Next, let us examine menus, changes from 2014, and so on (with some more changes in the pipeline* not shown):
camp menu shows influence of Diplomacy and PBOD, which each offer to let you tweak the variables used by each:
"Auto-loot settings" comes from Diplomacy
"Manage Split Troop Assignments" came from PBOD (Pre Battle Orders and Deployment) which expands formations AI
Diplomacy options.
Notice the Disguise system, which is new.
The Cheat menu enable/disable is setting the same global variable as used by cheat menu enable in PBOD.
The Actions menu had so many options I needed to split it so that more can be auto-added by (not yet used) Modmerger OSPs. I put the ones you use seldom (like retire character) on page 2.
As the list of items that can go rotten has at least doubled, you can now "preserve foods" as well -
fresh fruit and grapes convert 2:1 to their dried replacements, while various meats "smoke" 1:1 as you may be used to. Some checking occurs to keep for example 3 fresh "fruit" from becoming 2 sets of "dried fruit".
Guspav gave you "Import/Export NPCs", "Turn off Alignment clashes", and "Copy scroll to spellbook"
PBOD options are standard but if you haven't used them, re-assigning for example cavalry that lost their horses to infantry or handling ranged weapon classes that ran out of ammunition are useful. Consider skirmishers: after the javelins are gone (or whatever they were using from a distance), do they really need to stay 15 meters or more away from their targets? PBOD solves that for you. There is the possibility of letting PBOD automatically use spear walls against cavalry, couch lances or switch weapons depending on location of nearest enemy for cavalry, and other useful things. You should probably set "Battle Continuation, Charge after knockout (of player)" so that your last command (such as "hold here") can be cleared and the AI does something useful without you. Well - "useful" is a relative term, isn't it?
Here are Reports.
I needed to split this page as well, plus it is a good place to put some more partly hidden menus for testing and tuning as well (as "Reference material").
Right now the troop tree viewer isn't ideal, in that it shows only the main troops for a faction, none of the bandits, none of for example the special troops (female elves/drow/blazing hand), and none of the kingdom lords/ladies, mercenaries, etc. That will change later...
selecting a specific troop on the tree shows more stats, including all the alternative items the troop might equip with.
I'll later need to edit every single troop to reduce the number of variants, mainly because it is possible for Warband to assign for example (at least!) 2 swords to agents that spawn where there are a large number of alternative weapons listed, or combinations like polearm that do not allow a shield and shield, where the items that cannot be wielded take up weight and equipment slots but are neither drawn nor wield these second weapons. I suppose they would be useful if weapons broke in battle, but otherwise they are a nuisance for implementing weight related encumbrance and offering dodging to rogues, barbarians, and fighters. This would greatly improve those classes in terms of catching up to spell casters at character creation. I've also put in a game variable for each troop called "precognition" which basically is tied to awareness of ambush and hidden movement for Rogues, Rangers, and Barbarians, with Rogues getting the most. Otherwise I'd probably claim Rogues don't get a great start. I also plan a number of not-necessarily fighting skills so that rogues, rangers and barbarians have other skills for living off the land and movement in different terrain types/darkness/etc (not necessarily identically), that aren't shown at this time. Also I think tree viewer needs modifying to show Phantasy related attributes.
Tester oriented cheat menu right now.
Voting yourself money and healing are obvious, but "add xp to party" auto levels everyone in the party to next tier.
This can be incredibly handy during testing.
Recruit prisoners skips the chance of any of them defecting etc.
By the way they do run away at night, about 1/4 chance each evening, if you just carry them with you forever.
Later we'll see Guspav parked a permanent Ransom Broker at Four Winds trading post (near) the center of the map, in addition to whatever you find at the tavern.
Reference menu, under Reports, with "enable cheat menu" ON from Diplomacy/PBOD:
mainly I needed dynamic feedback on trade routes, prejudice and number of parties active/inactive in game.
None of that fits into player immersion but it greatly influences tuning the game...
That should be "8 races prejudice" at a time, and probably should be tweaked again.
Here I visit a town while leaving Cheat mode on to inspect the way menus changed at town to not overflow the
choices from "cheat menu" blocking "leave town" like you might have done in 2014. Menus extend fairly deeply.
I'm happy with how this turned out. When a town/castle changes hands, it and its attached villages now change NPCs for {guild master, tavern keeper, arena master, enterprise hireling, each of the 4 merchants (general, horse, weapons, armor)} in the case of towns and village elder in the case of villages.
This has two limitations:
a) for players, it gets skipped. You still have to migrate as before
b) the skin type is changed but not clothing, so dwarf NPCs that are populated this way from an expansion of Dwarves outside their usual territory will be in mismatched clothing. Likewise Dwarf places that now have mismatched humans/etc. It works pretty well for all the other skin types, and is smart enough to remember male or female of the old NPC and supply a gender appropriate substitute on change of faction ownership. It goes by faction culture, by the way.
Items have modified stats with item modifiers changing the morale value, including for drinks.
I did the first two changes and the last is from Guspav's original mod changes.
He managed to do this without using Modmerger "Item properties", which has a 63 item limit anyway,
but this means another 63 items or combination of items could give stacking benefits later. Its all interesting to me.
At first I was annoyed when I kept losing horses! Why was that? But Diplomacy's "autosell" just decided they weren't valuable enough to keep and kept dumping them. Except - more horses mean more party speed, especially when carrying heavy items like iron... The answer is go to market in town, select auto-sell, but now select configure and turn OFF auto-sale of horses, pistols, etc -- not that I've found any pistols in game. Yet. I sort of feel they should be rare craftable items, and not likely sold much anyway. Perhaps an Assasin might have one someday though. Or maybe not. We'll see...