Now updated for LH 1.8 compatibility. Download here via Nexus.
Updated to version 1.8a, includes compatability with LH 1.8 as well as a number of bug fixes, enhancements and balance tweaks. See here for the full change log.
http://demonsandwizards.wikidot.com/
http://demonsandwizards.wikidot.com/main:changelog
Heavenfall – For the BG Unitstats library, a few bits from Children of Storm, some ideas borrowed from the Goetia Mod, the Cacus Giant, lots of invaluable advice and assistance regarding modding FE/LH. Go checkout Children of Storm if you haven't already (http://childrenofstorm.wikidot.com/).
Davrovana - Faction, Sovereign, Champion backstories.Nightmurderer03 - Lots of ideas, unit designs, beta testing and feedback.
ManiiNames, NaytchSG – beta testing the early versions.jeffqyzt2 – Champion backstories.parrottmath – Maul debuff mod and his outstanding contribution to FE/LH modding.DsRaider - Some faction traits, some bits from AIPlus, inspiration from his various great mods.Primal_Savage - For the ClotheLootFix and lots of help with LH modding along the way.OliverFA_306, GfireflyE, Murteas, Brainjuggler, Naidrev, LordTheRon (and lots of others) - for providing ideas, feedback and discussion which is invaluable when working on this stuff.fsemprini – For the Summoner Path selection graphic.brich1212 - for the original Ranger path mod.
Stardock - for an awesome game
Yep! Though I still want the summons to have some maintenance cost also. So I think it's all about getting the mana vs summon pool balance right. With the dragon example, another way to tackle it would be to (greatly) increase the summon pool cost/maintenance... that way you'd only be able to call the dragon if you pick up some of the other (channeling skills) also, and/or not summon anything else etc.
So lots of options. Will do another version soon and probably incorporate a bit of all of these options to water down the dragon situation.
It's a good idea, I have been thinking about something similar. Just need to figure out how to get the AI to know when it is appropriate to cast the spell, though I think that is achievable. It might also be possible to have other spells that buff/debuff summoned units.
Something occurred to me. I've been running D+W on top of the 1.3b patch, with the substantial AI improvements but didn't test many games before trying the mod. Maybe they amped up the difficulty, made the AI heroes smarter and level faster. Anyone else been playing 1.3b?
Not me personally, I haven't gone to it because of the issue reported so far. I guess it's possible 1.3b has affected the level up somehow... certainly seems possible given the other weird behaviors reported.
I would like to see all (or most) summons directly linked to your spell spheres, with the summoner path effecting how strong and easy to cast they are. The reason I mention this is because right now, most of the summons' levels are not directly linked to amount of shards controlled. Some of them are, and the decision seems to be random.
+1
There definitely needs to be a consistent system. I felt the whole spell distribution in vanilla was just totally random and haphazard. Leaving the core summons in the spheres and adding buffs and tactical skills to the summoner path with few or no new summons would be quite fitting. It would also be consistent with the spheres being the main source of new spells and path traits being more for support.
Edit: make sure the mage path has a consistent system, too. IE: magic missiles are better than Flame Dart and Shadow Bolt.
Really nice concepts abob101. Looking forward to your new version.
Yep that's a fair point. Initially I had it setup so that (almost) all the summons got +1 level per shard, so even the Shrills etc. So in the early days it was consistent, you knew you'd pretty much always get a level bonus for shards. But I removed it from a lot of units.. mainly the first 3 levels of summons in the spellbook because they are the ones that can get grouping... and I though it might end up making it too powerful.
I still like the idea of having some unit summons only available in the path itself (like the OuterPlanes guys for example)... because in a similar way to having a few spells available in the Mage path, it means that there are some "special" summons that only the Summoner path can get.
I get that some people would prefer to have pretty much all spells organised under the spell spheres/books though to help with finding things and getting consistency. And I definitely get the shard bonus confusion, it's far from obvious at the moment which summons get a shard level bonus.
I don't really want to move spells just yet... but one option might be to make it so that all the summons under the spellbooks/sphers get shard bonuses... and the ones in the Summoning path don't. Will have a think about it.
Next patch will mostly be focused on balance.. need to nerf/fix the drake/dragon stuff. Will try and do something with the shard level stuff to make it more consistent though.
Then after that should have a version that includes 4 new spell schools.
Thanks again for the feedback guys.
That sounds like a great idea. It rewards people for their shard choices and starting spell spheres, while still providing summons as rewards for the summoning specialization.
Hi Abob101,
I love this mod, its very well implemented and the AI uses the summons too!, it would be nice however if the ai unleashed some high level summons upon the player.
I really haven't found any noteworthy bugs or anything and regarding balance i can only agree with what people have said, decrease the cost of low and mid end summons and increase it for high level summons i mean 20 mana for a weak skeleton?, in the beginning of the game that's too much.
Would be nice if you could buff high level elemental summons(fire magic, earth magic, air magic, water magic) because right now only the death demon is truly useful, the Archon is good but not THAT good, might need a little buffing, but Grave elementals and crow demons(the ones i have played) are lacking power they can't hold their ground against mid end troops.
Thanks for this!.
report:
v1.3a, tiny map, 3 opponents, challenging/challenging, dense monsters.
I finally finished a whole game with this mod and I've got nothing but praise! I made my Sov a mage and had a blast with all the new stuff. The passives were useful and well placed, as were the new spells. I had to think long and hard over which skill to take on each level up. There were no oddities with crazy high enemy heroes or one base AIs.
My only concern would be consider a shared cooldown for the magic missiles (normal and mass); if you have 2-3 schools of magic you can just cycle through them. Or, if you want to simply a little, just make a single arcane style MM.
As a mage my summons were pretty weak, even the high level ones. The default lvl 5 death demon was inferior to my standard troops in chain. I'll try the summoner path next see what a REAL summoner plays like.
Keep up the good work!
The summon Ignys spell seems to have a problem. Everytime I try to summon it, it tells me I do not meet the requirements. Costs me 40 mana and no Ignys. Am I missing something or is this a bug? Could be that it's not working since Kayla doesn't have fire magic, but my other hero Badra does? But with other summon spells that's never a problem.
LordTheRon - good spot. I've been able to replicate it and unfortunately looks like it's a bug. The bummer is that it's not just the Ignys spell... there's nothing particularly wrong with that spell... you can replicate it with any other spell under the right conditions.
I am presuming you have 2 champions in the one stack and you're trying to cast a summon spell (Ignys) that has a cast time greater than 1 ?
What I found is that if you do that, it works fine if the caster is the unit first in the stack... or at least the first champion in the stack. Seems that the game checks the caster has the right prereqs when the spell is completed.... but unfortunately it seems to check the first champion in the stack always (rather than the one who cast the spell).
I was a bit worried when I went for the multi-turn casting for strategic summons that something like this might come up, given there aren't actually any multi turn spells in the default game.
OK so assuming I can't fix the bug described above (and it's highly unlikely unfortunately), i'd really welcome any thoughts on what to do about it... I can think of a few options....
1) Leave it - just live with the bug and write it up as a known issue in the readme
2) Scrap the multi turn casting times for strategic summons, possibly increasing mana cost or something else for strategic summons instead to balance it
3) Change it so that the summons happens immediately, but the caster is immobilized for X turns instead. So this would be fairly similar to how it is now, except that the unit would get summoned at the start of the spell cast. Movement would be set to zero, and hopefully it would also be possible to prevent any spells casting from that unit for X turns also.
Edit.... just thought of another one...
4) Remove the casting time but give the strategic summons a cooldown time. So basically convert the casting time to a cooldown time. Possibly also increase mana cost for strategic summons for balance (as in option 2).
Edit2, yet another one...
5) Make it so that when you cast a strategic summons, the caster is unable to cast *any* other strategic summons for X turns where X is the power level of the summons spell. So Shrills summons are power level 1, you can cast another summons after 1 turn. A Death Demon is power level 5 summons so you can't summon anything else for 5 turns. So it's like a cooldown but affects all summons for that caster. I've tested this one and it seems to work ok.... the only downside is that for period where the particular champion can't cast any summons... all their summons spells are removed from the spellbook (rather than grayed out). Not ideal but probably ok.
Thoughts?
That is correct abob101, it happens with two champs (sov and champ actually) in one stack. As for your solutions, I wouldn't go for 1 as this will happen occasionally if one isn't paying attention. 2 would go best with the flow of the game I think. I'd vote for that.
Really enjoying the mod BTW! Kayla is currently a mage and I like the options and flexilibity this gives me. Even with essence pools and some good essence spots I'm short on mana thanks to all those options.
Cool thanks for the feedback
Working on a couple of updates for this now, will probably include a fix for this bug also.
Would be a shame to scrap the casting time, I liked it as a way of stopping summons abuse... will have to think about it.
My own vote would be for #3. The only time I can see this being to the player's advantage is if they are defending and are summoning up a horde to keep invaders at bay.
Thanks ManiiNames. I'm going to do a test for #3 so I can at least be sure whether it will work or not.
Just thought of another option, I could remove the casting time but add a cooldown for strategic summons. Tactical already has a cooldown so it would mean they work kinda the same. Possibly also increase mana cost for strategic summons for balance.
I did a quick test of the option 3 above, and although it works to set movement to 0 for a few turns... I can't seem to get it to prevent further spells.... so it might not be an option
Cooldown in combination with extra costs sounds like a fine balance.
I know Heavenfall implemented a spell for the Centaur Sovereign in which he is summoning something and is locked down for a few turns while doing so. He has another one for the Lizardman Sovereign in which he is casting a buffing spell (Endless). You might look and see what he did, it is completely possible the same errors exist in his code as in yours, or he might have found a way to work around it?
Thanks wasn't aware of that.. just had a look, it's (Centaur Sov spell) setup the same as my stuff. Probably unlikely you'd ever see it though because it's just the one spell and would only manifest if the Sov was not on top of the stack.
I guess I would vote for option 4, or option 1 (Just leave it). Having a cool down seems reasonable (although I really liked the immobilize effect). I wonder if we could get Derek to look at this and help us out. It wouldn't hurt to send him a PM, he and Brad have been pretty good to respond to me when I had questions.
edit: This probably causes problems for the AI quite a bit actually as they tend to run with 2 - 3 heroes per group a lot of times.
Guys thanks for all the input. It's really helpful because I like to bounce ideas around.
I've just been working on this now.... i've got yet another option which i'm thinking about... i've edited the previous post... but to make it easier here's the list of options again:
For now i've ruled out #1... I actually like it the way it was, but I really don't like that bug.
#3 was basically trying to replicate the casting time... however although the immobilization is possible, preventing casting of any spells is not so easy. It just gets messy.
So i'm looking at going for either 4 or 5 and doing a release with that change and a few balance changes. What do you think about option 5?
Thanks.
When I see this mod it makes me wonder why summoner and evoker aren't separate paths?
I think I still lean toward 4 as it probably has the fewest side effects. I guess I'd want to see how you do 5 before I could vote for it. However, either way you do it I will play with it, it just is that good.
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