Nimbyjester

I think a good example of how lighting can effect not only the look of a game but how it plays is Splinter Cell (can't remember which version). In the multi-player, as a spy, if you hid in shadow you literally could not be seen. Even if the opposing players max-out out their brightness etc. The mercenary side had to shine their torches in all the nooks and crannies searching for the spies. All the tension would have been lost from the game if all the maps were brightly lit.

I think you can alter the movement cost, but I think you will still move 1 square. However, it would be a choice of either attacking multiple times or moving one square, unlike just reducing combat speed.

[quote who="Magog_AoW" reply="185" id="2878658"]Ok, I've been doing particle effects for the grasping vines. It shows up and everything is fine but... After 3 turns when the spell is deactivated, the effect shows up again! Does anyone know if this "feature" can be disabled? If not, I'll have to create something new that works both for when casting and for spell deactivation. [/quote] Instead of having an effect for the spell it might work out better if you use a World

[quote]Follow-up question. When we use the gamemodifier DefendableDamage, does the game randomize that damage like it would a normal attack?[/quote] I am pritty sure it randomizes the damage as well. I've killed Unarmoured Janusk enough times to see that when using DefendableDamage with an ability that sets the damage "Value" (not MinValue/MaxValue), the damage done is in a range of 50% of the value to ~100% of the value. Note, roughly 100% as I don't recall seeing 100% damage, d

[quote]NJ, I hope I am not stepping on your toes with the whole staff mod thing. It was simply a way to prove a point to both myself and the community concering the idea of an item that gave abilities as a unit leveled. So what is the goal of your mod?[/quote] The goal was just to get some usable examples out there more than anything and possibly provide some ideas for others. There are two unlockable abilities used at the moment, but are unlocked by getting shards. Will keep the unlo

Just thought the spell target would be the tile resource which would then effect the enemies resources. I think the use of game modifier in the spell would still be effecting your own resources not theirs. Certainly worth looking into and around that area. Though I just got a horrible fealing that we can't alter enemy resources directly! I like the idea of oposing books of magic cursing eachother rather than a generic "Curse Shard" if it is implementable. I know it's not raiding

What about having a modable staff? Where the unit equips the staff which is pretty much just like a normal staff but enables the use of enchanted items. So depending on which enchanted items you have equipped you will have different abilities enabled. Possibly with some cost associated to equipping the items so it is less desirable to just have all of them on. A simmilar thing could be done to create item sets, unlocking more abilities as you aquire more items. Again ther

Code based reply The owner of the resource will only effect where the value comes from. The target of the spell will determine where the value goes to, and as you can only have one target then you can't effect the caster and the target at the same time. Although with strategic spells you might be able to fiddle with the spell cost (as it is a global resource) to get the desired result.

I originally intended to have the staffs available in the shop only. Which they will be in future releases. I jsut kind of forgot to change some tags! I might be able to get round the AI thing, though the user information will very wrong. Currently damage is essentially derived from attack * int mod. But to do that I had to remove the strength mod damage from attack first. I assume that the AI will probably be using the Attack * str mod value to determine weapon power. So I could make the sta

I have very early on had units that mobs don't have much if any chance of killing. This may be partly a tech tree issue as decent armour seems to be available very quickly. I think the key thing that should come out of this is a robust formula to prevent the possibilities of becoming invulnerable. A well balanced set of armour values is desirable but not necessarily essential. So long as all the modding tools are there so the Modding comunity can rectify any perceved imbalances, or al

Don't blame it on the Devs it's the Design managers job to make sure that sort of thing is in. The Devs will for the most part just put in what the design doc says should go in. Occasionally you will get a Dev who will put a bit more in as they think it will be usefull later, but that depends on how much of a work load they have at the time. Slightly more on topic, I tend to modify the elemental defs file to give sovs a huge research boost if I w

Should our focus be on seeing if monsters spawned in the world have high defence or enemy units in general? As the more the AI is tweaked the more likely it will build units similar to the user, which will then be similarly invulnerable.

Health increase would be good, I don't like one shot kills (even late game). Though if it were done I'd like to see it as an increase to base health with no change to health gained per level. It's personal preference but I prefer experienced units to have an edge rather than dominate. If we can suggest pie in the sky changes then I'd like to see health split into lethal and stun damage. If a weapon is not strong enough to bypass armour to do lethal damage then it does stun damage inst

I think what we have to consider is that a although a single target spell can damage all the men in a squad if it is high damage enough. It is still essentially a single target spell. The first level of an AOE effect should be that the spell does damage to all the people in a squad on a single tile. The next level would be that it does damage to all squad members within a range of 1 from the original tile, etc etc. Currently allot of AOE spells are actually AOE single target spells ra

I probably will do at some point yeah, my main concern is how much the AI will use different abilities. As well as the AI using a staff instead of something else. If the AI just looks at the attack value as to the worth of a weapon then there will have to be allot more thought put into the stats of each staff. How have you found the current staves? Are any of them particularly lacking or too powerful in your opinion? Also what would you like to see added, assuming it is possible?

[quote]3) Alternately to the first two, I may push the devs for three changes to the xml. The first would be to access the level of a unit from the required stat tag. This would then allow me to unlock abilities based on the unit's level, and thereby make skill trees which open up as units gain levels and become more skilled. The Second would be to allow me to specify that a special ability triggers a counter attack. This would allow me to create more realistic melee abilities. The third chan

I'd like to have the ability to make a spell/ability "use" a spell/ability. For example you have spell A and sub spells B and C. Spell A would have a GameModifier that calls spell B and another GameModifier that calls spell C. It would also be handy if you could have attribute requirements for GameModifiers. So you could cast a spell or use an ability on a target, but if it does not meet requirement xyz then that modifier does not take effect. Also it would be nice to define i

Just had an idea. Since you can have a strategic spell that effects a tile to do damage to units in the tile. Do you think it would be possible to make a tile grant effects/abilities/attributes etc when entering the Strategic tile. It may even be possible to make it so the abilities only unlock if your attributes exceed a certain amount.

[quote who="Chip5541" reply="5" id="2866596"]My idea was to create a Full Metal Alchemist mod. Each Alchemist would have a different ability which no others would have (flame, stone, water, etc.) [/quote] Heavenfall 's suggestion of creating your own stats UnitStat_IsFire

If I recollect correctly you can change what stats get updated by regular units as they level up. If you created your own "level" stat you could increment it by one each level and use that. Would have to be manually increased for Champions though I think. But yeah, could really do with having the actual Level stat exposed.

[quote]C)Is it possible to vary the damage per guy in the squad (min/max value)? [/quote] I don't think it is and even if it is then there is not much point due to the way squads work. A squad is really one unit that reduces in "power" as its HP goes down. e.g. a unit has 80HP and 8 people in it. If it takes 2 damage per unit; then it takes 16 damage over all "killing" one unit. If the damage varied per unit the outcome would essentially be the same as the HP is shared between th

Bah, can't find it. Reading back a bit further I think you've covered everything it did anyway. Had a quick play and couldn't manage to get a tactical spell to effect a unit upon entering it. There's an abandoned effort to make a firewall spell in CoreSpells_FIRE_Tactical.xml that is commented out. Looks like they got as far as placing the prop but couldn't apply damage. Looks like they've also tried raise land as a tactical spell but didn't work. If it were going to work it looks lik

I'll have a look when I get back home in about an hour or two, if I don't fall asleep first [e digicons]:zzz:[/e] .

The rock slide spell actually uses two modifiers, one that makes it unpassable and one that adds a custom tile to the target tile, in this case the rock slide tile. I have a spell somewhere that places a kind of iffy ice tile with blizzard effect, makes the tile unpassable and forces the unit in it to loose its turn untill the duration is up.

[quote who="LightofAbraxas" reply="21" id="2863025"]Not to get off topic here on your thread SS, but if we all combined forces (you, NJ, possibly Murteas), I bet we could bust out a group mod with easily 120+ new and interesting spells. Any thoughts on that? [/quote] I'd be happy to help out with ideas etc for something like that, but as I think I've mentioned before my available time is a bit erratic. I work alternate weeks of days then nights and ha