Mod: Mod thread- WH hordes of chaos

[Panpiper]

A thousand 'thank you's DrPraetorious, I shall implement virtually all of your suggestions. The only ones I am debating are;

- I don't like the idea of making chaos armor something they 'wear' and can take off and replace. Chaos armor is something that is part of their bodies like a horn is to a rhino or armor plates are to a stegosaurus. I realize that making it a part of their bodies eliminates resource costs and encumbrance, but this is actually intentional, and leads to their high gold costs.

- The dark citadel IS thematic as a starting location. Rather than breaking that theme, I think I would rather just put back the resource bonus on the starting location.

- I've long worried about using the poison cloud effect with Nurgle champions and lords. Your suggestion about making it disease clouds and Nurgle followers undead would certainly make the effect more properly what it is supposed to be and appropriately less powerful than poison. However I worry that making Nurgle followers 'undead' will make them vastly weaker due to the power of priest banishments. I'll do it and see. I think I'll pump their magic resistance a tad though.

- The flail is listed twice in Edi's database. One of the entries has it as a single hand weapon. I used that one assuming it was a smaller flail. I just compared the stats with the two hand version and they are identical. Oops. The flail is very thematic for Nurgle. I guess I'll have to drop the shield (except that will require that I redo a bunch of sprites). Hmm... I guess morning stars are thematic too. ;-)

DrPraetorious said:
The Champions are too expensive. Compare them to the Jotun Herse. With the exception of the mage-lord of Tzeentch, the lords are too expensive as well.

Hmm... Here things get difficult. The Jotun Herse is only 60 gold. I see what you mean in that the actual stats are somewhat comparable, while chaos has attack and defense a bit higher, the Jotun Herse has significantly higher hit points and strength. However Nurgle Champions have disease clouds, Slaanesh have enslavement, Tzeentch has a 30% chance at astral 3 magic, and the Khorne champion would slaughter Jotun Herses in droves. I note that the stats of the Jotun Herse and those of the Jotun Gode are roughly similar, but due to the addition of Holy 2, the Jotun Gode cost 200 gold. For now, I shall work on the assumption that the additional talents of the chaos champions are roughly analogous to the the holy 2 of the Jotun Gode and drop the gold cost to 200, awaiting further feedback. The physical stats of champions and lords are very similar but lords have higher leadership, and domsummon 20 appropriate units for their power. They also start with a magic weapon. Again, being very unsure as to what extra value this should cost, I'll bump the lord cost of Nurgle and Khorne down to 270. Slaanesh has enslavement which especially when massed is very powerful. I'll put the Lord of Slaanesh at 300 GP. The Lord of Tzeentch which is appropriately awesome stays at it's current maxed out 400 GP.

Again, thank you ever so much for the lookover and advice. I really do not want this race mod to be out of balance, that's no fun for anyone.

[DrPraetorious]

- If they don't have Torso slots and you put Torso armor on them, then they can't take it off. You can certainly leave it at Enc-0. Should chaos armor be immune to Rust Mist and Armor of Achilles? Maybe it should.
The chief concern is that natural prot values cannot be boosted by an earth blessing.

- Pump their MR and possibly hit points (for nurgle).

- You could add a "horseman's flail" or a "light flail", if you wished. The 1-H flail is for use by giants and Gods (like the Mother of Rivers.)

If you're going to give them an Admin-20 capital, that's potentially workable, but a 10% reduction in the costs of capital only units might be apropriate, to compensate for the lost gold revenue. You also might wish to give them superior fortress options elsewhere - the Motte-and-bailey and the Citadel are both excellent forts that you could claim would be built more or less anywhere. The Wizards' Tower is a secret super-cool fort type that you might allow them to build, but that'd be weird.

What you really need to do is run some combat tests with your mages and thugs, and see how they do.

[DrPraetorious]

Oh, one other thing - your sprites look nice, but they have black outlines around them. This is how you prevent that from happening (in GIMP):

take an image that still has a transparency layer, shrink it down to your heart's content.

once you are finished working on the image:

select layer -> transparency -> threshold alpha

you may want to try this a couple of times but the default value (127, which corresponds to 50%) usually works fine.

NOW flatten the image to add the black background (Image -> Flatten Image). Make sure that your background is black when you do this.

Tada.

[Panpiper]

DrPraetorious said:
- If they don't have Torso slots and you put Torso armor on them, then they can't take it off.

!!!

I did not know this! I shall promptly create chaos armor to put on them.

Pump their MR and possibly hit points (for nurgle).

I think I shall do this. I did another test game with the current 0.42 version and found myself 'not' recruiting Nurgle units because of their undeadedness.

You could add a "horseman's flail" or a "light flail", if you wished.

This too I should (shall) do.

If you're going to give them an Admin-20 capital, that's potentially workable, but a 10% reduction in the costs of capital only units might be appropriate, to compensate for the lost gold revenue.

I understood that the administration of a fort affected it's resource collection from neighboring territories. I was not aware it also affected gold collection somehow.

What you really need to do is run some combat tests with your mages and thugs, and see how they do.

My newbieness reveals itself. I am not sure how to go about doing such 'combat tests'. Guidelines as to how to do that would make for a good addition to your Bugrom thread.

Your advice on sprites is much appreciated, but you assume a greater understanding on our parts than may be warrented. I think I understand what you mean about 'transparency layer' though I don't yet know how to create such a thing. I haven't a clue what 'threshold alpha' means, though I am sure that by 'trying' to follow your instructions, I might at least gain a clue. ;-) Paraphrasing; If we paint the sprite on a layer that is transparent, then we won't get bleedover dark pixels at the edge of our sprite. 'Flattening' the image onto a black background afterwards gives us our final product without the dark borders. I think I get the theory. Now I just have to figure out where all the buttons are, what the labels mean, and how not to get lost in the morass of options. (How I long for the fictional 'simpler times'.)

[Amos]

Unless you resize or skew/rotate a sprite you shouldnt get bleedover dark pixels. I dont use Gimp so cant help you with that. You dont have to use transparency at all, if you paint on pure black (0,0,0) background. Personally, I only use transparency when I'm playing with alot of layers.

[Panpiper]

Actually I use resize and rotate quite a bit. I find for instance if trying to get a nice graduated shade on a small sprite, it is easier to paint the shading with an airbrush tool on a 'sprite' three times larger then shrink down. In fact in order to get a nicer blending effect, even on sprites that I have built pixel by pixel at the normal sprite size, I will often blow it up to three times it's size and use the blend tool to get a cleaner shading. When then shrunk back down, the pixel shading looks far better. This way I can build the sprite using only a handful of shade gradations and still make it look like I used dozens.

I stand however in awe of your sprite painting talents Amos.

[llamabeast]

Just had my first very quick look at this - good work! Looks like it will be a really nice mod. It's already really good fun.

A couple of quick comments:

- Maybe the graphics for the units from the different gods could be somehow differentiated a little more, apart from just their weapons? Maybe Khorne could have red armour or red edging to the armour, Nurgle could be covered in rust and mould, etc..

- I think the Champions and Lords may be a bit overpowered, or at least it warrants looking into. The only ones I tried were the Slaanesh ones. Two Champions of Slaanesh or one Lord are enough to conquer pretty much any indie province - I think that makes them overpowered. If you want to keep cool uber Lords (and they are pretty cool), maybe they could be summons.

[Amos]

Applying light "Blur" filter would be far neater. But I dont know if Gimp has filters and anyway you dont need it. Just resize the canvas (not the size) to anything other than the standard (64x64, 128x128 etc.). It will look like the sprite contains more pixels than it does.