Akesh the Cursed said:
Tuidjy said:
I think that it would be better to have a bit of balancing in place. All characters should start more or less equal, unless different experience requirements, depending on multi-classing, race stats, race-appropriate classes, etc. are introduced into the game.
I would absolutely agree with you if this was a multiplayer mod, but it's not. I would also agree with you maybe if there were more people working on the mod, however, GS is already working on a large backlog of items so I don't feel like this is something that really needs to be added to the
dreaded list.
I'm thankful that each of you acknowledges I'm just one dude whose energy comes and goes (and mostly left home to go on walkabout without me). I enjoy the reference to the
"dreaded list". It sounds so... precise.
So then I started thinking:
What exactly does this dreaded list look like right now? I've been so much in a "close combat with game killing bugs" mode I'm worried I lost track of the big picture. On the other hand, I can sort of get to mid game comfortably enough, maybe by avoiding difficult problem areas, and never did have time to go into the end game, which seems anticlimactic. So right now it is fair to say the game is "tuned" for mid game experience, which start of game always strikes me as frantic grinding for little to no reward, so I keep trying to speed that part up to not waste my "precious time", as a part time player.
Well, so THIS is MY dreaded list:
1) Some spells (Chaos and White bolt) are still down. I started to fix them up, got distracted, and they were never finished.
Ice storm needs to be 6000 not 4000 dinars. Outdoors its the single strongest spell, but it is weak for use
against fortifications.
Some new spells would be nice but I lack skills for the effects. I do pick up some ideas watching the discussion at Warsword Conquest...
2) There are a number of systems that either weren't finished or were deliberately skipped:
water movement: Water movement sort of worked in Warsword Conquest 2016, where I had elaborate tricks to decide when it was time to leave the ship, but sometimes it could glitch fairly deeply inland before deciding it was time to disembark. Worse, since crossing fords on map also placed a ship icon, there was some risk of having more than 1 boat, if the "boat" was "your party is over water right now", and thus implicitly wherever your boat was last parked needed to remove that boat from anchorage and attach to your party again. Otherwise you might leave a fleet of boats all over the map. Wouldn't boats ever get stolen? How many crew? Should a better captain have the boat travel better?
air travel, swimming in 3D: actually the "secret" of how to do this has been out of the bag for quite some time, but generally its not done well for formations or groups of NPCs following you. Its one thing for the player to fly, and quite a bit different for all his or her bodyguard companions to also fly in formation, let alone for PBOD to determine the best tactics for strafing or bombing (and probably this troop should be "skirmish" group to stay out of melee range of targets). Swimming is technically same as flying but without forward momentum, and with some further concern for amount of air left. Also some water encounters should have reduced vision range, which is easy enough to do by setting fog distance, except there are not two different distances to apply this reduced vision (above water one distance, below water a much smaller distance).
3) things that would be cool but require changes in the number of defined items or some new troop lines or other series breaking changes:
I was very impressed by the simplicity and usefulness of the new Warsword Conquest's potions, which made me ashamed for not coming up with them first so I could use them here. The general concept of a potion is certainly applicable to DND, and the implementation was the simplest possible, making it difficult to claim as an IP, even without looking at the code it is intuitively obvious how it is done. This implies other mods will have potions quickly, as military secrets and modders tricks are the first to be spread. But as I sort of have ethics, it also means I will have to hold off for a while, to be fair to each mod. Just as the 70 or so new spells at Warsword Conquest were not taken from here... and I have not one line of code interaction with the magic system over there, by intention.
I've stated troop trees were done badly in v155 and could be done better if not implemented in modmerger fashion, as the same modmerging process ruined TPE integration, forcing me to choose between them.
I'd like a different map to have support for an Asian faction and a heavenly/other worldly town, possibly not on map at all but just its own scene and associated savegame variables.
4) I made some promises for features that never did get implemented:
specifically, I promised to (someone) I'd implement support for female on female civic unions, better dialogs involving female matriarchs, and more female centric play. My 35 year old daughter who grew up aware I was a failure in everything, if she ever played this game once, would have deserved
that much effort from me. And for everyone else, who for better or worse is part of my "extended virtual family", they too deserve it. It's the
primary reason to not give up developing.
There are a list of features that ought to be implemented:
pretty much all of page two at this forum (especially posts from innocent flower): https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/board,5.30.html
and this one too: religion https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,372245.msg8880494.html#msg8880494
5) I'd like to see more mercenary offerings at castles instead of just towns. If someone really was looking for work, you'd think they'd market themselves well, where there was a
need. Of course, if the castle was about to be obliterated by a huge force of enemies, I'd hope the mercs would ask higher wages than normal... but I'm also partial to rogues and clerics getting discounts or buffs to the recruit sizes (as is already done in town "trade caravan recruiting"). These could be custom troops.
6) Its not clear to me if Drow have the correct matching bandit camp spawn. When the drow moved, the bandit spawn assigned to them should have moved also. This might have been the wrong one that got moved, in which case the next series should have bandit camp definition lines juggled around to align each camp type to the correct faction, else quests will get messed up at specific factions while working cleanly at others.
This would be a concern for Drow, Undead, and possibly Sarranid factions, but probably only drow and undead, and noone really plays undead faction as a vassal for long. I've heard drow is messed up.
7) I'd like to see village specialty soldier recruits change if the faction ownership changes, so that the tier 3 recruit matches the new faction that owns the village, since the village recruits change as well depending on which script changes village ownership.
8 ) There is quite a bit of unexplored possibility for stealth movement and new monster AI effects, which could possibly be tested in isolation from the rest of the mod by setting it to only occur in some dungeon. Actually, Guspav started on this and it was unfinished. There is a dormant lair with unique mechanics defined that was intended to be a test for new features and mission_template procedures/"triggers".
9) There were some simple events in Warsword Conquest that I liked seeing. One was losing all my food and drink during a sudden storm.
Another was discovering the potion seller, who afterwards was gone. Or the huge number of different and mutually exclusive branches of magic defined, so that no two mages had identical spells and each branch had some "theme" to it, as well as race and gender requirements. So some magic was only for women (nevermind that most women were suddenly gone from the mod), some only for green skins, etc. I still wouldn't mind a lizard man skin and some amphibious action, but hey its just a daydream. I lack art skills, scening skills, and a community that keeps that mod at #25 on Moddb despite no updates in 2 full years, and a broken release in 2016 anyways.
I like the new kludge to avoid ship combat... the ships start already tied for boarding, so they can't be sunk, and it becomes sort of a land battle at sea. I still want to be able to swim (someday) but for now it gets the job done.
10) Its a pity females are still getting a weaker start than dwarven paladins. Perhaps females should have innate superior magic resists or a class specific buff to magic power / faith depending on which primary class she chooses. Its usually my arrogant presumption that any female character played by user player is a dude that cross dresses, but hey its not my job description to be the "romance police". I'm happy when players are happy -- and not very orthodox so far as belief that people should be free to love people, with gender in an internet connected world being something arbitrary. This said, what females lack physically should be present in some other aspect, so that some value is gained by being female. I think it was Tuidgy who observed that in some respects I had made female characters considerably stronger than he expected; to the extent it was suggested I had favoritism. Yes, I do. I have two daughters and no sons -- although the virtual community may resemble family of sorts, although I'm nobody's ideal of a dad. I'm not even a good fairy Godfather... not even dressed in pink. Which some would say is a racist and needless poke, even though to me it sort of accepts that the world changes, and we ought to go with the flow and accept it. Its still more horrible that people are cool with burning villages and selling slaves than whether or not men are "manly", whatever that is. But I could use more female protagonists, Tomoe Gozen style. Why not? And there may be 1 in 100 female characters actually ran by females. Wouldn't it be something if they had a positive experience for a change?
11) and then there's my pointless speculation on what if the game gave experience/faction/something for non-violence or resolving conflicts by honor, whatever that means. Duel for the castle instead of sieges? Duel for the right to let your people go when hopelessly outclassed? Honor to mean more than it does, or to not apply to some factions, either/or? There is already a painful penalty to necromancers. If a person wanted to cover their faction in "dishonor", that faction should be treated likewise -- but the lords in that faction should be more interested in winning than honor. Or maybe thats just where all the scoundrel lords go...
12) I would not mind some reserved items, troop definitions, simple_triggers, etc for future expansion -- or some global variables that could be populated in the future to not break savegame next series. Its painful for a user to figure out "wait, so do I apply patch v155 over patch v150 and now you made a patch v156 and suddenly nothing works?". Half my users (the 97% half) can't figure out how to patch. Of
20K+ downloads, it looks like the numbers that can patch are
a few hundred, tops. I'd say fewer series are better.
But what about savegame editors, such as https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,376717.msg8984688.html#msg8984688
I'm torn between making a XML definition for a series and the desire to not have to deal with a thousand hacked savegames with new and unique "bugs" reported afterwards. On the one hand, it would be much better for development and testing to have a really comprehensive editor, and on the other, kind of letting myself in for a lot of needless pain, in that the community doesn't really have the self restraint to conduct their frankenstein play throughs in private, without involving me. Its also possible their sessions really do find something; it would be useful for example to see a stuck quest in their savegame as being what caused some side effect reported, so that
the quality of the mod is improved over time with superior tools like this.
I can still leave out areas I don't feel like having people mess with, in which case I suppose the people who want to probe the "hidden" part should be allowed to eventually get an invite to the dev team. Except, for now, everything is closed source, and I have no right nor motivation to open it, as usually that just means spawning a competing mod with no further help to the original mod. Its not like I can't just evolve the mod faster than they can clone old work, but eventually it burns the community out. In time though, I think it is inevitable that I will be too old or feeble to continue, and eventually in 3-7 years, perhaps less, Banterlord (TM) will stop bantering and actually release, in which case there is a huge (200K+ lines of script) amount of re-kludging needed to make a mod roughly equal to this one on the new platform. I'm so not looking forward to 6 months of native game in Banterlord (TM), with 0 mods, and finally the first mod changed the price of butter and did nothing else (per my advice to beginning modders). I can see two sides of this argument. It's also depending on Guspav wanting to do so -- the mod is tangled up with two distinct fathers and opening one exposes the other. its a later issue, that needs solving in the next few years. I'd rather it not be an issue too soon. Most of the magic is taken directly or indirectly from TGS (the Gathering Storm) and/or ElvenPath, but Guspav did a fair amount of genius level kludges and add-ins, and
all of the user-facing look and feel. This part of the code needs protecting, and I have mixed feelings about opening my side to strangers who might be personal enemies. I guess I'm vindictive
13) I wanted some ebb and flow for magic. and some out of battle impacts for holidays and special calendar events.
It is not necessary for every 10 second battle segment like in Warsword Conquest, but there is no reason why in some locations, perhaps where the right cathedral is built, the entire city has a magic shield, or on one particular holiday the magic shield drops... as an example.
- GS
You are welcome to add to my "dreaded list" for me, provided I am welcome to not even think about it until Christmas...
Any suggestions to buff Necromancers / make shadow knights /etc will of course be denied,
excepting for 2 weeks of Halloween, followed by a
heavy nerf for two weeks of All Saints Day, but you know that. I'm not opposed tobuffs to NPCs though... just not players.
