Mod: MA Skavenblight 1.15 hotfix

[Sombre]

Attached is a second preview showing a few things I've been working on, namely the Screaming Bell, Stormvermin, Plague Monk and Censor Bearer.

I'm sorry about the size, I have to use .bmp because .gif can't handle that many colours and the units get all messed up.

Most of these units are still a bit rough, but the Screaming Bell is a special case because it's much further from being finished than the rest. I just thought I'd show you the shape of the thing.

The Censor bearer is in there twice because I can't decide if I like the version with a gas cloud around the 'flail' or not. I might redo it.

[DigitalSin]

With the gas, with the gas! Much shinier!

[Szumo]

Nice, can't wait for the final version.

[BandarLover]

*Jaw drop*

Freaking.....



Awesome

[llamabeast]

Also very excited indeed about this.

About poison immunity: I haven't double checked, but I don't think there's any reason to think it doesn't work. Check the manual about how poison damage works. Essentially poison weapons apply a certain amount of "poison damage", 10% of which (rounded up) gets converted to real damage each round. So, lets say 10 poison damage is applied to two units: Unit A has no poison immunity, Unit B has 50% immunity. Both of them will start taking 1 damage per round, but Unit B will only take it for 5 rounds (total of 5 damage), whereas Unit A will take it for the full 10 rounds (total of 10 damage).

Hope that makes sense. So you can usefully give them poison immunity.

[Sombre]

I believe you're right when the poison damage is coming from weapons and is like 10 or so damage. It will slowly be dealt until it's all done.

But when it's a poison cloud that does very little damage, just several shots of 1 or 2 points, the immunity doesn't seem to be that helpful.

Anyway, I've been playing around with plague monks right now and I think I might have made them a bit too good. They get three attacks at the moment, which makes them excellent vs high def troops - that's something I may well have to change.

Here are the stats.

----Plague Monk

#newmonster 2146
#copystats 1010
#clearmagic#clearmagic#clearmagic
#spr1 "./Skaven/Plague Monk.tga"
#spr2 "./Skaven/Plague Monk2.tga"
#name "Pestilens Plague Monk"
#descr "Plague Monks form the bulk of Clan Pestilens' troops. They wear tattered robes and bandages to cover their disease ridden, sore-covered and horribly scarred bodies. So used are they to constant pain and disease that it appears to affect them not at all, indeed it is taken as a sign of their God's blessing and they must be hacked to pieces before they will cease fighting, such is their fanatical zeal. They are constantly surrounded by both putrid stench and clouds of flies which bite and distract their opponents; furthermore they have been exposed to so many toxins and poisons that they have become nearly immune to them."
#hp 13
#size 2
#prot 3
#mor 9
#mr 10
#enc 3
#str 9
#att 10
#def 11
#prec 8
#mapmove 2
#ap 15
#gcost 9
#rcost 1
#weapon "short sword"
#weapon 699
#weapon "Fly Swarm"
#poisonres 80
#stealthy 0
#maxage 30
#berserk 1
#siegebonus 1
#swampsurvival
#end

As you can see, they have 80% poison immunity. Most skaven have between 30-50%. The Globadiers have 70.

Flyswarm is a 1 AN damage capped weapon that counts as poison, so doesn't work on poison immune stuff like undead. Weapon 699 is 'pestilens bite' and is a -1 attack, -1 def, -1 damage (+ strength) bite which has the secondary effect of disease.

The Censer bearer is giving me trouble due to buggy mod commands. Basically I'm going to bite the bullet and just give them a perm poison cloud rather than aoe poison melee attacks ala snake bladder stick. They still whomp all kinds of *** with berserk 3 and great offensive stats (for a skaven) along with a high damage weapon that gets a bonus vs shields. Like the monks though, they do die quick if they get hit/shot.

Right now my favourite unit is gutter runners. They're expensive and pretty fragile, but they can kill the hell out of enemy elites with all that poison and skill.

[Sombre]

The latest cool thing in the mod is a change I made to the skavenslaves.

Now it's pretty clear in warhammer that routing skavenslaves should have no effect on the morale of clanrats, stormvermin etc - they are expendable chaff only expected to absorb fire and tie up units. The problem is that with the Dom3 morale system, which has your army rout once it's taken a set percentage of casualties, losing hordes of chaff to arrow fire etc is very likely to make your real troops scurry off the battlefield.

So faced with this problem I came up with a neat solution, which appears to have very few drawbacks. I made it so you buy the skavenslaves in sets of 3 - 3 of them counts as one monster for purposes of leadership and casualties in game. It has graphics that show 3 slaves standing together. Now when it takes damage, it changes into a set of 2 slaves together, with appropriate graphics. And finally when that takes damage, it turns into a single skaven slave on his own. The group of 3 and 2 slaves has a size of 3 to keep them a bit more spaced out - 2 slaves have 2 club attacks with ambidex to represent the two skaven swinging away, and 3 slaves have the same - 2 attacks because the third skaven isn't close enough to melee attack - just like if you had swarms of size 2 units really.

This causes a slight problem - as size 3, they can't be trampled by minotaurs, maybe some other things. A very minor problem though, I think.

The main goal is, I believe, a total success - you can field these chaff/useless milita which take time for the enemy to kill, but shouldn't end up routing your entire army.