"Twilight's Odyssey"
Overview:
This is a submod of Phantasy Calradia 2024, aiming to deploy a coop campaign fantasy mod in two distinct stages:
A) an initial single player mod where the player participates in quests, dialogs, and diplomacy exactly as if a coop campaign were in progress, meaning not tied to trp_player but being able to also play as a kingdom lord from start of game. The goal for first stage is to leverage the existing code for Phantasy Calradia 2024 as remade for coop, with focus on how this changes dialogs, quests, diplomacy, database, merges of "offline" changes, replacement of companions with multiplayer oriented assistants, and how these would affect other lords if every lord could recruit and actually use the powers assistants bring.
Consider the companion Jeremus, the healer. This companion adds considerably to the survivability of the player party. But if NPC lords also used a healer, who might impact even npc to npc battles intercepted at script_game_event_simulate_battle then the distinction between player and other lords becomes more nuanced.
One of the strengths brought to the project is the already existing "campaign export/import" cycle whereby the metadata is exported to a text file via WSE2 enabled Lua for the player, the player's party, their equipment, their garrisons, their stored items at diplomacy chamberlain, constable, and trp_household_possessions, as well as their enterprises, relations with centers, vassals, fiefs, bank balances and loans outstanding, debts to party, investments in infrastructure at owned fiefs, and so on. Writing a savegame agnostic file for this rather than depending on the savegame allows recovery of the player as new layers are added or the savegame composition changes. This can allow "offline" changes of coop members performing quests, shopping, crafting items, repairing items, chasing bandit parties at their local computer and then merging to the campaign as a coop member, so that members are not at the mercy of one member that is late or missing. For that matter the entire campaign could be done as single player or a coop member added late game. The intent is for close friends or family to collaborate if they wish, while not forcing this on anyone.
In terms of immediate changes to the existing Phantasy Calradia 2024 v160 C17.IVc code:
1) Factions are expanded to add "minor factions" that do not participate in diplomacy - they neither initiate wars nor can be pulled into existing wars occurring between their sponsoring faction and someone else. They do have a protector faction, meaning hostile actions taken against them will act as war declarations against a much larger faction. This in turn could change relations with other factions.
The "Mageocracy" will no longer be managed as a diplomacy "major faction". Instead, it sponsors pure neutral traders to both "good" and "evil" destinations with each faction they trade with assigned the role of protector in case of attack upon their caravans or centers. They are moved to the far corner of the map to be harder to reach. They sell golems as before but orders for quantity have lead times before delivery, similar to the existing caravan recruiting mechanic but with longer delays.
Djann are sponsored by the Sarranids.
Vedmaks are sponsored by the Vaegir.
Asgard has no sponsor but will have double strength garrisons are a high number of shadow-II and shadow-III templated "bandits" roaming the cold wastes. Besides Vedmaks and Valkyries, these will also have Frost Giants, based on the existing golem/ogre skin and with the skin magnified slightly more to be a little larger than before. Asgard will be kept from roaming onto normal lands by a bridge party that can be placed at game start as disabled and dynamically enabled based on trigger events or time of year. By intent, it will be much more powerful, troop for troop, than normal factions.
Possibly a lizard man faction will exist on a different continent, and if so it will not participate in diplomacy to avoid having to travel across the sea.
Probably a mer-folk faction will exist with some control of the sea.
If I can find an artist I would happily add sea monsters to sea travel, especially near high magic regions.
All major factions have roughly twice as many towns and villages as before and most non-Native factions are moved to segment their influence. Wars are less pervasive but more likely to drag other factions in, making it more dangerous to provoke wars.
2) Magic and cleric prayers are too overwhelming in Phantasy Calradia 2024. Now there will be "low magic" regions and "high magic" regions. At a low magic region, magic does half damage, mana refreshes at half rate, and effective magic ability is half. For cleric prayers, a region can be "positive" (good), negative (evil), or neither, with positive boosting good prayers and negative weakening these same, and vice versa, implemented as changes in damage, radius, effective faith value, and rate of regeneration of spell points. Villages and Castles may build monasteries granting benefits within a certain map distance, and time of year may also grant brief changes to the battle conditions.
Cursed places can also be created, and likely have been made in the past throughout much of the evil territories.
Players can then plan their campaigns according to where, when they will be traveling, with no "I win" button everywhere. Necromancy is likewise hindered in the good/low magic regions, as it needs access to negative energy. It may be boosted in a negative energy rich area.
3) Undead versus the living: This will likely become total war, with no quarter.
Undead have an increased relationship with plagues, and plagues will weaken garrisons now. Undead parties will be spawned from villages and centers with an active plague, and these will continue to recruit prisoners as equivalent strength undead. Parties visiting towns with undead in their ranks risk bringing plague to a center, as will player parties with active plague among the player party. This should make you thoroughly welcome as guests. Or not... Undead amongst the garrison will corrupt the garrison over time.
There may be more than one undead faction. Undead lords will not be welcomed to other factions; nor their undead troops. In compensation, the undead faction will have many more centers deep in the south roughlands, which are both high magic and cursed.
Their logical enemies are relatively far away, excepting the blazing hand, which has enemies on two flanks.
4) Travel: Ships are more expensive and harder to get. Teleportation is more expensive according to the destination (and whether that destination is assisting in the teleport or not), with changes from high to low magic having different requirements than high to high. Depending on where you are and where you are going there can be level requirements for you and your troops.
The four ways inn is moved away from the center to where the Wizard Tower is in Phantasy 2024. Every player has their own "party" placeholder at the four ways inn, allowing more than one player to park excess/dormant troops and assistants there, housed at half wages of course. If these troops meet the requirements for using the teleportal, you could request they be jumped to a center as reinforcements if a suitable leader is stationed with them. This has a cost of course. An enemy might do likewise, especially a player that is not present and relying on AI to keep their fiefs safe from a player that intends to snipe them while the person is offline.
5) Hiding among the nobles. It may be interesting to obfuscate just WHO and where a coop player is. If every noble has a retinue of assistants, than a clever player could pretend to be AI controlled or even delegate control to AI for some time. Coop also gives better ability for hidden movement on the map.
6) Rogues, rangers, bards, and dungeons.
Dungeons should be dynamically placed upon triggering from a player held map, as sort of a mini-quest. They should be difficult to find, dangerous to roam about looking for them, and have potentially unsavory things inside, that might unlock other quests or have high value drops. They may also be too powerful for a single player to defeat alone, or grow in strength the later in game they are encountered, depending on world events.
For 2024 Rogue class was essentially useless. For that matter Ranger was fairly useless, giving a passive buff on pathfinding and no longer contributing to exploration as originally implemented in late 2017 era Phantasy Calradia. The fog of war effect used then was discontinued as well, with the entire first time exploration bonus and Rigale encounters limited. Rigale battlefields/graveyard temporary parties were discontinued as well. These will be put back in, allowing Necromancers a better place to recruit from and a disincentive to unnecessary battles.
Rangers and Bards can summon companions, as will Djinn, Werewolves, and Valkyries. The dark elf priestesses and Shamans may also summon monsters in high magic areas. More clerics or mages will be embedded at the reinforcements C template per faction, according to the location of that faction's capital.
7) Currently the map and center placements are under construction - the map already existed from Guspav's era but has undergone changes to allow access to previously closed areas, and the settlements relocated to put dark elves down in the desert as neighbors to orcs and undead. Thus the two halves of the map, north and south, have distinctly different populations. Currently the starting towns are expected to increase to one per faction, with some technical change to allow the starting merchant to be dynamically placed at the correct starting town rather than pre-allocating a "starting merchant" at each starting town.
Database storage of secondary player skills will be moved to a single list, which can accommodate at least 6 players. Crafting/harvest/healing etc guilds will be bitflags so that all of the guilds take one slot at the parties database. Guilds will be able to be built at any walled center.
Many player centric database slots exist that need to convert to stacks or at least virtual_player0 through 5 or even 0..7.
8 ) Phase II -- many single player oriented battles occurring locally, but with a shared random seed and some built in regulation for consistent battle size and frame rate controls. Rather than multiplayer actions for every bot, the bots fight locally by letting single player supply their local dice rolls, generating the same stream of dice rolls as the next node. The main concern then becomes sharing by network semaphore the real-time changes to formations orders and individual player's actions by the usual multiplayer paradigm. Other than this, the battle at each node looks single player-ish, with small pauses to keep any one node that is running slowly from lagging the others.
This means overriding player's choices on battle size, frame rate options, even graphics settings and with some of the CPU intensive activities handed off to another thread via Lua Lanes to have better/smoother response.
In determining the ideal number of threads it is important to consider any player might have streaming video such as twitch, OBS, Xsplit, among others. This means leaving 1 core always unused for best streaming.
https://discord.gg/xDGqgZcmmf (shared 2024 and 2025 discord)
