Warning: Big Thread, for some reasons I like writing them
Have you ever wondered while all the spells and perks seems similar to each other. Many spells seems to be either more of the same thing, or slight variation to another effect (Yeah! another elemental attack spell). After modding for quite sometime, I can now start to see the limits and possibilities of the game. So I decided to make a list of recommendations that should not require a lot of coding.
In fact I would do it myself if it were in the lua script the but lack of success to change a lua script prevented me from investigating further. Now I hope the dev read this and actually implement most of those features, and correct bugs, to increase the capabilities of their game engine.
The suggestions has been categorized by theme, and I try to refer or use the current XML structure. Some stuff could require more coding than others. Still, if 50% of the stuff here could be implemented, myself and probably the players will be more than happy.
There are a few things that I have not modded yet so new ideas could come in later.
----- Bugs in the Editor or in the game -----
- Support Values greater than 99: If I want to input a value of 100 or above, I need to use the XML
- Allow input of negative value: On certain module, like city perk resource bonus, I cannot enter a negative value. Again, need to edit the XML directly.
- Skip spells with missing prerequisite: If a spell has a prerequisite that does not exists, simply ignore it in the spell research display. Do not simply leave the research screen blank.
- Level up tables: The ability for a unit to level up is not determined by it's table but by it's type "Regiment", "Creature", etc. In my mod, I did not want level up, so I have to put everybody as "creatures". Not very convenient. I should have instead set everybody as "Non-Combat". If the level up table influence the AI decision, then make another level up table "No table".
- Have "support" do something: I never seen a single situation where my units used their support ability. The odds to occur should be pretty low. Why not give a support bonus to any other attack in range. For example, my archers gives +25% attack bonus to any other battle in range triggered by another unit.
- Radio group for wizard non-spell perk does not work in the editor. They get reset to 0 all the time. Manual editing the XML is necessary.
- Viewing the race's building tree a second time in the editor freezes the game.
- Changing the spell group of a spell to a prefixed value doe not work. "Auto" is set by default.
- Terrain modifications in the XML does not work. I tried changing the movement cost of terrain without any success. I know there is a special effect bitfield too. If you can document it, that would be awesome.
- Makes it possible to disable and create new glyphs with the XML. Up to now, only replacing the glyphs in the game has been possible.
- Make unrest do something: I don't know it's a bug in my mod, but I filled up the unrest bar to the maximum multiple times and nothing happened. The wiki said you could have rebels or riots, but none of this happen. I hope those unrest events are modable.
- Bug in the building editor: You cannot make a building produce a fixed and percentage value. For example, I cannot say to a building to increase population by +20 and +20%. Inserting a value reset the other value. It needs to be done through the XML.
- Have perks that can give positive and negative income at the same time. For example, I made a transmute gold spell that makes a city spend 2 gold to get 5 mana every turn. But when you look at the income generation, the spell gives 5 mana and 0 gold. So it cannot substract the -2 probably because the perk is flagged positive effect.
----- Spells -----
- Add type "Attack and Terraform": Replace add effect perk section by terraform type in the editor. Make the spell do damage and terraform the area. Certain spells like dragon tornado does that hard coded. I want to be possible to make any kind of attack spell that terraform any kind of terrain. Actions can do that.
- Add the following targets: "All Friendly Units", "All enemy units", "All Units", "All enemy factions", "All enemy castles", "All castles", "Friendly Capital", "Enemy Capital", "Any Capital", "Random Friendly Location", "Random Enemy/neutral location", "Random Location", "Random Enemy City", "Random Friendly City", "Random City"
- Add target sub-filter: "Summoned units" (or creature), "Hired Units" (or regiment). Make sure you have fixed those EXP table first.
- Permanent Spell-Perk and god requirements: Right now, if a perk requires Agrela 30 relation to research, once researched it will remain active if relation with agrela drops below 30. It should disable itself once relation drops below 30.
- Reveal world: All hexes in the targeted area will be revealed. The fog will go away, and units will remain visible until the end of the turn.
- Persistant spells: This might require adding a time or repeat count variable to spells. The spell is cast on the same target location each round for multiple rounds. One idea could be call lightning, where an area, 2 hex radius, get hit by random lightning for X turns. Or have a faction blessing that hit random cities with a spell each turn.
- Attack and destroy: Have attack spell that can kill population and buildings if in the target area. Stage of the spell could determine the odds of success. Would allow earth quake that destroy only buildings (does O dmg), or a meteor strike that does damage, kills population and destroy buildings.
- Transmute Resources: Be able to transmute special resources in other resources. That might require a transmute table in the XML, but still you could change for example red dragon eggs to gold dragon eggs, silver ore to adamantium ore, Magic Fields to Magic Nodes, etc.
- Counter magic field: Create a temporary enchanted area where any spell cast has a chance of being dispelled according to it's stage. Could also be a faction perk that allow any spell of any wizard in the world, or any spell of the targetted great mage to have a percentage of being countered when cast.
- Enchant an area: The line above made me thought that it could be interesting to have a temporary enchantment over an area of the map. You could do something like the totems, you have an enchantment core that creates an aura around, but the core can be passed by units.
- Summon a storm: Similar to the totem but that can be move through enemies and apply effects. For example, you could have a storm cloud that you can move on the map for 5 turns, and when it pass over enemies, it does elemental damage. Seem similar to your lighting sphere, but that you can pass through it.
- Add spellbooks: This would require a bit more work, so you could just ignore it if you want. In order to have various theme of magic to make sure all players does not get the same spell book, add 1 variable called "book" or "spellbook" which hold a value from 0-99. 0 or undefined is not part of a spell books. Then during the wizard config screen, you can select a perk that will give you a spell book of a certain number. Once you have let say spell book 6, all spell which are flagged with spell book 6 will be researchable, and acquirable by trade. Spells from a book players does not own are simply grayed out.
- Research Group and size: There is this annoying things where you say that your research group should be of size 11. But if you have like 16 spells, instead of placing the first 11 spell on the first level and the last 5 spell on the second level, it will split them evenly instead with 8 spell on first and 2nd level. Why it does not fill a level before passing to the next research level.
- Disintegrate: Destroy spell which prevent resurrection.
- Remove fortification defenses: I am not sure if units stationed on a fort or in a city get defense bonus. This spell effect would disable any of those bonus.
- City portal: When a unit enter a city, it show a list of cities and a cancel button to allow the unit to warp into another city with the same enchantment.
- Temporary Terraforming: Terraform a piece of land that will revert to it's original state after a few turns.
- Terrain Enchantment: Add perk to location on the map that could give various perks like continuous damage, accelerated movement, heal units, etc.
- Make certain spell type, god spells or magic school spells harder to cast by requiring more mana and time to cast them. This could make interesting wizard perk, or counter wizard spells (you cast nature magic, here take that anti-nature bane )
- Give experience to units: Simply give a chunk of experience to 1 or many units. Not a perk that gives it each turn.
- Transmute a unit into another unit: For example, transform any unit "hired" unit into skeletons.
- Steal a faction perk from another great mage. Maybe only applies to dispelable perks.
- Summon a random hero. The stage of the spell could summon various stage of hero.
- Maybe have a spell that can apply 2 perks so that a blessing and bane can be applied at the same time. For example, in master of magic: Wind mastery boost your movement, but hinder the movement of others.
----- Units Perks -----
- Define a "SetMissingStatus": This is the opposite of "setHatredStatus" which gives 50% bonus if target has a specific status. While "SetMissingStatus": Would give 50% bonus if target does not have a specific status. That should allow for example to have "Perk: Piercing Damage" gives +50% vs units which does not have "Perk: Shielded".
- Use a value for "SetHatredStatus": Instead of giving a flat 50% bonus, allow player define other percentages than 50.
- Negate perk: Create a new type of perk that negates a status or another perk. For example, you could have a web spell that adds a perk to the target unit which negates the "Flying" status and change it's movement for walking. This would allow to bring a flying unit down so that it can be attacked.
- Define a "Can attack Flying" status: Allow certain units to attack flying creatures by other mean than range attacks. For example spiders should be allowed to attack flying creature. It should solve a game's problem where flying can only be attack by other flying creatures or archers.
- Modify max HP: Have a perk that raises/reduce max HP by percentage and by value. (ex: +10 max HP). An alternate way to add armor to a unit (inspired from Final Fantasy Tactics)
- Modify Critical: Have a perk that increase/reduce critical chances by a multiplier. (ex: +30% chances for critical)
- Confuse Status: The target unit is out of control of it's owner it will attack randomly friend and enemies or do nothing.
- Mind Control: Take control of the target, it becomes one of your unit as the perk remain.
- Bane Resistance: Increase or reduce resistance to bane of the target. Indirectly increase/reduce the stage of the unit because there is no bane resistance stat.
- Replace damage type: Allow changing the basic damage type of the unit. So for example a frost weapon spell, instead of adding +20% elemental, it could replace the basic attack as elemental and add a 20% strength.
- Afraid: Can be used on 2 ways: A bane that can make certain unit actions be cancelled (ex: skills, or attack). OR A blessing where enemy units attacking the blessed target need to make a fear check else they do nothing. Also works for counter attack. During melee battles, attacked units failing their fear check does not counter attack.
- Status: First strike: Not sure if battles are resolved simultaneously, first strike would make the unit with that status deals damage first before the enemy can reply.
- Status: Ambush: The enemy cannot counter attack when attacking.
- Perks can only have mana upkeep. Allow to have gold or food upkeep too.
- Negate Immunities: Allow a unit's attack to bypass a immunity to a specific type of element. (Ex: by pass elemental immunity)
- Auto Critical: This unit will always receive critical attacks. For example: "Stun: Stunned, Auto-Critical"
- Boost/reduce certain type of movement: For example, +2 to flying and naval movement. But not land movement.
----- Faction Perks -----
- Reduce upkeep: Have some perks that reduce the upkeep in gold, mana, food of specific entities like units, Creatures, Buildings, etc. Value could be by unit or for the whole empire. For example: "Warlord: reduce gold upkeep of each units by 1 gold", OR "Reduce unit upkeep by 10 gold" OR "Architect: Reduce building gold upkeep by 20%".
- Targeting: add "All Enemy Factions"
- Change political relations: Increase/ Decrease once or each turn the diplomatic relations of you with enemy wizards, or enemy wizards with their enemies.
- Reveal the location of cities on the map and it's surroundings. Lift of fog of war too if perk is active.
----- City Perks -----
There are so few city perks, making it impossible to have city enchantment spells. Here are some ideas:
- Experience Boost: Gives experience to units produced into the city.
- Reduce building maintenance: Specify for gold, food, mana, as a fixed value or percentage.
- Modify Fortification of city's max HP: Increase/reduce the max HP of cities, tower and forts
- Make the city fly (or setstatus). It can only be attacked by flying units. Or units that can attack flying. Or simply give any other status units can have to cities.
- Resistance: Give damage resistance to the city. There is already a resistance to life for the building. Allow perk to give new resistance for the core city and it's forts and tower.
- Damage Surrounding units: Any enemy units standing in the 6 hex around the city will receive damage.
- Give perk to friendly, enemy or all units around the city. Allow to make "wall of ..." spells (ex: wall of fire, wall of shadows, wall of stone, etc". Targeted units located around the city will receive a blessing or a bane.
- Immune to banes: Allow city to be protected from city banes.
- Production time of units or buildings: Increase or reduce the production time in turns of units or buildings.
- Steal Resources: Allow stealing gold, food, mana and others.
- Increase sight range of the city.
----- Game rules -----
- Prefixed setup: add a way to prefix or disable certain map parameters, victory conditions or game mode to make sure the mod gets played as intended with a possibility to use randomly generated maps. Be allow to use 0 other worlds, so have only ardania.
- Realm Configuration: add a way to set some world generation parameters to set up which shards can appear, how many shard, how many gates between shards etc. I would love to be able to do something like master of magic where you have 2 worlds: Ardania and Ainadra with MULTIPLE gates connecting both worlds. With 2 perfect mirror worlds, spells like "astral gate" or "plane shift" spells could be possible to do. But both maps needs to be the same size.
- Level up options: Add in logic param different ways to level up. You can add the "random" mode where perks are selected randomly from the list of 3, or "first" where only the first perk in the list is used. This will prevent the player to chose is powerup. You could even make it a game option to allow players to let the computer select randomly a perk.
- Allow setting the default resistance: Again in <logicparam> it should be possible to determine the default resistance of all units. If I don't want life to start at 100 resistance because I changed it for poison, I should be able to do it.
- Maximum population: It should be possible to set the maximum population of a city. A single variable added to <logicparam> could do the job.
- City Size and level: It should be possible in <logicparam> to determine how much population is required for the city to change level. If for example I want level 3 cities to appear at 8 population, and level 4 at 13 population, I should be able to do so.
- Diplomatic Actions: Resource treaty: Have mutual treaties that allow exchanging gold, research, food or mana. Income starts in the negative and raise with time up to the empire's output. See master of orion 2.
- I hate you, let's be allies: Make it require more time before jumping from War to peace to allies.
- Place the artifact effect content in the XML so that we can change them. Right now, the artifact effects are way too weak.
- Be able to affect the probabilities of success of banes. I cannot really say which variable needs to be changed because I don't know the formula, but it should be possible to change those parameters that determined the final resistance % according to the unit and spell stage.
- Armor: That could demand more work. I always felt the resistance system to be a bit bland when designing equipment perks that should raise defenses. An idea would be to add an armor value it order to give more defense option that simply resistance to something. Armor would be applied BEFORE resistance. I played Paper Sorcerer lately, and their armor system game me some ideas (soak dmg, regen after battle). You could have various options:
A: Fixed Value that reduce damage each attack: Problem, if value is too high, some attacks could make 0 damage. But if resistance is applied last, it should be not so problematic. Still, it's simple to implement. You could add a bar of a different color at the top of the HP bar to indicate that this is the minimum damage it needs before making real damage.
B: Variable value that soak damage 1 point for 1 point until empty. Regenerate at the end of the round.
C: Variable value where only half it's value can soak damage. Regenerate at the end of the round.
D: Set a max damage you can receive from 1 attack by slitting the lifebar into various dash. Ex, you have 21 HP, split in 3 that makes 3 dash of 7 HP, and attack that exceed 7, will only do 7 damage. Requiring 3 attacks to kill the unit. The problem is that the range is pretty tight. SPliting the life bar in more that 3 dash is very strong.
OR
The opposite effect is that armor split the HP in dashs, the higher the armor the higher the nb of dash. An attack that does only 1 damage will eat up a whole dash, in this case, resistance is applied first. So for example a unit with 21 HP and 3 dash of 7 HP, will lose 2 of 3 dash (14 damage) if it receives 10 damage. So a unit that receives 3 attacks that does at least 1 dmg will die. But if your armor gives you 5 dash with 20 HP (5 dash of 4 HP), receiving 10 damage will each 3 dash, so 12 damage. The advantage of a similar system is that it does not take additional space in the unit stat display.
Don't forget to add an armor piercing unit status that could ignore armor effects what ever it is.
----- Unit Action -----
- Be able to have action that apply bane without engaging the enemy like you could have an action that gives you a blessing without healing yourself. So setting an attack damage of 0 on a "attack/debuff" action should not engage the enemy.
- Be able to have airship transports by allowing units to morph as a flying ship by clicking an action button. Action that should be unlocked with a building. Else moving into mountains could auto-transform a unit. You would push another action button to land on ground.
- Inspired from the master of magic node meld ability, allow a unit to place a building on a special resources for example. It would consume the unit. Similar to found city, and work boat in civ 5.
----- Moding Features -----
Certain features that could be added to the editor or the game to make moding easier.
- Preview stuff: It should be possible from editor to be able to preview particle effects of spells and actions, 3D models of units and buildings. I can't remember all animations by heart. If we could preview the thing we are cloning, it would make editing easier. Since the editor is in game, it should not be a problem to show a black screen with the model or particle effect.
- Enable the System Console: If you have one, enable it. It would make debugging much more easier. If it's already done, why
not enable it. Even if it's awkward, or badly documented, at least we could do a few debugging things. If you need command ideas, just ask, I am a DOS fan.
- Show in percentage the bane resistance level of units. The only thing we know is that the stage of the unit and spell influence this, but we don't know how.
- Use icons from other game aspect: For example, I should be able to use icons for action as spells or vice versa. Else I need to extract the pictures from the game, cut out the icons and repackage them in the mod. Not very convenient.
- Also be allowed to use action animations for spells and vice versa.
- Could it be possible to have a list of all the system text strings that can be redefined in locdata. A list of the icons names would also be useful. Having the name of the loading screen text strings to change the hints given to player while loading would also be nice to have.
---------------------------------
So this is it. There is probably a few things I have missed, but like I said, implementing half of the stuff listed here would be awesome. I am starting my vacations, so I'll take a moding break for now and continue in september. I would have liked to alpha release my mod, but realized that it is way too hard/unfair to play as it is. So perhaps later.
Thank you for reading this long message.
Have you ever wondered while all the spells and perks seems similar to each other. Many spells seems to be either more of the same thing, or slight variation to another effect (Yeah! another elemental attack spell). After modding for quite sometime, I can now start to see the limits and possibilities of the game. So I decided to make a list of recommendations that should not require a lot of coding.
In fact I would do it myself if it were in the lua script the but lack of success to change a lua script prevented me from investigating further. Now I hope the dev read this and actually implement most of those features, and correct bugs, to increase the capabilities of their game engine.
The suggestions has been categorized by theme, and I try to refer or use the current XML structure. Some stuff could require more coding than others. Still, if 50% of the stuff here could be implemented, myself and probably the players will be more than happy.
There are a few things that I have not modded yet so new ideas could come in later.
----- Bugs in the Editor or in the game -----
- Support Values greater than 99: If I want to input a value of 100 or above, I need to use the XML
- Allow input of negative value: On certain module, like city perk resource bonus, I cannot enter a negative value. Again, need to edit the XML directly.
- Skip spells with missing prerequisite: If a spell has a prerequisite that does not exists, simply ignore it in the spell research display. Do not simply leave the research screen blank.
- Level up tables: The ability for a unit to level up is not determined by it's table but by it's type "Regiment", "Creature", etc. In my mod, I did not want level up, so I have to put everybody as "creatures". Not very convenient. I should have instead set everybody as "Non-Combat". If the level up table influence the AI decision, then make another level up table "No table".
- Have "support" do something: I never seen a single situation where my units used their support ability. The odds to occur should be pretty low. Why not give a support bonus to any other attack in range. For example, my archers gives +25% attack bonus to any other battle in range triggered by another unit.
- Radio group for wizard non-spell perk does not work in the editor. They get reset to 0 all the time. Manual editing the XML is necessary.
- Viewing the race's building tree a second time in the editor freezes the game.
- Changing the spell group of a spell to a prefixed value doe not work. "Auto" is set by default.
- Terrain modifications in the XML does not work. I tried changing the movement cost of terrain without any success. I know there is a special effect bitfield too. If you can document it, that would be awesome.
- Makes it possible to disable and create new glyphs with the XML. Up to now, only replacing the glyphs in the game has been possible.
- Make unrest do something: I don't know it's a bug in my mod, but I filled up the unrest bar to the maximum multiple times and nothing happened. The wiki said you could have rebels or riots, but none of this happen. I hope those unrest events are modable.
- Bug in the building editor: You cannot make a building produce a fixed and percentage value. For example, I cannot say to a building to increase population by +20 and +20%. Inserting a value reset the other value. It needs to be done through the XML.
- Have perks that can give positive and negative income at the same time. For example, I made a transmute gold spell that makes a city spend 2 gold to get 5 mana every turn. But when you look at the income generation, the spell gives 5 mana and 0 gold. So it cannot substract the -2 probably because the perk is flagged positive effect.
----- Spells -----
- Add type "Attack and Terraform": Replace add effect perk section by terraform type in the editor. Make the spell do damage and terraform the area. Certain spells like dragon tornado does that hard coded. I want to be possible to make any kind of attack spell that terraform any kind of terrain. Actions can do that.
- Add the following targets: "All Friendly Units", "All enemy units", "All Units", "All enemy factions", "All enemy castles", "All castles", "Friendly Capital", "Enemy Capital", "Any Capital", "Random Friendly Location", "Random Enemy/neutral location", "Random Location", "Random Enemy City", "Random Friendly City", "Random City"
- Add target sub-filter: "Summoned units" (or creature), "Hired Units" (or regiment). Make sure you have fixed those EXP table first.
- Permanent Spell-Perk and god requirements: Right now, if a perk requires Agrela 30 relation to research, once researched it will remain active if relation with agrela drops below 30. It should disable itself once relation drops below 30.
- Reveal world: All hexes in the targeted area will be revealed. The fog will go away, and units will remain visible until the end of the turn.
- Persistant spells: This might require adding a time or repeat count variable to spells. The spell is cast on the same target location each round for multiple rounds. One idea could be call lightning, where an area, 2 hex radius, get hit by random lightning for X turns. Or have a faction blessing that hit random cities with a spell each turn.
- Attack and destroy: Have attack spell that can kill population and buildings if in the target area. Stage of the spell could determine the odds of success. Would allow earth quake that destroy only buildings (does O dmg), or a meteor strike that does damage, kills population and destroy buildings.
- Transmute Resources: Be able to transmute special resources in other resources. That might require a transmute table in the XML, but still you could change for example red dragon eggs to gold dragon eggs, silver ore to adamantium ore, Magic Fields to Magic Nodes, etc.
- Counter magic field: Create a temporary enchanted area where any spell cast has a chance of being dispelled according to it's stage. Could also be a faction perk that allow any spell of any wizard in the world, or any spell of the targetted great mage to have a percentage of being countered when cast.
- Enchant an area: The line above made me thought that it could be interesting to have a temporary enchantment over an area of the map. You could do something like the totems, you have an enchantment core that creates an aura around, but the core can be passed by units.
- Summon a storm: Similar to the totem but that can be move through enemies and apply effects. For example, you could have a storm cloud that you can move on the map for 5 turns, and when it pass over enemies, it does elemental damage. Seem similar to your lighting sphere, but that you can pass through it.
- Add spellbooks: This would require a bit more work, so you could just ignore it if you want. In order to have various theme of magic to make sure all players does not get the same spell book, add 1 variable called "book" or "spellbook" which hold a value from 0-99. 0 or undefined is not part of a spell books. Then during the wizard config screen, you can select a perk that will give you a spell book of a certain number. Once you have let say spell book 6, all spell which are flagged with spell book 6 will be researchable, and acquirable by trade. Spells from a book players does not own are simply grayed out.
- Research Group and size: There is this annoying things where you say that your research group should be of size 11. But if you have like 16 spells, instead of placing the first 11 spell on the first level and the last 5 spell on the second level, it will split them evenly instead with 8 spell on first and 2nd level. Why it does not fill a level before passing to the next research level.
- Disintegrate: Destroy spell which prevent resurrection.
- Remove fortification defenses: I am not sure if units stationed on a fort or in a city get defense bonus. This spell effect would disable any of those bonus.
- City portal: When a unit enter a city, it show a list of cities and a cancel button to allow the unit to warp into another city with the same enchantment.
- Temporary Terraforming: Terraform a piece of land that will revert to it's original state after a few turns.
- Terrain Enchantment: Add perk to location on the map that could give various perks like continuous damage, accelerated movement, heal units, etc.
- Make certain spell type, god spells or magic school spells harder to cast by requiring more mana and time to cast them. This could make interesting wizard perk, or counter wizard spells (you cast nature magic, here take that anti-nature bane )
- Give experience to units: Simply give a chunk of experience to 1 or many units. Not a perk that gives it each turn.
- Transmute a unit into another unit: For example, transform any unit "hired" unit into skeletons.
- Steal a faction perk from another great mage. Maybe only applies to dispelable perks.
- Summon a random hero. The stage of the spell could summon various stage of hero.
- Maybe have a spell that can apply 2 perks so that a blessing and bane can be applied at the same time. For example, in master of magic: Wind mastery boost your movement, but hinder the movement of others.
----- Units Perks -----
- Define a "SetMissingStatus": This is the opposite of "setHatredStatus" which gives 50% bonus if target has a specific status. While "SetMissingStatus": Would give 50% bonus if target does not have a specific status. That should allow for example to have "Perk: Piercing Damage" gives +50% vs units which does not have "Perk: Shielded".
- Use a value for "SetHatredStatus": Instead of giving a flat 50% bonus, allow player define other percentages than 50.
- Negate perk: Create a new type of perk that negates a status or another perk. For example, you could have a web spell that adds a perk to the target unit which negates the "Flying" status and change it's movement for walking. This would allow to bring a flying unit down so that it can be attacked.
- Define a "Can attack Flying" status: Allow certain units to attack flying creatures by other mean than range attacks. For example spiders should be allowed to attack flying creature. It should solve a game's problem where flying can only be attack by other flying creatures or archers.
- Modify max HP: Have a perk that raises/reduce max HP by percentage and by value. (ex: +10 max HP). An alternate way to add armor to a unit (inspired from Final Fantasy Tactics)
- Modify Critical: Have a perk that increase/reduce critical chances by a multiplier. (ex: +30% chances for critical)
- Confuse Status: The target unit is out of control of it's owner it will attack randomly friend and enemies or do nothing.
- Mind Control: Take control of the target, it becomes one of your unit as the perk remain.
- Bane Resistance: Increase or reduce resistance to bane of the target. Indirectly increase/reduce the stage of the unit because there is no bane resistance stat.
- Replace damage type: Allow changing the basic damage type of the unit. So for example a frost weapon spell, instead of adding +20% elemental, it could replace the basic attack as elemental and add a 20% strength.
- Afraid: Can be used on 2 ways: A bane that can make certain unit actions be cancelled (ex: skills, or attack). OR A blessing where enemy units attacking the blessed target need to make a fear check else they do nothing. Also works for counter attack. During melee battles, attacked units failing their fear check does not counter attack.
- Status: First strike: Not sure if battles are resolved simultaneously, first strike would make the unit with that status deals damage first before the enemy can reply.
- Status: Ambush: The enemy cannot counter attack when attacking.
- Perks can only have mana upkeep. Allow to have gold or food upkeep too.
- Negate Immunities: Allow a unit's attack to bypass a immunity to a specific type of element. (Ex: by pass elemental immunity)
- Auto Critical: This unit will always receive critical attacks. For example: "Stun: Stunned, Auto-Critical"
- Boost/reduce certain type of movement: For example, +2 to flying and naval movement. But not land movement.
----- Faction Perks -----
- Reduce upkeep: Have some perks that reduce the upkeep in gold, mana, food of specific entities like units, Creatures, Buildings, etc. Value could be by unit or for the whole empire. For example: "Warlord: reduce gold upkeep of each units by 1 gold", OR "Reduce unit upkeep by 10 gold" OR "Architect: Reduce building gold upkeep by 20%".
- Targeting: add "All Enemy Factions"
- Change political relations: Increase/ Decrease once or each turn the diplomatic relations of you with enemy wizards, or enemy wizards with their enemies.
- Reveal the location of cities on the map and it's surroundings. Lift of fog of war too if perk is active.
----- City Perks -----
There are so few city perks, making it impossible to have city enchantment spells. Here are some ideas:
- Experience Boost: Gives experience to units produced into the city.
- Reduce building maintenance: Specify for gold, food, mana, as a fixed value or percentage.
- Modify Fortification of city's max HP: Increase/reduce the max HP of cities, tower and forts
- Make the city fly (or setstatus). It can only be attacked by flying units. Or units that can attack flying. Or simply give any other status units can have to cities.
- Resistance: Give damage resistance to the city. There is already a resistance to life for the building. Allow perk to give new resistance for the core city and it's forts and tower.
- Damage Surrounding units: Any enemy units standing in the 6 hex around the city will receive damage.
- Give perk to friendly, enemy or all units around the city. Allow to make "wall of ..." spells (ex: wall of fire, wall of shadows, wall of stone, etc". Targeted units located around the city will receive a blessing or a bane.
- Immune to banes: Allow city to be protected from city banes.
- Production time of units or buildings: Increase or reduce the production time in turns of units or buildings.
- Steal Resources: Allow stealing gold, food, mana and others.
- Increase sight range of the city.
----- Game rules -----
- Prefixed setup: add a way to prefix or disable certain map parameters, victory conditions or game mode to make sure the mod gets played as intended with a possibility to use randomly generated maps. Be allow to use 0 other worlds, so have only ardania.
- Realm Configuration: add a way to set some world generation parameters to set up which shards can appear, how many shard, how many gates between shards etc. I would love to be able to do something like master of magic where you have 2 worlds: Ardania and Ainadra with MULTIPLE gates connecting both worlds. With 2 perfect mirror worlds, spells like "astral gate" or "plane shift" spells could be possible to do. But both maps needs to be the same size.
- Level up options: Add in logic param different ways to level up. You can add the "random" mode where perks are selected randomly from the list of 3, or "first" where only the first perk in the list is used. This will prevent the player to chose is powerup. You could even make it a game option to allow players to let the computer select randomly a perk.
- Allow setting the default resistance: Again in <logicparam> it should be possible to determine the default resistance of all units. If I don't want life to start at 100 resistance because I changed it for poison, I should be able to do it.
- Maximum population: It should be possible to set the maximum population of a city. A single variable added to <logicparam> could do the job.
- City Size and level: It should be possible in <logicparam> to determine how much population is required for the city to change level. If for example I want level 3 cities to appear at 8 population, and level 4 at 13 population, I should be able to do so.
- Diplomatic Actions: Resource treaty: Have mutual treaties that allow exchanging gold, research, food or mana. Income starts in the negative and raise with time up to the empire's output. See master of orion 2.
- I hate you, let's be allies: Make it require more time before jumping from War to peace to allies.
- Place the artifact effect content in the XML so that we can change them. Right now, the artifact effects are way too weak.
- Be able to affect the probabilities of success of banes. I cannot really say which variable needs to be changed because I don't know the formula, but it should be possible to change those parameters that determined the final resistance % according to the unit and spell stage.
- Armor: That could demand more work. I always felt the resistance system to be a bit bland when designing equipment perks that should raise defenses. An idea would be to add an armor value it order to give more defense option that simply resistance to something. Armor would be applied BEFORE resistance. I played Paper Sorcerer lately, and their armor system game me some ideas (soak dmg, regen after battle). You could have various options:
A: Fixed Value that reduce damage each attack: Problem, if value is too high, some attacks could make 0 damage. But if resistance is applied last, it should be not so problematic. Still, it's simple to implement. You could add a bar of a different color at the top of the HP bar to indicate that this is the minimum damage it needs before making real damage.
B: Variable value that soak damage 1 point for 1 point until empty. Regenerate at the end of the round.
C: Variable value where only half it's value can soak damage. Regenerate at the end of the round.
D: Set a max damage you can receive from 1 attack by slitting the lifebar into various dash. Ex, you have 21 HP, split in 3 that makes 3 dash of 7 HP, and attack that exceed 7, will only do 7 damage. Requiring 3 attacks to kill the unit. The problem is that the range is pretty tight. SPliting the life bar in more that 3 dash is very strong.
OR
The opposite effect is that armor split the HP in dashs, the higher the armor the higher the nb of dash. An attack that does only 1 damage will eat up a whole dash, in this case, resistance is applied first. So for example a unit with 21 HP and 3 dash of 7 HP, will lose 2 of 3 dash (14 damage) if it receives 10 damage. So a unit that receives 3 attacks that does at least 1 dmg will die. But if your armor gives you 5 dash with 20 HP (5 dash of 4 HP), receiving 10 damage will each 3 dash, so 12 damage. The advantage of a similar system is that it does not take additional space in the unit stat display.
Don't forget to add an armor piercing unit status that could ignore armor effects what ever it is.
----- Unit Action -----
- Be able to have action that apply bane without engaging the enemy like you could have an action that gives you a blessing without healing yourself. So setting an attack damage of 0 on a "attack/debuff" action should not engage the enemy.
- Be able to have airship transports by allowing units to morph as a flying ship by clicking an action button. Action that should be unlocked with a building. Else moving into mountains could auto-transform a unit. You would push another action button to land on ground.
- Inspired from the master of magic node meld ability, allow a unit to place a building on a special resources for example. It would consume the unit. Similar to found city, and work boat in civ 5.
----- Moding Features -----
Certain features that could be added to the editor or the game to make moding easier.
- Preview stuff: It should be possible from editor to be able to preview particle effects of spells and actions, 3D models of units and buildings. I can't remember all animations by heart. If we could preview the thing we are cloning, it would make editing easier. Since the editor is in game, it should not be a problem to show a black screen with the model or particle effect.
- Enable the System Console: If you have one, enable it. It would make debugging much more easier. If it's already done, why
not enable it. Even if it's awkward, or badly documented, at least we could do a few debugging things. If you need command ideas, just ask, I am a DOS fan.
- Show in percentage the bane resistance level of units. The only thing we know is that the stage of the unit and spell influence this, but we don't know how.
- Use icons from other game aspect: For example, I should be able to use icons for action as spells or vice versa. Else I need to extract the pictures from the game, cut out the icons and repackage them in the mod. Not very convenient.
- Also be allowed to use action animations for spells and vice versa.
- Could it be possible to have a list of all the system text strings that can be redefined in locdata. A list of the icons names would also be useful. Having the name of the loading screen text strings to change the hints given to player while loading would also be nice to have.
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So this is it. There is probably a few things I have missed, but like I said, implementing half of the stuff listed here would be awesome. I am starting my vacations, so I'll take a moding break for now and continue in september. I would have liked to alpha release my mod, but realized that it is way too hard/unfair to play as it is. So perhaps later.
Thank you for reading this long message.
