Moonday Era

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DopeKiwiWarrior
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Moonday Era

Post by DopeKiwiWarrior »

Moonday Era
an add-on on the 1.14 server

Intro:
Moonday Era is an ambitious era add-on aiming to bring original fantasy world concepts to a place where people can have active fun with them.
In-universe, it is set on the habitable moon of Maasic where 9 factions with unique cultures, means of war and religions battle for supremacy.

Locale:
Maasic, a small moon orbiting a planet simply called Planet in most languages of its inhabitants. It is not the only moon of the planet, Bahat being the second one. Maasic has a large main Continent with a frozen pole north, a number of islands east, a big island west and a couple of disjointed floes south.
A very bad handdrawn, computercolored map
Image
Corresponding historic setting: late antiquity/early medieval (meaning sticks: yes, swords: yes, crossbows: maybe, heavy armor/fortification: not really, robots: products of magic or craziness)

Fantasy level: high

Inhabitants:
Maasikians (out-universe: a cross between human and elf): an evolutionarily plastic race that dominates Maasic through its adaptability.
Zóothrópoi: Maasikian-animal hybrids present in nearly every faction's ranks.
Peregrini: a humanoid race of fragile four-armed pale beings.
Bolotyaki: tiny orange-skinned [censored].

The 9 factions correspond to the 9 teamcolors of original Wesnoth (language characteristics are out-universe):

Bolotyaki (Swampies):

Bolotyaki are mischievous swamp-dwelling creatures of short stature. They live in most of Continent's swamps but are prominent in the central north. Despite their unintelligent facade they are very technologically advanced due to the fact they love fire and were able to harness the explosive fumes of their living space and use it to their need. They don't rely on their technology but think it's too fun not to use. They speak a language identical to Russian.
Races: bolotyaki

Vetikate Kuningriik (Algae Kingdom):

The Ujujad (Swimmers) of the Algae Kingdom are a Maasikian subrace that has adapted to living both in water and on land. The imperfection of their adaptation, however, doesn't allow them to control the whole of Maasic's oceans, as they are bound to reef algae "forests" for naval navigation. They control all of Idasaared (the Eastern Isles), giving them the second largest territory of Maasic's factions. They speak a language identical to Estonian.
Races: Maasikian (Ujuja), zóothrópoi (salamander, goby, eel)

Yanka Runakuna (Jungle People):

The People of the Jungle are a Maasikian subrace adapted to the wild rainforest environment of the northeastern jungles of the continent. They form a primitive tribal society with a strong connection to nature and are very dedicated to protecting it. They speak a language identical to Quechua.
Races: Maasikian (Runa), zóothrópoi (frog), yurakuna kawsakunaq (living plants), elemental (earth)

Cult Planetarium (Planetary Cult):

The largest organization of peregrini is the Cult Planetarium. It is based on the belief that peregrini don't belong on Maasic and have, in fact, come from the Planet it orbits. The Cult uses the arcanima crystals found only on Insula Meridiem (Southwestern Island, their base of operation) to create magical technology in the form of Constructs they use as tools and means of war in stead of their weak bodies. Peregrini speak a language identical to Latin.
Races: peregrini, arcanima

Jaysh il-Zalaam (Forces of the Night):

Forces of the Night are a collection of foul beings who have succumbed to the influence of the Night (an omnipresent psychic force powered by the suffering and dark desires of Maasic's inhabitants). They are organized by dark magicians who use their powers of (not always verbal) manipulation to sway thugs, killers and mentally sick people to do their cruel bidding.
Races: Maasikian, zóothrópoi (moth), elemental (shadow)

Jaysh il-Ainhilal (Forces of Decay):

Decay is an omnipresent force of nature which aims to clean the world of all life. It is necessary for nature in moderation, but very dangerous if abused. The Forces of Decay are led by such abuseive individuals, aiming to preserve their own life in spite of everyone who stands in their path to immortality. They are composed of disease creators, scavenger Zóothrópoi and enemies of theirs unlucky enough to have been resurrected.
Races: Maasikian, zóothrópoi (rat, hyena)

Erimia (Wilderness):

Saytari disillusioned with the imperial way of life often choose to journey through the uncharted territories of the Hizam Bry (Wild Belt). There they are found by Erimia, a group of Maasikians who share their worldview and have regressed into primitiveness through years of living in this savage land. Their behavior is their form of worship to the wilderness itself, an unpredictable idol. They speak a language identical to Greek.
Races: Maasikian (Saytari), Erimioi, kentávroi, zóothrópoi (boar), elemental (fire)

Saytara Qamri (Lunar Empire):

The Lunar Empire owns the largest part of Maasic, controlling nearly the whole the Continent except the swamps of Bolotyaki, northeastern jungles and the Hizam Bry. It hosts a culturally advanced civilization whose religion is based on the worship of Bahat, the other moon of Kawkab (Planet). Its expansion happened thanks to it being a slowly crossbred alliance between southern and central Qarani (continental) Maasikians - the most versatile group of Maasikians on the moon. It uses a language identical to Arabic.
Races: Maasikian (Saytari), zóothrópoi (cat, owl)

Avannarleqimaqinuiaat (North-Seas People):

The people of the North Seas are the inhabitants of the frozen north pole. Their control of the area remains unchallenged as theirs is the only Maasikian subrace currently able to prosper in the harsh conditions of the icy wastelands. The larger, more insulated Avannarleqimaqinuit live in a matriarchal society led by the Great Mothers who manage the northern way of life. They pray to animal symbols and personifications of elements and speak a language identical to Inuktitut.
Races: Maasikian (Avannarleqimaqinuk), akpak [murre], zóothrópoi (walrus), elemental (snow)
Extended version factions (to be made)

Adelfótita Agrioselíni (Wildmoon Siblinghood):

The Wildmoon Siblinghood is an alliance of different forest-dwelling outcasts:
The Lykánthrópoi - former allies of Erimia who broke off due to their natural habitat not being in the Hizam Bry. They still have some weak ties but have created their very own way of living.
The Wildmoon Sect - an alternative version of the Bahat religion opposed to the Saytaran way of worship. The Wildmoon employ a very familial structure and use different magics to the empire.
Various forest outcasts - Saytariyn who prefer living in the woods to the imperial civilization.
Adelfótita uses languages of all of their members, identical to Greek and Arabic.
Races: Maasikian (Saytari), zóothrópoi (wolf)
Unit spreadsheet

Peregrini Radiciti (Radical Peregrini):

The Radicals are peregrini who have lost trust in the teachings of the Cult and don't want to contribute to their goals anymore. They utilize the Insula's resources which are otherwise ignored by the Cult, like its fauna and flora, and have a deeper, less exploitative connection to the arcanima crystals. To the Cult they are terrorists and frankly have embraced that moniker in recent times with escalating aggressivity.
Races: peregrini, arcanima
Unit spreadsheet
Each of the factions will have 7 recruitable units, somewhere between 26 and 30 total and a unique style and gameplay feel, provided by a ton of custom abilities and weapon specials.

Implemented factions currently use placeholder sprites from too many places to credit in the addon description (PM me if you want me to remove yours). We are very slowly trying to make our own, Káprothropos being the first (and so far only) unit to receive a custom sprite by Soranoningen.

Unit database entry
Abilities/Weapon Specials/Notes/Statistics of the era

I'll welcome any balance and conceptual feedback.

Hope you have a good experience with my addon!

P.S.:
If you speak any of these languages:
  • Arabic
  • Greek
  • Latin
  • Quechua
  • Estonian Shoutout to Ravana for his help!
  • Russian
  • Inuktitut
or are a capable artist, please PM me.
Last edited by DopeKiwiWarrior on June 18th, 2018, 2:30 pm, edited 52 times in total.
Creator of Moonday Era, go check it out! (And critique the hell out of it, because it needs it.)
Can-ned_Food
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by Can-ned_Food »

I like the names well enough. Not much more I can say as yet.

Don't forget to put the backstory and lore in Help pages so that we can read it in–game!

Not every lvl2 needs to be on the leader= lists.
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IPS
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by IPS »

Seems to have some potential, but some units have bugged resistances (negative instead positive) and some needs urgent balance adjustments.
Will be sending feedback during this week.

resistances values is based in % of damage taken. Resistance of 80 to blade for example is 20% blade resistant while 120 to blade is -20%, it's a common resistances mistake

Check how does a unit look in game before future releases.
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Shiki
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by Shiki »

DopeKiwiWarrior wrote: March 9th, 2018, 11:38 pm Unit database site (broken for some reason, works ingame though
I encountered this error before, and fixed it by just fixing anything, never found the real cause for it. Some things you could try:
- like ~add-ons, ~multiplayer could as well need a ~
- I noticed Mde Dev era is not in the list of warnings!
- as a general hint, better use yes/no instead of true/false, while they are all valid boolean values, I think there exists since recently some code which does only take yes/no into account (though you probably won't run into it)
- try swapping these two lines in _main.cfg. maybe order matters (though I guess it does not)

Code: Select all

{~add-ons/Moonday/moonday-eras.cfg}
{~add-ons/Moonday/units.cfg}
- you have an [units] tag in units.cfg. You include that file in the _main.cfg at a place which is encapsulated by another [units] tag. You can imagine the preprocessor as a copy-and-paste machine - macros are not functions which are called, it are places where text is inserted. So you end up having two of these tags. [units] does not have [units] as subtag, thus I'm surprises that the code works.
- actually you use [+units] in _main.cfg. This means, everything in that tag appends to the last [units] tag, the one from mainline. This was once the way how it had to be done, but as of today you can change it to [units].
- You are not using the file factions/random.cfg. In case you want to do so one day use / instead of \ as separator in paths. The latter one works only on windows, and is banned in 1.13
- The {~add-ons/Moonday/units/} does actually do nothing, because this folder contains no files. It doesn't do anything bad either :)
- other things I saw ingame: One of the Poachers attacks is callefd "_bow", Soilborns have an weapon special just called "_"
- one last thing - there is an stderr.txt in the folder which contains your wesnoth installation. It logs very picky complaints about errorsand warnings. e.g. when you specified an image for a unit which doesn't exist. This file is overwritten every time you start wesnoth. currently it complains about
Spoiler:
Not sure how to explain these things in an understandable way. The BOM is an invisible letter at the very beginning of the file, you can just delete it, and best configure your editor to not create it.
- Did you already find out about :debug mode? you can use :unit advances=1 for testing things rather than dummy units.

While this list became quite long, I'm happy to see that you didn't run into the usual pitfalls and even use this mainline-strings file.
Best wishes, and good luck on finding the bug.
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DopeKiwiWarrior
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by DopeKiwiWarrior »

Spoiler:
Hey, didn't notice replies to this thread, so I'm sorry for replying late.

The backstory will be done in the future, for now my main focus is to get everything working.

I just couldn't bring myself to leave out any unit. There are no scout advancements in there though, that would be broken.
Spoiler:
Which units you think have bugged resistances? Maybe I've intended them to be so, because I haven't run into any inconsistencies with my idea when I was testing.

I'll be sure to take your feedback into account. My only balancing was watching series of 1v1 AI matches and adjusting until there was a 1:1 win ratio.
Spoiler:
Thanks a lot for all of the advice, I'll make sure to fix everything tomorrow. I might have made the mistake of copying the main file and the units file from different places and thus creating that inconsistency.

And about the stderr: the BOMs are just skipped, so I don't see any pressing reason to eliminate them. They might have been made by UMCDK, because the units I made with my little Python script don't include them. The images are automatic - when I name an attack "tusks" and don't specify an image, the game unsuccessfully tries to find tusks.png. Nothing I can do about that as long as I'm lacking art.

I'll try the debug mode too. It will make Exp Bank obsolete. But there's also the Sasa unit which was an experiment with the ingame effects of negative numbers in the unit-type file and a source of great fun. It gives gold back when recruited and subtracts its killer's XP. Also, it used to crash the game with a negative number-of-attacks.

EDIT: The "_bow" thing is another bug I can't fix. It uses the mainline-strings macro. All the others work but the one for the bow produces the underscore and I don't understand why.
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Can-ned_Food
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by Can-ned_Food »

I'm just coming over from Stack Exchange, so I want to upvote and suggest edits here …

You know that you can use [section=name]text[/section] rather than [spoiler]text[/spoiler] when you want to reduce the apparent length of your post. Both are initially hidden, but the Section has a "name" attribute.
CORRECTION: As Pentarctagon mentioned, you can also change the text shown in lieu of “Spoiler” with [spoiler=text]. The chief difference, then, is with the indentation and the formatting of the header.
DopeKiwiWarrior wrote: March 22nd, 2018, 10:07 pm The backstory will be done in the future, for now my main focus is to get everything working.
Wh-what?! Well, concept and thorough backstory are two different things, of course, but I like to do both simultaneously or alternatingly: it helps you avoid simply having a faction derived solely from some mathematical, logical, or systematic theme on which a graphical face is later painted. IMHO.
Last edited by Can-ned_Food on March 23rd, 2018, 3:44 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by DopeKiwiWarrior »

Section Test
Can-ned_Food wrote: March 23rd, 2018, 2:16 pm I'm just coming over from Stack Exchange, so I want to upvote and suggest edits here …

You know that you can use [section=name]text[/section] rather than [spoiler]text[/spoiler] when you want to reduce the apparent length of your post. Both are initially hidden, but the Section has a name= attribute.
DopeKiwiWarrior wrote: March 22nd, 2018, 10:07 pm The backstory will be done in the future, for now my main focus is to get everything working.
Wh-what?! Well, concept and thorough backstory are two different things, of course, but I like to do both simultaneously or alternatingly: it helps you avoid simply having a faction derived solely from some mathematical, logical, or systematic theme on which a graphical face is later painted. IMHO.
Thank you, I actually didn't know that!

I meant that the backstory of course exists conceptually in my mind and that I'll be adding it later, not that it will be fully created in the future. None of the era could exist without this background.
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by Pentarctagon »

Both section and [spoiler] can do that actually.

[section=hello][/section]
hello

[spoiler=hello][/spoiler]
hello:
Hovering over their respective button in the full editor will give a description and an example or two of how to use the tags.
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DopeKiwiWarrior
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by DopeKiwiWarrior »

Quote:
Thanks but let's not derail the thread here. Anyone can PM me if they wish to discuss formatting tags further :lol:
Last edited by DopeKiwiWarrior on March 23rd, 2018, 9:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by DopeKiwiWarrior »

0.2.1 now live on the 1.13 server. Go check it out!

Changelog:
  • every attack now has an icon, even if it's blank
  • some strings have been updated
  • leader lists were slimmed down
  • fixed interrupt event to stop constantly throwing errors
  • racial cleansing *cough* I mean the default human and mechanical race were replaced by Maasikian and Arcanima respectively
  • other backend changes suggested by Shiki
EDIT:
0.2.1b:
  • owlfoot changes (affects Saytara's Bawma Birkh and Thalija Bawma)
EDIT2:
0.2.1c
  • fixed the interrupt weapon special to actually work in 1.13
EDIT3:
0.2.1d
  • fixed double penetration (pun intended)
Last edited by DopeKiwiWarrior on March 24th, 2018, 5:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Can-ned_Food
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by Can-ned_Food »

DopeKiwiWarrior wrote: March 23rd, 2018, 6:41 pm the default human and mechanical race were replaced to fit the era
I haven't looked at what you meant by that, but you do know that you can define a different [race] with the same displayed name, yes? If you defined a new [race] with same id=, then your new definition will not be used IIRC.
Unless, of course, you began a whole new [units] — which will cause its own problems.

Disregard as necessary.
Sections and Spoilers
Anyways, I don't think it is fair to say that Pentarctagon was derailing the thread. I posted my comment in the thread because it featured examples of [spoiler] where you could also use [section]; Pentarctagon posted an update which corrected information in my post. Both of those were done in mind of future readers; if anything, I was the one who derailed and should've PMed you — but then Pentarctagon would've needed to use the PM Surveillance Feature :twisted: to correct me.
Last edited by Can-ned_Food on March 24th, 2018, 12:56 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by DopeKiwiWarrior »

Quote:
Well, your reply was talking about the era and then also about sections and spoilers. His was only about that. I don't blame him for anything, I just want to stay on topic :)

I have of course defined new races. Replace in this case meaning the units that used to be default human or mechanical are now MdE Human and MdE Arcanima respectively.
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by DopeKiwiWarrior »

A full day's work up on the add-on server, v0.2.2:
  • all Maasikian units of Saytara changed from chaotic to lawful, to fit the lore and overall tone of the faction
  • a ton of descriptions added for Can-ned_Food to read
  • added a leader-only unit to Saytara, Bondmaker
  • added a USUI (see Weapon Specials/Abilities/Notes) for Erimia, Tzákoforeás
Question:
Should I be posting the changelog here? It's in the add-on description too and I can't decide if I'm creating unnecessary clutter by putting it here.
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by Can-ned_Food »

Some people only edit the topical post i.e. the threadstarter. Some people only answer questions and give cursory information. Some people make a new post every time they update. Depends on whether you want to bump the thread for attention or not.

I'd say edit the first post and update it; if you need to interrupt an ongoing discussion to notify posters and lurkers, then do so, but otherwise it is a bit much to make a new post for each change.
Eh, maybe if the change is big enough and you think the add–on deserves it.
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Re: Moonday Era

Post by DopeKiwiWarrior »

Quote:
Main post edited, no more changelog replies. I also realized I can put the changelog in a spoiler so that people who don't want to read it don't have to.

So, moving on from sections/spoilers and changelog clutter:
How even is the era? I noticed I haven't gotten nearly any specific feedback for the content. The only content suggestion was the trimming of leaderlists, which I did, and IPS' promised feedback, which I'm patiently waiting for. So what's your opinion about the units, added descriptions and all that stuff? :)
Creator of Moonday Era, go check it out! (And critique the hell out of it, because it needs it.)
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