New Mod Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Babies!

[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by Sir Whiskers

I'm trying out the latest version and have run into two bugs so far.

1. When using Griffin eggs, if I use multiple eggs, I only receive 1 griffin per two eggs, rounded down. If I use one egg at a time, I get 1 griffin per egg.

Whoops! I see my error on the eggs - my bad! I'll fix that right away. (The Dragon Eggs are messed up, too).

Originally Posted by Sir Whiskers

2. I have a fatal crash to desktop (no error message) when fighting Butory (the bandit leader in Marshan Swamp). It occurs as soon as he can act in the battle, which suggests it may be a spell issue. I tried to attach my save file, but the website keeps giving me an error when I do so.

(Note: I modded hero.txt to add a lot of creature containers - eggs - for testing, but otherwise made no changes to the game files.)

I'll look into Dirty Butory. You're probably right about it being a spell. Hmmm... his spells are Shroud, Berserker, and Ghost Sword. @jorko80 mentioned he had problems with Martin Vodash and his spells are Berserker, Pain Mirror, and Shroud. So the two common spells are Berserker and Shroud. I'll see if these spells are the problem.

I'll try to get an update out to at least fix the egg problem this weekend and we'll see what I can find out about the crash to desktop problem...

Thanks for reporting these issues!

Matt

/C\/C\

P.S. By the way, the forum has been messed up since about the middle of March with respect to posting files on the forum. I did message @Nike-IT on the problem and a ticket was issued to fix the problem, but it still persists. I'm not sure what to do at this stage, but you can email me your save game file and I'll see if I can find the problem (my email is in the readme file for my mod) straightaway.

[Fatt_Shade]

Hello ppl

-- I played with warrior. The poison cloud is a good change and works nice,but the shoal is overpowered,one shoal and half the enemy army is gone and that on 300% ,I imagine on 170% it'll be a disaster . Another overpowered ability is the wall ,with so many health and the ability to cast it every turn,I block everything too easy.

Warrior is probably first class to upgrade `Master of spirits` skill and upgrade rage skills faster, but trust me later in game enemy heroes with high intellect will devastate you with much more powerful spells then your rage skills are. Wall is useless against enemy range units and flyers, so it`s not overpowered, it`s just you didnt get to strong enough enemy. Placing it in front of enemy dwarf army with alchemist/cannoners/giants wont mean much. Or vs demon(demoness swap, and wall you placed to block enemy, become obstacle for your unit escape)/dragon army. Also piranha shoal is pure physical dmg skill, it will be much less in power vs demons/dragons/ghosts/black knights/... I`ll repeat myself and ask you to try a bit further to check elven/undead lands.

--Hmm ,spells with warrior are limited,maybe haste and fear come first.But I didn't needed them so much. At some point I found the spell: sacrifice , and I noticed that you reduced the gained percentage. In my opinion that spell is really hard to use anyway and now you made it useless.In "Grandmaster" the mana for the spell is increased and that balances it good I think.

Spells are changed in mechanics and gain with intellect, and work great. Warrior is not class that should rely to much on spellbook to finish his battles (haste/slow/stone skin etc all bennefitial spells are his to use, but you should forget dmg spells with warrior class). With high enough intellect even weakness become great spell : fighting vs Misticus in undead lands, i had Dryads, 2xFairies, druids, Inquisitors. He cast mass weakness and all my fairies gone from dmg 4-5 to 0-0, and druids/inquisitors to 3-3. So it`s not only make your unit do minimum dmg, but even lowers minimal dmg unit make, with higher intellect. As for sacrifice it`s % is low on first lvl, but on higher lvls and more int points you get insane numbers (with 3rd lvl, and 52 intellect you make 10k dmg, and 365% increase). Mana shield gives 250% defense bonus, and +40mana for 6 hits. Precision give +400%dmg for range units mass effect ... And so on, spells are supposed to work great on high intellect, not for warrior with less then 10 points in it. But on other hand warrior have his own perks.

And another important thing is,that in my opinion you messed with the speed of the creatures too much. On impossible every enemy creature has +1 speed in the beginning(later maybe more) and in some heroes armies again +1 speed and that makes them impossible to stop. So either I kill them on the first round with overpowered shoal or they kill me in the second. There is just no way to distract them,to use different tactics,to slow them, to make a change to your army and strategy. That is all gone, everything lasts 2 max 3 turns and that's it.

That +1 speed is allot in beginning, but later you`ll can use slow/have kids that give -1speed to all enemy units/lvlup tactics skill/or fight enemy units that +1speed means nothing (dragons,fairies,archdemons,demoness ...), or vs enemy heroes that use teleport spell. So that +1 speed is nuisance at start, later you`ll simply except it as normal.

Of course lesser difficulties don't need to be this hard, but you can always control that by the meat percentage - just a suggestion. And the increasing stats are a good control thing too,just the speed is a bad thing.

Simple increase in `meat %` as you said it, means nothing in tactical approach to battle. In Red sands mod for Ap/Cw they made something similar but every stack you fight along the way have different increase of stats by random generator. Bad thing they did there is minimal increase in low number stats : speed for slow units, and hp for weak units. So later in game on Elon for example you find 10000 fairies 10th lvl with 35hp each. Or thousands of barbarians with speed 6 and initiative 12. Increase is good, but not in absolute numbers, but percentages. I agree that +1 speed is allot when you have no units/items/spells ... but that lasts only for a little while(first 3-4 areas).

--Suppression not, just the druid thingie and Rina's ring ,but they were too easy,one shoal and 3 towers are gone

Try some higher lvl items. Fighting with 1000hp towers, that have initiative 15 and cast horribly strong spells is a test I fought marshal baton upgrade, and towers cast 4000dmg fire rain, lightning that shock my units for 5 turns, and summon 500+ bowman/swordman. It was interesting fight.

--I was with Feanora and I did used royal snakes,but anyway without royal snakes in the beginning of The Legend is very hard. For the turtle I also got Bears and ancient bears,because the kids provided bonuses for them and I think the bears were too powerful with bonuses from the wife combined with 2 kids, they had max morale and amazing stats,doing around 1500 dmg to the Turtle in a single hit.

My advice is to save game before you change wife. Just so you can see how different is tactical approach to battles with different lineups with different wife/kids. here both wife and kids are much different then in original the Legend ,and i like change and unique buffs you get with each kid


In the end, about crash with Dirty Butory and Martin Vodash, berserk is my bet. Probably enemy hero cast it, and get in loop trying to control that unit, but cant because it refuses to act. Weird thing is, when i cast berserk on some of my units. it make no problems

EDIT : As for rage spirit exp gain, i checked spirit_common.lua file in the Legend (600B), and compared it to similar file in Ap/Cw exp_pet_hint.lua (6kB) around 10 times larger file. In the Legend only is listed base exp from each spirit , with addexp_spirit in case of master of spirits skill, or some item/kid that gives bonus exp for rage skills. But in Ap/Cw there is code line added for current enemy/ally leadership ratio, and that is great bonus in case of small army fighting larger enemy. i mentioned couple posts before i try lvling spirits with 3x1 inquisitors (rage generators) and 2x1 dryads(sleep - control enemy stacks). This works great for first couple areas because dryads control all 3rd lvl enemy, and i use rage skills every turn. What i didnt expect is that spirit exp gain have absolutely no connection with your army total lds in the legend
In Ap/Cw i had battles where in first turn use some pet dragon rage skill and get 700 exp for it. But here with spirits up to 48th lvl , it will be pain getting them up there New lvls and added effects are great (stun/bleeding for Zerock, freeze for Lina) and i like them. Only problem is later in game when you pass 20 lvl for hero, getting spirits from 35 to 36 lvl takes at least 10 long battles with using mostly rage instead your troops. And as Mat mentioned, changing base exp gain in spirit .atom files might be only solution for now. At least until we get full mod for Ap/Cw and start bug proofing it

[MattCaspermeyer]

It is good to finally see some discussion! So please keep it coming!

With respect to increases, the way it works is it is always a percentage.

So if you have units with a speed of 2, you need a 50% increase to get them up to 3. I like the rounding approach (i.e. 2.5 will get you up to 3 so you can just have a 25% increase in stats). I'm a big fan of stronger units and leaving the impossible 170% leadership increase alone because I think it gets a bit boring when you give the computer insane numbers, but that's me. Why not set this value to 1000 if you really want a challenge? That just seems tedious to me, though, and so I left alead at 170 and decided to make the game harder in other ways. So to that end I created the new bonus modifiers in the difficulty_k section in LOGIC.TXT to implement this design philosophy:

eunit - this is the statistic scaler (or gain) per difficulty level. You'll note here that for impossible it is set to 1.25. So you can scale alead like you've done (to 300%) or you can leave alead alone and change this value. It is your choice.
maplocden - this scales units based on their map location. Smaller values (divisors) give a larger increase to enemy unit statistics that is additive with eunit based on far into the game you are. So for impossible the divisor is 4 so that will give you an additional +25% (100 is the maximum map difficulty value and I think either 0 or 1 is the minimum, so 100/4=25) to enemy unit statistics when you are in the last area (or hardest areas as I think both Murock and the turtle's back give you +25%). When starting in Greenwort, this is only +1% so it scales nicely throughout the game. So with this, the enemy unit statistic bonus scales from 1.25 to 1.5.
releadmax - this is the maximum leadership (in units) that you'll get when you lose a battle and restart outside the castle with the regenerated army.
minstatinc - this specifies the minimum increase in a unit's statistic from the eunit and maplocden bonuses. For impossible this is set to one, and so is why you see units with +1 speed and initiative always. I put this one in as mentioned above, but it is really needed to give units with 1 in their statistic category a bonus as they wouldn't get it until the last area (if at all) with the 1.5 total bonus from eunit and maplocden. But you can set this to 0 and rely on eunit and maplocden by themselves to increase the enemy unit's stats if you'd like.
ehlvldbc - level at which enemy heroes double cast, mentioned previously.
ehmanadbc - mana at which enemy heroes double cast, mentioned previously.

For the 2 above you may be wondering why I don't use the enemy hero's intellect. Well guess what, I can't get their intellect where the double cast bonus must be applied, so I use mana as a pseudo intellect instead.

roundmrgk1, 2, and 3 - these set the rounds where your mana and rage gain change to only 50%, then 25%, and finally 0%.
roundehero, tower, and boss - these set additive rounds to roundmrgk1, 2, and 3 when fighting enemy heroes, towers, and bosses.

So you can see that I've added quite a few knobs you can twist if you find the game too easy / difficult. So I encourage you to play around with these knobs if you're finding my mod to not be satisfying as I think you can see here that you can literally make it impossible if you give too much bonus to enemy unit statistics or shorten the number of rounds where you have nominal mana and rage regeneration.

@Fatt_Shade pretty much brought up all the points about the spirit abilities and really there is not much I can do because of the game's nonlinearity with respect to skipping things that are too difficult and returning to them later.

Case in point: Sleem's level requirements for getting level4 fishes (where you are doing 900-1100 damage) is level 7 (Sleem's level, not your hero's). I could increase this level higher if you'd rather struggle with 475-625 for a bit longer, but you'll find due to the nonlinear gameplay that languishing at this amount of damage can make Evil Shoal pretty useless. And this is pretty much the only skill you can use to level up Sleem rapidly due to the Spirit Experience game mechanics. Also, since Evil Shoal can damage your own units you are mostly limited to using Evil Shoal on round 1 after that it becomes harder to use it without damaging your own troops so the damage needs to be high otherwise you're not going to use it.

Since you're playing Warrior, I think you can appreciate that you can actually now do damage with your Spirits whereas before you pretty much were stuck with Black Hole and using spells. So maybe this will grow on you as you play the game further...

Okay, I'll look into the crashes - Berserk is my guess, too, although I know it has worked in the past. So I'll see if I can track down this problem...

I've already fixed the Griffin / Dragon Egg problem and will post a new update shortly...

Thanks again for the feedback and keep the comments coming!

Matt

/C\/C\

[jorko80]

Hi Matt , Fatt Shade!

So if you have units with a speed of 2, you need a 50% increase to get them up to 3. I like the rounding approach (i.e. 2.5 will get you up to 3 so you can just have a 25% increase in stats).

Ok, I understand that,but that means that later in the game units with just 4 base speed will get to my side on the first turn if they have +2 speed boost ability and if they are combined with good shooters and fliers and it becomes impossible to stop them. That's only an estimate ofcourse,because I didn't played the game to that point. And I guess that dragons and some other creatures will have speeds of 11-12 ,making them absolutely unstoppable. I think that just +1 speed bonus to a creature is more then enough to make it much harder,but I guess I'll try your version and see what happens .

I'm a big fan of stronger units and leaving the impossible 170% leadership increase alone because I think it gets a bit boring when you give the computer insane numbers, but that's me. Why not set this value to 1000 if you really want a challenge? That just seems tedious to me, though, and so I left alead at 170 and decided to make the game harder in other ways. So to that end I created the new bonus modifiers in the difficulty_k section in LOGIC.TXT to implement this design philosophy:

I like this idea.

So you can see that I've added quite a few knobs you can twist if you find the game too easy / difficult. So I encourage you to play around with these knobs if you're finding my mod to not be satisfying as I think you can see here that you can literally make it impossible if you give too much bonus to enemy unit statistics or shorten the number of rounds where you have nominal mana and rage regeneration.

Those knobs are really nice.Thanks for the explanation also.

@Fatt_Shade pretty much brought up all the points about the spirit abilities and really there is not much I can do because of the game's nonlinearity with respect to skipping things that are too difficult and returning to them later.

The nonlinearity is something good in my opinion. I don't want to fight everything I meet in the second I meet it, I want to be challenged and to have to think harder. I like to compare it with HOMM games ,when you see a difficult army you return later for it. But still I'll try playing with a different approach to see the overall feeling. I think I will start a new game with 170% or 200% max as you intended it to be,because later such high number of creatures with such speed will be awful. And ofcourse I need to finish one game to the end to be able to make more complete comments .
And about sacrifice, it is of little use in late game,because the player already have access to many different creatures ,almost always in unlimited numbers, so it is usable in early game, when you find some creatures that are not enough to fill your leadership and with carefull planning you can increase them to the number you like with sacrifice, I just think the initial % should be higher.

Simple increase in `meat %` as you said it, means nothing in tactical approach to battle. In Red sands mod for Ap/Cw they made something similar but every stack you fight along the way have different increase of stats by random generator. Bad thing they did there is minimal increase in low number stats : speed for slow units, and hp for weak units. So later in game on Elon for example you find 10000 fairies 10th lvl with 35hp each. Or thousands of barbarians with speed 6 and initiative 12. Increase is good, but not in absolute numbers, but percentages. I agree that +1 speed is allot when you have no units/items/spells ... but that lasts only for a little while(first 3-4 areas).

I agree percentage increase is better. I played version 1.8 of red sands(russian) and with Grandmaster on top of it. It is really well balanced ,provides much challenge and the levels of the units are well thought. I never saw a barbarian with 12 init, or maybe when they use their special they receive 12 ,but thats normal. I don't know which is the latest english version, but maybe it is not balanced so good.

P.S. Can you guys tell me how to find a specific hero in order to edit him? It was a lot a of searching in order to edit the werewolf hero and now if the game crashes when I fight Butori , I have to search again. I know the numbers are area related somehow,but if you know some specifics I will be thankful.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by jorko80

Hi Matt , Fatt Shade!




Ok, I understand that,but that means that later in the game units with just 4 base speed will get to my side on the first turn if they have +2 speed boost ability and if they are combined with good shooters and fliers and it becomes impossible to stop them. That's only an estimate ofcourse,because I didn't played the game to that point. And I guess that dragons and some other creatures will have speeds of 11-12 ,making them absolutely unstoppable. I think that just +1 speed bonus to a creature is more then enough to make it much harder,but I guess I'll try your version and see what happens .

Your statements are true, but now you may have a use for the Slow Spell and it becomes mass at level 3 and so it is something to consider with respect to strategy. I think you'll end up liking it as you now think about how can you slow the enemy down, and then the Black Dragon's Magic Immunity really comes into play so they get a bit tougher, but not too much.

There are other strategies, too, like you mentioned the Wall and then there's the new improved Ice Thorns that can damage and block your enemies now (although these are more for ground troops) as well as other strategies to slow them down (including flyers), which you'll discover.

Originally Posted by jorko80

The nonlinearity is something good in my opinion. I don't want to fight everything I meet in the second I meet it, I want to be challenged and to have to think harder. I like to compare it with HOMM games ,when you see a difficult army you return later for it. But still I'll try playing with a different approach to see the overall feeling. I think I will start a new game with 170% or 200% max as you intended it to be,because later such high number of creatures with such speed will be awful. And ofcourse I need to finish one game to the end to be able to make more complete comments .

We're in agreement here - that's why I've done what I've done to accommodate the variability in play...

Originally Posted by jorko80

And about sacrifice, it is of little use in late game,because the player already have access to many different creatures ,almost always in unlimited numbers, so it is usable in early game, when you find some creatures that are not enough to fill your leadership and with carefull planning you can increase them to the number you like with sacrifice, I just think the initial % should be higher.

I'll look into Sacrifice and see if it merits an increase, but one thing you'll learn as you play is that your spells continuously improve throughout the game because there are quite a few extra bonuses that you get from my mod that weren't included in the stock game (for example, for every hero level you get a +1% increase in spell power).

So like Fatt_Shade mentioned spells can get pretty potent towards the end if you're a Mage. Since you're playing Warrior, you can't expect it to be as good as the Mage's and so perhaps Sacrifice is not the best strategy for a Warrior to boost rare troops early in the game. Plus I did try to pepper in some of the more obscure troops by editing the *.LOC files. If you get plants (i.e. Royal Thorns and Ents later) you can grow their numbers by using Thorns / Thorn Warrior's Gift of Life Skill.

Plus, I'm not sure if you've noticed the containers (i.e. eggs, sprouts, coffins, etc.), but they are now variable and that provides another way to replenish troops. So for example, Spider Eggs produce all the spider variants (it is random) and the same with Snake Eggs. You can get either Skeletons or Archers from Skeleton Coffins and Vampires or Ancient Vampires from Vampire Coffins. You can get Royal Thorns from Sprouts if you have enough and the same is true with getting Ancient Ents from Ent Seeds if you use enough.

I edited the *.LOC files to increase the chance of finding these containers in the various shops throughout the lands. For example, there is now a chance that a Ghost ship can sell Skeleton or Vampire Coffins or the Royal Thorn in Greenwort may be able to sell you enough Thorn Sprouts so that you can get a Royal Thorn for your army.

These are troops that aren't used as often, but offer a path for increasing their numbers when it is hard to find them in shops.

Originally Posted by jorko80

I agree percentage increase is better. I played version 1.8 of red sands(russian) and with Grandmaster on top of it. It is really well balanced ,provides much challenge and the levels of the units are well thought. I never saw a barbarian with 12 init, or maybe when they use their special they receive 12 ,but thats normal. I don't know which is the latest english version, but maybe it is not balanced so good.

Sounds interesting, I didn't really know about the Grandmaster that you mentioned, but it sounds like they did a great job from your impression of it.

Originally Posted by jorko80

P.S. Can you guys tell me how to find a specific hero in order to edit him? It was a lot a of searching in order to edit the werewolf hero and now if the game crashes when I fight Butori , I have to search again. I know the numbers are area related somehow,but if you know some specifics I will be thankful.

I found the error (Shroud) and fixed it in a new update so you can download it.

I do have an Excel Spreadsheet with the *.HERO file references and their original statistics as well as my enemy skill design sheet and the new hero designs. I'll snap out the HERO file reference worksheet and post it on here for reference...

Once again, thanks for your comments - they've really been interesting and helpful...

Matt

/C\/C\

[jorko80]

Your statements are true, but now you may have a use for the Slow Spell and it becomes mass at level 3 and so it is something to consider with respect to strategy. I think you'll end up liking it as you now think about how can you slow the enemy down, and then the Black Dragon's Magic Immunity really comes into play so they get a bit tougher, but not too much.

You make it sound as the slow spell was useless, but that was the first spell I wanted to aquire before ,especially in GM . And now in the beginning it's a bit useless and later we'll see

Plus, I'm not sure if you've noticed the containers (i.e. eggs, sprouts, coffins, etc.), but they are now variable and that provides another way to replenish troops. So for example, Spider Eggs produce all the spider variants (it is random) and the same with Snake Eggs. You can get either Skeletons or Archers from Skeleton Coffins and Vampires or Ancient Vampires from Vampire Coffins. You can get Royal Thorns from Sprouts if you have enough and the same is true with getting Ancient Ents from Ent Seeds if you use enough.

I discovered that yesterday, I like it a lot, finally some use for these things, I like it when all the things in the game are usable and make you think harder what to choose to do with them ,not just sell them.

Sounds interesting, I didn't really know about the Grandmaster that you mentioned, but it sounds like they did a great job from your impression of it.

About that mod, it aims to remove all abusive strategies in the game, not just increasing the meat% . So there are a lot of changes to creatures,abilities and everything. For example the mage can cast double only 3 times at expert level. The balancing is amazing. You are thrown in the game and seeing the armies, you wonder : LOL how the hell can I kill that? . But knowing that the russian guys did it, means that there is a way . The first thing is realizing the truth that you are not ready to fight right away,so you start thinking : can I perform some quests in order to become stronger, what is possible without fighting and etc. Also when you are a bit familiar with KB , the original impossible difficulty really feels as normal, absolutely easy.

I found the error (Shroud) and fixed it in a new update so you can download it.

Thanks

I do have an Excel Spreadsheet with the *.HERO file references and their original statistics as well as my enemy skill design sheet and the new hero designs. I'll snap out the HERO file reference worksheet and post it on here for reference...

Thank you very much for this .

So yesterday, I started your mod again, this time at 170% with a mage hero. Only 2 changes in logic.txt , the money income is 0.4 and so far it is good. And the boss attack and hp is 500% and the turtle was a bit easy,but I guess next time I will make it 1000% as in GM. As I think of it now, your mod makes my creatures even stronger then in the original game and the bosses suck big time, leaving them with no changes makes them something quite ordinary and they shouldn't be. And also the name "impossible" should stand for itself.
So far I managed to clear Darion without the swamp, then cleared the turtle and got to the pirate lands to see if there is something interesting and performing 2-3 not fighting quests to hopefully raise 1 level. Now the feeling and the challenge with the mage is quite better than with the warrior. The spirits are hard to use every battle as it should be with a mage, my shoal does only 250-350 so it's completely normal. So my thoughts about that are that the shoal must be balanced somehow. It's like having a chain lightning that costs 10 mana and does 1000 damage to 5 units in the beginning of the game with a mage for example.
Two questions :
- I've read that the ghosts have 80% might damage resistance, but in my games they have 95% ,is that supposed to be in "impossible" ? Anyway I managed to kill the undead armies, but they are quite a challenge compared to the other armies and the feeling is different. Maybe 90% should be enough. I will see what happens in the late game.
- On level 4 with the mage I was offered 72 leadership and took it. Then on level 6 I was offered 76 leadership , that was a bit shocking, is it normal ? Can you give me the chart by which the mage receives leadership ?

P.S. Just found a really unpleasant bug. The heroes I fight in castles don't appear in battle, it's just the army without any hero bonuses. That applies to Baron Norge, Frogus Bagaba and Enemen. I tried to fight Lucky James and there everything seems normal. The first three I did not find in your xls-description so maybe you didn't changed them ,but something prevents the game from using their original .hero files.

[Fatt_Shade]

You make it sound as the slow spell was useless, but that was the first spell I wanted to acquire before ,especially in GM . And now in the beginning it's a bit useless and later we'll see

Slow is not useless on start, just not strong enough. As i mentioned before, now all spells work as described in original game, but didnt work like that. Now with every 15intellect you get +1 turn for spells that have lasting effect. So for 1 lvl slow and 15 intellect you`ll have -2 speed for enemy units. For 3rd lvl slow and 30 intellect, you`ll have -4 speed to all enemy, which is great. And as Mat said, spells are suposed to be mage`s best weapon, now warriors.

And the boss attack and hp is 500% and the turtle was a bit easy,but I guess next time I will make it 1000% as in GM.

Since here we have only 3 boss fights (Turtle, Kraken, Spider) and each is a bit easy for time you`re supposed to fight it. When this mod goes to Ap/Cw i expect to have a bit more fun in Droid and Gremilion battles, not to mention Baal and Ktahu end game bosses, with huge summoning stacks and strong AOE attacks.

As for your questions, i`ll try to help as i can :
1) Ghosts resistances - ghost have nominal 80% physical res, but for impossible difficulty they get 25% of that, so it`s 80% + 0,25x80% = 100% but since max resistance for some dmg type is 95% then it`s capped to 95%.
And they have vunerability to magic -100%, and they gain 25% of that for impossible diff settings, so it`s -100% +0.25x100 = -75%. So they gain resistance compared to normal diff lvl.
Same goes for plants and fire vunerability , or some human units and physical dmg.

2) Here all is random, and that includes lvlup rewards. Try to get near lvlup, and go to some are and save game. Fight 1 battle to get lvl and see choices, save after that. Load before battle and change area and fight to gain lvl. You`ll get different reward choice. I`m not sure how this is calculated, but as i figured it out, harder areas give higher rewards. So if you gain lvl 5 in Greenwort you`ll get lower reward then in Marshan swamp, because swamp have harder battles to fight and therefor give higher rewards on lvlup.
SPOILER :
Simple test for this is just on start (begin new game to try it). Right on start after talking to king go to swamp, and take quest to blow up alchemist cauldron, and receive stinky potion form witch but dont go to alchemist. Save game. Open inventory , and use potion (right click on it, and `use`) it should give you some exp points 150 for paladin, 100 for warrior, and 200 for mage class and that should be enough for you to lvlup), and you`ll see what reward you get for 2nd lvl in swamp. Load game, go to Greeworth use potion, and see reward for it, load game go to Arlania/Verlon forest ... I think you get my point. For tactician with enough nerves this can give significant bonuses on start of game. Later 15+ lvl it become difficult to calculate how much battles you need to make this happen , and in areas you cleared there are no enemy stacks for you to lvlup on. For this i always have some high lvl item to suppress.

Hope i helped

[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by jorko80

You make it sound as the slow spell was useless, but that was the first spell I wanted to aquire before ,especially in GM . And now in the beginning it's a bit useless and later we'll see

Okay, sounds good - I just wanted to point out that increased speed can be countered...

Originally Posted by jorko80

I discovered that yesterday, I like it a lot, finally some use for these things, I like it when all the things in the game are usable and make you think harder what to choose to do with them ,not just sell them.

Glad you like them!

Originally Posted by jorko80

About that mod, it aims to remove all abusive strategies in the game, not just increasing the meat% . So there are a lot of changes to creatures,abilities and everything. For example the mage can cast double only 3 times at expert level. The balancing is amazing. You are thrown in the game and seeing the armies, you wonder : LOL how the hell can I kill that? . But knowing that the russian guys did it, means that there is a way . The first thing is realizing the truth that you are not ready to fight right away,so you start thinking : can I perform some quests in order to become stronger, what is possible without fighting and etc. Also when you are a bit familiar with KB , the original impossible difficulty really feels as normal, absolutely easy.

I set out to do this a well, but only with the most abusive strategies and I don't like to limit spells except by their power and your mana. For example, Invisibility is limited to level 4 units so you can no longer do the single Emerald Green Dragon strategy, but you're only limited by the number of crystals you get to get it as high of a level as you need and then the mana that you have during combat.

Also the mana_rage_gain_k that reduces and prevents mana and rage regeneration during combat eliminates strategies of going 100 rounds to rebuild your army for no losses. Also, you'll note that your troops become tired during extended combat and they'll begin to lose their effectiveness.

I'm not sure what you mean by the double spell (unless you're referring to Phantom), but these types of strategies are mitigated by the fact that a lot of the enemy heroes have the Dispel spell and so that spell is easily dealt with by enemy heroes (as well as the aforementioned mana_rage_gain_k).

Originally Posted by jorko80

So yesterday, I started your mod again, this time at 170% with a mage hero. Only 2 changes in logic.txt , the money income is 0.4 and so far it is good. And the boss attack and hp is 500% and the turtle was a bit easy,but I guess next time I will make it 1000% as in GM. As I think of it now, your mod makes my creatures even stronger then in the original game and the bosses suck big time, leaving them with no changes makes them something quite ordinary and they shouldn't be. And also the name "impossible" should stand for itself.

Most of the starting units were left untouched so it is possible that it is due to other changes.

I'd probably be more apt to make the Turtle's powers stronger rather than just give it more health. But you have to remember that this is a gate to other areas of the game and making it too hard would just turn people off. So perhaps with you changing its health it's then a personal choice for you to make it harder. I think you can see that there are probably enough knobs in my mod to make it really challenging for you, but since I didn't touch this area of the game I'll think about possible changes here. For the Kraken and the Spider there's really nothing I can do there as no matter how hard I make it you can just skip them and do them at the end of the game (well, I guess if you want to marry Mirabella then maybe you have incentive to fight the Kraken earlier).

Originally Posted by jorko80

So far I managed to clear Darion without the swamp, then cleared the turtle and got to the pirate lands to see if there is something interesting and performing 2-3 not fighting quests to hopefully raise 1 level. Now the feeling and the challenge with the mage is quite better than with the warrior. The spirits are hard to use every battle as it should be with a mage, my shoal does only 250-350 so it's completely normal. So my thoughts about that are that the shoal must be balanced somehow. It's like having a chain lightning that costs 10 mana and does 1000 damage to 5 units in the beginning of the game with a mage for example.

You'll note that there are greater differences between the hero classes now and so you saw how good the Warrior was with Rage Spirits early and conversely you're finding out how much less effective they are with the Mage.

I did make some slight level changes in the latest update to Evil Shoal requiring a higher Sleem level to get to the damages you were seeing so maybe it is enough, but it doesn't really affect the game in the latter part if you can maximize that spirit ability, which you haven't seen yet.

I think for the most part when it comes to the spirit abilities is that all of them are useful if you decide to put points into them, but due to the spirit level-up mechanics you'll want to maximize your mass damage abilities since they garner the most experience per use. So you'll find that the utility of the single or no damage abilities becomes second to leveling your spirits.

Originally Posted by jorko80

Two questions :
- I've read that the ghosts have 80% might damage resistance, but in my games they have 95% ,is that supposed to be in "impossible" ? Anyway I managed to kill the undead armies, but they are quite a challenge compared to the other armies and the feeling is different. Maybe 90% should be enough. I will see what happens in the late game.

Fatt_Shade is 100% correct on this assessment - don't forget that all enemy unit statistics are modified by the difficulty level scaler plus the map location divisor.

Originally Posted by jorko80

- On level 4 with the mage I was offered 72 leadership and took it. Then on level 6 I was offered 76 leadership , that was a bit shocking, is it normal ? Can you give me the chart by which the mage receives leadership ?

The game used to use the leadtable in HERO.TXT, but it was changed I'm guessing in patch 1.6 or 1.7. Now the leadership increase is the range specified in the hero's level-up section times their level. For mage, that is 10 to 20 times their level. So you can see that you were pretty close to the max at level 4 (20 * 4 = 80) whereas level 6 you were a bit below average (15 * 6 = 90). Curse that random number generator at level 6, but praise it at level 4!

Originally Posted by jorko80

P.S. Just found a really unpleasant bug. The heroes I fight in castles don't appear in battle, it's just the army without any hero bonuses. That applies to Baron Norge, Frogus Bagaba and Enemen. I tried to fight Lucky James and there everything seems normal. The first three I did not find in your xls-description so maybe you didn't changed them ,but something prevents the game from using their original .hero files.

You know, I thought the same thing as you - didn't they partake in the combat? But then I looked for their *.HERO file and they didn't have one. I also went and looked up what was supposed to take place with this combat (I can't quite remember it was either in the *.QST or *.LOC files (or maybe both!)) and noticed that there was no hero listed so I thought I was simply mistaken and that these battles were always without their heroes.

Am I mistaken here? I can't find where I changed this and I don't find any reference to these heroes partaking so I think it was just that my memory (and perhaps yours) were wrong here and those heroes never partook in the combat.

Like you said Lucky James is there and you can see his *.HERO file in my list (you even see some heroes that are not in the game that I found in the *.HERO files) so this is how these battles go, I guess.

Well, thanks again for the comments. I can see that your level of play is pretty high and so it will be interesting to see how you do when you play the game further than you have and whether you run into any trouble...

Matt

/C\/C\