Sean, I just realized I have been playing your mod with duplicated file bug (everything appears in double. double heroes, double monsters, etc), and was using wrong map file (the research rate was really low, even for epic mod).

I am playing again with all of the bugs and mistakes fixed, so please ignore my previous impression.

Silver tongue seems a bit weak, 130 Influence for a single trained unit, its even resistible. How about making it effect champions, although for a higher price (depending on lvl)?

On the other side, the Broken Loyalties is too strong, getting a city for 500 Influence is so much easier than conquering them, since you upgraded their defenses. Is it possible to make the influence cost dependant on the city level? Maybe 250 Inf for a lvl 1 city and than doubling the cost for every city-level (250 / 500 / 1000 / 2000 / 4000) ?

Bugs:

throwing boulders - does not stack either (burning hands, flame dart as well) 

haste - expires as well during tactical battle (also evade) 

Again, something wrong going with dodge.

Example: my 51 dodge hero fighting against 90 accuracy bear, attacked by bear 10 times (i am not attacking, just casting evade/defending), out of 10:

- 3 x triple maul, 4 x double maul, 3 x single maul

- chances of triple maul:  1%  (90-50)/100*( 40-15)/100*(40-30)/100)

- chance of double maul: 10% (90-50)/100*( 40-15)/100

- chance of hitting all first-time attacks: 0.01% ((90-50)/100)^10

i do not even want to calculate general chance of all of that happening at once ... Even 3 triple mauls out of ten will be like around 0.001% of chance of happening. I do not know what is wrong, either number on hero's/beast's info, or i am the most unlucky dud in the world ...

Playing Tarth my sovereign only have 2 moves, even though "Master Scouts" states I get +1 move, (But when I hover over my Movement points, it says I gain +1% moves)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

What he said, if this is the point of it, at least include it in the tooltip.

PS. after installing this mod, HP is always calculated wrong...

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Stacking issue added to the next update fix list.

Haste and Slow are intended to be temporary spells. I will make sure the tooltip mentions it.

Dodge problems would be a vanilla game problem. I have not personally noticed any issues. Evade is indeed intended as a temporary defensive spell. One thing to know about maul is that it no longer subtracts accuracy. Instead, we have it set up to multiply accuracy by .75. That creates a slightly more uses trend of reduced accuracy so that units with high accuracy are not getting dozens of strikes. But your example does seem to be unlikely regardless. Nothing I can do about it I am sorry to say.

As to moves, the extra 1% is supposed to allow an extra move. Is it rounding down so that you don't get it? I had the idea, but have yet to test it. Seems like it's not working.

The Hp thing is temporary. I used the ElementalDefs global Hp bonus setting to add 6Hp to all units. Unfortunately this bonus is not added to the base Hp tooltip. The solution is to add Hp in CoreUnitstats. But doing that only affects trained units. I will also have to add 6Hp to every monster one at a time. It's something that we are working on, but as long as you know why you and everyone else is getting the Hp, not a major priority. I suspect that they could hook this tag into the tooltip, but since the vanilla game doesn't use it, they left it behind.

Thanks for all the bug posts and letting us know what is incorrectly described everyone. I'll try to get these fixed soon.

Sean - may want to look at Weakspot trait. Just had a battle where I used the ability via Irane and for some reason the AI opponents just sat there defending while my archers took them out. I can't confirm 100% the trait caused the behavior but in prior battles the AI moved forward... this was the first time I used the trait.

Arcane Bolt is *way* too powerful. 5 Mana for a spell that easily does 300+ damage, with no cooldown or casting time? It's ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something going wrong in the damage calcs - probably something to do with the damage bonuses from things like Archmage and Evoker traits. I mean, it's doing 20x my sovereign's level in damage. Doesn't seem right.

Also: Way too many bugged tooltips. When you add in new GameModifiers, always remember to add the <Provides> attribute! It looks like just about all of them that you added to the game lack that.

Bullseye tooltip differs from when you have it on the level up screen and the tooltip in a battle.

I also feel Flurry tooltip should state it MOVES your next 3 turns  down instead of implying you just get 3 attacks with lowered accuracy.

I'm still wondering how powerful my Rogue with the "Sure Fire" ability will be with a Greatsword. If it really works the way you describe with a constant 75% accuracy penalty

Changing 100's of XML entries isn't too bad if you use a good text editor with good find and replace features. Using the right tools can allow you to do something like that quickly. I spent a little time looking and I found a plugin for Sublime Text 2 (my preferred editor) that can increment or decrement all found matches.

edit: nvm Taxes were set to none.

Also I'd like to report that I casted Hold on a bear, but the bear was still able to attack me while the spell was in effect.

Also, bears are able to switch targets and continue attacking after killing one of my heroes. Is this intended?

Sean: focus does not add any spell damage. 

Ups, sorry, does not add any spell mastery.

Here's some feedback.

Playing Tarth, I'm now ~200 turns in the game, normal world, challenging AI. I had no metal til around 150 turns and sparse crystal due to strong monster lairs right by the Crystal Crag. That would've been a problem if I wasn't playing Tarth .

The early game was hard due to 3 Troll lairs in my part of the world. My first hero has 5-6 wounds and really suffered (now he has path of barbarian and 125 HP so things are better, but for a while he was close to useless), my dodging spearmen didn't really dodge anything but things greatly improved when I built archers. But even then, every battle against troll armies was a close thing, especially when they had Shamen.

I have 7 cities, cleared the Troll lairs (some battles were really epic) and killed all weaker monsters. Now I have to decide where and how to expand next, and an Ogre lair is close by, generating big armies which is awesome.

Now some observations and suggestions:

- Corpse Spider has race: Men

- Umberdroths are too weak. After all the trouble with Trolls, I killed 3 Umberdroths without breaking a sweat. I'd suggest you improve their stats considerably.

- Cave Bear lair doesn't seem to improve or generate additional bears. There are only 3 bears sitting there. Is this intended? By the way, battle against them was great and I nearly lost it due to maul and sick bear HP.

- Dodge doesn't seem to make much difference. I haven't noticed units that I designed as great dodgers to behave better than units with 0 dodge.

- Heroes are too cheap. And very much so. Level 7 or 9s for 5 or 7 gildar. I don't like that. Now I have 6 quite powerful heroes and I bought them for almost nothing. Also, I think they're slightly too many of them around, especially since AI cannot kill them due to their powerful armies.

All in all, I'm enjoying the game. Archers are kings so far against monsters, but I still need meatshields in front of them and still usually lose at least one group due to fast monsters. I'm looking forward the war against AI and siege.

Playing through Tarth as well.  Think it was Harder World, Harder AI, Unmoderate? (medium) monsters.

I've gotten my Sovereign (normal Tarth - Irane?) up to 12 now.  She's riding around with a posse of Longbow mounted archers and dragoons (masterwork chainmail mounted spearmen).  A good amount of the time I can simply autobattle, but for a tough nut I go into tactical... She's deadly.  She's mounted on a Mire Skath (from a quest), so she speeds around nicely in combat.  Between Haste and Flurry with full out Path of the Archer, it's very hard for most enemies to keep up with her, so she rides around playing hit and run tactics, and when she's currently doing 40-50 damage to your average Troll Warrior (when she doesn't crit and one-shot it instead - I think I've seen crits 150+)...  I've had situations where her guard died halfway through the battle, and then she then proceeded to kill the entire force herself.  In fact, for tough battles, effectively my force is there purely to hold the enemies off of her while she slaughters them all.

Note, I don't feel this is a bad thing.  For one, she's still vulnerable if the enemy does manage to catch up to her, or hits her with arrows/spells.  I'm getting her items to help deal with the latter, but I have to be careful on the former.  I made a mistake once and nearly got her killed fighting a troll/troll warrior squad.  Only reason I survived was Hasting into a Flurry - getting effectively 4 moves (with three shots) does wonders for getting to safety.

I'm well into the campaign... no idea what turn.  Easily 200+.  Currently researching Alliances, as I recall.  I'm in second place, having completely mousetrapped in Yithril, Magnar, and Resoln - note that all four of us started in a cluster in the far east (random medium? map) with Pariden and Altar in the far west.  I was the most southern of all of them, and very aggressively expanded early on, preventing them from getting more than 2-3 cities.  Of course, this bit me in the rear later on due to bypassing rather than killing lairs.  Eventually Yithril (who only had the one city) bit the bullet and declared war on me, and I stomped him (though it -was- a very close fight for his capital - only my sovereign survived).  So far, Magnar and Resoln are hostile to me, but I'm almost double in power so they're just tiptoeing around.  Meanwhile, Altar and Pariden have managed to apparently expand greatly in the far west, though from what I've seen of the map Altar pretty much did much the same as I did the the Empire factions.  Currently I'm consolidating my lands, killing off all these pesky lairs (they really do get nasty after awhile - 4 man squads of Troll Warriors?  Sheesh.)  Then I'm going to absorb Magnar and Resoln, who are pretty much trapped from not being able to expand without antagonizing me and my huge armies of archers.  Once that's taken care of, I'll see where I'm at game wise.  Assuming Altar and Pariden don't pull anything out of their hats, I'll likely just save and then start mucking around.

Sean:

I have the very same feeling ...

Dodge starts to be noticeable when you have over 50 of dodge, under that: no impact whatsoever.AI's troops, however, a little dodge they have and immediately you start to miss them frequently.I also realize that my lord Vega with accuracy over 120 still misses from time to time a troops with dodge 0 ...

And it was not like that before. I remembering Vega when he had equip giving him +5 dodge, suddenly from time to time he will start to dodge (since battles are looooong lots hits are dealt even small things start to be noticable). In my present game he has dodge 12 and i still have to see him dodge once.

I made mistake, so here i just correct myself: spell focus does not add you any spell mastery at the moment. An icon on a picture of a hero shows that it has focus, tool-tip says that it has focus cast on, but in information spell power remains the same. Also when i cast it by mage who has normally spell power 50 on 7 units i usually get 3-5 resists, though enemy has no res. With focus i should hit 6-7 of them easily and regularly. Right now, whether i cast it, or not, does not make any difference.

Is there a reason for some recruitable hero camps that turns out to be mobs instead and dissapear when cleared or is it a bug?

When I have dodge with this mod it seems to work, you guys care to describe what heroes you are using, or where you are getting the dodge from? These things could be the key factor.

The game states "Dodged" when the attack misses for whatever reason, if you have 0 dodge, and the enemy is blinded, the game will say "Dodged" alot since the enemy will have little to no accuracy.

~ K

I can't do much about the accuracy and dodge issues. It's probably an error in the new logic they made. We used to have a system where 100 dodge against 100 accuracy would mean a 0% chance to hit. Not there is a minimum 3% chance to hit and miss. I would guess that they implemented this poorly and it is causing low to mid range hits to perform irrationally. I haven't done anything to the dodge system, except balance the numbers. MA tactical battles also last alot longer than vanilla battles. It may just be that we are seeing bugs no one has noticed in the vanilla. I don't currently have any units that utilize dodge, but next game I'll play as Altar and see what happens. If the stat is broken, I'll make some adjustments to defense balance to compensate.

Replies:

Apparently the vanilla game fixed spells to use the spell damage stat. Since I had already fixed it, the fixes are stacking. Easy fix.

I'll check weakspot, but that does just look like dumb AI behavior. They probably were trying to use an archer strategy.

Hold, as in D&D, holds the unit in one spot. The unit can still attack from that position.

I'll take a look at Focus.

Umberdroths and Cave Bears are on my list of things to fix. I realized recently that a lair needs 9 units to make sure the new spawns don't get stuck to the boss.

Heroes are way too cheap, but I have yet to find the right balance. I would prefer them at 100 gildar per unit level.

There is a vanilla bug where heroes don't spawn on the lair. Since we added monsters to those lairs, it creates this problem. I have yet to find a solution. To reduce the effect, we did double the number of heroes so that the game doesn't run out of heroes when placing them. It has reduced the issue, but I still see roaming cave bears communing with drakes. I usually just Ctrl+k them.

This is vanilla problem .... If you have more than one attack / turn militia sometimes shows up, sometimes not.On the other hand, when i attack a city, they are always there I guess that cannot me moded...

My point is that my hero has 12 dodge, and never ever he does dodge anything ... He get always hit, at best it is block/clink. Before it was different.

My experience is about Lord killing machine Varga. Very high accuracy, low dodge makes him a good guinea pig for dodge related experiments.

What matters the most is the enemy's accuracy. The Dodge value is simply subtracted from the Accuracy of your enemy. If they have 112 Accuracy, your Dodge is irrelevant. What you might be experiencing is the fact that all units get +3 Accuracy per level in this version. I think the vanilla is down to 1 per level. Dodge is in no way balanced or fair in the vanilla, which is why I have this one set up the way I do. Dodge is essentially a defense that diminishes in value against high level units.

Some report on those bosses and beastlord's taming.

First of all, I could tame those supposedly untamable bosses...

And then, obviously being boss with 0/0 movement, my army gets stuck after the battle if that boss monster joins my army (thus I had to disband that unit to move on.)

But the real thing is, I just could keep taming those unmovable bosses in the wild, boosting my faction's combat rating while still relatively enjoying faster clearing of monster lairs.

We need some better way to deal with these... I tried to force variable mana cost requirement on Tame (like, higher the mob's level is, the more mana required to tame) but it seems the game engine is bugged in a way that you can't use both charm and variable mana cost requirement.

Yup. That's why i am now clicking non-stop on and checking dodge/accuracy values of units. 

3% chance of missing always regardless of accuracy/dodge stats explains some cases, but not all. Problem now is that there is no point at all to choose any dodge perks for units. You can as well remove them from game, because why should i choose them? Whether my dodge is 0 or 20 there is no noticeable difference at all, also in early game stage.  As you also admit, for the high level units it is even more irrelevant. And i am talking about enemies that have accuracy of 80 ... On the other hand, i agree, in vanilla dodge/accuracy mechanics could easily be abused, and were abused. The point is to find a balance, that dodge is a viable strategy but not an overkill. Interesting thing enough is, that it works for AI. I feel a big difference when facing wolves with dodge of 20, they are really annoying at times, but not too much. My troops, however, having the same dodge are being happily pounded. Again, both wolves and my troops have the same accuracy. 

 I think it is problem with vanila, b/c it started after the very last update. 

And when you are playing insane world, and facing a 1000hp units battles last looooong enough to start to pay attention to this kind of details  

Serious bug (let me know if it vanilla, i will report it):

if i build a outpost close to a city that it gets incorporated into the city then this outpost cannot be upgraded. You can click upgrade, choose whatever you want, upgrade will be finished but will not show on the outpost screen.... You can build them without end