them to const 12.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

For items, you make them research level 12 (as TheConway points out.)

For weapons/armor, you either
1) Mod the units using them to use different weapons/armor (e.g. change the horror's "astral claw" weapon into a regular "claw" weapon.)
2) Mod the weapons/armor so that they are no longer objectionable (e.g. set all the stats on the "astral claw" such that it no longer does a horror marking attack.)

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

How do you go about doing this exactly? Do you have to stat out the whole item? Or can you just make one change and it will drop any "special" properties? If the former, do you need something in the place of the #secondaryeffect/#secondaryeffectalways? (How do you know which it is anyway, I don't believe the database specifies..)

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

The secondary effect/secondary effect always values are listed in Edi's database. Check columns Q/R and S/T respectively (one is the effect number, the other the effect name.)

Setting the value will remove any existing value (if any.)

That said, for your purposes I'd filter by column AT and directly change the weapons/effects that do "Attribute: Horror Mark" to something else.

...hrm...it looks like the Horror mark effect itself isn't directly removeable, as it's a special effect....so you're down to option 1 again (although you could combine approaches - there are two horror mark weapons, and one of them is only used as a secondary effect, so you could update the weapons using it instead of the units.)

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

So I guess there's no way to "erase" the effect instead?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

No, there isn't a "#clear" command for weapons. That said, only horrors use the "Horror Mark" weapon, so the list of units to update is relatively small.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Okay, so at this point, the idea is to change the units that use the first (Or second) "Horror Mark" weapon to another weapon, and change the weapon in the case of the other one where you can mod out the Horror Mark effect? (Or is it the item the 'weapon' is attached to that you need to change?)

Also, what about a way to hopelessly gimp the Horror Mark weapon (The one with the special effect) so that the odds of it hitting or doing anything are 0%? Ditto Curse.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

You should really be reading your modding manual, with a copy of edi's database sitting open in front of you for this. Then it would be much easier to understand what we're saying.

But to answer: Horrors have a weapon called "Astral Claw". If you give them the weapon "Claw" instead, they will not be able to horror mark anymore. But you can do it both ways.

Giving horror mark/curse a 0% chance to hit is implausible, there is always a chance to hit, no matter how low your attack skill. You have to either give the horrors different weapons, or alter the weapons they have to not horror mark. Those are your options.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

One slight clarification - the horror marking effect itself can't be removed from weapons 367 and 368 (both named "Horror Mark".) It's probably hard coded to the weapon number (note that horrors have a base age of 3670 years - the number probably means something to Johan or Kristopher.

Of the two, 368 is directly assigned to some horrors, and could be eliminated by giving them other weapons. 367 is used as a secondary effect of e.g. Astral Claw, and could be eliminated by updating the weapons that use it to have a different secondary effect.

You could do something similar with the weapons/effects that cause cursing; I'll leave that as an exercise for someone who actually wants to do it.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

..I am. :doh:

Okay, I think I understand the unit/weapon thing.

To double check on sites: I'm seeing conflicting reports. Some of you said you can overwrite, others say you can only delete.

Here's one example of what I've done so far:

Would this have the desired effect, or do I need to add the #clear tag? You can add stuff -after- #clear, right?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Oh and when changing the secondary effect, can't I just give it a value of 0 or some other non-weapon number?
*EDIT*
And also when changing the weapons for units.. how do I go about that? Do I need to list four weapons to overwrite what was already there? And do I need a weapon, or can I use a 0?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

You could handle this a couple of ways. If you just want to remove the site, the easiest way is to set the rarity to 5 so it never gets randomly assigned.

If you want to keep the site but remove the horror marking/cursing effect (and not that I'm not 100% sure this will work if the effects are hard coded to the site number) then you'd want to do:

You *might* need to use the #clear command as a separate step, e.g.:

That's not normally necessary, but since this is one of the special effects, it might work if doing all in one operation doesn't (I only say that because that trick works when removing OKLEADER from copystatted units.)

If the above still doesn't work, then the effects are hard coded to the site number, and you'll need to remove it (but you could add back in a new site with the same name/other attributes, if you want):

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Best way to find out is to try it. For that, you'll want to see the modified unit; easiest way to do that is to use map modding to place a commander version of the unit in the starting province of your nation. Something like (assuming you're modding unit 123):

Just add the above in at the bottom of the map and choose EA Arco to start a test game. Of course, you'll need to make sure province 1 is a land province, but otherwise any normal map should work.

BTW, weapons 0 is "Nothing" and usually works to clear a weapon, but I haven't tried it for removing a secondaryeffect. I'd expect it to work, but if not, you could just create a whole new weapon that has the same base attributes, but no secondary effect specified.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

So far I haven't been able to get the weapons to change at all. Weapon 0 isn't clearing the existing weapons, or changing them. I've tried listing as many as 7 weapons and the base weapons remain (At least in the debug mod I've been using.)

And removing items from the construction list doesn't seem to work either. :/

..and I can't get your mod to work. I tried it in the Aran map, but I didn't start in Province 1 (Which was land!) nor did I get unit 123.
*edit*
Oh, that's -map- modding. No wonder that last one didn't work.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Yah, the commander thing is for map modding. It's just so you can see your change easily.

Quick question - are you closing the game (the entire program, not an individual game session) in between modifications to your .DM file? Note that the program only reads the mods when it's starting, so if you change the mod after the program is started, it won't "notice".

Also - are you sure you've enabled your mod in the preferences menu?

If you try this:

...does that change anything?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Yes and yes.

I'll have to test it. I have discovered that I haven't managed to get rid of the Horror Mark effect from Astral Claw with
Maybe I'll try "nothing" instead of "0" when I try the other thing.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Tested, didn't work (Although I used numbers instead of names for the latter.)

Example:

At first I thought the weapon changes worked, but I guess the Horrors were just unlucky/one-shotting their opponents. The Eater of Gods vs. some undead seems to be Horror Marking them just fine.
*edit*
Unless it has a special property where things that hit it get Horror Marked. I saw a command for that in the modding manual, but the database didn't mention any units that actually had such a property.
*edit2*
I think that's exactly what's happening. How do I get rid of THAT?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Have you clicked on the actual weapons to make sure what they do? Because there's a tag to cause a unit to horror mark things that attempt to attack it, which could be the culprit.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Well I don't think that's the case with the Eater of Gods.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Oops, I'm retarded, I've been using #selectunit instead of #selectmonster. Still don't quite have that sorted out (Will need to do more testing now that the starting tag actually works.)

And of course I need to know about any hidden Horror Marking units or items that inflict the status upon attackers..