Shadow Brand?

[MaxWilson]

Are there conditions under which a Shadow Brand will not function? After recent discussion, I've been giving them to all my low-level human commanders, and while it works fine for my pretender the item has failed to function in three different battles for two different Blindlords.

-Max

[Saint_Dude]

I have no idea.

Is the pretender's shadow brand functioning in the same battles that the blindlords are participating in? If they are in different battles, are there battlefield enchantments in operation in the battles where the shadow brands are acting up?

Are they fighting the same opponents?

Are you sure that the shadow brands are not functioning? Perhaps there is just a glitch with the graphics?

[MaxWilson]

Urm. Maybe it was just a graphical glitch. It's started working again.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Okay, look at Bram's Wall (#71) in this game here. In the battle replay there, there's a Blindlord wielding a Shadow Brand who gets surrounded by dragonflies. I know he attacks them because his fatigue goes up by 10 when he does. (He's also taking fatigue from, apparently, being in the cloud from a Magma Eruption. That's separate, though.) Nevertheless, no Leeching Darkness animation activates and no dragonflies take splash damage.

-Max

[Saint_Dude]

Don't we need more than just the trn file to look at the replay? What about the ftherland and map files? Anyway, I couldn't see it.

[Sensori]

I wanted to check that thing out too, but I can't even find all the mods you're using.

But nah, you don't need anything but the .trn. Just like in PBEM games (and TCP/IP games!) and whatnot.

[MaxWilson]

I didn't think you needed more than the .trn, and I've since continued on in that game and so lost the .2h and ftherlnd files. But if you want the mod files, I have Psientist's Mytheology mod enabled, a version of the Single-age mod, Edi's No Independents mod, and my house rules. None of them should affect Shadow Brands. If you want to take a look, here they are:

http://students.cs.byu.edu/~mdw45/mods.tgz

Let me know if I left out a file.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

After seeing one battle where the Shadow Brand, in the hand of a minor thug (Tomb Oracle), functioned about half of the time, my tentative conclusion is that the Leeching Darkness ability is under the control of the wielder, and the wielder uses it only when the combat AI determines that friendly fire casualties will be minimal. For instance, he usually didn't use it when surrounded by bodyguards, but when surrounded mostly by enemies on one side he did.

I suppose it's a good thing he's so careful.

-Max

[Sombre]

That's very interesting. I must consider this when modding weapons.

[Saint_Dude]

Where did you get that map Max? It looks interesting.