Any way to change number of points to spend on pretenders

[LintMan]

I think it'd be cool to set up a game where everyone got more (or less) points to spend on their scales and pretender (say 600/700 per race or even just 200)- is there any way to do this, maybe through a command line argument?

[Vodalus]

The only way I can think of to do what you are suggesting would be to create a mod. In the mod you would change the unit stats (stats, starting equipment, special abilities, magic paths and levels, ...) for some of the Pretenders to be in line with the power level you wanted. Baseline Pretenders are simply defined as regular units and can be modded just like regular units (well, actually like special units since some commands only work, I believe, with Pretenders).

Modding all of the Pretenders would be a large amount of work, so you would probably just want to know which Pretenders people were going to play and just change those. Also, you probably wouldn't want to do it with AI players since they might not pick the modded Pretenders creating a serious power imbalance.

V

[PvK]

You might be able to give a negative cost to all the pretenders... subtract X number of points from all of their costs.

PvK

[Vodalus]

Hello PvK,

I seemed to remember that there was some problem with negative point Pretenders, so I just tried modding a couple. The negative point Pretenders were interpreted as having a cost of 10 points. A 0 point Pretender cost 0 points. Various positive scores work as expected.

Given the price of most Pretenders if you wanted to make a 100 or 200 point change you would have to mod their abilities as well as, or instead of, modding their point cost.

V

[PvK]

Ah, interesting, ok.

PvK

[Gandalf Parker]

You used to be able to create a pretender that far exceeded points by using MAP commands instead of MOD. Now many of those tricks seem to kickoff the "nation has cheated" thing and replace him genericly. I guess to keep the host of a game from cheating that way.

[Psitticine]

The 2.11 Version currently being tested has a cheat-protection bypass for situations like that. Everybody has to flip in on in MP for it to work, I believe, but then it would allow things that aren't cheats as far as the players are concerned (i.e. high-price pre-coded gods) but that the game would object to.