Elemental Mod for MM7 -- v3.1 holiday release!

[Tomsod]

Status report: I'm 95% sure to release something by New Year, but it'll most likely be an open beta kind of thing. Just as well, it'll probably have more bugs than I can squash alone!

For now, I just finished adding the Black Market to Steadwick sewers, where you can buy and sell stolen items:

House animation is from the (unimplemented) Nighon bank. I don't like the glowing eyes, but otherwise it's close enough.

The plan is to also have it replace the Judge's "I lost it" feature, but this would require tracking quest items more thoroughly, otherwise the market ends up crammed with every trinket currently in your castle's chest. If I do implement that, it will organically fix the book of Divine Intervention exploit (which can be duplicated and sold in vanilla), since you'd have to pay money to get it back from the market, eliminating any potential profit. Hopefully I'll get around to this.

[Lone_Wolf]

I've looked at the changelog and read many interesting ideas.

I don't like easy games and doubled monster hp in vanilla to reduce the number of oneshot kills.

Will 4 be harder / have a higher difficulty option then 3.x ?

[Tomsod]

Yeah, everyone asks me to make Hard difficulty harder! I'll try, there's already some stuff done for 4.0, e.g. last month I added a bunch of new monster spells that only appear on higher difficulties. But it seems that the more tricky features, like better AI, will have to wait for later releases because I'm nearly out of time.

[Lone_Wolf]

Understood, I'm watching the github repo.

I can at the very least spare some time to check if rangers are treated differently then other classes in 4.x .
Would a VCS/release package for archlinux following arch wine package guidelines be useful for you ?

[Tomsod]

I've rewritten the monster-chooses-target function from scratch, so even if there's a bug in vanilla that causes everything to have a preference for rangers or something, my mod shouldn't inherit it.

While I do happen to use arch btw, my MM7 is just locally installed in ~/.wine -- actually there are like ten copies of the install for various mods and versions of the game and other testing purposes. You can put your thing on AUR, maybe someone is interested, I dunno.

[Kaltenberg]

This black market is a much-needed idea, it fills a gap!

[Lone_Wolf]

I often feel the limit of 2 hirelings is too restrictive and noticed you have been working on hirelings.

Any chance to increase the limit to 3 or 4 ?

An alternative might be to introduce new hirelings that replace lower ones of similar profession .

example :
I often have instructor + teacher that give 25% bonus to xp.

Make instructor & teacher conflict so you can only hire one of them.
Add a new hireling, Master Teacher that gives 25% bonus but conflicts with instructor & teacher.

This still gives the option to get 25% bonus xp, but only takes up one hireling slot .

[Tomsod]

I originally intended to add an option to hire a skill-boosting hireling for just one character, at the same cost but only taking half a hireling slot. In the end I scrapped this idea, as I don't have enough time left to properly implement this, and, more importantly, the vanilla hireling system heavily favors homogeneous parties, which is fair to them as MM7 class skill caps mean such parties (even four sorcerers, but especially four knights or monks) are crippled in some other way(s), so this is even balancing! Yes, in the default KTCS party any given skill hireling will be wasted on at least one of your characters, but in exchange you get a very versatile skill set.

[Lone_Wolf]

I should have chosen a better example as it's not the skill boosters I would put in the extra slots but utility hirelings .

I don't like waiting days for stables/ships until they head to my next chosen destination, so I walk across borders a lot.

By hiring a pathfinder the travel time is reduced to 1 or 2 days per crossing, but food supply goes down fast and most inns only sell a low amount of food.

Adding a Chef (creates 2 food a day upto 14) would solve this and also make camping outside easier then running back to an inn when you need to rest.
Unfortunately that means both hireling slots are filled.


You know a lot more about the internals of the MM games then I do : is categorizing hirelings and limiting slots to certain categories technically possible ?

[Tomsod]

You might be the first person I met who considers vanilla chefs useful! Unfortunately, they're already completely revamped as of v3.0, improving stats on rest instead of adding food. Personally, I've never had problems with food, in most regions taverns sell over 10 food at once which is enough for a while. And in a pinch, there are apples.

As part of that discarded idea I've considered having "weak" hirelings such as travel time boosters also occupy half a slot, but I think a better solution is to make each profession at least somewhat competitive. For instance, in the next version travel hirelings will boost walking speed and tell you which dungeons have refilled.

As for technical feasibility, most code calls an unified "is this profession hired" function, so if it's rewritten, only the hire/fire code itself needs to be modified to tweak hireling slots however necessary. However, having a special slot for travel NPCs is questionable, as a lot of players (not me, though) consider them all completely useless.

[Lone_Wolf]

I checked and indeed only 3 taverns sell less then 12 food : Harmondale , Emerald, Evenmorn .

I usually realised after crossing a border (especially during trading triangles) I didn't have enough food left .


Looking at commits post 3.1 I see several things I'd like to try out. Please let me know when you need testers.

[Tomsod]

Well, hopefully at the end of the month I'll invite everyone here to test a horribly buggy 4.0 beta! Unless I find time to do a playthrough myself before the deadline (unlikely), then it'd be ordinarily buggy.

[raekuul]

In my experience, food and travel NPCs are convenient but because of the limited hireling space aren't worth picking up over healing or spellcasting or skill buff NPCs. I would enjoy travel NPCs not counting against the hireling cap - MM7 and onwards don't permit Diagonal crossings like MM6 does so going from AvLee to Deyja or Ravenshore to Murmurwoods (or Blackshire to Sweet Water in MMMerge) overland is always two crossings.

[Tomsod]

FWIW with a (promoted) Knight in party you're allowed to buy a horse which pretty much acts like a slotless travel and/or hauling hireling (some horses have other bonuses, too). But yeah, my current plan is to make it so any NPC type is worth the slot in at least some situations. Running faster in dungeons oughta be worth something; if not, well I could think of something else to add.