[eMOD] Improved Undead v1.21 (for LH v1.6 DLC04)

Primarily geared at helping the AI play the Dead faction

from Elemental Forums

Improved Undead for FE Legendary Heroes v1.6

Download v1.1: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gj2p3bfjq21esjf/Improved%20Undead%20v1.1.zip

Download v1.1b: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wk69x414vx9sas/Improved%20Undead%20v1.1b.zip

Download v1.21: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g2g6hohoqzq6sgv/Improved%20Undead%20v1.21.zip

This mod requires 'The Dead World' DLC!

This mod arose out of my like for the undead faction, and disappointment at how poorly they fare as AI opponents. As this game is a singleplayer game, it did not make sense to me that a faction be so unplayable by the AI. The mod aims to change that.

This mod thus makes several changes to the undead faction. Most of these changes do not affect balance outright, but affect how the AI will behave.

A few of these changes were originally featured in webusver's Patchwork mod at http://www.nexusmods.com/fallenenchantress/mods/1891/? (mentioned below).

This mod works best with Primal_Savage's XtraDeconstruct (specifically the AI improvements) at https://forums.elementalgame.com/451107/page/1/ as I've done most of the tweaking with this in mind. Not compatible with his Dead faction fixes, but everything else works well with this.

Balance Changes (player affected):

The Dead faction-specific improvements will add a small amount of growth (taken from Patchwork mod)

The Mausoleum provides +2 growth.

The Catacomb provides +3 growth.

The Necropolis provides +4 growth.

The AI is not quite able to play the Dead faction very much differently from the other factions, so this was necessary to help it keep up. AI priorities for these improvements have been raised as well so the AI will build them early (or at least, not omit them from their cities).

AI Changes (invisible to player):

Terror has been disabled for the AI. The AI fights most of its battles in auto-resolve, where Terror is useless. Thus, it hampers the AI as it wastes turns using Terror in auto-resolve which is futile. While the AI will no longer use Terror against you, it will have less difficulties dealing with wandering monsters and be better at expanding as a result. The player is still able to use Terror without any issues.

AI has new units. Some of these are taken from webusver's Patchwork mod. I designed the rest of the units. This gives the AI something to build in the midgame. I'm not the best at designing units, so most of these designs are simply functional.

Morrigan's AI traits are now a little more varied. He is no longer always Sorcerer and Unstable. I personally think that Unstable hampers it a little as the AI would often go to war with everybody else for no reason and have difficulty coping with multiple wars. The traits available to Morrigan were taken from the Patchwork mod.

New Content (accessible to player):

11 new Undead heroes have been added, with their own backstories. They are inspired by the Undead heroes in the Patchwork mod.

General Bugfixes:

The default Undead Scout design now has the Scout ability. It previously was lacking this trait, which made it less effective than other faction's scouts. More importantly, this seems to signal to be a flag for the AI that this unit is a Scout, so it does not seem to spam Scouts like it did before.

The Risen Brood now uses the skeleton soundpack, so they actually sound like skeletons. They were previously using the generic male soundpack.

To install:

Extract the files into Documents\My Games\legendaryheroes\Mods.

Make sure you select 'Enable Mods' from the game options.

Play!

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Hope this mod helps make the Dead faction slightly better as an AI opponent.

Feedback is appreciated, though with the new semester starting, I might be a little less responsive to implement additional fixes where necessary.

Changes from v1.2 to v1.21

Updated to use the Morrigan cutscene pack added in LH 1.6.

Changes from v1.1b to v1.2

Added 6 heroes of the Undead race, bringing the total count to 11.

Gallowman is now of the Undead race.

Change AITag for unique undead improvements back to Economy, but with the AIPriority values raised a lot more (thanks Primal_Savage for the advice!)

Changes from v1.1 to v1.1b

Changed AITag for unique undead improvements from Economy to Merchant. They're much more likely to build it now, but I've not tested enough with this.

Raised the AIPriority for the unique undead improvements even further.

Changes from v1.0 (initial release) to v1.1 (current release)

Tidied up the xml files

Added 5 heroes of the Undead race

Mod Credits

Thanks to webusver for the ideas in the Patchwork Mod.

18,192 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top


Will be keeping my eye on this mod. :thumbsup:

testing and feedback to come...

 

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

It would be nice if you add undead heroes toy your mod, since original game doesn't have them. If you want, you make take ready undead heroes from my Patchwork mod.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

This Mod has been added to the Regularly Updated List of Mods for E:LH

:thumbsup:

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

webusver: I will consider it. I initially wasn't too interested because those heroes lacked unique descriptions (which I think are a big part of adding flavour to the game). I would look into adding them, preferably if they had unique descriptions, or if I could write something interesting myself :P

 

tjashen: Thanks!

 

Edit: As an aside, is there a way to spawn a particular unit, like say a Champion? I'd like to see how these champions look like. Reading xml files doesn't really help a lot with the visualisation v_v

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Rotlung, reply 4
Edit: As an aside, is there a way to spawn a particular unit, like say a Champion? I'd like to see how these champions look like. Reading xml files doesn't really help a lot with the visualisation

You can spawn heroes with sovereign, though I don't know if it's possible to spawnmore that 5 (army limit) - check CoreUnits file.

Or you can make a scenario and place your heroes on map under Player 1 rule, near Player 1 starting location. Player 1 is human player. I always use this way.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top


Thanks for the suggestions. I've managed to add 5 undead heroes with their own unique backstories.

v1.1 released! Unless there are more fixes to find, this should hopefully be the final version of the mod.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top


Good Morning

Am playing a game with your 1.0 version. Just stopped by them on turn 125 to see how they are doing. Here's what I found out:

- They have 3 cities.....ALL villages still. Considering that I have a level 3 city and a level 4 city, I'm thinking something is wrong.

- There were several really good locations for outposts near them, yet no outposts. In fact, it looks like they haven't built a single resource.

- They REALLY like building units. Especially Archers.

- The capital is Producing Wealth....I didn't think ANYONE produced wealth...

 

Don't know if these sorts of comments will help.....does seem like priorities are off a little.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top


Playing another game with your 1.1 version.

- Undead have built 2 nearby resources.

- Unfortunately, they are right beside me and thus will be wiped out shortly.

- When attacking there Capital, I noticed that they do not have any city defenders. Are they supposed to?

 

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Thanks for the feedback!

That's quite weird, since I didn't modify anything about the way they develop their cities except giving growth to the unique undead buildings and increasing the priority for those buildings.

Not sure about the city defenders part as I didn't modify that as well. I have encountered city defenders in my games though.

I've noticed the thing about archers as well. Not quite sure why at the moment. They do eventually move on to build a ton of horsemen too, I'm not sure why they don't build mixed armies.

Edit: Just had a few tests. I've modified the AITag for the unique undead buildings to Merchant (they really like building Merchant and Monument buildings, and raised the priority levels again, so now they are much more likely to build them. However, if they already have these growth buildings but are at a low city level, chances are they are building too many Pioneers (especially if they got the random AITrait 'Expansionist'). If only there's a way to force the AI to ensure every city has a particular building by a certain number of turns...

I've also seen them building Outposts, and even a bunch of units apart from Archers, though I think part of this is random (I'm not sure how they decide on the type of units to build. I gave them a variety of cheaper units so they can still get some decent troops if they are lacking in crystals, or both crystals and metal).

When I play my own games, I prefer PrimalSavage's mods. I think the AIs in general tend to perform more consistently when using that.

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top


Updated to v1.1b (just some quick changes, not much extensive testing). Link is in OP.

I've raised AIPriority of the undead improvements, as well as changed their AITag to Merchant. Seems like they're much more likely to build the improvements early to get some growth.

Do note that undead cities will still grow slower than other factions' cities in general. I'm a little ambivalent about raising the growth provided by those buildings further.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top


Updated to v1.2. Added a few more heroes for the Undead race, and tweaked the Undead improvement AI values again.

I'm wondering if there's a way to make the buildings add growth only for the AI player and not the human player, ie the AI can accumulate growth from catacombs/mausoleum/necropolis, but the human player cannot. Anyone with ideas?

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top


Updated to v1.21. The only change is for the mod to use the Morrigan cutscene pack added by SD in LH 1.6.