Mod: Age of Wonders Mod

[Professor_Dyar]

Been busy.

Now, here is a question: I am considering making heroes summonable to the different races and nations, instead of having them sometimes spontaneously appear the way that existing Dominions heroes work. This would mean that they are more reliable, but it also means that you wouldn't get extremely powerful heroes early in the game that would unbalance things. However, here is the question: suppose that the hero is killed. Could you just summon him again (even if he is unique)?

[Sombre]

If you make them unique, which is doable, you could just resummon them, yes.

[Edi]

Heroes are not unique, but only appear once because they have been designated as national heroes by the #hero1-5 command. IF they die, you could wish for them again and get a shiny new one. If you have a summoning spell, e.g. Abysia could summon 15x Ba'al Chozron and Sauromatia as many Circes as it liked and so on. So making them summonable is a bad idea.

By the way, if you haven't been around, there's a new reorganized modding manual out as a result of a project of mine. Thought you could find that useful. You can find it by following the link in my sig.

[Sombre]

It's relatively easy to make them unique though. The actual units. Then you can offer them as a summon, though of course they can be resummoned if killed then.

[Professor_Dyar]

Thanks Edi!

Here is what I am thinking: Julia will be available for least seven different nations. I could make her a hero for each unit, a unique summon, or both. If she's a hero, the she could appear multiple times (one for each nation), but each nation would get her only once, but it would be unpredictable when and if she would appear. If she's a summon, then I could restrict access to her by requiring research, magic paths, and magic gems, to acquire her, and I could make her unique, but if she dies, she could be summoned (resurrected?) anew, and moreover, another nation could probably swipe her away since she is available to multiple nations. I could of course do both: make a hero Julia and a unique summon Julia with a different unit number. Here, of course, there really could be two of her, if you both get her as a hero and summon her, but if you do get her as a hero, she can't be swiped from under your nose by another player casting the same summon. A final thing I can do, of course, is just add Julia to the list of female names - of course, then there could again be more than one Julia, but that could be explained that they are different people who just happen to have the same name!

Speaking of which, I'm trying to understand how heroes are named. Are the name tables reiterated for each nation, or how do you make sure that a hero has a specific name? I don't see a #heroname command. Are the custom name lists specific to each nation, i.e. if I, say, give the Elves two heroes (say, Julia and Elric), and give the Dark Elves two heroes (Meandor and Melenis), would modding name lists 127 and 128 separately for the Elves and Dark Elves respectively allow me to ensure these names? Certainly the nations in the game have heroes with specific names, many of them more than two such heroes!

[Edi]

There's no way to do extensive name modding for individual heroes, because each hero requires a separate nametype with just one entry. There are not nearly enough free nametypes. Existing hero names are hardcoded.

[Professor_Dyar]

Hm - that's a problem. What happens if I give a hero a name from one of the custom name lists, but the list is blank? Could I name the unit the name of a hero?

Also, which do you think would work better for my purposes: seven different nations each with a hero for Julia, or a unique Julia summon available to those seven nations?

Last, I'm curious, but I want to know approximately how powerful to make AoW heroes. What stats/abilities/magic would you give to Julia? How would you represent her armor?

[Edi]

The best you can do is just do the description and whenever somebody does get the hero, they can rename it so the name matches.

As for what you want, take a look at the Worthy Heroes mod and how the heroes there have been beefed up. For Julia, I'd probably go for something like

hp 14
prot 0
mor 17
mr 18
str 12
att 14
def 16
prec 16
mapmove 2
ap 13
ldr-n 120 or 160
ldr-u 0
ldr-m 10
forest survival
awe +2
standard +20 or 30
sacred
female (well, duh)
magic A3E3N4H3 (or H4 instead of H3, if you prefer)
Weapon Enchanted Sword
Armor Silver Hauberk, Golden Shield (or Enchanted Shield)

That'd be fairly thematic. At least it comes closest to how I've envisioned Julia, but may be influenced how I played the original Keepers campaign with Earth 3 Life 4.

[Wauthan]

Making a custom name list with every single entry named "Julia" oughto work. I remember poking around with the Avernum mod to produce a similar result.

I'm a bit confused with Julia being a hero rather then a pretender (she's the queen of the elves after all) but personally I would go with the unique summon approach. Would be wierd to have all seven nations sporting a Julia hero unit at the same time.

Believe it or not but I too worked on an AoW mod (even managed to create some silly looking graphics). But that was way back when Dom3 was just released, and the tools are more powerful now. I eventually scrapped the idea because it was fairly difficult for me to 'translate' AoW into Dom3.

All things considered the AoW heroes need to be toned down to the standard set by the Worthy Heroes mod. In AoW the high level heroes where nigh unstoppable, and would make the supercombatants in dom3 seem mewling kittens in comparison.

My take on Julia (assuming mounted AoW1 style hero):

#size 3
#hp 14
#mor 15
#mr 15
#str 10
#att 12
#def 12
#prec 12
#mapmove 3
#ap 36
#maxage 10000
#mounted
#forestsurvival
#incunrest -30
#magicskill 6 3
#weapon "Enchanted Sword"
#armor "Silver Hauberk"
#superiorleader
#expertmagicleader

It might be a bit too powerful though.

Edit: Curse your ninja skills Edi! But atleast our "Julia" had some overlap. Your's even more buffed then mine though.