I know HMM4. But still possibility is better, that lack of it.
If player wants all units, he could always just comment “forbids”.
But for modding it will be a great thing.
And it will be possible to create one town with completely different lineups. So one faction can have several totally different towns (only common buildings will be the same).
I don’s say it must be implemented in every town. But in some towns it will be cool.
For example, I have Castle variation, where I have on lev. 6 degrade/upgrade of cavalry + arcballista/falconer from HOL.
It would be great, if I could built only cavalry or only siege weapons (and buildings can look different).
I didn’t mean multiple upgrades, I meant alternative branches of creatures. If “forbids” will be implemented, there will be no mess. Player could always build only one alt. upgrade.
And in other towns there can be built other upgrades.
PS I didn’t play HMM5, because it looked like snow.
But freely upgrades can be implemented right now like in HeroOfLight. For example, “creature1” upgrades to “creature2”, “creature2” upgrades to “creature3”, “creature3” upgrades to “creature1”. If cost is same, there will be free choice of upgrade. Didn’t test it, because I think unblocked upgrading is stoopid and cheating, but this should work.
Maybe I did not get the joke, but having mutually exclusive build paths is one of my most wanted feature of H2-7. (Especially H6 with the core, elite, champions separation). In H3 you will build every time the same buildings more or less in the same order. (Unlike Disciples II for EG).
Imagine you have 4 Core Creature buildings but you must choose only 3 of them. (Depending of opponent faction, of map, etc). Or you choose one alternate upgrade and then you cannot have another. (Unlike H5 where you always could get the best of all upgrades).
So I would say, build restrictions are quite a nice thing to have.
This will give him something modder didn’t expected to see. For example in H4 removing such block will result in placing 2 different buildings in the same place on screen and broken recruit UI.
Then go ahead - implement this. I’m not against this feature but I don’t have time on this in near future.
You may complain about graphics, you may complain about story. But H5 have a lot of cool mechanics elements that fit HoMM quite well.
It is just extremely fun to capture enemy town and find out that he has built Golem Factory there while all your towns have Mages Tower built in it.
This may work well with some (balanced) way to raze such buildings (at least when you capture the town). But again - somebody must implement this in vcmi.
Don’t think all players can’t open file in Notepad and correct it.
Why this will break multiplayer? If two people want to play with exact town, they always can share same mod files.
It’s modder’s responsibility. If he can, he would place alt. branches to different places.
Or use same building graphics for different branches. Some neitrally looking stone tower can be good place for pikemen or for archers at same time
And what tragedy is this? This is expected for this faction, player knows that there are alt. branches. People played HMM4-HMM6 knowing this could happen.
Players are not modders. They are not interested in figuring out how to disable this. They are interested in playing.
They can. But what if player wants to start the game with several players and each of them made some changes to mods - time to decide what version should be used in game would be extremely high.
WoG options coughcough
But modder blocked such possibility! Why should he care about something that is impossible?
In this case player may decide that the best solution is not to play such faction and uninstall the mod.
And in H6 only special building were mutual exclusive. Unlike dwellings they have very limited effect on gameplay and (what’s more important) still useful for player. While different dwelling is useless for player due to limit on number of stacks in army.
Lol I have not thought about this scenario. But I think that like you’ve suggested, coupled with intelligent razing for only those buildings, this could only add some depth to mp strategy.
VCMI will look in mechanics a lot like H7. That’s inevitable. (will still have core H3 but there will be some advanced game-play mods out-there that’s for sure ).
This is already problem not regarding alternatives:
each of players can make changes even in configs of standard factions. This is question of multiplayer and CRC sums, not of modders or players.
It not only in this case. player can decide to not play any mod.
Nobody forces nobody to play with mods with alternatives.
Altrough VCMI is going to turn out standard factions, so choice to not play is not a problem.
Macron1, OK, vcmi detected checksum mismatch with mod X and/or vcmi configs. What players should do? They still have to decide what version to use, remember full list of changes they’ve made and so on.
Checksum won’t give you magical “fix the game” button. Well… it can. But only with “reverse to default” behavior. Meaning that commented out “forbids” will be back in place.
Yes. But what’s the point of mod in which no-one plays?
We are? Definitely not in near future - I still see quite a lot of potential problems with SoD mod from krs to include it as default.
Trust me, there is no mod no one plays.
If it’s new town, there always be people playing it.
At least modder will play it.
Or you want to limit modder demands?
There is no magic way to return commented forbids or remember all information, that players changed.
The only solution, that all configuration will be taken from one machine and copied to all other players machines to memory.
Or before game players get same CRCed distributive that they will play.
PS There goes krs’s wish to put graphics out of LOD - this will restrict this way of gaming (copyrighted materials are not good to distribute).
Oh well… this dispute is pointless. If you want this feature that bad - go ahead and implement this. As I said - I’m not against this feature but I’m not interested in spending time on it in near future.
And what configuration is correct one? Multiple players have made multiple changes to mods. Which of these versions should be copied to everyone else?
Interesting topic this mod and multiplayer. I remember from other games a nice feature. Every player could play with whatever gui mods he wanted, but only he would see them. The server handled all the mechanics send the data to the other player that could have locally totally different GUI mods.
The problem appears when we are talking about other type of mods that change mechanics/stats…
It might be interesting to apply only common elements changed, disregarding the mod that offered it. For example, players use two different balance mods, which share some settings, other differ in values, the rest don’t cover:
default values: A=100, B=100, C=100, D=100, E=100
A=120, B=150, C=70, D=80,
A=120, B=130, C=50, E=170
resulting properties: A=120 (shared), B=130 (the overlapping increase from default 100), C=70 (as default was 100, decrease only that much as both parts agreed), D=100, E=100 (another player didn’t altered this).
This mode creates magnitude of different results, some of them might be de-balanced, so one might consider it somehow ‘random’, so this should be optional. The straight-forward rule ‘enable only common mods’ seems to be the basic settings merge mode, but this requires players cooperation (especially when choosing balance mods, a single player with different version of the same balance mod would disable it entirely). The third option might be to follow specified players settings, transferring all the parameters to other players when needed.
There is morale bonus/minus, when creatures in army are from different alignment (evil/good/neutral) and different factions (neutral etc).
And there is a creature bonus HATE, that requires other mod in depedences and full list of enemy faction, so two factions that hate each other must be turned on together.
I propose external configuration of factions, that will not require all of them turned on.
Factions there will get some changes in mix/HATE strategy. Other factions not mentioned here will stay as they were.
“factionRelation”
{
“castle”: //faction name
{
“ally” : “rampart”, “tower”],
“enemy” : “inferno”, “necropolis”]
}
So Castle will not loose morale when mixing Rampart, Tower.
When mixed with Inferno units, morale loss will be twice (compared to mix with other evil races).
When fighting Inferno, creatures will get some additional bonus to damage replaced hate.
When some of mentioned factions are not turned on for game, VCMI will just ingnore them.
This can be tuned by some form.
}
to modify ability SHOOTER to make limited shooters:
{“type”:“SHOOTER”,
“subtype”:1, // 0 - regular shooter, 1 - shooter with limited distance
"val":6 //number of hexes for distance
}
It will be very useful, for example, for grenade throwers - to throw grenade to full battlefield is too cheating, but if range is limited, they become second-row defence line.
And for weak shooters. I don’t remember now, but I barely remember, that orcs in HMM2 couldn’t shoot through all field (I may be wrong).
Maybe, we could have units with multiple attacks?
Mini-window, or interface-element, where you can choose if unit will strike with melee, ranged attack, granade throw, natural ability applying or spell casting.