Building the Realm of Middle-Earth.

[kevinflemming]

Heh at least...
...for the future.

It's been interesting...
...right.  Good luck!

Yes, that's true. I have this habit of modding or altering aspects of games and before I get to play, burn myself out. Did exactly the same thing with Skyrim, added around 300 mods over a few days, testing and tweaking a lot of things and stopped before I got to play with everything together. And you're completely right there, it is very easy to burn yourself out doing anything, unless you're a robot. I think I was just having an off-day and it's actually quite annoying changing what is already there (I'll explain why*) especially after a few non-stop days of it.

*So, Morgh's has this rather annoying habit of only allowing you to remove the last entry rather than the highlighted one. Frustrating as hell. Some factions have more tiers than others and I would love to remove the unused ones. It would just be much easier if everything was together, neatly laid-out. Kings, Lords, troops in order and according to faction, one after the other.
This is more to do with my minor OCD though. Certain things really irritate and cause stress. Such as books, DVDs and games not being in alphabetical order. Stacked plates not ascending from large at the bottom to small on top. You get the idea. But you soldier on and try to suppress it. It would really help if I could tidy-up the list.

Thing is, I don't want to remove any troops as I'm not sure how that would affect the core. So, I guess I'm asking something here. Say that I copied King Torlian, entry 718, to a new entry (using Add Troop, which as you know creates a copy of the selected troop to the bottom of the list) and deleted the original, will that break anything? I'm curious, does the code use the entry number or the ID to identify data regarding troops? Once I know, I can deal with it.

So, while my brain is active and I'm typing...

Another idea and question, if I may?

I also wanted to try and integrate "preset" wars between specific factions. I see that you can alter the relations on the factions.txt editor, been looking and mulling this over as an idea of how to deal with the hard-coded Invasion aspect.
I noticed that Zann is hostile (-40.000000) to everybody. Imagine Zann is Sauron's invading army for a moment. If I changed the relations toward Mordor, Isengard and Harad to 40.000000, would they ever declare war on them or only focus on the other factions due to the positive value? Does this relationship value have any affect on how a faction will determine who they declare war on?
It would be nice to have a "Good vs. Evil" war, where specific factions "teamed-up" but if it's too complicated or can't be done with Morgh's then I might dumb-down Sauron slightly and keep everything how it already is.

Well, the spark is still there it seems, huh?. But I guess I do need to have some time away. Starting... now. Thanks for reminding me to have a break!

 

[gsanders]

well now you're asking coder questions.

  I had planned to take a break also, and work on a different mod for Christmas, since its just a hair over 2 weeks till then.

  The initialization at the start of game starts from the first king and contiinues to last king in the faction list, so moving kings around will break their getting
initialized correctly.  Save games store the INDEX # to the troops list, so adding troops to the end isn't dangerous to saves, but deleting rows throws all troops after that off by 1 and will have strange side effects.  Something similar for items in inventory - if items is changed so some rows are moved or deleted, everything after that ends up in a new row, and since savegame previously stored only an offset value into the list of items, it now pulls a different item, leading to unexpected things like mounts as helmet or spices as a shield (well, probably not now, as those are tightly sorted but in the past those happened).

  Wars are autoinitiated at game start for factions with negative relations, and otherwise the numbers decay or add gradually until the next level of relationship occurs.  In Phosphor I adjusted Zann so the southern kingdoms were neutral or enthusiastic for Zann and northern kingdoms more angry for them, except Valahir who hoped the enemy of their enemy might be a friend.  I looked at the code for Zann and in .7-series all the diplomacy capabilities of Zann are removed, so after they first go to peace they are incapable of going back on the offensive, which was unneccessary.  These are issues that preceded me; just before maintenance was on the basis of getting a specific observation and having a light bulb show where the simplest fix was -- there weren't comprehensive, line by line reviews of the code until recently.  There is much that needed changing, but most of those changes are already in Phosphor Test H.  About the only issue really blocking a Christmas release is  a) lack of enthusiasm this month  and b) the taverns are messed up in Phosphor, for the latest cities - something eats them.  When I know why that happens, I am ready for release.  Until then I'll take a break.

  For good versus evil, mainly there needs to be some sort of test for "selfishness" or "coherence" - if evil cooperates greatly it is one thing, but if they each have selfish goals then a coalition splits apart with time.  Likewise with "good".  I'll probably look at this more at another mod shortly.

  - GS

 

[kevinflemming]

well now you're...
...another mod shortly.

  - GS

Well, I've played around with Morgh's for... a few months now actually, editing this and that with the modules I regularly play. Troops, companions, stats, items. Occasionally, there is a little spark of interest for what else could be potentially changed and I can't help but wonder how I would go about making such changes. It's nice to be curious when it comes to modding, as it could open-up another path to melding a game into your own. Pretty much why you started making Pho right, GS? I might even start reading-up on some aspects of coding Warband in my spare time. I would prefer to be able to edit Bannerlord, but I don't know what can be changed, how flexible it will be or even when it is due to be released. Could be another year or two, for all we know.

I'll be heading down to see my Sister for Christmas, in the next few days and stay for a week or so. It's a good opportunity to have a break and unwind.

It's better to keep the method that I have now, editing what is already there and adding new troops if needed. Got it. Thank you! It's good to know before I start screwing everything up, by removing entries. That's exactly why I generally ask beforehand. Especially if what I hope to do is slightly out of my editing comfort-zone. Now I can deal with the list being as is and simply crack-on with changing everything.

I can alter who is at war, the relations towards Sauron's Army and how everybody reacts to him. That's good! Although, I'm a little unclear on what the values actually mean. What are the minimum and maximum to achieve a Vilified and Loyal status? The small piece of text under the Relations windows says "Set a value between 1.0 and -1.0" but there are some with -40.000000. This is slightly confusing to somebody who has no idea, as you can imagine.
Oh, are the Zann are broken in .77? He would invade and then stop once at peace, unless declared war upon? Well, I suppose that isn't such a bad thing as he would steamroll most of the map. Especially as I planned to make Sauron pretty tough (as he would be) and with Mordor "helping" him. If Sauron and Mordor were Loyal or Accepting, would the relation decay to a minus value over time and cause them to eventually declare war? This would actually be quite interesting, if everybody started to turn on one another as war progressed.

That would also be very interesting and add a new dynamic, giving a faction a " random hidden motive" of sorts. I suppose it would be slightly similar to how a dishonourable Lord acts, plotting behind a King's back. Could that behaviour be implemented into a faction as a whole, so they act in such a way and potentially turn on an ally if it serves in their interest?
I'm wondering if some of PoP's code regarding the Oath of Fealty, is similar to this in some way. There is an overall check for military strength, relation with current leader and relation to your character to convince a captured Lord to join your faction. I'm guessing who a faction decides to attack is also based on something along those lines. Strength, weakness, military advantage, profit. No idea what I'm really talking about, merely speculating.

EDIT: Also, just need a little confirmation as to changing which fiefs are owned by factions. Editing parties.txt, all of the towns and villages are set to Neutral. If I assign a town or village to faction, how does it affect the game? Would that fief be permanently theirs and unable to become captured?

Ah, I know all about lack of enthusiasm, friend. Aside from the odd bit of modding or gaming, I'm a very lethargic person and it's extremely hard to find the motivation to accomplish tasks. I'm trying to work on that. Hmm, something eats taverns? That's unsettling. Perhaps your Giants are hungry.

Well, at least this is the perfect time of year for a little break.

 

[MrSplashy]

I love being with the Realm of the Falcons, they are pure cavalry. I try using them with some of the Mercenary Lancers on some Redwood Elves(which has a LOT of horses by the way) and they rekt, but hopefully they will add a infantry unit and another problem you might encounter with them when you enlist with their army is that they always held a feast and if they are at war with the Reich they don't even do anything. Hopefully this faction will get changed.