[MOD] The Expansionist

[Modjo]

Hi all,

I would like to announce my first mod project, The Expansionist! The aim of this mod is to slow down the early game expansion without delaying the mid-game arrival. To that effect settlers now take twice as much and twice as long to build, but they will yield lvl 2 cities straight away. Same goes if you capture a neutral town, its population will "bump" to 2 if it was only 1. An interesting side effect of this is that now you can move a city immediately after capturing/settling, no need to wait for that lvl 2 anymore! The other change regarding the lord of koatls perk is more of a game balance decision, more could follow and I am open to suggestions.

features

Working:
v0.2-------------------------

• New cities start at 2000 pop (instead of 1000 - note: due to a bug, you may need to destroy a building if it's showing as lvl1)
• Settlers price and construction time increased again (+25 gold and +1 turn)

v0.1-------------------------

• Lord of Koatls mage perk now costs 5 points (instead of 2)
• The Koatl queen premade mage has been changed accordingly (2 Koatls perks + lesser heal)
• Settlers price, construction time and maintenance increased (+25 gold and +1 turn, +1gold/turn maintenance)

future work:

• Settlers cost population (2000 pop for 1 settler)
• Researcher perk gives an extra research slot on top the existing +3 research(can choose from 6 spells instead of 5)
• Population cost gold(on top of food/mana. 1 gold for 1000 pop)

That's it, the first release is out!! On the bad side it looks like it will be harder than expected to get some features working until we can figure out the scripting. I'm all open for suggestions so please feel free to comment!

How to install

1. Download the mod [==>View attachment TheExpansionist.zip<==]
2. Extract the archive
3. Copy the .pack file in the warlock install directory
4. Run Warlock
5. Sit back and enjoy

Modjo

 

[unmerged(506787)]

I have some ideas like this also. Looking forward to making some changes.

Suggestion, you should put [WIP] in your title, as this isn't a completed mod.

 

[BjornB]

Oooh... Love that there is already something out there

 

[Modjo]

Oooh... Love that there is already something out there

Hey don't get your hopes too high, I am still depending on the modding tools! There will be a lot more out there if we have something to work with that is

 

[Mardagg]

Hey, I like your ideas.
I have my doubts though that this is doable since it would require to do a whole new game mechanic.
I think that you can achieve similar results by simply changing the production time and cost of settlers.
Maybe give the AI more gold to start with in addition.

I always wanted to play a game of Warlock where my settlers would take 4 turns to produce...i think that in general the production times of many units are totally off btw...like for example Temple unit should take way more turns to produce,and some low tier units maybe only 1 turn.I think there is a lot that could be done in this area.

 

[Modjo]

Hey, I like your ideas.
I have my doubts though that this is doable since it would require to do a whole new game mechanic.
I think that you can achieve similar results by simply changing the production time and cost of settlers.

Hey thanks for the suggestion. i don't know yet whether this can be done but I like the idea of longer production time for settlers. I'll try it out and see if it is not too much burden then. Perhaps 3 turns would be more balanced.

Modjo

 

[Modjo]

First release is out! Check out the first post for download link

v0.1-------------------------

Working:
- koatls lord perk now costs 5
- koatl queen premade changed accordingly
- settlers price, construction time and maintenance increased

not working yet:
- building settlers cost population
- researcher perk gives an extra reasearch slot

future:
- population gold maintenance

 

[Mardagg]

nice!
What about arethi elves settlers?

some more suggestions:
-Favor of Fervus should be either 10 points or removed completely.Alternatevly you could alter the stats of the summon bears spells,so that it either cost mana and food upkeep or only food but much more mana to cast.That perk is totally overpowered wth Undead starting race.
-Bats are too cheap for what they offer.Maybe double cost?
-Human Warriors are 3 turns...mabye 2 turns?
-Some temple units are ridicilousy bad...maybe improve stats or make them a lot cheaper?

 

[Modjo]

nice!
What about arethi elves settlers?

some more suggestions:
-Favor of Fervus should be either 10 points or removed completely.Alternatevly you could alter the stats of the summon bears spells,so that it either cost mana and food upkeep or only food but much more mana to cast.That perk is totally overpowered wth Undead starting race.
-Bats are too cheap for what they offer.Maybe double cost?
-Human Warriors are 3 turns...mabye 2 turns?
-Some temple units are ridicilousy bad...maybe improve stats or make them a lot cheaper?

Hi Mardagg,
Arethi elves settlers now take 5turns and 125gold to build, although their upkeep is still 1gold and 1food / turn. I was thinking about making settlers a little bit tougher to kill as well since now losing a settler is much more dramatic than before and could easily cost a victory on 1v1.

I agree than summoned bears and summoned rats are imbalanced with undead and I might up their cost as you suggested. I think a better way of handling food exploits by the undead is to make units that are food dependent take a percentage of damage each turn when there is food missing (based on food produced / food consumed) that way even the undead would have to rely on a minimum food production to keep these units alive. I think units heal for 10% of their max health in your territory so any food deficit less than 10% would go unnoticed for units defending their territory. This would also mean that you would need a positive food economy to go invading other territories. Sounds good but I can't do that until we figure out scripting...

I'm not going to focus on changing individual units stats for now, I'll let other modders experiment with that aspect of the game if they want.

Thanks for your suggestions, appreciated

 

[Fenryder]

This is great to see! Warlock has so much unlocked potential thats been flushed. Guess I'll need to load up the old bird and start testing how these changed affect AI

Suggestions borrowed from suggestion thread ::

reduce monster harbor bonus to 25% to make tax office more attractive
give ships siege trait to make them more useful
increase rat plague infection duration to 5 turns to make them useful late game
reduce warrior buildtime to 2 so there are more of them to hit with lightning bolt
Raise all 1 space terraform spells except cleanse types to 1.25 turn cast time, increase mana cost
Raise all multiple space terraform except cleanse types to 1.75 turn cast time, increase mana cost
Reduce Fertile land to 1 space terraform and raise cast time to 1.25; too easy to get, not tied to a god and very powerful for food eco
reduce counterspell casting time/mana cost to make it worth casting
reduce upkeep of demonology workshop and excavations; reduce research amount to compensate.
remove undead death immunity perk - give 100 death resist to compensate; helps undead not be useless agianst death cities
reduce warlock, wizard, cleric (vampire?)(mage style units) upkeep/build gold costs to promote more use of these units
reduce mage hero gold upkeep cost;
equalize all basic hero upkeep costs so hero choice is a flavor choice not a business/economy choice
reduce arathi gold upkeep on research buildings - having lots of spells doesnt give that great an advantage
Give arathi market +2 mana +2 food to make more attractive, help with early eco

If you do follow through with some of these changes please separate your expansion mod with the balance mod!

 

[ConjurerDragon]

I like the idea that it´s possible to conquer a city and immediately raze it and get a settler to rebuild it in a better position.

However is that only possible by making cities generally start bigger and suddenly grow if conquered?
Or is there a way to mod that any city, even with only 1 population gives 1 settler if razed?

In what .xml file are the settings for cities that you changed?

Edit: I just encountered the bug you mentioned in my current game when 3 of my newfounded villages refused to grow at all.

New cities start at 2000 pop (instead of 1000 - note: due to a bug, you may need to destroy a building if it's showing as lvl1)

When I destroyed the farm that was built at the moment of founding the villages they jumped to a population of 2000.
However when that happens to AI cities too in a game and the AI does not know how to avoid it that could cripple AI expansion.
I think I won´t use the 2000 minimum pop setting until a solution to that has been found.

 

[pickardj79]

If you haven't found it yet, I found minCityPopulation in logicparams.xml. Maybe this is what was changed to make citys have a min pop of 2?

Here's an idea to get around the bug, make the min pop 1900. Then the first turn after conquering the city will grow to size two and you might not have the need-to-destroy-a-building bug.

 

[pickardj79]

Making minCityPopulation 1900 in logicparams.xml did not get around the bug, however I did find a setting in structuredatalist.xml that I think has fixed the bug . There are i_population values for level one towns for all four races. ElvesTown01, HumanTown01, etc. I changed these and minCityPopulation in logicarams.xml to 2000 and cities start at 2000 and grow normally. I haven't seen any AI cities not grow (which was a problem when just changing logicparams.xml). I had to unpack structuredatalist.xml from the dxxx.pack files that originally came with the game. It was in d110 in my version.

There is some weirdness with this fix. The population increase number in the lower left of the city screen shows +0 when I first found a city. However the city grows normally that turn and the next turn the increase number is back to normal .