Hi everyone, today marks one week since I began learning VCMI modding and I wanted to share with you my 1-week progress. I used Cathedral Mod as a base and every creatures/heroes have been replaced and my town is fully playable. Though, I don’t know if it’s compatible with Cathedral mod but I changed most IDs so it should be okay.
You can find the download link below and I would really appreciate any reviews of that very-early version so that I could improve what I’ve done and what I could do next. To do list: Town screen, buildings stats (costs/effects) and the puzzle & siege segments.
Refugee is a new town that takes its inspiration from WoG’s Neutral Town. The common point of its creatures is their nonbelonging to the other factions. Thus, this castle sports concepts such as nomadism, motley armies and makeshift solutions.
Creatures:
I tried my best to take the most interesting neutral creatures that doesn’t belong to any faction. Each creatures have their own IDs and doesn’t change anything to the real neutral creatures. They also have their own stats & abilities that make them “unique” (some of them got buffed while others got nerfed to fit the dwelling’s level).
Thank you for your proposal! I’m actually working on the Town Screen design so we cannot work on its implementation in the mod yet but I might need your help for this section (suggestion/ideas on the designs right now) and on the implementation (defs importation & coding) when the designs are finished.
If you want to help me on the code right now, I’d really appreciate if you could handle the buildings costs (gold/ressources), the lock/unlock tree (which buildings must be built before being able to construct) and/or specific buildings.
I haven’t decided anything about those specific buildings (if I remember correctly there are 3 free slots) so if you work on that, you have the opportunity to decide what to implement in the mod. It could be a building that add extra gold each days, bonus to hero & garrison defending castle, or something else you could think of that you think would fit with this new faction.
Also, if you want to make some modifications of stuffs I already did, just tell me what you change so I make sure it fits with this faction’s concept. Every ideas are welcomed! Furthermore, when all of the above is finished, we could work on adding new spells for heroes & creatures to make this faction even more unique and consistent with the original ones.
@Macron1 Yeah I forgot that you could use PNGs like you told me on the HeroesCommunity’s forum. Do you know where I could find any documentation of how to implement those visuals in the mod? I’ve downloaded every GrayFace’s tools but I do not know which one I’ll need to do that.
@zerg That town looks nice, I didn’t knew about this one! I’d say that the Town’s concept was initially based on neutral units & the “refugee” map objects we could find. But then I thought about adding more conceptual elements such as:
Some middle eastern influences (heroes & town names/visuals; lvl7 unit is from persian mythology and its dwelling is based on door to hell, rogue/nomads share those M.E influences),
Nomadism(synergy between rogues & nomads - rogues have spy talents & nomads decrease rough terrains penalties, heroes have talents and bonus that are coherent with nomadism),
Neutral alignment & Motley armies(units are different from each others but those difference are their strongs, heroes should’ve bonuses that will reduce penalty of having units from different factions - but you might have to build a specific building or something else I didn’t thought of yet).
I played a while with your town. It has lots of minor bugs (missing commas in heroes jsons). Quick thoughts.
Level 4 building has too much mercury for build. Playing in hard+ difficulty level, it lasts too long to gather enough mercury to build unupgraded buiding.
Creatures have too many abilities. In vanilla H3, flying or shooting was ‘ability’ and it was enough for given creature. In the other hand, Peasants are weakest creature in h3, so maby super strong sharpshooters give good job for balance? Don’t know…
@misiokles The buildings costs are Cathedral’s mod vanilla values (I didn’t changed anything yet), but I remember having the same issue with mercury. If nobody’s interested in working on the building costs then I might do it soon.
About balancing, most of the town’s units are GROUND/MELEE and are kind of slow so that’s why I decided to add abilities to few creatures but yeah, that might’ve been too much lol. Some creatures are from WoG and I just kept their abilities while changing their stats but I didn’t thought of modifying abilities. Here’s a list of the units and their abilities:
Then we could remove some abilities that might be “too much”:
Lvl3 Unit: Sharpshooter (Nrm) won’t have the ‘NoPenaltyMelee’ ability and Sharpshooter (Upg) will no longer be able to perform ‘RangedRetaliation’.
Lvl6 Unit: No more Dragon Breath.
Lvl7 Unit: No more Self morale.
@zerg Are you familiar with H3 sprites creation? Is there a way you could work on a new upgrade for Nomads and/or rogues? I’m not entirely satisfied with the actual units roster of the town and if we could replace peasants & boars that would be cool!
I really like your idea of having a gold/diamond-colored tubes for the dwelling to fits with the town’s creatures. There are few errors that will need to be fixed (as seen below) but it still looks way better than what I did !
The next step after completing the town screen would be to work on adding some animations to it. The Tower’s Golem Factory has animations sprites that we could reuse. Is there a way you could also work on this?
By the way, here is the last-to-date WIP town screen. The missing buildings are: Grail, Horde(1) and 3 Specials buildings. Also, I have made the ressources costs and unlocking tree and it’s already implemented in the mod.
