The Aleph

[Epicrules]

Although I do love your excellent points about how two marshal parties won't be locked in a battle and then all of a sudden, RUN TIME ERROR OUT OF NOWHERE... Of course it may still happen, but with all the big fodder spam stuff removed, it should be much more interesting. Oh, and, Xeno, you may also wish to look in to some... advanced AI tactics? Current AI tactics are just "Form a big line and space out your archers", where as in some other mods, I.E. Prophesy of Pendor [Which I do not love as much as I love Blood and Steel] the AI will literally scare the hell out of you because he flanks his cavalry and crashes it in to you from the side... Actually, I thought that the reason for lord parties being so big originally when I first started playing this mod were to make it more... Immersive, and for the lords to have more of a chance against your castle's garrisons thereby adding to the difficulty.

[xenoargh]

The tactics got better, if maybe not that smart 

Hopefully the fodder-removal will cut down on the dreaded lockups in big battles; it appears to be tied into some sort of memory problem on GPUs, where they eventually run out of VRAM, and vast numbers of new troops seems to play a part in this.  It's one of the most frustrating things about the mod atm; even if you think you can handle a really huge battle with your awesome army of uber-leet dudes and have settled in with a light snack and a drink to have a fun hour away from your daily life to play out such an epic... your computer can't do it, because the engine just wasn't really designed for that. 

That truly sucks, so I'm working around it.  It'll hopefully also make the game cooler, too.

[xenoargh]

The Aleph is done, I think.

(click to show/hide)

[Specialist]

AMAZING!

[ressk]

a classic solution to your problem. i cant wait to cavalry charge my knights into those huge targets.

[Hallegra]

Are the troop costs going to be adjusted to make way for the big walky thingies?

[nilloc93]

i don't think cost really matters to anyone, the only real restriction should be on thier recruitability

[xenoargh]

Yeah, that is the crucial point of the exercise, really. 

I think what I'll try is to make them very expensive to recruit, but they'll be like Companions- you can only have a few of them, period.

Anyhow, now the model's ready... so I need to dive into code-and-content fun s'more.

[Caba`drin]

I didn't see an answer to this:

Will we get to drive one?

Might we have one?

[xenoargh]

...Maybe?

I don't see any major show-stoppers to doing that, code-wise, unless Race can't be altered. 

It'd be fairly easy to strip equipment in that case, if you, er, equipped it as a "suit" of "armor" and then alter the Race value for the duration of the combat.  That might actually be interesting; then they could be special equipment for you and Companions.  I really don't know if that will work or not, though.

There are other issues that might prove troublesome, though; amongst other things, the position of the cameras.  We'll just have to see; there are a lot of issues that I can't say with any certainty can be dealt with just yet.

[Caba`drin]

It'd be fairly easy to strip equipment in that case, if you, er, equipped it as a "suit" of "armor" and then alter the Race value for the duration of the combat.  That might actually be interesting; then they could be special equipment for you and Companions.  I really don't know if that will work or not, though.

Might it be easier to use (set_player_troop,<troop_id>), than monkeying with equipment and race?

[xenoargh]

Yeah, maybe; I'd forgotten that we could do that, since I never use that feature 

[Dorrin]

Now i can just see my next peasant revolutionary terrorizing the poor lords with this thing.

If it can be equipped on companions it probably needs some form of check for siege battles, though it would be amusing to see a few shuffling up the ladders... Perhaps set it as a type of mount, which covers the unit/player/companion who has it equipped, and has a separate weapon you need to equip along with some ammo. Ammo in low quantity stacks(force users to load up on ammo, not melee weapons), otherwise people with one on and using lances or something would be surprised that it looks funny.


Edit: While commenting in the features request on ranged weapons it reminded me of another good reason to design the Aleph to use the horse slot. One of the companions (or perhaps it was in a store) had some item i think called a Bolas, bolo.. something along those lines. It claimed it did bonus damage to horses by breaking their legs, looked like ropes with a weight on the ends. Throw it, it wraps about the legs and brings things down.. If we get Alephs lets have some nasty Aleph killer weapons too

[Hallegra]

So this is going to completely replace cannon troops? If I might ask, how many will be in circulation and will they be a common thing for enemy forces?

[xenoargh]

As planned, they will replace the explosive cannons, not the Rocketeers, the Dragons or the solid-shot variety.  They are basically a fancy way to limit access to the explosive cannons and make sure the AI can use them properly so that sieges are a little more balanced.

I think it's going to be an expensive thing that you and your Companions can use; to what extent enemies use them I am not quite sure yet, it really depends on what testing results look like.  For example, it's probably reasonable that an enemy castle or siege party can have some, but there are various logistical issues that have to be dealt with as well as how it effects game balance.  They're a New Thing; like all New Things, they'll probably have to go through a fair amount of testing before release and get tweaked as people figure out novel ways to abuse them.