Elemental Mod for MM7 -- v4.0 open beta

[raekuul]

I'm pretty sure this was reported already but adding MMExt v2.2 to the install crashes with the below:

Code: Select all

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
...ntal with MMExt\Scripts\Structs\After\ElementalFixes.lua:41: attempt to index global 'DataTables' (a nil value)

stack traceback:
	...ntal with MMExt\Scripts\Structs\After\ElementalFixes.lua:41: in function 'dofile'
	Scripts\Core\main.lua:484: in main chunk

local variables of 'dofile':
	name = "Data/elemental.delete.txt"
	list = ("file (closed)")
	(*temporary) = nil
	(*temporary) = "Data/elemental.delete.txt"
	(*temporary) = true
	(*temporary) = nil
	(*temporary) = nil
	(*temporary) = "DataFiles/dsft.bin"
	(*temporary) = "attempt to index global 'DataTables' (a nil value)"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 

Additionally, elemental.delete.txt appears to delete itself when this happens. This crash does not happen when using the lastest code from github, but elemental.delete.txt still self-deletes so users won't be able to update MMExt.

[Tomsod]

Oh, that's interesting! It crashes on 2.2 compatibility code specifically, and I think what happens is the scripts in Structs/After aren't run in alphabetical order for you, which I assumed they would (DataTablesSupport.lua which defines DataTables is just before my script), but apparently this is not actually guaranteed (works for me, though!) I guess I need more ugly hacks to make sure it works properly even without this assumption.

elemental.delete.txt is supposed to delete itself; there's no need to delete anything (else) after the mod is already installed, in fact all the deleted files are only (incorrectly) generated if the game is ever run with MMExt but without the mod.

[raekuul]

what's funny is I stumbled onto the solution for room 2 by accident exactly because of the facet limit errors

Spoiler

- I was trying to use thrown items to see where the disappearing things were. Took me a bit to make the connection once I had everything visible. I don't believe there are any puzzles in retail 6-8 that use that mechanic? so it needs an antepiece somewhere before the trumpet quest but there isn't a good place to put one.

[Lone_Wolf]

My party now has probatory access and it's tempting to use it for finishing the arcomage quest , getting high level items, gm alchemy (assasssin) etc.

I thought about it, figured out a simple quest that gives a dark token

Spoiler

kill the griffins

Unfortunately that quest is one I refuse to do even on DP .(It just feels wrong to kill peaceful monsters)

How do I avoid getting the probatory access options after giving trumpet to arbiter ?
Should i stay away from castle H until the arbiter dies ?

[raekuul]

My understanding is that you get twilight time if you have enough time between completing the trumpet quest and the arbiter's regularly scheduled appointment with the great beyond.

Spoiler

You can also just complete the altar pieces quest for your chosen side, that'll end the probatory period immediately. And also give you another apprenticing token.

in any case the fastest way to get out of that space of time is to just... go train. If you've been saving up experience points you'll blow through it pretty quickly.

Re Altar of Wishes, Room 3

I think I understand what you're asking me to do, but as these are all ranged flyers (and therefore insist on staying at range), Air Elementals don't leave behind corpses, and MM7 doesn't have Turn to Stone (or any reliable way to reposition ranged flyers - Stun would work if they would stay still long enough for me to cast it twice) I'm at quite a loss as to how I'm supposed to do it. And honestly I'm surprised that the Party itself is insufficient - you can easily get up there with a Jump spell, which a Warrior Mage should have.

[Tomsod]

If you don't want to have cross-promotions (or enemy guild membership) at all, you can ally with one king and immediately refuse the other, with even some minor benefits for loyalty. Another option is to fail one of the human-elf war quests, but then you'd have to wait. On that topic, training is always 8 days now, so it'd only kill enough time if you purposefully do it one level per visit.

altar of wishes

Stun is almost certainly required for room 3, along with another spell, and in fact wands of both can be looted in the locked side-rooms of room 2. Tell me if it's still too hard (there was some feedback about that).

Meanwhile, room 2's hint is obtained by casting wizard eye (there's even a scroll in a drawer in room 1): you can see on the minimap that there's already an item inside the vase with an open niche. Overall, all three puzzles employ an unutilized vanilla mechanic of surfaces triggering script events on contact with monsters or objects. In fact, room 1 puzzle squares can be triggered with thrown items and room 2, sparks, because they're both objects, but I guess this is a bit subtle for an introduction?

Fluff-wise, room 3 puzzle is not supposed to be triggered by the party itself because something needs to hold down the other cup while you loot the chest. It doesn't actually work like that, because the engine can't detect entities coming off surfaces, but that's the idea.

[raekuul]

Again, I can see the what, I just can't see the how (I am able to cast both spells naturally because mixed party, the problem is getting them in position in the first place)

Altar of Wishes stuff

And the party standing on the scales should at least provide motion, to help indicate what is wanted - you can't hit the chest with TK from the other end anyway so it's not a full solution - since four dwarves is still heavier than one paralyzed air elemental. Granted, it's less important to telegraph this since you do have the petrified fire elemental on the other set of scales, but it would Make Sense that the puzzle scales react to the party standing on them.

Also, just as a little flavor thing, I'm not sure if I'm displeased or relieved that casting Dispel Magic towards the petrified Fire Elemental doesn't free it from its stony prison, but as MM7 doesn't actually have monster petrification I can only just conclude that it's a well-crafted statue.

Regarding the combat difficulty: the first room feels overloaded (and you can trigger a failure on the puzzle of room 1 by accident while clearing the room out - happened to me, but because mixed party I still was able to use Reanimate to fix it - so maybe require pushing the button to "start" the puzzle instead?), the rest of the rooms are about equal to the AvLee Temple of Baa so it feels right for level 30ish on the whole. Combat for the second room onward are made easier because of the alcoves for room 2 - you can isolate them a lot easier which means you can fight more manageable clumps of monsters (which is very important for a melee-heavy team).

[Tomsod]

room 3

Yeah, at this point I'm pretty sure we've made room 3 too hard. The cup needs to be larger, for one. Try turn-based mode to prevent monsters from moving too much, it worked for me.

The cup reacting to party would make sense, but it's just infeasible to implement properly without reworking the engine, and since this map also goes into Kaltenberg's mod, I'm trying to keep it as vanilla (mechanically speaking) as possible.

Stray projectiles messing up room 1 puzzle are intentional; some adjusted positions are still winnable, and anyway there's a temple nearby. As for its monster density, have you tried hiding in the side-rooms? Pathfinding is still dumb, so they won't swarm you all at once this way. But yeah, I might remove a spawn point or two, since having such a greeting party feels intimidating.

[raekuul]

Not necessarily "remove" spawn points so much as "move" them - if there are more clusters that start in the side rooms then that's more clusters of ranged flying monsters that don't have line of sight on the party as soon as the map is loaded.

[Lone_Wolf]

If you don't want to have cross-promotions (or enemy guild membership) at all, you can ally with one king and immediately refuse the other, with even some minor benefits for loyalty. Another option is to fail one of the human-elf war quests, but then you'd have to wait

I always aim to make H independent (lords of H should do something for the people they lord over) and prefer to treat elf & human monarchs equal .

For the paintings quest I clear castle G , clearing out castle N for black knight quest matches that nicely .
Alsoi I have never had a gm alchemist in vanilla, the black immunity potions are very appealing and so is the ability to buy dark & light scrolls.


Guess I have to relax my rpg style a bit this playthrough and start dark then switch to light.

Sidenote : When doing the dwarven barrows for initiate promotion (my final first promotion) I stopped switcihng to easy to collect loot after fighting.
Next playthrough I'll consider staying at hard difficulty much earlier.

@Tomsod : did you notice my remarks about jumping monsters in https://www.celestialheavens.com/forum/ ... 40#p394145 ?

[raekuul]

I actually would love to see the gold nerf and monster adjustments as separate options, but I'm not sure how much extra work would go into disentangling the two.

[Lone_Wolf]

I agree splitting combat & non-combat options would be nice.

In the Pit & Celeste I donated in the twmples, but reputation didn't change .
Is this because they are not considered regions but dungeons that share rep with deyja/bracada ?

[raekuul]

altar of wishes

Meanwhile, room 2's hint is obtained by casting wizard eye (there's even a scroll in a drawer in room 1): you can see on the minimap that there's already an item inside the vase with an open niche.

And this is where the facets error hurts me -

Spoiler

I threw something into that vase in an attempt to see where it was, since at the time I thought it was a platform to stand on rather than a basket in which to throw a ball.

[Tomsod]

I actually would love to see the gold nerf and monster adjustments as separate options, but I'm not sure how much extra work would go into disentangling the two.

Probably not that much, but it would require me to either add a separate set of buttons somewhere, or use .ini files or something, and I don't want either, mostly for aesthetic reasons. It's not that hard for the players to switch difficulty, and in late game killing everything with teacher and instructor and then looting with factor and banker is the optimal play anyway.

@Tomsod : did you notice my remarks about jumping monsters in https://www.celestialheavens.com/forum/ ... 40#p394145 ?

Sorry, I was meaning to reply to that post (and the one after it), but I got caught in the tempo of the latest discussion. Jump, and monster AI in general, would benefit from improved pathfinding, but it's a lot of work! My best bet is to steal the code Merge uses, but I'm not even sure it's compatible with MM7. For now, indeed, monsters may jump right into walls and pits, but I don't see an easy way to fix that in particular.

But outside of priests and archers the 2nd promotions were never at parity with each other

Actually a great point, I ought to scale class power with promotion difficulty somewhat. Rangers in particular are fairly strong now, but with a laughably easy first promotion (maybe that's why they were a joke in vanilla?) If I move away from restricting all master skills behind a promotion, doing that selectively could provide an opportunity to balance things a bit.

In the Pit & Celeste I donated in the twmples, but reputation didn't change .
Is this because they are not considered regions but dungeons that share rep with deyja/bracada ?

Indeed they do. You should have already had 5 or more rep if you donated to surface temples before.

[raekuul]

It might be the optimal play in the late game but unless you're actively going around murdering every last titan in the land of the titans you don't actually need all that much power - the only properly hard part is the passage to Eofol and Colony Zod itself (though I guess that The Lincoln is dangerous now that we can't just Beacon back in from a temple, but you can still place a beacon then hie back to Harmondale to properly rest, then just buff up like normal). Level 50 is sufficient, especially since we can just buy scrolls for GM Immutability now, and that's about where you end up if you just do quests.

Room 3. Again.

The problem isn't with Width or Length so much as with height - unless you manage to paralyze one of the ones that spawned originally, there's no way to coax a reanimated fire elemental or summoned air elemental to go high enough for Stun to be able to do the rest of the work - you're waiting for the monster's move AI to randomly choose to do that. And paralyzed fliers lose all their height, so you have to stun before paralyzing.

EDIT: Wait, no, I got a good angle on this guy so that I can stun him vertically upwards, so it's not just waiting for RNG, but it still Feels Bad, Man - sometimes you stun it and it doesn't actually get shoved, sometimes it's in place but Paralyze fails and you have to push it back into place again, and if it gets too low you have to start all over since you have to be below it to stun it upwards and they like to move to be level with the party.
Making the doorway to the side room with the portal taller (and making the spawn point for Air Elementals summoned by the portal further up as well) will help a lot with the verticality problem, as Air Elementals are a lot slower to move downward than Genies or Fire Elementals. If the doorway is taller then they don't have to come down to the party's level before coming into the Scales Room, which makes stunning them upwards a lot easier - and as Stun isn't exactly in common use among the playerbase I doubt most players know that you even can stun a monster upwards, let alone how to do it to a monster that's already level with the party).

[Tomsod]

Lincoln is a bit easier if you use the temple in a bottle that is still found in that general area (but is an actual temple now).

room 3

Stun can be resisted, like any debuff. (It would be nice to remove magic resistance from the summoned monsters, but game script can't do that.) Kaltenberg also wanted to make that doorway taller, we were mostly waiting for feedback that I guess we have now, thanks!

[raekuul]

Room 3

Since Stun deals zero damage to begin with, maybe change its resistance type to Energy? That way it's only level that gets factored in, and unless you changed it in MM7 it gets factored in at 1/4th rate (as opposed to mm6 where the full level contributed to debuff resistance, which makes stuff like turn to stone or shrink ray hilariously useless in the endgame since all the level 95 titans also are completely immune to capital-M Magic anyway)

[Tomsod]

Stun is buffed in the mod: the recovery it imposes on the target is significantly higher than that of the caster (unlike in vanilla), so it's now possible to completely stunlock low-resistance enemies. If it also weren't resistible, it would be as OP as vanilla paralysis, but easier to get.

[raekuul]

That's actually useful information and now that I know it I wish I'd been using it more often (except not because my earth specialist in this party is my archer, who has better things to do with her turn, but it's still good to know for the Lincoln)

[Lone_Wolf]

I did griffins quest, used dark token for assassin , then season stole. used light token for starting archmage .
Allied with deyja, do breeding zone .
Got 2nd dark token, started black knight quest.


Some comments
Stealing dagger from lady carmine was impossible, I got caught every time I tried (even with cheating to get thievery GM 20, being invisibile on easy it failed) .
Had to kill her and TP out .
The area around castle lambent now has several hostile angel types, using an hourglass solved this.

My party required lots of healing for Breeding zone, as behemoths were to much even at easy .
This may atleast be partially caused by having only expert regeneration (cleric & druid are only classes that can have body magic M at first promotion and neither is in my party) .
This reveals a big disadvantage for early/midgame of using paladin/ranger as a cleric replacement.

After allying D/ finishing breeding zone an entry was added to journal and the castle was upgraded .
This feels to early for probatory access phase, maybe delay entry & castle upgrade until after choice is final ?

When I goto H messenger of judge death appears. This hasn't blocked the probatory access and I did get an offer from magnus to switch sides.
No Idea if selecting an arbiter is still necessary and whether that will allow switching sides a 2nd time .

The mix of probatory access with regular path choice is confusing .