Mod questions
 

I've got a few questions

Is there a way to make sure a creature
- WIll NOT DIE the first turn after it's summoned in combat
- Do creatures with a HUGE AOE ranged attack with a very short range (say 1) fire if they do not have a target withing range (range 1) but DO have targets within the AOE if they shoot just next to themselves?
- Make it die after making one attack
- is there a limit to the AOE you can give an attack?

Just making a creature that has 1 HP and then fires a huge AOE ranged attack that will nearly always hit himself was my first idea and would do well enough but if he's killed before he can attack it would be kinda silly.

(The use is: I want to create an orbital strike spell but since we lack the graphs for that I wanted to summon the "Orbital beam" creature with a sprite of about 6000x6000 transparent with a beam about 4000 pixels from the right border. THat way if a mage summons it on an average battle field it will be summoned next to the mage but I guess the actually beam will show somewhere between the enemy or about in the middle if it's a larger battle field.)
Then I make an attack sprite which is the explosion sprite that hits on where the beam "landed".
That way the mage cast a spell, the beam hits the battlefield and when the beam attacks there is an explosion. Of course the beam should DIE then or it will be very awkward.
The attack would then deal huge damage all over the battle field. It would of course be a high level combat spell in line with the battle winning spells that the vanilla game has.

any ideas on how to do this most effectively

Of course if you summon the beam next to the mage usually somewhere on back of the battlefield you USUALLY wouldn't lose the beam before it could attack but if it happens (fliers dom 3 K has a lot of these, and dom 3 K has lots of powerfull ranged attack) it would be silly.

edit:

PS I thought about giving it flying so most damage wouldn't be on your part of the battle field but a jumping orbital beam would be silly too.

Re: Mod questions
 

You are making this way more difficult than it needs to be. You can easily create impressive nuklear strike with the explsprites we've got.

Let's create spells A, B, C, D. A nextspells B which nextspells C which nextspells D.

A is your beam, with AoE: 1, there is a "massive orange pillar" explsprite*, this spell will represent direct hit. B has AoE 5 to 6, you should probably use the massive expanding white explosion sprite. C has AoE 3-4 (since this effect will go on *each* square where B lands it would hit 15-24 squares), for sprite, use something orangish or yellow. D would be some sort of black smoke effect.

This post in nutshell: use #nextspells to stack graphical effects. It will look epic, trust me.

*it might be flightsprite, not 100% sure. You can find the explsprite numbers from the mapped spell flightsprites & explsprites charts, just search for "massive".

Re: Mod questions
 

hmmm ok I'll look into that :D

I'm not sure it will give the 200 pix wide beam and 500 x200 pix wide explosion sprite I had in mind and I sort of did like the idea of the beam being there a while (a turn) before going of... but this might indeed be a much better solution. I will also incorporate the option to make damage lower when spreading out.

Re: Mod questions
 

#newspell
#name "Orbital Blast6"
#descr "BOOM"
#school -1
#researchlevel 0
#path 0 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#effect 2
#fatiguecost 10
#flightspr 10000
#explspr 10188
#dmg 5
#aoe 663
#spec 128
--nextspell "Orbital Blast5"
#range 200
#precision 0
#end

#newspell
#name "Orbital Blast5"
#descr "BOOM"
#school -1
#researchlevel 0
#path 0 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#effect 3
#fatiguecost 10
#flightspr 10000
#explspr 10188
#dmg 40
#aoe 666
#spec 128
#nextspell "Orbital Blast6"
#range 200
#precision 0
#end

#newspell
#name "Orbital Blast4"
#descr "BOOM"
#school -1
#researchlevel 0
#path 0 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#effect 2
#fatiguecost 10
#flightspr 10000
#explspr 10140
#dmg 10
#aoe 10
#spec 128
#nextspell "Orbital Blast5"
#range 200
#precision 0
#end

#newspell
#name "Orbital Blast3"
#descr "BOOM"
#school -1
#researchlevel 0
#path 0 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#effect 2
#fatiguecost 10
#flightspr 10000
#explspr 10110
#dmg 50
#aoe 20
#spec 128
#nextspell "Orbital Blast4"
#range 200
#precision 0
#end

#newspell
#name "Orbital Blast2"
#descr "BOOM"
#school -1
#researchlevel 0
#path 0 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#effect 2
#fatiguecost 10
#explspr 10110
#flightspr 10000
#aoe 100
#dmg 99
#spec 128
#nextspell "Orbital Blast3"
#range 200
#precision 0
#end

#newspell
#name "Orbital Blast"
#descr "BOOM"
#school 2
#researchlevel 0
#path 0 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#effect 2
#fatiguecost 10
#flightspr 10000
#explspr 10242
#dmg 99
#spec 128
#nextspell "Orbital Blast2"
#range 200
#precision 0
#end

that makes this :D I'm surprised it actually doesn't seem to do the kind of damage you would expect.

Re: Mod questions
 

I tried it out. Gotta admit, it looks pretty damn epic. Just like I told you it would :P.

The damage "problem" is that #dmg is not a valid spell modding command, it just makes it default to 10 damage. #damage however, is very valid command for spell modding.

I also suggest you remove the empty flightsprite from the first spell (give value -1), since that is the reason for the pause between the casting and the graphical effect. The game actually takes the time to make the invisible missile fly to the target.

Also, I really don't see any reason for so epic damage. Since the troops in "ground zero" get hit by all of the spells, they'll get hit for quite a lot of damage (especially if you have all of the spells AN). I suggest you do 3 damage effects, first is AN (the laser itself), second AP (the fire explosion), third normal damage (sharpnel) the rest of the spells could do some minor fatigue damage (smoke, heat, falling down to ground, etc...)

Also, in future, would you mind using the code tags when posting long lists of code. Like this:

Re: Mod questions
 

I'd have to look into that next time.. I just hope I remember it

The reason the damage is so high is because I was not very happy with the damage otu put before so I kept increasing it :D (it didn't help much and now I know why :D) I might make only the direct hit AN and the rest AP, but damage will be reasonably high since dom 3 K has lots of 15-20 prot troops and 20 hitpoints aren't rare either.
(I'd either make it a very high power spell with high gem cost which is mean to devastate the opposing army or medium/high power with 1-2 gem cost)
I do like the idea of dealing a bit of damage to half or whole battlefield and to deal fatigue damamge to everyone around :D

I put the empty flight sprite in because without it my mage was throwing fires (like fire flies or something) as flightsprite which wasn't my intention. I guess I could change the timing on this one right.. you can cut graphs short a bit.

Re: Mod questions
 

thanks for the idea btw