we definitely need an increased difficulty mod especially stronger neutral stacks but this is insane.
i think you need to release a toned down version to be somewhat playable. given how important troop preservation in this game is fighting an uphill battle against a plain t3 stack of Gor during full moon when all his units are werewolves is not fun at all.
nor`s grip should be removed from ALL units too in my opinion.
Gor's Lycanthropy upgrade for goblins is progression 10, which on Impossible is probably 30+ weeks into the game. And there are no T3 goblins, so I'm not sure what you are seeing. You can also trivialize this fight by having a Turn Animal skill in your stack. (Which is something that cannot be done for Zahaar's werewolves.)
Feel free to remove Nor's Grip if you don't like it. Some on the Steam forum thread have had similar gripes and I explained my position there. But since this is a text mod, you can modify it however you wish.
Sandman also reported something similar for Raith over in the Steam thread. I've fixed it in version 1.4.3 (it is backwards compatible with existing 1.4).
I found two bugs while playing this MOD: 1. Around the 30th week, when fighting against Ilia, they entered the battlefield and Ilian's soldiers drank a bunch of potions. After that, the game crashed and displayed: 0x00000003f800000 memory cannot be written. 2. Around twenty weeks later, when Ron's soldiers entered the battle, they remained idle and motionless.
Do you have saves from directly before both these events? And if so, if you can replicate both, there should be an error log in the game's Player.log.
I might not be able to do anything about issue 1, but I'd still like to see the crash log regardless. As for issue 2, there will definitely be something in the logs. I've hit that sort of error plenty of times while testing the mod, so there must be an AI issue I didn't catch.
Sorry, I reinstalled the game and opened a new file. I haven't started detecting these two bugs. However, it can be certain that Ron's soldiers will not move in the later stages because I have activated three or four gears, and the result will always be like this. That is to say, his soldiers can fight normally in the early stage, but in the later stage, they will only stand by and not take any other actions. Also, thank you very much for your MOD. I haven't played this game for half a year, but after installing your MOD, it made me feel the fun of this game again. Your MOD is really great!
By "Ron" do you mean "Rohen"? For his changes, the "Progression 9" upgrade might be the problematic one. But I can't know unless I can reproduce the scenario (it seems to work in my tests) or if you give me the error message from the Player.log.
For some background, this mod adds some new skills to AI units. But in order for the AI to use these skills, I have to give them a "SkillEvaluation". I do this by copying an existing skill and copying the "SkillEvaluation" from an existing skill into the new skill. This is technically unsupported by the modding system, but as long as the existing skill and new skill are roughly the same, it usually works. This method is also tied to the game version. So if you aren't using the exact version of the game (latest is 01.09.30883 I think) that the mod is based on, the mod won't work fully.
I wanted to add Not Even Bones - works fine without your patch; but when I add your patch the game CTD
[USER] - Checking stronger.antagonists.notevenbones - Found stronger.antagonists.notevenbones.asset.json -> this is a mod[ERROR] System.ArgumentException: JSON parse error: Missing a comma or ']' after an array element. at (wrapper managed-to-native) UnityEngine.JsonUtility.FromJsonInternal(string,object,System.Type) at UnityEngine.JsonUtility.FromJsonOverwrite (System.String json, System.Object objectToOverwrite) [0x00059] in <0183b61def4f4ce0b68d9468606304ec>:0 at OwnedByGravity.ContentManagement.ExternalContentManagerDriver.<GetAvailablePackagesAsync>g__CheckDirectoryForMod|12_0 (System.String directory, System.String packageName, OwnedByGravity.ContentManagement.Modding.IUserContentLogger+LineLogger logger, OwnedByGravity.ContentManagement.ExternalContentManagerDriver+<>c__DisplayClass12_0& ) [0x0007d] in <faf7cacc77e046dbba1a5dac36ed1c51>:0
I've been playing another game, now on Version 1.3.1 of the mod. This time, I chose to play as a Demonologist/Alchemist Invader with the Enchantment school on a random map. I rolled Gor, Raith, Rohen, and Uram as antagonists.
I bumped the Progression difficulty up by 2 increments (160%). As of Week 16, I've hit Progression 11 (compared to Progression 8 at Week 15 on my last game). So that aspect is certainly working as intended.
One aspect I hadn't really considered is that Rohen's Progression 9 (Mindcontrol Followers/Slaves) comes a lot sooner now, so you have to prepare for it pretty early on. This would have been a problem for me normally (Invader is a Slaver-heavy start), but I also found 3 Demonlords near my starting area, which let me keep all the Antagonists except Uram happy. The intention here is to force the player to keep paying upkeep (i.e. a strong economy) since Rohen seems to love gold in his events. And the preparation method is quite simple (don't have Followers/Slaves in all your stacks).
I've noticed that Rohen has ended up with control over most of the map (the Circle Mages do fight each other for Allfire nodes). Between Uram and Rohen, Rohen's forces overwhelmingly win. I think the auto-resolve favors Trolls a lot more than Demons. And Demons tend to lack healing options, so neutral forces will wear them down (I saw an Uram stack with Demonlord Rav Ozeal get mobbed by spiders and killed). So I think I should give Uram some additional buffs (Progression 6 - Heal to 50% each day and +200% regen, found in the Leviathan Demon and the Shaman upgrade tree). I'm currently fighting Uram, so maybe I'll figure out more of what he is lacking while doing so.
I did find one bug with a change I made for Isgrimm:
Dwarven Combat Balloon had an entry for a melee weapon removed, which was causing it to get some melee levelups per Isgrimm's buffs. It doesn't have a melee attack, so there should be no impact.
This turns out to cause the enemy AI to bug out if you have a Combat Balloon in melee range of an AI unit. So I might revert this change for the time being. (That said, the Combat Balloon doesn't seem like a common unit for the player to use.)
This mod is great, I think. Just finished a play through with the updated version.
The antagonists are much more active - but not necessarily more aggressive. The antagonist armies are tougher - both external and tower it seems.
I did the 'wait till late, hold off circle/appease, then rush the towers with a beefed up stack... cleaning up a bit as I went' and while the tower fights were tough...er. They weren't really tough. Had to use some consumables to change damage types, walked in with summons and bathe in blood with the orc hero. Hero was decked out with demon weapon and demon armor.
Not sure it would be possible to fully counter the entire game build up and artificer buffing.
With that said, i wouldn't want everything to be countered. This was still a very enjoyable play through and I really don't want to be progressing along the map and need to rush back all the time or be in the midst of multiple wars.
This mod is great. :)
I'll install the update, think I caught it in between. Uram was a bit weird. It was cool to see the titans but they didn't break out on the first turn and I was able to lock them in and limit their actions.
Question/Request - I like a lot of speed/movement. It does make it way easier though. Is it reasonable to change some of the +speed items to +worldmap only? So I can cruise around the map, but in combat I'm still limited? May not be too much of a difference - still means I can accomplish more in fewer weeks with heavy movement.
Question - is there a way to see progression level? I finished on impossible week 21. Attacking undergast I have the shaper golem, but they are still only carrying minor research material on week 20 with 130 proficiency and most spells researched.
The antagonists are much more active - but not necessarily more aggressive. The antagonist armies are tougher - both external and tower it seems.
I don't have any way of changing the antagonists' world-map AI. This mod should only make their stacks tougher (the most recent patches to CoE did increase the AI's aggressiveness though, so you might have experienced that).
Uram was a bit weird. It was cool to see the titans but they didn't break out on the first turn and I was able to lock them in and limit their actions.
I also noticed this. Demonlord Sa'Hrul seems to mess up the combat AI and it sometimes just refuses to move. This might be one of those unintended consequences of using a unit outside of their intended programming :D. The Demonlords don't appear in combat with other units after all. (However, I also noticed this behavior when fighting against Sa'Hrul in his story fight too.)
Question/Request - I like a lot of speed/movement.
I removed the speed changes in Version 1.1, since taking Speed means giving up attack/defense stats. So there is a tradeoff between movement and the maximum strength of an army.
Question - is there a way to see progression level?
I know you can see the progression via the Dev Console. But outside of that, you can only see the progression by checking what buffs the antagonists currently have and comparing it to a list (such as in the description of this mod).
Seems like you reached Progression 10 in 20 weeks, which roughly matches the calculation I made. If you wanted to fight the antagonists at max strength, you'd have to wait for 4-5 weeks per progression level. That's why I put an optional file in the downloads, to compress progressions 9-15 into 1/3 the time. But even this is a sub-optimal solution, since you have to enable that optional file before you start the campaign :(
I've been experimenting with a way to get around this, by adding a spell page whose purpose is to boost progression, but I haven't gotten it to work yet. I basically want a button in game the player can press to increase the world's progression by 1. And if you do so repeatedly, you can fight the antagonists at their stronger state without waiting around.
I'm assuming we need both the base updated mod file and the optional file? Started a new run last night, but will restart with new files and optional. Started in a corner of a random map in the malbec/undead area. Had to grind through it over like 8 weeks for a tiny space but can probably cruise most of the map with the resulting stacks.
Yes, if you want all the updates, then downloading the latest version of the mod is a good idea.
The optional file is a separate mod (you'll notice it has a very small file size). Like difficulty options, I believe this has to be present when the campaign starts to take effect. Some combination of the optional file and/or increased progression speed should give a nice challenge.
I think I just realized that the "Bad Moon" event (the minus relations for all antagonists one) occurs once whenever the progression level increases. So if you count the number of those events, you can keep track of the progression level. The number of Bad Moon events + 1 will equal the world progression level.
I've been playing a game (no other mods except this one and my starting recipes mod) as a Demonologist/Alchemist vs 4 random antagonists (Ianna, Uram, Rohen, Gor). So far, my progression calculations are a bit early. 15 weeks in and I'm just on the cusp of Progression level 8, so not that far off from the calculation.
I've also been thinking about tweaking some of these antagonists a bit:
Ianna's Grim Reaper unit may be annoying to fight. My intention at the time was to ensure the presence of an Apprentice/Hero in fights while also reducing their available actions. But chances are, there's going to be an Apprentice/Hero in any real fight. I might just remove an Action Point from the Apprentice/Hero and 1 random unit each turn. This would be on top of the existing random Stun (Dreamweaver Sleep) that happens.
I think I'm going to overhaul the Titan reinforcements for all antagonists. Rohen's buff of changing the stack spawns to include a Titan is a much better way to include Titans in Circle armies. This means all antagonists are going to get increased stack sizes (most of them cap out at 8, so I can easily add 2 more just for Titans or special units). And of course this means you get the loot from killing them. For reinforcement units, I might add some fodder if they make sense.
For Uram, ^ this means a debuff, since there'd be at most like 2 Demonlords per army. But I can also make them (nearly) as strong as their story fights by giving them levels or other buffs. And it should be more fun to fight 2 strong Demonlords (out of 5, so 10 different combinations) compared to 5 that don't give rewards.
Demonlord Sa'Hrul seems to have some AI issues, since the Demonlord and/or his Doppelgangers don't charge with the rest of the group. Instead, their presence seems to cause the AI units to split into two groups and approach the player piecemeal. This might need some experimentation to "fix".
Just uploaded version 1.1, with the overhaul to Titan reinforcements. This was actually the first thing I added to the mod when I started, and it is how I got the screenshot with all the Titans standing together.
But looking back, having Titans with upgrades (and rewards for beating them) makes more sense.
I tried playing your mod but it didn't work. Then I disabled all other mods and it still didn't work. I think it has something to do with not having the DLCs.
That is correct. I added both DLCs as explicit dependencies because multiple antagonists use DLC features. Uram, for example, is using a lot of the units in the Demon Scourge DLC. And Ianna's buffs are based on the Dreamweaver spells from the second DLC.
Just two antagonists to go! They're the necromancers Hokan and Raith. I have Hokan half-complete, but I haven't thought of anything good to fill in the rest of his progression levels. And I have even less of an idea for what Raith could bring to the table.
Love the mod, thank you for the awesome work! When I have some spare time ill try to pitch some ideas for Hokan and Raith.
By any chance is the mod also available without the changes to the items? I think that is pretty much the only thing I dont like as much although i appreciate the effort at balancing.
I think these particular items trivialize the game, which defeats the purpose of this mod. I'd have to crank up the difficulty to account for them normally. But that would make every other strategy nearly impossible to use.
For example, to counter the Paradox demon's execution ability, I could give all NPCs +300% HP. But then that Demon would be required if you want to have any chance of winning battles. Similar logic goes for the Corrupted Leader Glyph, which easily increases your unit's damage to +60 or so. I could give all NPCs 60 armor/willpower to counter it, but then nothing else will deal damage.
The Undead Officer (Greater Necromancer glyph) and Corrupted Pathfinder glyph mean that you can stack absurd amounts of world-map movement onto a single stack (with no real downside), which trivializes collection of materials. I could give NPC armies the same amount of movement, but then your tower and all your lodges will be under siege basically every turn.
38 comments
i think you need to release a toned down version to be somewhat playable. given how important troop preservation in this game is fighting an uphill battle against a plain t3 stack of Gor during full moon when all his units are werewolves is not fun at all.
nor`s grip should be removed from ALL units too in my opinion.
Feel free to remove Nor's Grip if you don't like it. Some on the Steam forum thread have had similar gripes and I explained my position there. But since this is a text mod, you can modify it however you wish.
Are you fighting Raith? Or someone else?
1. Around the 30th week, when fighting against Ilia, they entered the battlefield and Ilian's soldiers drank a bunch of potions. After that, the game crashed and displayed: 0x00000003f800000 memory cannot be written.
2. Around twenty weeks later, when Ron's soldiers entered the battle, they remained idle and motionless.
I might not be able to do anything about issue 1, but I'd still like to see the crash log regardless. As for issue 2, there will definitely be something in the logs. I've hit that sort of error plenty of times while testing the mod, so there must be an AI issue I didn't catch.
However, it can be certain that Ron's soldiers will not move in the later stages because I have activated three or four gears, and the result will always be like this. That is to say, his soldiers can fight normally in the early stage, but in the later stage, they will only stand by and not take any other actions.
Also, thank you very much for your MOD. I haven't played this game for half a year, but after installing your MOD, it made me feel the fun of this game again. Your MOD is really great!
For some background, this mod adds some new skills to AI units. But in order for the AI to use these skills, I have to give them a "SkillEvaluation". I do this by copying an existing skill and copying the "SkillEvaluation" from an existing skill into the new skill. This is technically unsupported by the modding system, but as long as the existing skill and new skill are roughly the same, it usually works. This method is also tied to the game version. So if you aren't using the exact version of the game (latest is 01.09.30883 I think) that the mod is based on, the mod won't work fully.
I wanted to add Not Even Bones - works fine without your patch; but when I add your patch the game CTD
[USER] - Checking stronger.antagonists.notevenbones - Found stronger.antagonists.notevenbones.asset.json -> this is a mod[ERROR] System.ArgumentException: JSON parse error: Missing a comma or ']' after an array element.
at (wrapper managed-to-native) UnityEngine.JsonUtility.FromJsonInternal(string,object,System.Type)
at UnityEngine.JsonUtility.FromJsonOverwrite (System.String json, System.Object objectToOverwrite) [0x00059] in <0183b61def4f4ce0b68d9468606304ec>:0
at OwnedByGravity.ContentManagement.ExternalContentManagerDriver.<GetAvailablePackagesAsync>g__CheckDirectoryForMod|12_0 (System.String directory, System.String packageName, OwnedByGravity.ContentManagement.Modding.IUserContentLogger+LineLogger logger, OwnedByGravity.ContentManagement.ExternalContentManagerDriver+<>c__DisplayClass12_0& ) [0x0007d] in <faf7cacc77e046dbba1a5dac36ed1c51>:0
I've uploaded a fix:
{
"HardDependencies": [
{"Package":"com.ownedbygravity.sf.base"},
{"Package":"com.ownedbygravity.sf.dlc1"},
{"Package":"com.ownedbygravity.sf.dlc2"},
{"Package":"stronger.antagonists"}, <--- This comma was missing
{"Package":"orian34.notevenbones"}
],
"SoftDependencies": [],
"IsDependencyForSavegames":false
}
I bumped the Progression difficulty up by 2 increments (160%). As of Week 16, I've hit Progression 11 (compared to Progression 8 at Week 15 on my last game). So that aspect is certainly working as intended.
One aspect I hadn't really considered is that Rohen's Progression 9 (Mindcontrol Followers/Slaves) comes a lot sooner now, so you have to prepare for it pretty early on. This would have been a problem for me normally (Invader is a Slaver-heavy start), but I also found 3 Demonlords near my starting area, which let me keep all the Antagonists except Uram happy. The intention here is to force the player to keep paying upkeep (i.e. a strong economy) since Rohen seems to love gold in his events. And the preparation method is quite simple (don't have Followers/Slaves in all your stacks).
I've noticed that Rohen has ended up with control over most of the map (the Circle Mages do fight each other for Allfire nodes). Between Uram and Rohen, Rohen's forces overwhelmingly win. I think the auto-resolve favors Trolls a lot more than Demons. And Demons tend to lack healing options, so neutral forces will wear them down (I saw an Uram stack with Demonlord Rav Ozeal get mobbed by spiders and killed). So I think I should give Uram some additional buffs (Progression 6 - Heal to 50% each day and +200% regen, found in the Leviathan Demon and the Shaman upgrade tree). I'm currently fighting Uram, so maybe I'll figure out more of what he is lacking while doing so.
I did find one bug with a change I made for Isgrimm:
This turns out to cause the enemy AI to bug out if you have a Combat Balloon in melee range of an AI unit. So I might revert this change for the time being. (That said, the Combat Balloon doesn't seem like a common unit for the player to use.)
The antagonists are much more active - but not necessarily more aggressive.
The antagonist armies are tougher - both external and tower it seems.
I did the 'wait till late, hold off circle/appease, then rush the towers with a beefed up stack... cleaning up a bit as I went' and while the tower fights were tough...er. They weren't really tough. Had to use some consumables to change damage types, walked in with summons and bathe in blood with the orc hero. Hero was decked out with demon weapon and demon armor.
Not sure it would be possible to fully counter the entire game build up and artificer buffing.
With that said, i wouldn't want everything to be countered. This was still a very enjoyable play through and I really don't want to be progressing along the map and need to rush back all the time or be in the midst of multiple wars.
This mod is great. :)
I'll install the update, think I caught it in between. Uram was a bit weird. It was cool to see the titans but they didn't break out on the first turn and I was able to lock them in and limit their actions.
Question/Request - I like a lot of speed/movement. It does make it way easier though. Is it reasonable to change some of the +speed items to +worldmap only? So I can cruise around the map, but in combat I'm still limited? May not be too much of a difference - still means I can accomplish more in fewer weeks with heavy movement.
Question - is there a way to see progression level? I finished on impossible week 21. Attacking undergast I have the shaper golem, but they are still only carrying minor research material on week 20 with 130 proficiency and most spells researched.
Seems like you reached Progression 10 in 20 weeks, which roughly matches the calculation I made. If you wanted to fight the antagonists at max strength, you'd have to wait for 4-5 weeks per progression level. That's why I put an optional file in the downloads, to compress progressions 9-15 into 1/3 the time. But even this is a sub-optimal solution, since you have to enable that optional file before you start the campaign :(
I've been experimenting with a way to get around this, by adding a spell page whose purpose is to boost progression, but I haven't gotten it to work yet. I basically want a button in game the player can press to increase the world's progression by 1. And if you do so repeatedly, you can fight the antagonists at their stronger state without waiting around.
The optional file is a separate mod (you'll notice it has a very small file size). Like difficulty options, I believe this has to be present when the campaign starts to take effect. Some combination of the optional file and/or increased progression speed should give a nice challenge.
Now to play my creation :D (I think some antagonists might be a bit too strong...)
I've also been thinking about tweaking some of these antagonists a bit:
I might just remove an Action Point from the Apprentice/Hero and 1 random unit each turn. This would be on top of the existing random Stun (Dreamweaver Sleep) that happens.
But looking back, having Titans with upgrades (and rewards for beating them) makes more sense.
By any chance is the mod also available without the changes to the items? I think that is pretty much the only thing I dont like as much although i appreciate the effort at balancing.
I think these particular items trivialize the game, which defeats the purpose of this mod. I'd have to crank up the difficulty to account for them normally. But that would make every other strategy nearly impossible to use.
For example, to counter the Paradox demon's execution ability, I could give all NPCs +300% HP. But then that Demon would be required if you want to have any chance of winning battles. Similar logic goes for the Corrupted Leader Glyph, which easily increases your unit's damage to +60 or so. I could give all NPCs 60 armor/willpower to counter it, but then nothing else will deal damage.
The Undead Officer (Greater Necromancer glyph) and Corrupted Pathfinder glyph mean that you can stack absurd amounts of world-map movement onto a single stack (with no real downside), which trivializes collection of materials. I could give NPC armies the same amount of movement, but then your tower and all your lodges will be under siege basically every turn.