[MOD] Village Conquest collection

[Can-ned_Food]

This topic is for the discussion of my collected custom events and MP modifications which focus around Village capture and ownership.
It is available on the 1.12 Add–on server.

At time of writing, I have released

• “No Zeros”, which makes lvl 0 troops unable to capture Villages,
• “Volume Counts”, which simulates infrastructure of villages,
• “Teamshare”, which is designed to facilitate use of teammate Villages.

They are now all past Beta.

There is one disclaimer of which I want to make special mention. MP Mods are loded to cache or memory by the order that you click ‘Activate’, not collated by title or by order in which they are read. This means that [event] blocks will be applied in that same order also. Until I or anyone else decides to write composites for these modules, you need to Activate them in a certain sequence if you are using more than one of them.
Otherwise, they play together very well.

[The_Gnat]

Sounds interesting, the only thing is though that it doesn't have overly large impact on multiplayer but if you do happen to be playing a map/scenario with lvl 0's the effect can be large have you given this addon a try playing the first scenario of northern rebirth?

In order to balance this effect maybe you could make it that the level of the unit that takes the village is the income that you gain? That might be hard to create though, also it might overly encourage leveling up scouts which is silly...

Also if you made a modification that you only got gold if a lvl 1 or higher was actually staying on a village that would be cool

Also I personally think a interesting gameplay mechanic would be to have villages ONLY heal and not give income and the only way you can get money is from looting enemy keeps & stealing their money, raiding villages and so destroying them, or finding treasures!

What are your thoughts on these ideas? I would be interested to help create that last idea I suggested!

[Can-ned_Food]

Yes, if a scenario wasn't designed so as to accomodate No Zeros then you'd have a difficult time of it.
I figure that skirmish scenarios would have the expectation that you'd be playing with lvl 2 Leaders who could recruit mostly lvl 1 troops.
As for the Default Era, the No Zeros mod does slightly change the necessary strategies for the Undead players, in that they can't use their batscouts to capture villages early.

It would be possible, but somewhat tedious, to set an envar which would remember the exp. lvl of the troop which made a most recent capture on a village, and to use that to adjust the income accordingly. That doesn't much interest me at this time, but it could be done.

If you were to require a Village be occupied for your Side to receive income, you'd need to release the Village to Side 0 every time its tile was exited. That's the simplest way I can figure at this time.

As for the ultimate idea of yours, I've recently been considering something similar. I don't like Villages — they really disturb any consistency of scale with the maps.

¶ healfont
• heals=

¶ manafont
• gives_income=
(could be a resource, but this isn't a civilization rheme)

¶ portal
• gives_income=
• recruit_onto=
but would that make it so you could only recruit_onto if you owned it — or is the engine not intelligent enough?

¶ landing pad
• recruit_onto=

¶ portal invoker
• recruit_from=
(unless you combine that with the portals too)

There is a glitch that requires a terrain_type to be both recruit_onto=TRUE and recruit_from=TRUE for the Recruit to function, of course.
Anyways, the idea is that you use the portals to sustain your troops as well as to bring them in. Of course, this would probably require you to bottleneck the portals by making village_support=0, or by raising the recruitment and recall costs, or something along such lines.

[The_Gnat]

the No Zeros mod does slightly change the necessary strategies for the Undead players, in that they can't use their batscouts to capture villages early.

Yeah it doesn't seem like it effects to other sides enough...

As for the ultimate idea of yours, I've recently been considering something similar. I don't like Villages — they really disturb any consistency of scale with the maps.

Yeah and they create to large a tactical advantage with good defense healing and income

¶ healfont
• heals=

Yeah i think these could be represented by village tiles but also monasteries (like priests healing your troops), or magic places (ponds, groves, alters, etc) and different teams could have different places that healed them for example undead are healed on darkstones, humans are healed at monasteries, etc.

Then teams could have a menu items which they can choose "destroy tile" this would then make it so people had to defend their places or they would get destroyed

¶ manafont
• gives_income=
(could be a resource, but this isn't a civilization rheme)

This could be represented by a gold mine or a vineyard or anything like that and it would give players income

¶ portal
• gives_income=
• recruit_onto=
¶ landing pad
• recruit_onto=

Personally i think castles are good for allowing recruit onto but maybe some castle tiles could have a blacksmith or a tavern and those give the player income like villages do now.

¶ portal invoker
• recruit_from=
(unless you combine that with the portals too)

Like i said before i think castles are good for recruit locations and that keeps also are good for the recruit from, i personally think it would mess up think maps look to (and realism) to have portals on the map (but then you might not mean literal portals ) i think though that maybe other locations also allow recruits, for example if you go to a tavern, maybe any player can recruit ruffians,peasants,woodsman and at a waterfall any player can recruit merman... that would add a cool dynamic

There is a glitch that requires a terrain_type to be both recruit_onto=TRUE and recruit_from=TRUE for the Recruit to function, of course.
Anyways, the idea is that you use the portals to sustain your troops as well as to bring them in. Of course, this would probably require you to bottleneck the portals by making village_support=0, or by raising the recruitment and recall costs, or something along such lines.

Technically i don't know how all this would be implemented but i think rather than assigning everything to the terrain using [event] name=moveto for some things would make it easier

What do you think of these ideas?

[Can-ned_Food]

replies to The_Gnat

Yeah; ‘portal’ doesn't need to mean a magical or wormhole portal. It could be a door to outside an arena or anything.

On my Not Atoll What I Wanted map, i do have villages which allow you to recruit. I use some complex WML to change the lists of recruitables. It is not elegant atoll — er, at all, — but that's how Wesnoth does recruiting.
Indeed, devising workaround for the limitations of the recruit system is one thing that has delayed work with a few of my new factions.

Using moveto events to toggle the recruit_from and recruit_onto properties would be similar: it seems clumsy, but maybe it is actually the better system of methods.

announcement of new Village Conquest edition

So, a few things have changed since. I separated Teamshare to its own module. Village Conquest now includes the other two as submodules. Thematically, that makes sense; both of them will continue to share this topic for discussion.

I also would like to announce that Village Conquest is almost ready to be used for inclusion in campaigns. Functionally, it does not have any problems of which I am aware. It needs one small change to be ready on the user side: the way that it prepares the message informing a user of slot ownership.
I am looking for ideas as to how that could be done. You can see to the TODO section of mod_village-conquest/rsrc/enhance_village-conqest-volume-_ed-1-7-1 for some of my thoughts on the matter.