Now *HERE* is a fine conundrum:
I wanted to store all the changes to stats and skills from encumbrances separately from those stats, simply so that when companions, your spouse, and yourself assign new points spent the points go to base and not modified / "effective" stats. Otherwise every time your character or companions/spouse change gear the weight changes, encumbrance changes, and the modifiers change, leading to either something that could be glitched into raising stats unexpectedly or difficult to detect whether changes were from leveling and a player decision to add a point someplace, instead of just assuming the last original values should be restored, always, to find the "native" value. So I have this working setup, that writes modified values someplace safe and they make it through a save game, I can view the values saved, I can see it adjusted the values the way I asked...
EXCEPT
except the game engine never once actually ASKS, in script, for the values. Instead it just grabs them silently, from native, so I have to adjust native's
values (Silverstag chose to do this). This works, in my opinion, excellent for TROOPS and poorly for companions, the player, and the player's spouse -- all of whom can and will undergo constant changes in stats, level, gear, and resulting encumbrance changes.
Probably the golden compromise has to be this:
TROOPS, who don't change gear (there is some variation in what they can equip but I've already taken that into account), can go ahead and have the changes written on top of their native stats. This lets Mel's perisno maidens have some extra shield and athletics, gimps slightly some cavalry archers, and makes having really light gear really useful. Higher athletics then means faster foot movement, heavily burdened troops move slowly or are clumsier riding, all as should be. But for example Perisno .8 custom troops could change often -- so they need to be handled as "heroes", even though they are hired as a group.
Their exceedingly high cost is countered by whatever you assign one of them, all of them get at the same time. I kind of think there should be 6-7 separate "custom troops" reserved to have some variety in their kitting, but that's a separate issue. The issue stands that companions either shouldn't participate in the encumbrance == changes to stats issue or it should be a limited change like encumbrance affects dodge (THIS I can do, as it happens outside the game engine and under script control) for heroes (and the player, and his/her spouse, and enemy lords, and named enemies, etc).
I suppose I could even do some heroes if I could guarantee they'd never join the player party as companions, but that's really a lot of checking.
So here's a compromise:
Encumbrance has a wide range of influences FOR TROOPS
Encumbrance ONLY affects you and your companions for DODGE, which is checking modified athletics.
Rigale sprint (O key during combat, "O" as in Oscar) is one way to boost native athletics for a few seconds, but does not help dodge.
So far this seems decent enough to me...
Martial arts and other scripted skills, that are outside the Warband engine, can use hero "effective skills", but that's a Pho v20 r5 problem.
For now I have to change my approach for hero class (companions, lords, marryable kingdom ladies, princesses, pretenders, named quest npcs that might join your party, and of course the Player - the most special hero class entity in "troops". So I suppose for ordinary grunts I'm ready to release v20 r4 but for hero class I have to make some changes, which I'll sleep on overnight. I probably will toss and turn more than usual tonight, not simply because its 31 C outside tonight. Last night was a blue moon, so not much can top that...
Worse case: more realistic troops, some buffs for those nearly naked slaves, some minuses for overly geared high tiers (who were already Uber).
Mostly they look to stay uber; looking them over they turned out well. V20 r5 can re-do item stats and pricing, bring down some armors, and otherwise smooth over what I'd say was uneven item stats from Persno .7-ish series. The values things have now are mostly Perisno, and I didn't decide any of them.
Those sorts of decisions were generally taken away from me for Perisno; that's why Phosphor is in it's own container. I can, if I had time, change anything.
*If I had time*.
Hell I can barely breathe. Time is something I have less of each day...
But that's not your problem. It just means I need to get more done with the time I have. And I think the path is clear. So that's all that needs saying.
It's gonna be a great day tomorrow, "one of many"...
- GS