[Mod] Enchanter Reimagined Thread - Conquest of Elysium 3

A(nother) critical bug in the modding API makes this mod crash your game occasionally. Don't bother until Illwinter iron out these issues - don't hold your breath.

While I'm definately happy with the overall state of vanilla CoE3, I think some classes are clearly better than others, and some are thematically ... problematic.
For me, the worst offender in the latter area is the Enchanter - he's got access to all those nifty golems and constructs, but the most efficient way to play him is by spamming lots and lots of Necrotods and then use the wildlife and low-mr enemies as your actual army.
I love the Necrotod's design principle, but I'd like to design a different race around that concept instead of fitting him into the Enchanter's lineup that otherwise consists of mostly huge, lumbering collossal golems, which SHOULD be the main tools in his pocked, in my opinion.
So, that's the main thought I employed when I started my attempt at rebalancing the Enchanter.

My exact changes in detail:

Necrotod
Due to limitation in modding capabilities, replacing the Necrotod by a different creature is not possible, so there's now a different monster still called Necrotod.
You can think of it as some type of frankenstein'ish flesh golem construct made from corpses.
It's mostly similar to the other golems (and it has no charming ability of any kind), but similar to the Abomination, it can heal itself from corpses present on it's location. This process is slow, though, and it cannot exceed it's HP maximum.

Stone Golem
Coal mines are an important asset for the Enchanter, because promoting an actual Enchanter in rank consumes one, so crafting a Stone Golem was somewhat foolish. In a way, that's still the case, but now you're building less of a one-shot brickwall unit.
The stats of the Stone Golem remain mostly unchanged, but when severly damaged, the unit will transform into a "Damaged Stone Golem", which - on the next possible occasion - will be withdrawn to the rear rank by the Enchanter to be repaired.
Unlike the actual Stone Golem, the damaged variant can heal to simulate this. However, the damaged variant has no attacks and is immobile, so you might have to linger around for quite a while before he's rebuilt and you can move on. Once that's the case, though, he transforms back to it's original form and can, once again, fight in the frontline.

Iron Golem
The changes to the Iron Golem are mostly similar to those made to the Stone Golem - he now has a damaged variant that can be "repaired" over time but is immobile. The damaged Iron Golem retains a weak melee attack that he can employ if forced to, but he's located in the rear when possible and should only be forced to do so in the most dire of circumstances.
One additional change to the Iron Golem: Iron Mines are probably the main source for production, an important asset for everyone, including especially the Enchanter. This is one reason why I felt, in vanilla, it was mostly not a wise choice to make an Iron Golem in the first place.
To counter this concern, the Iron Golem will now produce 2 production - but only in his combat-worthy form, keep that in mind before using him in battle.

Onyx Golem
While most of his stats remained unchanged (for now), I changed the idea of the Onyx Golem a bit, imagine it as a raging golem with molten Gold running through his veins. I'd like to make him more expensive and/or time consuming to produce, but for now, that's not possible.
Anyway, he's now the only Golem with fast movement, and I'd like him to be able to move independently, though I haven't figured out how to do that (someone got a tip?). When severly damaged, he will slowly heal up, but unlike Stone and Iron Golem, he can still crawl along at slow speed in this state.
In combat-worthy shape, he produces 3 gold, in damaged form, still one gold. Useful little bugger, ain't he?

Crystal Golem
The Crystal Golems stats remained mostly untouched for now, but I changed it's shape a little bit (might be familiar to some of you).
It's currently losing small amount of crystal that can be sold (4 gold), and even has a very small chance of spawning a new crystal golem (untested, please report when seeing this happen). When shattered, it'll turn into a pile of shards that need to be reconstructed - a time consuming process.

Gold Golem
I've yet to capture a Gold Mine, so I left this one untouched for now.

Wood Golem, Oak Golem, Clay Golem, Ice Golem
I'm pretty happy with those golems in their basic form and left them untouched. If you have any recommendations about making changes to them, feel free to let me know, though.

Terracotta Warriors
I feel Terracotta Warriors are pretty useless in vanilla. They take too long to construct, especially in numbers, and even leaving an Apprentice to do the job seems a waste of time. They are pretty weak and will fall quickly, making the investment an even worse one.
To bring in a little variety, I added three different types of TCWs, one with a Shield, one with a long Spear (Pike) and one with a Bow. Maybe I'll add more.
The main change I made, though: Terracotta Warriors can now heal. And not only that, they are also Immortal.
If you spend all the time making them and even risk the Swamp who could also become a precious Clay Golem, you ought to get something useful in return.
And that you do now. It's still hard to make a sizeable number of them, and they're still weak, but if they fall, they'll come back in your citadel.

These are all the changes I made (for now). Feel free to give feedback, this is the first version of this mod, some balancing might very well be in order.

You can download the mod here. (v1.01)

Have fun.

Edit: Ah well, turns out I missed some numbers when defining the Crystal Golem's weapons, and also turns out that the spawning skill both doesn't work as intended AND crashes the game. Removed that for now, and corrected the weapon numbers.

Cheers
Marco

Edited by: MarcoK

Would it be ok for you, if I included the new Terracotta (maybe edit them a little) soldiers into my own mod? I like them! With the golems I tried something different and I don't want to remove the Necrotod.

Go ahead ulius4, the new TCWs are actually slightly modified Dom3 units, so no credit for me.

About the Necrotod, yeah, I love him too, but he doesn't fit to the Enchanter, and as long as he remains in the lineup, Golems are bound to take the back seat, imo.
Of course, nobody is forcing you to use the mod, it's just ONE possible approach of many.

Cheers
Marco

MarcoK wrote: Go ahead ulius4, the new TCWs are actually slightly modified Dom3 units, so no credit for me.

About the Necrotod, yeah, I love him too, but he doesn't fit to the Enchanter, and as long as he remains in the lineup, Golems are bound to take the back seat, imo.
Of course, nobody is forcing you to use the mod, it's just ONE possible approach of many.

Cheers
Marco

Thank you! Removing the necrotods now nerfes the Enchanter too much on the other hand, because he was already on the weak side. You can look at the changes I did to the golems in my mod (in the "Mod Discussions" Subforum) if you want to. I solely gave them more damage output for now.

Don't underestimate the changes I made, though.
You can spam golems now, especially since the Iron Golems will provide production and Onyx and Crystal Golems provide gold.
Damaged mine-consuming golems will (almost) fully recover when damaged, so Golems are not nearly a one-sided investement as before.
The new Necrotod is quite powerful and can heal, and you can produce lots relatively early on.
Gaining Immortality makes the (otherwise free!) TCWs pretty useful units.

I played only a few test games so far, but I don't think the new Enchanter is too weak. Rather the opposite, actually.
But I'd love to hear from other people who played a game with this mod, maybe I'm wrong.

Also, like I wrote, I love the concept of the Necrotod, and once modding permits, I'll definately make another class which relies on a unit like this heavily.
I just think it's a very weird and un-thematic fit for the Enchanter, which is why I removed it.

Cheers
Marco

Looks good to me in theory. Will give it a go.

There seems to be a bug with this mod; when it's installed, the game seems to occasionally crash during the 'independents' phase. It then pops a dialog box titled "NÃ¥got gick fel!" containing the text "GSP: bad sprnr", which has to be one of the most cryptic error messages in ever... followed by a generic C++ runtime error, which claims that the application requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.

afaik this is fixed in the next patch
the crash occurs when a user added sprite appears somewhere on the mapscreen, for example if you leave a single terracotta soldier standing somewhere and move away the game should crash.

You can work around that, if you want, by using only built in sprites with the "copystats" command and then overwriting any unit properties you want to change. This should make the mod stable for now.

Hmm ... anyone still got crystal shards appear when the crystal golem attacks in 1.01?
From the mod documentation, I figured spawnnextmon means a monster will randomly spawn the next monster in the file, with a percent value determining the likelyhood. Instead, this seems to work kinda like the Doppelganger's attack, i.e. it'll spawn the monster in combat when killing enemies.
Also, no idea what the chance value ACTUALLY does, but I had the attack spawn creatures every time.
Since the crystal shards are immobile, moving the stack away would crash the game with the sprite error Endovior encountered.
Probably the same thing happens with the damaged golem forms.

Yay, yet another error that makes the modding commands basically useless. Way to go, Illwinter.

Cheers
Marco

Do you have an example that I can show Illwinter?
Otherwise your comment by itself does not strike me as a way of getting what you want.
Way to go Marco

MarcoK wrote: Hmm ... anyone still got crystal shards appear when the crystal golem attacks in 1.01?
From the mod documentation, I figured spawnnextmon means a monster will randomly spawn the next monster in the file, with a percent value determining the likelyhood. Instead, this seems to work kinda like the Doppelganger's attack, i.e. it'll spawn the monster in combat when killing enemies.
Also, no idea what the chance value ACTUALLY does, but I had the attack spawn creatures every time.
Since the crystal shards are immobile, moving the stack away would crash the game with the sprite error Endovior encountered.
Probably the same thing happens with the damaged golem forms.

Yay, yet another error that makes the modding commands basically useless. Way to go, Illwinter.

Cheers
Marco

The spawnnextmon command works as intended in my mod. It does exactly, what it says it does.
AFAIK the crystals spawning after death are something special to the Crystal Golem. What are you saying "basically useless"? I created a whole lot of stuff already with the mod tools and they work. The tools included are not complete yet, but you can still have a lot of fun with them. At least I am having fun with them.

Johan even fixed the bug with the sprites today if you haven't noticed. So next patch will have it work.

edit: and for now you can easily work around it, by using the "copystats" command.

Edited by: ulius4

An example for what gp1628?
The Doppelganger issue can be reproduced by making a Crystal Golem in 1.0 of this mod (actually, even 1.01 shows this behavior, even though I removed the spawning line). Here's the 1.0 link again: Mediafire.com
Here's a savegame which has an Enchanter army with a Crystal Golem close to enemies: Mediafire.com
Attacking with the golem will produce spawns like crazy.

Regarding "way to go" ... there was a critical bug in 3.06 that could have been EASILY noticed if the feature had been tested before releasing.
Well, sorry, sh*t happens, that's ok, but it's not so good when you turn around and immediately make the same mistake again, releasing another version with another modding-breaking bug, once again only because you didn't bother to test the stuff you implemented before releasing it to the public.
Sorry to tell, but I find this kind of stuff hardly acceptable from a programmer developing a game people (including me) paid money for. I won't go make new threads complaining, but I feel entitled to voice my disappointment in this practice nonetheless.
I expect this bug to be fixed without me asking nicely - when I have a feature request, then I'll do that.

That said, you could claim I basically made the same kind of mistake myself by only changing the damaged golems icons after my last remotely extensive test, and that claim would be very justified. Now that I know that I can't trust Illwinter's modding commands to actually work as advertised and without crashing the game, I'll try to do more extensive tests next time around, but feel free to call me names for this time, I promise not to play the "but I don't get paid for this" card, either.
Criticism where it's due.

(The forum auto-combined those posts...)

ulius4 wrote: The spawnnextmon command works as intended in my mod. It does exactly, what it says it does.
AFAIK the crystals spawning after death are something special to the Crystal Golem.

Hmph. Thanks, then it must be a special effect of the Shard Fist? Is that documented somewhere?
I'll try to swap this with an ordinary fist attack for now, because otherwise it breaks the entire regeneration dynamic.

ulius4 wrote: What are you saying "basically useless"? I created a whole lot of stuff already with the mod tools and they work. The tools included are not complete yet, but you can still have a lot of fun with them. At least I am having fun with them.

Let's say basically useless as long as you want to use graphics not included in the game. Copystats also has another bug with custom graphics - a custom icon is automatically applied to all units copied from the same base unit. At least it doesn't crash the game, though.

ulius4 wrote: Johan even fixed the bug with the sprites today if you haven't noticed. So next patch will have it work.

That's nice. I'll take a look on the patch when it releases in two weeks or something, and I'm already excited which other issue will crash the game then.
Sorry, I guess I'm a bit soured at the moment. I apologize.

Cheers
Marco

Edited by: MarcoK

MarcoK wrote:
That's nice. I'll take a look on the patch when it releases in two weeks or something, and I'm already excited which other issue will crash the game then.
Sorry, I guess I'm a bit soured at the moment. I apologize.

Cheers
Marco

Doesn't matter .
I think, they don't really have a testing team there. It's just some guys doing it in their free time, so we'll have to expect this to happen more often in the future, I suppose. But this happens to big companies, too. Johan is really fast at fixing and patches are out regularly.
I think being sour about it, will rather slow him down . It's about the fun, isn't it?

Edited by: ulius4

ulius4 wrote: afaik this is fixed in the next patch
the crash occurs when a user added sprite appears somewhere on the mapscreen, for example if you leave a single terracotta soldier standing somewhere and move away the game should crash.

You can work around that, if you want, by using only built in sprites with the "copystats" command and then overwriting any unit properties you want to change. This should make the mod stable for now.

Awesome, fixed already!

Being upset with Illwinter for not being omniscient and releasing buggy patches doesn't make sense to me. They're already impressively responsive for a company their size, so why complain? These things happen, especially early in the life of a product... also, it's been fixed already, so why gripe about it?

... and they're making great games

I think the current approach is best practice. Get something done, minimal testing, get it in the hands of the modders and users. See what is broken and what other things they want.

Sure, it's frustrating when the doco is wrong and mods break in 'hard to know why' ways, but I think of us all as part of one team developing this stuff together. We need to, because a one man programming team shouldn't try to also be a test team, etc.

Everything has its Pros and Cons.
The advantage of this method is the momentum. You have to admit that Illwinter maintains fantastic momentum for guys with regular jobs and family. The progress page for CoE3 is impressive as was the progress page for the Dominions 3 game before it. GO GO ILLWINTER !

Edited by: gp1628

Maybe they should just label the patches betas?
Quite a few developers use this method, and when it's not officially final and out, you ought to be more forgiving.
If there's really no true internal beta testers for this game, there could be a mandatory registration and closed forum to report such issues in, or - alternatively - it could just be an open beta.
Either way, there'd be a playerbase to test those issues and they'd report them back, but people not willing to mess with unfinished non-working stuff could just wait for the next non-beta patch and run it with a reasonable chance that everything works as advertised.
As it stands, most stuff that's changed seems to be modding related, and I get the impression that the developer himself doesn't do any modding himself (as evident by the lack of most basic tests on his part, resulting in easily (re-)producible crash-bugs.
So it might be kinda neat having a couple of folks that are actually interested in modding the game test this stuff before releasing it out in the wild, no?

Cheers
Marco

We have asked various expert modders from our past.
And recently added a couple more.
But thanks for the suggestion