[kennydicke]

rdonj, again!

Hmm, iirc priests of sotek have the heretic tag in Itza.

Yeah, I was trying to point out in my own way a heretic unit that I like; because, fluffwise, they are heretics and because they had such a different path from the other mages. I thought this could apply to servants of erlik; although, historically, not heretics, they have a vastly different philosophical outlook and in my mod a vastly different magic path. I can go either way on them at this point.


sombre, again! thanks for the warhammer mods, should've said so earlier!

Not that this is possible outside of onebattlespell, but no no no. Having a silk vest on does not equate to airshield. Airshield can stop massive boulders, flaming arrows (without getting hit by the fire), seeking arrows etc. Airshield is a magical force batting away projectiles. A silk vest is just something to add to custom armours, or you could give the unit a natural #prot level of 4 or something.

Actually, it was more like a full thermal top and bottom than a vest. But I strongly agree that airshield would be inappropriate. My reasons for further inquiry were more for personal knowledge than for something I planned too implement. I don't know if I want to give any of them natural protection, although a very interesting method of accounting for the silk underclothes (and one I disregarded early).

No. It can't be added to magical items either. Nor is it a monster command. It would require a onebattlespell, unless I'm forgetting some monster you could copystats. Regardless I think putting air shield in to represent a silk vest is insane.

Yeah, I couldn't find it in modding.pdf at all. I don't know any monster has airshield naturally (but I'm not familiar with half or more of the summons, and few of the MA vanilla nations. Using an airshield as it is would be insane to represent silk underclothing. However, I was trying to elicit ideas, and it worked. Was it a bad idea? No. Was it a feasible idea? Yes. Was it an idea appropriate to the goal? Probably not, considering I only wanted it to work against arrows/bolts. The whole concept of silk stopping these missles only works because of the spinning/twisting action that flights create. Silk offers no protection versus knives, swords, spears, clubs, maces, javelins, boulders, fire (well, a little, but not enough to matter) or any other type of attack that is not spinning on a particular axis. You are right, though.

I would. From your descriptions, I would give all their archer units the longbow weapon. It still gives them the best human bows in the dom3 world, works with flaming arrows etc - only issue is it says 'longbow' instead of 'recurve compound horsebow' or whatever you want it to say. Which I don't think is an issue, much in the same way I wouldn't make a 'cutlass' weapon to replace 'falcion' or a 'gladius' to replace 'shortsword'.

And this may probably be the final fix. I wanted as a unique feel to their equipment as to their nationals. Being a thorough (read: anal) person, in a world of 'close-enoughs' (our own, not dominions) I prefer accuracy. It was more than the name. Firing a recurve bow is as different from firing a longbow as firing a light crossbow is from firing heavy crossbow, or as different as throwing a knife is from an axe; not to mention the difference in capabilities. If equivalency is equal to happiness, then I can live with the change. (And it appears to be a popular choice!)

As far as the sabre is concerned, it is an even more unique weapon when compared to a short sword or falchion; longer and easier to wield (slashes, instead of stabs) than a short sword (which you rightly compare to a gladius, other that the fact that a gladius was broader, they were functionally the same weapon); lighter and faster than a 'traditional' falchion (this is more subjective, some would consider a falchion the same as a sabre, many would not; some would say a cutlass is a scimitar, some would call it a sabre; some would say a scimitar is a sabre, others would say it's a falchion; others still would say it's semantics and that they are all the same weapon because they all have medium to long length, variably curved, blades, thin to thick in width wielded primarily from horseback in a slashing motion, in this sense a shamshir and a dao are also the same weapon as the rest. I could easily have used either to represent a sabre; and if people prefer, I will replace the sabres with short swords or falchions. This was not brought up by anyone yet, but why not nip a potential problem in the bud?

Gems have nothing to do with it imo. If you point out the specific units its going wrong for I can take a look. onebattlespell has always acted a little weird though.

I'm not sure at all, first time I messed with that tag. I believe all of my pretenders were having the issue, but I was honestly just checking out the function, and the only one I really wanted was for Tengri to autocast Storm, although now that I've given Erlik Darkness, that is one I'd like to keep.

The method for getting round the vanilla restriction is to first make an exact copy of the vanilla spell using #copyspell - then you edit the original vanilla spell to be whatever you want it to be, then you #onebattlespell call it by ID number.

This wouldn't affect that spell for everyone? I thought that was how it worked! (#copyxxxx, I mean) Interesting, are their other uses for #copyspell? I've never been able to find the ID number of a spell, unless, of course, the name is the ID number.

If you do want units to fight with both sword and lance at the same time, you have to give the unit an appropriate level of ambi. Regardless of what historians say, there's no way I'm going to believe warriors would use a technique like that unless it was /useful/, therefore there should be a point to it in dom3. Two attacks at att8 is the lowest you could really go before it becomes too crappy to imagine a warrior using it. Even that is pretty abysmal. Remember ambidexterity can essentially be whatever value you like, because it /only/ matters for these weapons. So you can make it 10 if you want and realistically it won't cause any problems.

It would be useful to hold one opponent at bay from feet away with your lance while simultaneously attacking another with your sword. And if it was a literal translation from the real world, every Mongol warrior would have an Att of 14 or more. Using a weapon in each hand, sometimes called Florentine, is a very attack oriented style that many people have died trying to use, and, if you ask any SCA member, suicidal unless heavily trained to do it (like say, from a young age). All that aside, I agree, it must have a point. I thought that light lances broke after the charge like the normal ones; so, what I had intended, a charge followed by sword attacks, was not what I had rendered. Also, I thought that at a certain point ambidexterity would equate to an Att bonus, if not then I have no qualms with adding it to the troops.

If you want a lance with charge bonus which beaks after one round and doesn't screw up the attack from the sword on the first round it needs #charge, #ammo 1 and #bonus. The #ammo 1 is the breaking part.

That's sweet, did you come across that by yourself, or did I just miss it?

I see no reason not to make a new lance for the mongols.

I could make a tweener lance, using your awesome idea. My favorite part is making weapons and armor (hence, what I consider to be an overabundance in my mod). I could do it all day for every weapon conceivable and not really get bored. I had wanted to make equipment that other people would use for their own mods. Like hey, I want a Persian nation, and I can use this guys bows, sabres and lamellar armor; or, I want a Byzantine nation and I could use the very same items; or Korean, or Cossack, or Turkic, or a slew of other peoples that would make for a great mod IMO.

Unlike with missile weapons it isn't going to cause any flaming arrows style interaction problems.

Right after I created the bows and assigned them to my first units, I fired up dom3, enabled the mod, started a game with a fire9 great sage, researched to ench5, attacked a neighbor, cast flaming arrows with my pretender, checked the archers to see that they had flaming arrows ability, hit 'q', quit out and checked a mental box in my head that said, 'yup, it works;' this was not just bad programming, it was bad testing. It wasn't until right before I was ready to post that I had actually watched a battle with flaming arrows and realized it didn't work! I could have then made substitutions, but had grown accustomed to and started to like the bows I made. I figured if anybody thought they were worth sacrificing flaming arrows for, I would keep them. I'll just remove them. Saves spaces for better implemented weapons at least! Oh, well, too bad there isn't a #bow or #flamen tag to add flame arrow compatibility.

Regarding encumbrance free armour or having low enc. Think very carefully about this. If you're saying all your guys, racially/culturally have high levels of endurance which set them apart from the other dom3 species/nations (like machaka) then give them enc 2. No lower. <---> Besides which, most of your stuff is mounted (which should mean base enc 5 or 4 with the racial bonus) and ignores the armour enc.

I gave all the human units 3 enc, AFAICR. The modding.pdf didn't point out that mounted units have a higher enc value. I noticed most if not all had 4, so I gave some 3 and some 4 to account for riding horses since early childhood (which makes a *huge* difference in how fast you tire out from riding one). Easy enough to correct. I gave 0-enc to the javelin launcher, because I saw it as a machine, with a horse just their to pull it into position. I gave the spirits 0-enc because they're supposed to be essentially just air (even the humanoid one!).

As concerns the armour, the fact that they're used to wearing it around as clothing doesn't mean it causes no enc. You might say it reduces the enc by 1 or something, but being used to something and it being magically weightless are different things. Knights used to do exercise in armour, but dom3 has its own system of armour and enc and it's best to stick to that if possible.

I agree, and I attempted to account, almost exactly as you say. I reasoned if they all wore the base armor everyday from a young age, hunted, played, slept in it, treated it like a second skin (or third when you count that silk) in combination with the fact that it was already lighter and more flexible than chain mail hauberks (enc-2 vanilla), and only slightly more cumbersome than leather hauberks (enc-0 vanilla) that these factors would all combine to make the base armor enc-1. I postulated then that when donning the *lighter* version, they would feel significantly unburdened (hence, enc-0), like wearing heavy winter clothes all year round (Wyoming!) and then going south and changing into summer clothes (BOOM! you feel light as a feather); and that when donning the *heavier* version they would feel slightly more burdened (hence, enc-2). I should reiterate the fact they only had two forms of armor, lacquered leather scale and lacquered leather scale with a lamellar drape. I created more for variation, I thought it might be boring if all the troops had the same armor. More to the point: I can either increase the three scale #newarmors enc tag by 1 each; or I can remove the light and heavy versions of the scale and simply alter the normal scale and lamellar #newarmors to be more different.

Yep. In my version they worship Sotek, who is either not an old one, or is an old one on a different path from the others.

Games Workshop have actually retconned that difference and now Sotek is simply the most popular and powerful old one, in fact they seem to suggest he's the king of the old ones or something. Which is just less interesting, so I went with the old version. I also made slann unable to be empowered in blood.

Wow, I must really need to catch up on my fluff! That's not at all how I remember it. I thought your lizardmen fit how I remembered them to an absolute T!

Thanks for the valuable insights, and to anyone who actually read this.


rdonj

I've already made most of your pretender suggestions. Thanks!

I would make the lance #bonus instead, as it is longer.

Will undo change to sabres and make a new tweener lance with #bonus.

Maybe thematic, but if you are GoRing those, you're seriously wasting gems. Just remove it, it looks odd and doesn't really add anything.

It's just something me and my bro do. Will save it for the house version!

Well, depending on what the new bows look like they may not need to be cap only. If the bows they had weren't capable of killing even the mightiest of SCs, they could actually go down to a reasonable gold price, too.

We'll see. Probably gonna end up being longbows/composite bows.

0 encumbrance trample is just too good for a recruitable. The horse is fatigueable even if the cart isn't, and without the horse the cart is pretty useless. My suggestion would be to give it 3-5 encumbrance to represent the horse, and remove the resistances because they're really weird and abnormal for a unit like that. Then reduce the price of the cart by 60 or so gold because they're no longer ridiculously abusable

I honestly thought that trample would ignore enc-0, my bad. Agree enc-4 sounds pretty good right now, 5 is probably better for a single horse lugging that thing around (even though few animals compare in raw strength to a horse... or a human!). Note: it's supposed to have two wheels, something look off?

As for the death worms, I don't know, from your description it sounds like they could get away without having any aoe at all (with a precision and range boost to make them not useless. Range increased to 10 is probably warranted anyway). Also, they have fear 15, which is a completely nuts value. For a unit summonable so early, that is just too much. Suggestions for this unit: Again, maximum aoe of 1 on both weapons, fear no greater than 5, cost at least 5 per worm, and no more than 1 or 2 at a time for a level 3 summon. You could possibly make a higher level version of this spell that summons more at once. Another thing that might be a good idea would be raising the level of conjuration required to summon them.

Range 10 and aoe gone. Check and double-check! Um, my bro was justing raving about a fear 15 pretender yesterday. The worms are supposed to have fear 0... Apparently #fear tag by itself defaults to 15? That .pdf said it was 0! Fixed.

One last bit of advice: Weigh sombre's comments more heavily than mine. He is actually a modder, and there are plenty of things I have no good idea of pricing for. I've also been known to make snap judgements and be way off the mark in some cases of balance.

I will not disregard anyone's advice, but I will take the harshest criticism as the best calls for change. I never really paid attention to who made what before, just what I liked and didn't. I will take everyone's advice with a grain of sand, a tablet of aspirin and a pair of blinders.