Mod: UnitGen - Random nations with procedural sprites!

[elmokki]

http://koti.kapsi.fi/elmokki/dom3/un...en_11_4_12.zip

SpriteGen shows a 2x zoom version along with the normal image. UnitGen may have something new, not sure if I've touched it.

[Ragnarok-X]

I have a small bug report and a suggestion.

Firstly, in the last 2 days i created a lot of nations and played them for 2 or 3 turns. About 30 or so.
I had many occasions, where units had the sprite of holding a flail, but they were actually equipped with a mace. You might check that, im pretty sure there is art mixup there.

I have to say something about balance yet again. I suppose all these nations are made with middle era in mind. However, i found that there is really strong bias towards heavy protection in the nations made. Out of 30 nations, i would say about 20 had protection 14+, many even protection 16+. Many nations felt like you were playing Ulm. I didnt matter if i got lizards, hoburgs or humans, heavy protection nations were certainly favoured among nation creation. I believe you might want to check that, maybe lower the bance chance for heavy armor and stuff. Nations similar to Miclan (i.e. low protection in general or sacred heavy) nations seem to be impossible atm, maybe you can add a modifier which grants + sacreds or disabled heavy armor to increase variance.
In addition to the different mounts, i would love if you would add the tien chi tiger or miclan jaguar as base mount arts. Maybe even add pegasus or griffin knight wings as a sprite so there can be flying boards, lizards, tigers. That would be awesome.


Regarding sacred creation, i got a bunch of nations that got a sacred with crossbow and heavy melee weapon, which is rather unfortunate. Maybe decrease the chance for that. Ranged and dagger or melee and jav or poision pipes is fine, but many times i got stuff like long spear and crossbow or enchanted mace and arbalest, which seems unlikely and less useful.

Lastly, one thing in particular i did not like is how ranged stock units are created. Several times i got crossbow or arbalest infantry, of course with 2 variations, normal and heavy. In these cases, the heavy variants had heavy armor (obviously) and ressource cost went from ~ 15 to 25/30. I think this is rather useless. I never found myself in the situation where i wanted to buy heavy armor ranged infantry especially considering the increased ressource cost. I think you should definitly disable the routine that automaticly creates a heavy armor variant, at least for xbow/arbalest shooters.
Im so looking forward to further tinkering with unitgen and hope for updates and more features. Thanks for including the sprite-zoom in spritegen.


edit: lastly, would it be possible to create a logfile with each nations created ? I would like to the reason for nation creation, i.e. the exact rolls that resulted in certain units being created.

[elmokki]

Originally Posted by Ragnarok-X

I have a small bug report and a suggestion.

Firstly, in the last 2 days i created a lot of nations and played them for 2 or 3 turns. About 30 or so.
I had many occasions, where units had the sprite of holding a flail, but they were actually equipped with a mace. You might check that, im pretty sure there is art mixup there.

I need the races of these units to look at it. There's no way it can happen on all races since Tengu and Hoburgs don't even get flails and Abysians have a different sprite for it than the other nations.

I have to say something about balance yet again. I suppose all these nations are made with middle era in mind. However, i found that there is really strong bias towards heavy protection in the nations made. Out of 30 nations, i would say about 20 had protection 14+, many even protection 16+. Many nations felt like you were playing Ulm. I didnt matter if i got lizards, hoburgs or humans, heavy protection nations were certainly favoured among nation creation. I believe you might want to check that, maybe lower the bance chance for heavy armor and stuff. Nations similar to Miclan (i.e. low protection in general or sacred heavy) nations seem to be impossible atm, maybe you can add a modifier which grants + sacreds or disabled heavy armor to increase variance.

It can be tweaked pretty easily. I'll also probably need to look into nation tag generation since some nations did at some point occasionally get tagged "primitive" and those nations generally were in leather and some ring mail.

In addition to the different mounts, i would love if you would add the tien chi tiger or miclan jaguar as base mount arts. Maybe even add pegasus or griffin knight wings as a sprite so there can be flying boards, lizards, tigers. That would be awesome.

Flying whatevers is actually a pretty neat idea and can definitely be implemented. Mounts (and helmets, weapons and shields) are very easy to add in general, but my policy is that I don't really take requests on graphics as the whole program is designed so that pretty much anyone can define new stuff in so I don't have to do all the graphics (that said like 95%+ are made by me currently and the rest is by kianduatha)

Regarding sacred creation, i got a bunch of nations that got a sacred with crossbow and heavy melee weapon, which is rather unfortunate. Maybe decrease the chance for that. Ranged and dagger or melee and jav or poision pipes is fine, but many times i got stuff like long spear and crossbow or enchanted mace and arbalest, which seems unlikely and less useful.

Not all sacreds need to be useful, but I do agree that at the very least the primarily ranged sacreds should have a reduced chance of getting a magical melee weapon.

Lastly, one thing in particular i did not like is how ranged stock units are created. Several times i got crossbow or arbalest infantry, of course with 2 variations, normal and heavy. In these cases, the heavy variants had heavy armor (obviously) and ressource cost went from ~ 15 to 25/30. I think this is rather useless. I never found myself in the situation where i wanted to buy heavy armor ranged infantry especially considering the increased ressource cost. I think you should definitly disable the routine that automaticly creates a heavy armor variant, at least for xbow/arbalest shooters.

Take a look at base game ranged units. Yes, the only units people tend to use are the lightest ones possible, but there still are plenty of needlessly heavy crossbowmen (as an extreme, Agarthan full chain crossbowmen, but nations like MA Ulm get a fairly heavy crossbowman already). Not all the units need to be useful, which is the case in all categories. That said the heavy armor on ranged might be too common right now, so it could probably get some weighing towards lighter armor (this is also something absolutely anyone can do)

edit: lastly, would it be possible to create a logfile with each nations created ? I would like to the reason for nation creation, i.e. the exact rolls that resulted in certain units being created.

I'll take that to mind for if/when I bother to rewrite some systems to be more user accessible.

[Ragnarok-X]

hey,

i realize most my sugggestions (like chances for armor, weapons, equipment) can be modified using the existing files. However, i have one huge problem with that. Currently im already using several modded files, i.e. i added more description variables for sacreds, more tri-path mage-class names suffix and prefixes but at some point i realized all of my altered files will be gone for good if i download a new revision and replace all the files. Since i already dont know which files i tinkered with, (and thus cant save) i decided to stop modding them alltogether until you realize a "breakthrough" revision which then will be more durable.

If i do sprite parts for tiger/jaguar (more maybe) will you incorporate them in offical revisions ?

[elmokki]

Originally Posted by Ragnarok-X

hey,

i realize most my sugggestions (like chances for armor, weapons, equipment) can be modified using the existing files. However, i have one huge problem with that. Currently im already using several modded files, i.e. i added more description variables for sacreds, more tri-path mage-class names suffix and prefixes but at some point i realized all of my altered files will be gone for good if i download a new revision and replace all the files. Since i already dont know which files i tinkered with, (and thus cant save) i decided to stop modding them alltogether until you realize a "breakthrough" revision which then will be more durable.

When you do changes submitting stuff to for example this thread is a pretty good idea.

If i do sprite parts for tiger/jaguar (more maybe) will you incorporate them in offical revisions ?

Pretty much anything that looks decent will be added in. I do hope though that instead of just graphics people will also do the text based parts of item additions, since in some cases that's like half the work.

[Ragnarok-X]

If possible (please) could you alter the routines so that not every race gets an heavy armed variant of each infantry ? Something like a 50 % chance to spawn a heavy variant would be great (for me). In additionn, please alter the amount of base types so that not each race gets 4 melee weapon variants. If you dont feel like altering it in general, would you kindly explain to me where these values are stored ?

Regarding the mace/flail thingy, i was mistaken. It was not a mace, it was a morning star. I.e. many races had units with a flail artwork but a morning star equipment. I will run another 10 nations today evening and if i spot anything, i will post it.

Here are the mods i was able to find.




magicweapons
-- 64: decay
#unitname "prefix warped"
#unitname "suffix 'of warp'"

-- 216: Fire
#unitname "prefix charring"
#unitname "suffix 'of char'"

-- raising
#unitname "prefix soulbound"
#unitname "suffix 'of reanimation'"


sacredarmdesc
"answering their gods call, %unitname% armed with both faith and %weapons%, they are staying true to their believe"
"recruited into service, %unitname% are now leaving their holy ground, bringing justice in their gods name"
"wilding %weapons% blessed by faith, %unitname% is now forcing everyone to acknowledge the one true god"

majormagicdesc
"The %unitname% of %nation% long studies make them knowledgeable in %magics%"
"The %unitname% of %nation% are born with an affinity in %magics%"
"The %unitname% of %nation% have reached expertise in %magics% due to long training"

adjectives
planar 3 astral earth death
maelstrom 3 fire death nature
putrid 2 death nature
gorgonic 2 death nature
Acashic 3 astral

sacredparts
-- Generic
#define
#name "divine"
#tag "notsuffix"
#basechance 1
#end

#define
#name "just"
#tag "notsuffix"
#basechance 1
#end

-- Nature
#define
#name "firstborn"
#basechance 0
#chanceinc "magic nature 1"
#tag "notsuffix"
#end

#define
#name "primordial"
#basechance 0
#chanceinc "magic nature 1"
#tag "notsuffix"
#end

-- Crosspath
#define
#name "hellbent"
#basechance 0
#tag "notsuffix"
#chanceinc "magic earth fire 2"
#end

#define
#name "radiant"
#basechance 0
#tag "notsuffix"
#chanceinc "magic fire astral 2"
#end

#define
#name "devouring"
#basechance 0
#tag "notsuffix"
#chanceinc "magic earth nature 2"
#end

[elmokki]

Originally Posted by Ragnarok-X

Regarding the mace/flail thingy, i was mistaken. It was not a mace, it was a morning star. I.e. many races had units with a flail artwork but a morning star equipment. I will run another 10 nations today evening and if i spot anything, i will post it.

Morningstar is graphically pretty much a flail with just one ball-in-chain and one hand length shaft. While I personally consider both the Dominions 3 long two handed flail and the graphic for morningstar flails and morningstar a spiked ball on a shaft without a chain, Dominions 3 base graphics have morningstar drawn as one handed flail so it's the same in UnitGen.

[Ragnarok-X]

Well, that wasnt too hard. Since i cant add new basesprites into spritegen, i just created tiger and named it like the boar mount. Selected boarmount in the tool, preview showed the tiger, saved and it worked.

http://prntscr.com/80h8s

Can you add functionality to add new sprites for users ?

[elmokki]

You can add sprites. You just need to define them as mounts for a race.

Like for example humans, you'll probably want to go to /races/human/human_mounted/humanmounts_low.txt (humanmounts.txt is horses, the difference is the positioning of the leg: it's "shorter" in the non-horse poses)

There you'll just add like

#newitem
--- Pretty much any name an another mount doesn't already have
#name "tiger"
--- Only matters for for items that the game considers items, ie armor, shields and weapons.
#gameid -1
--- Replace with your tiger sprite:
#sprite /graphics/mounts/standard/serpent1.png
--- Doesn't matter if this really exists or not since it's just for indicating some #gameid is armor instead of weapon
#armor
--- Since it's a mount these mean the actual rider will be 7 pixels left from the normal position and 14 pixels below the normal position. You'll probably want to ignore these at first and then adjust them once you see your sprite in SpriteGen. 
#offsetx -7
#offsety 14
--- mountedoverlay.txt in the same folder defines an overlay named "6" (yes, terrible name) which is pasted on top of everything after everything else is drawn. This is basically the mount's head and most visible on spider where it makes the leg look decent.
#needs overlay 6
--- #define commands define what stats the item should affect
#define "#size 3"
#define "#mapmove 2"
#define "#ap 18"
#define "#mounted"
#define "#weapon 19 --- Bite"
--- This is a bit different. You can just give it a number, but if you want the mount to be sacred/not sacred depending on the rider you'll need to go play with /nations/secondshapes. 
#define "#secondtmpshape serpent1"
--- The +35 is there to indicate it increases gold cost, the other stuff don't have + or - so they just set the value to that.
#define "#gcost +35"
#define "#ressize 2"
#define "#enc 3"
--- The "animal serpent" #theme line is pretty important for summaries and generating somewhat coherent lineups
#theme "animal serpent"
#theme "light"
--- Guaranteed (it's a bit bugged so it isn't) prefix for units, ie most cavalry with this mount are "Serpent Cavalry"
#tag "guaranteedprefix serpent"
--- Maximum chest armor prot this mount can carry, minprot is the opposite. If you plan to make a mount with 0 to 100 armor, you probably want to split it to 0 to 12 and 13 to 100 versions with different gold cost increases.
#tag "maxprot 13"
#enditem

The reason I'm not very happy with just graphics is that writing those things to right places is actually usually more work than some weapon or mount or similiar.

[Ragnarok-X]

Ok, i see. Its actually a lot of work to implement sprites if you want to associate them with values.
Assuming i add the tiger like you described, it will not only show up in spritegen, but from then on it will as well be used in nation gen ? I dont think so, right. Can you write a tutorial about getting it to show up in unitgen, i.e. where to set base chance and stuff ?
Once i have a full tutorial, i could begin adding real units.