I have played with VCMI, but I couldn’t add creature as war machine.
I am right, that there is no way to use in “faction.json” non-standard war machines without replacing standart DEFs?
This is not planned for this year, am I right?
It’s not that simple. War machines are creatures and artifacts at the same time.
I’m hoping to allow new war machines in the future, but this feature needs to be carefully designed to be useful for modders.
This is quite a thing fit for a discussion. You would also need to determine if that solution you come up with will be balanced. I’m not even sure that having cannons and ballistas like in HotA is balanced, because sometimes the cannon might be overpowered in situations like castle sieges, but I don’t know all the stats of the 2 war machines.
This is only talk of adding mod support for war machine. It’s not VCMI, but user’s ability to add custom war machines.
What if I like to add some Laser Turrel? It’s my choice and it’s for me.
My request: A mod that redesigns Heroes 3 VCMI to support simultaneous turns in multiplayer. Age of Wonders 1+2 supports this very nicely, Heroes 3 multiplayer is just too slow to enjoy. This would be no small task, though. 
If you do this (insanely cool and difficult thing) also check out this feature request i posted on the AoW3 fan forum
AoW:SM has two modes: classical, which is each turn in order. And simultaneous. In classical mode, you can choose to control more than one faction as a human (the so called ‘hotseat mode’, for playing on one computer with another person, though you can perfectly play alone). In that thread i’m saying that multiple human factions (more like ‘alliance …’) in simultaneous mode could be interpreted differently from ‘hotseat’, into ‘empires’ where a single human controls more than one faction and the UI changes according to which unit or city is selected (or a composite ‘empire’ color scheme is used) and you can control 2 or more sides at once.
In multiplayer games this is obviously different than just ‘human’ so to avoid confusion with hotseat this option should be refered as ‘COLOR Alliance’ to distinguish it from normal human players (or even ‘human’ or ‘alliance’ colored differently for each faction, with the ability to choose >1, if you want to get obscure).
This would be useful mostly in story maps i’d guess (but could be nice for multiplayer too, when you don’t have enough players and don’t want to leave it to AI or want more variability). Problems would arise if you want ‘deep integration’ instead of a simple context switch. For instance, on H3 you apparently only can share spells with your faction heroes, and if you’d want this on this mode, this would take work. Or to display both ‘subfactions’ heroes on the list of heroes.
The ‘simple integration’ context switch is much easier and avoids some exploits (like researching/finding different spells and then sharing them), but also creates usability problems.
The ‘deep integration’ way is elegant (dynamically create a ‘composite’ faction from any map with more than 1). But it requires smart programing and new code.
Hi all . First of all , I must say I’m impressed with this project and I hope good work will continue . For the moment I have a single question : Do you take into account changing some creatures’ stats in order to make the game more balanced ?
We provide possibility for such changes. Modders may try to make “better balance” mod - such functionality is already in-place. But this mod won’t be part of VCMI just like current mods like Cove, Forge and so on.
Now alternative units is possible on one tier. But they are available without restricting one another.
Now it works that way: for example if buildings 30, 37,44,51 exist, building 30 must be constructed first (first creature growth is taken). If building 44 is builded before 30,37,51, growth of creatures level will be set to 0.
Suggestions:
-
Correct this issue - growth of units of level must be taken from creature stats, that was builded first.
-
add to “requires/upgrades” third option “forbids”:
{
“id” : 0,
“name” : “”,
“description” : “”,
“upgrades” : 0, // optional, which building can be upgraded by this one
"requires" : ], // building requirements
"forbids": ] //optional, which building blocks construction
"cost" : { … },//determine how this building can be built. Possible values are:
// normal - default value. Fulfill requirements, use resources, spend one day
// auto - building appears when all requirements are built
// special - building can not be built manually
// grail - building reqires grail to be built
"mode" : “auto”
}
This will help make strict alternative creature lines.
I proposed before that growth should be an attribute of building and not creature. This way you can easily make external dwellings with different growth.
Regarding forbids… that is is must! 
Alternate upgrades, restricted build paths, alternate creatures… And like I always guess, it should not be so hard to implement either :).
This could be ported to VCMI (at least what is already made).
Currently you can not make an external dwelling in any way, it’s just a workaround to turn neutral dwellings into ones matching the town. Your argument is invalid 
And yes, alternative upgrades would be cool if only somebody created dialog for them.
That theme is long dead. And I couldn’t get at least red crusader.
Look this theme:
forum.acidcave.net/topic.php?TID=1974&page=15
Polish modders work on third upgrades and dwellings. And they prepare it for VCMI.
There is no need for any dialog. In town hall will be placed icons for different branches. When one is bought, other becomes red and anavailable.
What you are proposing, I guess, are alternative buildings with different upgrades, not alternative upgrdes as in H5, availale all the time. But this is by far insufficient, as creature with multiple upgrades can be declared already and we can’t handle it with GUI. You could play some H5 before talking about alternative upgrades, really.
[quote=“Macron1”]
Again this division and duplicate works because of perceived language barrier. What I do not understand is… is it so hard to ask someone to make even a basic thread for you in engrish that you update once every 3/6 months so that non-native speakers know about what is going on?..
So anything downloadable? alphas? betas? Or some list with stuff that is already made?
There is golem dwelling that allows you to recruit 4 golems… can’t the UI from there be adapted?
H5’s implementation of alternative upgrades is more of a particular case too. There you have every upgrade available at once and you can freely convert from one to the other.
I think a more appropriate definition/implementation of alternative upgrades would be one where you lose the other upgrade once you build one.
But that is nitpicking… we should have both and people will choose what they like :).
Once again - upgrades are properties of creature, not building. In VCMI creatures already can have multiple upgrades, it already done. It has nothing to do with town buildings. Creatures and towns are completely separate entities and you still insist we should bind them and impose arbitrary limitations, just because you like it.
ALso, there is strong distinction between something that you wish (alternative buiildings in town) and something that has to be done (upgrade selection dialog) to make game complete and working.
How would you adapt that, then?
Here you got me completely wrong. I am just asking around to see how to go about starting a mod that will enable alternate upgrades. I am not asking anyone to do anything. I just expressed my opinion that.
I have no idea how this translates into
Regarding the golem dwelling interface, I thought that since there is an interface with multiple creature selection it could be used/modified for hiring more than 2 creatures/alternate upgrades.
Only some sprites of buildings, that can be made to DEF, may be found in topic. But work seems to go fast.
He also should play H4 to see how bad is it to have building that block another one. Especially if multiple players play same faction 
Yes. Golems and war machines factories use exactly same UI as dwellings. Dwelling may produce up to 4 creatures without any problems. But this is not what Warmonger is talking about.
If player have unupgraded creature AND visiting town with multiple upgrades available - how he can choose to which one his creatures should upgrade to? Same question goes to hill fort UI. H5 fixed this by introducing custom UI for this situation.