Vampires

[Fiach Dubh]

I looked into this a bit, I still might be missing something but this is what I found:

Bonuses/penalties for alignments are determined within schedules.cfg - which only specifies the modifier for Lawful units at any given time of day. Chaotic units presumably invert this to find their damage modifier. I can't see any other reference to alignments in any file, so as far as I can tell the only way to change it is to affect both standard alignments equally - I can't see any way of defining a new one, they seem to be hardwired into the game engine itself.

You might be able to define a unit as being 'twice as Chaotic', but I can't see how you'd go about it.

[Darth Jordius]

Deleted for being in wrong thread.

[Ryorin]

Wow, talk about necromancy...

The problem with this idea is that, if these creatures change form at all they would have to remain changed. That's assuming that we're following the old legends about werewolves for a basis. For instance the Warg would have to be human for the entire day. Otherwise it would look a bit silly to have him change forms so quickly.

The only way it would work is if the transformation into animal form was via a magic spell. However, (Correct me if I'm wrong JW) the 'animal form' is the natural form of the Warg. Therefore, the transformation isn't a magical one.

[Maeglin Dubh]

Necromancy most foul.

The last person to have posted in the thread is, in fact, by all accounts, deceased.

[enclave]

havent read all, so i dont know if i post something new..

what if vampires were double chaotic.. like 50% more damage at night, 50% less at day

well i just threw the idea.. doesnt matter if it is bad

[JW]

havent read all, so i dont know if i post something new..

what if vampires were double chaotic.. like 50% more damage at night, 50% less at day

well i just threw the idea.. doesnt matter if it is bad

That would be even harder to balance for, and would really make the game too time dependant for my tastes. It's heavy enough as it is.

There have been thoughts about regen at night, poison at day type stuff. It could be neat, but again, same thing.

[enclave]

yeah.. but that's the point..

i mean.. why adding new factions if they are all the same?
What is the point to have another loyalists, or elves, or undead with just different pictures?

If somebody wanted to control the faction which is more time dependent he must have better skills than somebody who controls simple loyals.

vampires who are better at night can be fastly screwed at day.. unless the player's skills save him.

more options, more strategies, more variety, more fun..

[Velensk]

The vampires in EoM don't play like any other faction I've seen, they are probably underpowered at the moment, but they are already diffrent without needing gimmicks.

[JW]

To move the discussion out of Melon's art thread:

On the note of redoing the vampire bite, why not make it pierce? I know making it blade is more consistent with the other units who have bite, but a vampire bite especially is just a piercing bite to draw blood.

Perhaps. I'm trying to think of units whose resistancies from blade to pierce are significantly different.

1) Wose: Biting as blade would do more damage. Pierce makes more sense here.
2) Drakes: resist blade, weak to pierce. No real matter.
3) Saurians: resist pierce, weak to blade. Could be weird, but it could be explained away by their tough hide (as I THINK is the reason for their pierce resist? -but then why a blade deficiency?) Anyway, the paranthsized is a topic for another day. No real matter here.

I can't think of any more offhand. Oh, the Spearman levels....but they're weird anyway. I see that as a problem with them and not with the proposed.

Okay, HORSES. Units like the cavalry and horseman that resist blade but are weak to pierce would need some explaining. Why would biting be more effective than a sword? I suppose the argument is that they are attacked from behind anyway (I temporarily forgot), so a charge wouldn't do as much damage as I thought (don't get backstab on defense IIRC). Pierce could work!! The only oddity is then the Cavalry, but I can live with that as blade may bring up more issues, and I think the different damage type makes it more interesting anyway.

Okay, so the fledgeling does 5-4 melee with 5-3 bite right now.
6-4 sword at night = 24
6-3 bite = 18

a 7-1 backstab attack would do 18-1 at night, giving it the same damage...but when not backstabbing it would be nearly useless, and even then it does less damage than the sword. It still needs a boost.

9-1? This does 11-1 (5hp drain normally) or 22-1 backstab. Hmm...actually, I've thought about increasing the Fledgling attack to 7-3 to take more advatage of the night bonus, and increasing his price to 14g. This would give him 27 at night, so the drain should be increased even more then.....I don't like giving it 1 huge attack though, because it then becomes a viable attack against stand-alone high defense units with moderately low hp: say an elf in forest at 9hp. Do you want 2/3 hits to land at 30%, or 1/1? 1/1 gives you a lightly better chance and would be the default option.

So......I'm thinking 7-3 sword, 6-2 bite, 14g. Sword does 27 at night, bite does 28 (if backstabbing), before resists.......and actually, thinking about it, the bite should be weaker than that because it's already the better option on backstab since you drain from it too......5-2 gives 12-2 backstab at night. That's good enough for me.

Sory to kind of "mind-flow" on you guys here, but I'm going to try to list my reasons more for changes more I think. That way we can all talk it out and arrive to a hopefully better conclusion.

[Melon]

If you're thinking of changing the damage type for the vampires, I would suggest looking into the Blood Manipulator tree as well, since fire damage makes very little sense for this unit. Units most heavily effected by fire damage tend to be woses, skeletons and EOM Ice Crabs. It strikes me kind of silly for an attack called "blood boil" to cause critical damage to skeletons and then utterly fail against cold-blooded drakes. If the damage type is going to remain as being fire then the name needs some serious rethinking. A better choice however would be to change the damage type to cold and rename the attack "drain life" or something of that nature.
The name of the second attack the unit gains makes just as little sense as the first. However since it's an arcane damage based attack, picking a more appropriate name shouldn't be much of a big deal.

[JW]

If you're thinking of changing the damage type for the vampires, I would suggest looking into the Blood Manipulator tree as well, since fire damage makes very little sense for this unit. Units most heavily effected by fire damage tend to be woses, skeletons and EOM Ice Crabs. It strikes me kind of silly for an attack called "blood boil" to cause critical damage to skeletons and then utterly fail against cold-blooded drakes. If the damage type is going to remain as being fire then the name needs some serious rethinking. A better choice however would be to change the damage type to cold and rename the attack "drain life" or something of that nature.

Indeed, that has been a problem for some time now noticed by others as well.

The name of the second attack the unit gains makes just as little sense as the first. However since it's an arcane damage based attack, picking a more appropriate name shouldn't be much of a big deal.

Yeah.....that name is leftover from the days of psychic damage. It was a really cool idea that I scrapped because it didn't mesh well with default, and it seemed that making it compatible with default was the only way the era was going to get played. The change was made, and several months later it has payed off greatly! Unfortunately, not all the concepts and configs were updated at the same time due to either not realizing or noticing the problem, or pure laziness/lack of time. This is a pretty easy fix indeed.

[Aethaeryn]

Yeah.....that name is leftover from the days of psychic damage. It was a really cool idea that I scrapped because it didn't mesh well with default, and it seemed that making it compatible with default was the only way the era was going to get played. The change was made, and several months later it has payed off greatly! Unfortunately, not all the concepts and configs were updated at the same time due to either not realizing or noticing the problem, or pure laziness/lack of time. This is a pretty easy fix indeed.

iirc, units in mainline now have a default resist of 0% to unknown damage types. I can't remember where I read that or if I misread that though. If you wanted to bring back one good damage type it could work better if you tested that this now works, as long as it makes sense that most units would have 0% resist.

[JW]

iirc, units in mainline now have a default resist of 0% to unknown damage types. I can't remember where I read that or if I misread that though. If you wanted to bring back one good damage type it could work better if you tested that this now works, as long as it makes sense that most units would have 0% resist.

Actually, I've been pondering over the whole idea of weapon specials relating to enemy race idea.

If I added Psychic back, that would truly be awesome. The problem arises in that default units from spearmen to trolls to ghosts would all receive the same damage from it!

I was wondering if there is a way to code it so that when a "psychic" attack (it would need a weapon special for this if I'm correct) hits an enemy with race "undead" it would do 50% less damage. Against "trolls" it would do 20% less, etc.

Is this possible? If so, how? I've also considered using such a weapon special to change the crusader's sword to blade, but simply give him a special that grants him additional bonuses against vamps et al.

[megane]

I was wondering if there is a way to code it so that when a "psychic" attack (it would need a weapon special for this if I'm correct) hits an enemy with race "undead" it would do 50% less damage. Against "trolls" it would do 20% less, etc.

I believe I could manage this; what would happen is that the attack would have type "psychic" (meaning that all units would, by default, take %100 from it), along with an invisible weapon special which would change the damage for various races.

Might you be able to throw together a little list of the effective resists I'm going for? IIRC it can be filtered on just about anything, so (for example) it could be %120 effective against units with the Intelligent trait xD

[Aethaeryn]

The only problem is that it would be hard to tell what damage that psychic would do to other units...