Mod: UnitGen - Random nations with procedural sprites!

[elmokki]

After a couple of days of doing nothing for UnitGen I've:

- Refined cavalry generation somewhat. You can now specify precise maximum and minimum armor (chest armor right now) for a mount type. This was done since the generic "light", "heavy", "medium" tags were a bit lacking. Some units just need a custom range of possible riders.

- Added nation tag system. Each nation gets a couple of tags - maximum of 3, but usually 0 or 1. These tags are stuff that range from very influencing to very minor. Currently I've added a preliminary list of some tags and they'll include stuff like increased chance of stealthy units, increased chance of dualwielding, nation wide +1 mr, nation wide +1 str, nation wide light cold resistance, nation wide light fire resistance, advanced, primitive, increased chance of cavalry. Tags have opposite tags that can't be chosen together with them.

Currently only two things work regarding these though. Dual wield chance may drastically increase with suitable tags or slightly decrease if you have advanced. Dual wield generation mechanics are going to change sooner or later which'll make the effect of this more major. Tags also affect item selection when items have tags defined for them - currently that's just primitive and advanced.

The effect of this item selection is currently that suitable items for your tags (ie primitive items for primitive nations or advanced ones for advanced nations) get a double chance of being selected for a nation and the opposite items (ie advanced items for primitive nations) for your nation get a fourth of the base chance.

[elmokki]

Today I "fixed" nation naming, ie made four consonants in a row and three same letters in a row impossible.

I also worked on militia/start unit selection, which is working fairly well right now, but we'll see how much work it'll need once I get to trimming nation rosters to manageable sizes, which'll be soon.

And of course as always tweaked item data. Also added Chakrams (actually got a graphic) and Sticks and stones (no graphic)

There's a 19th of February version up. I know the bonus weapons give names to units far too often and that crossbows/shortbows/chakrams as seocndary weapons should be rarer. This'll get fixed eventually.

[elmokki]

kianduatha gave an awesome idea for naming units. Now apart from some very long nation names instead of "heavy archer", "javelineer", "spearman", "infantry", "lancer" you get stuff like (nation names bolded):

Haakagian Archer
Uzumish Chariot
Vaainine Heavy Infantry
Tenchiide Lancer
Zasisic Crossbowman
Gomirian Falchioneer
Zekkan Axe Thrower
Gomnagomish Heavy Serpent Cavalry

In the future I might make just the elites get this kind of naming. We'll see.

[elmokki]

23th of Feb version up.

I worked quite a bit on filters that go through units and give them stuff if they fulfill the requirements. Currently there's nothing very noticeable with this since filters are handling just bonus weapon and dual wielding generation, but those two have both changed.

Dual wielding can now convert any unit to a dualwielder instead of turning shields to onehanded weapons. This makes the 5% dual wield chance higher in effect and I'll have to consider lowering it if it generates dual wielders for nations without primitive / dualwielding / berserking tags too often.

Bonus ranged weapon generation algorithm has been changed. Nations posses a bonus weapon affinity now, which is from 0 to 1. Currently it's given completely randomly, but I'm fairly sure I'll make some tags affect this as well as possibly giving extra affinity to such bonus ranged weapons that suit the national tags. Bonus weapon affinity determines two things. How heavy units can get bonus weapons and what weapon-shield configurations can get them. Currently with an affinity of 1 you'll probably see tons of bonus weapons, but the heaviest possible units still won't get them. Also some bonus weapons (chakrams and sticks & stones) have additional limitations and standards ignore the affinity completely, but have a limit in generateability. This feature is something that will recieve tweaks at some point since it still is far from perfect.

I've also worked on trimming nation unit rosters since obviously every human nation won't have 4 ranged, 1 chariot, 4-9 infantry and 2-4 horsemen. Currently nations get 8 to 13 units if I recall correctly. This'll get heavy tweaks - currently it's a very rough algorithm, but in general generates fairly good lineups.

Elitefying some units is pretty much an obvious next step since that is heavily tied with filters. That does need a bit of extra work compared to just adding filters though.

[shatner]

Those are some really cool developments elmokki. This creation of yours is getting pretty snazzy and I, along with many others, I'm sure, look forward to its continued refinement.

[elmokki]

Two major features shown, neither is even nearly ready enough for me to bother update the dev version.

- Commanders get ran by the elitefying filter at strength 2, giving them commandery stats and looks Sometimes there just aren't suitable helmets though, but I plan to add some light ones and a lizard full helmet one to remedy that. The tower shields there are coincidence.

- Mage generator can generate 3 tiers of mage sprites. Still needs tweaking, but results aren't bad at all right now most of the time. I do see the graphic bug on the lower row of mages, it'll get fixed.

[elmokki]

Today I added nets and poison darts as bonus weapons, rare ones though. Net required a minor feature addition since it's a bonus weapon and should be generated as such but it replaces a shield. I saw some net cavalry and first though about removing nets from mounted units and chariots, but then again if cavalry sacrifices a shield for a net, then that's what happens. Twohanders can use net without any penalties, so it's definitely a better weapon for them. Them getting it is fairly rare though.

I also reworked Randomocalypse site name generation files and code so that it now sometimes shows both primary and secondary path of a site (if there are such) in the name and it now supports dual-path names too.

And mage generation got some work too in terms of restructuring code. I get some good looking mage setups now in terms of sprites but there's no code for magic paths yet.