Questions About Heroes, Forging, and Scrying

malthaussen · #1 November 25th, 2007, 03:30 AM

In the mod I'm working on (coming soon to a web site near you), the design intent is for the nation to be ruled by a sort of "triumvirite," of Pretender, Field Marshal, and Prophet. The FM and Prophet are intended to be custom heroes. Which leads to a couple of questions about the mechanics of heroes:

1) Is it possible to start a hero as a commander? Yes, it appears. Query will starting a hero as a commander cause problems later in the game?

2) Is it possible to start more than one commander, so I can have my FM and Prophet right from the start (the Pretender is sleeping). I could check this out by trying it and seeing, but I'm working on a different part of the mod right now, and figured what the heck, why not ask.

3) How does the game know a hero monster is unique? Is this an assumption based on it's being labelled a "hero," or something to do with the fact that the gold/resource cost is 0? (For that matter, is it possible to have heroes that cost gold/resources?) I only want one copy of my FM and Prophet running around -- more would be overkill in a mod that may already be suffering too much of that.

Multiheroes, clearly, are not unique.

4) What regulates the appearence of heroes? Luck? Cash? Dominion? Some combination? If I have five heroes assigned to a nation, how does the game decide which appears when and where? Can two copies of the same multihero be running around at the same time?

The second question concerns forging items. From the mod manual, there appears not to be a command to make forgeable items unique to a specific nation. Is this correct, or have I overlooked a command? Nation-specific items would certainly add a lot of flavor to the game.

Lastly, there appears to be no command in the mod manual to give a nation scrying ability like EA Arco. How is this done, or isn't it?

-- Mal

Sombre · #2 November 25th, 2007, 05:18 AM

1) I don't really understand your question. If a unit is specified in the #hero1 field then he may appear as a hero. If a unit is specified in #startcom or #startscout then he will appear as a starting commander. Heroes have no intrinsic properties, they do not have the unique tag in basegame, it's just that each hero event may only happen once.

2) Yes, you can start with 2 commanders (all nations do in fact). These are defined by #startcom and #startscout.

3) Neither heroes not multiheroes are instrinsically unique. It's actually the #multihero1, #multiehero2, #hero1 to #hero5 events that are unique - they can point to whatever kind of monster you want and it will turn up as a commander. So they could all point to a militia unit and if you got all 5 hero events you'd get 5 militia commanders out of it. If you want to add a unque tag to a unit (only one of this unit may ever be in the world at a time) you need to copystats a unique unit. This brings some more problems, but if you want to know how best to set it up I can tell you.

4) There is a base 3% chance of a hero event, I believe. Luck adds +1% per point. Misfortune is -1% per point. So with misfortune 3 you get no hero events. It decides which hero appears from the event at random, but #hero1 to #hero5 cannot happen more than once. #multihero1 and #multihero2 can happen an infinite number of times.

Lastly, that ability is tied to the nation ID number. So if you want your nation to do that, you'll have to overwrite Arco.

malthaussen · #3 November 25th, 2007, 09:06 AM

Ah, that actually makes a sort of sense. It isn't clear from either manual that "hero" is an event, and not a specific creature.

My question #2 was not worded carefully. What I really wanted to know was if it was possible to have two #startcom commands for a single nation.

-- Mal

llamabeast · #4 November 25th, 2007, 09:18 AM

There is #startcom and #startscout. You can have only one of each, but the scout doesn't actually have to be a scout - basically you can just give two commanders of your choice to the nation at the beginning.

Sombre · #5 November 25th, 2007, 10:41 AM

The mod manual gives you those two options, but it seems like you might take the third.

To answer the question I missed, no you can't mod nation restricted items.

malthaussen · #6 November 26th, 2007, 09:29 AM

Not having a scout at the beginning is no big deal, but as Sombre said, I do try to live up to my name.

Creating two monsters and not making them recruitable took care of the uniqueness problem, as far as I can tell. So the FM and Prophet can both start for the nation, without worrying about hero events.

I wonder why there are no nation-specific items? Seems to me there ought to be. It seems wrong that mages can forge, e.g., black steel armor without first having to steal the secret from Ulm.

-- Mal