Mod: Game Master

[vladikus]

The purpose of this mod to allow roleplay and multiplayer scenarios. Specifically, his mod creates a nation known as "another realm" for every era. This nation is provided with units and spells capable of quickly attaining ever spell, viewing the entire map, casting Gift of Reason on any unit, and wishing for any unit or item in the game. To use this mod properly, a nation should be created specifically for the Game Master off of the map. An exaplanation of how to do this can be found in the dominions3/doc mapedit section 6-1.

Version .02

-Added decoy for Game Master and Implementer so if players wish for them they will be very sorry they did.
-Maximized amount of gems through adding magic sites, now a total of four magic sites, gain of 198 of everything per turn.
-Created Recall Commander spell, so that commanders sent to provinces can be taken away. They aren’t really recalled, most of the time they will die. Also, implementers cannot be recalled. Although, you shouldn’t send them out of their starting province.
-Created Summon Implementer spell, which allows you summon up to 20 commanders, or less depending on how many you want to put in your capital.
-Start with 10 Horrors and 10 Lesser Horrors in capital.
-Gave Game Master and Implementer maxed out research points (99).

Version .01

-Implementer and Game Master units created.
-"another realm" nation created.
-Added two magic sites with maximum gems.
-Added spell Send Troops in order to teleport units across the map.


Note: This modification uses all the latter available slots for armor, monsters, magic sites, and nations in an effort to not conflict with other modifications. It specifically uses:

Armor slot 398
Monster slots 2994-2999
Spell slots (unsure)
Magic site slots 995-998
Nation slots 92-94

Special thanks to the following for their help: Gandalf Parker and ryo_akashi for their mods, which I have built off of. Ballbarian for hosting files for me and answering questions I've had. Also, Gregstrom, Ironhawk, and Sombre for modding advice.

If you start a game using this please let me know, I'd like to hear feedback and see how things progress.

[Gandalf Parker]

THANK YOU
Im always thrilled when someone takes one of mine and improves on it. Any I do tend to be bare proof-of-concept efforts when the conversation doesnt seem to spark anyone to tackle it.

I will gladly host any game using this mod. PBEM, or Direct Connect (easier for new players), or both types of players at once. I also can provide text-message turn notices for most people.

Gandalf Parker

[vladikus]

Alright, I just thought of something that fixes some of the encountered problems. First of all, thanks to Ironhawk for helping me sort out my problems adding units. You can simply add implementers (unit #2996) to the province that the GM will start out in. Add a ton of them because they will be used to research, summon, wish, and cast Gift of Reason. You'll quickly get all the spells you need and have plenty open for summoning.

Here is a little example of adding the unit to a map:
#specstart [GM nation] [the province nbr you made off of the map]

#setland [GM starting province nbr]
#owner [GM nation, remember early 94, middle 93, late 92]
#commander 2996
#commander 2996
#commander 2996
... and so on many times.

For all the math people out there (and GMs), to reach level 8 in any magic path requires 2820 rp. Since the implementer and GM have maxed out research points at 74, this means it will take 39 units researching to complete one path of magic. This means after 8 turns of full researching you will have every spell researched and priests available to cast them. So you might want to add more than 39 units. This does clutter up the capital quite a bit, but these units can do much besides research and in this sense they will always be valuable. If you really felt the need to have all spells by the first turn, then you'd need, oh, only about 312 units, but why you would need all spells maxed out in the beginning of the game, I don't know. I don't think research should cause much of a problem though.

As for the gate stone and that problem, I forgot all about the ability to empower troops so that they have some magic. Once they have this ability, any of them can cast the send troops spell, so teleporting should not be a problem with any commander at all. This really fixes all the problems except for getting a wide variety of units easier (without having to wish up a million troops).


You will have summons from researching so much and can easy wish for commanders. As for regiments of troops, I'm not entirely sure. I'll put my brain to it, but otherwise I believe this mod has the capacity to give the GM enough power to control a game.

[vladikus]

For some reason I can't edit my last post, so I'll add a reply. Does anyone know where there is a list of spell effect values. The modding manual says on pg. 22 (counting cover and everything) that table 18 includes some effect values for rituals. But under the #effect (Section 9.14), it reads:

Set the effect of the spell. Some of the most
common eff values can be seen in Table 17 and
Table 18. Value higher than 10000 are rituals and
those lower are combat spells. There are many
other values that can be used, but these are the
only documented ones for now. There are more
complete lists in fan-made documentation.

Where are these complete lists?

[Ballbarian]

This might be what you are looking for (Dr P's list):
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=43000

Hope that helps.

[Gregstrom]

This looks great! A couple of thoughts have sprung to mind, though.

1: If you give implementors a #researchbonus of a few hundred, maybe you won't need to start with so many of them in order to get your research together quickly.

2: As things stand, Game Masters and Implementors can be wished for by players. This might be a little over-powerful. If you add non-recruitable units called Implementor and Game Master with lower monster IDs than the ones the GM nation is using, they'll be the ones picked up by Wish. As an idea: give 'em straight 8s for stats, no magic, immobility, 2 hits, starting affliction of disease and... lots of leper and reaper bonus.

3: (I thought of this while typing) A free national GoR might be good. Then you can have Implementors as non-commander recruitables (as well as commanders), and GoR them. That would help to ramp up Implementor numbers early in the game.

[vladikus]

Originally Posted by Gregstrom

This looks great! A couple of thoughts have sprung to mind, though.

1: If you give implementors a #researchbonus of a few hundred, maybe you won't need to start with so many of them in order to get your research together quickly.

I gave them a 300 researchbonus, but in the game it only reaches 99 rp, but that's better than before.

Originally Posted by Gregstrom

2: As things stand, Game Masters and Implementors can be wished for by players. This might be a little over-powerful. If you add non-recruitable units called Implementor and Game Master with lower monster IDs than the ones the GM nation is using, they'll be the ones picked up by Wish. As an idea: give 'em straight 8s for stats, no magic, immobility, 2 hits, starting affliction of disease and... lots of leper and reaper bonus.

I had not even thought of this, thank you. I'm going to add this in for sure.

Originally Posted by Gregstrom

3: (I thought of this while typing) A free national GoR might be good. Then you can have Implementors as non-commander recruitables (as well as commanders), and GoR them. That would help to ramp up Implementor numbers early in the game.

Hm, if I am not mistaken, they already have GoR through the debug mod. But just so I am clear on the reason this this, you're saying that I could make implementers recruitable units for cheap so that other ones could cast GoR on them, or are you saying it is possible to have a GoR that is cast on every unit in the nation? If this possible, this would be great because I would like to eliminate any map editing from this mod (besides adding a province for GM nation and using #specstart).

[Gregstrom]

Hm, if I am not mistaken, they already have GoR through the debug mod. But just so I am clear on the reason this this, you're saying that I could make implementers recruitable units for cheap so that other ones could cast GoR on them,

Yep. If a free turn 1 GoR is already there, that's cool.

With only commander implementors recruitable, growth is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. With free GoR and non-commanders available as well as commanders, growth is 1, 3, 7, 15, 31.

[vladikus]

Originally Posted by Gregstrom

Yep. If a free turn 1 GoR is already there, that's cool.

With only commander implementors recruitable, growth is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. With free GoR and non-commanders available as well as commanders, growth is 1, 3, 7, 15, 31.

The problem I am finding with GoR is that it only allows targeting one type of a unit. Therefore, the player could only grow at the rate of one implementer a turn. I don't think there's any way around this.


I took care of making units to dissuade players from wishing for either game master or implementers. I ave also been working on a return troops spell which uses wind ride to call back commanders. Every time I have used it though the commander is killed (which isn't a big deal). The code looks like this:

#newspell
#name "Return commander"
#descr "Calls a commander back to home province."
#effect 10049
#damage 100
#school 0
#path 0 4
#pathlevel 0 0
#researchlevel 0
#fatiguecost 0
#restricted 94
#restricted 93
#restricted 92
#end

[Gregstrom]

The problem I am finding with GoR is that it only allows targeting one type of a unit. Therefore, the player could only grow at the rate of one implementer a turn. I don't think there's any way around this.

Hmm. I thought it would be one implementer per unit casting the spell. It's a push, but I think if the non-commanders were a separate unit which had a random affliction then they might come up separately - I think that's why Tartarians often display separately. You'd need implementors to have heal(100) as well as their other powers, I guess. It's starting to look like a bit of a fudge, though.

And how come the game master isn't a size one unit wearing a red robe, by the way?