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Yes, Archon Paladin. What happened is that you need to make block animations. Or at least put something in the 'special' framesets. They are currently empty, but when a hero finds a block item of gets an upgrade, you get missing images.

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Well, the cities just look like shadow Demon cities. not really like the cities I imagine Demons to be 'living'. Since Demons are hellish beings, I'd think some more red would be an obvious choice!

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In 'WMaps: CWTower'. The racial specific ones are in the 'Races' folder.

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Lemme know if you do and send me the corrected files as well. We can always add them for a v1.5.

[This message has been edited by swolte (edited 05-22-2006 @ 09:57 PM).]

Timelord elemental already had poison immunity in 4.5, then lost it when ram was replaced by whirlwind and now it cost more!

I don't remember it having poison immunity, Air...

Joep, I'd be happy to send you the Dragon caves. Though, as you should know, that creature is no longer a Salamander

Also, I'm hoping to release a patch in a week or two...maybe we could have the lizards done by then?

On a general note, I'll go through all the animation sequences and try to cobble "special" ones together for those units that lack 'em.

bj

[This message has been edited by The_Stranger (edited 05-22-2006 @ 11:19 PM).]

set dwiggs 4.5 in setup and check :P gargoyle had lightning immunity there too, why its missing now is mystery. btw garden cart for 120 in siege workshop with 32 or 34 moves and trasport5 wont be ever built because of no use.

[This message has been edited by Air_warlord (edited 05-23-2006 @ 01:26 AM).]

Atleast it has heal, very few other racial transports have anything other functionality other than transport X.

btw did all air balloons lose fire pistol or was that only on certain ones?

Cheers
SB

Stillborn--

Weekends are possible with advance planning; for instance, NOT June 3&4--already have commitment that weekend. Next weekend, (Memorial Day in US--in case you're not) all of Sat is possible.

For those gentlemen interested,
I will be online today (23rd) from 6 PM GMT till around 1 AM GMT and tomorrow (24th) from 6 PM GMT till around 4 AM GMT.

If anyone of you can grace GS for a fun game, that would be wonderful as I won't have a chance to play this great mod online for a few weeks after tomorrow.

Hi, This mod's got me interested in AOW-SM again.
I have a problem starting a game with the mod installed.
I get the following errors in aowsmLog.txt file:
"Missing Image Library: C:\PROGRAM FILES\AGE OF WONDERS SHADOW MAGIC\IMAGES\UNITS\_DMOD_DRYAD.ILB
Missing Image Library: C:\PROGRAM FILES\AGE OF WONDERS SHADOW MAGIC\IMAGES\UNITS\NB_OWLBEAR.ILB
Missing Image Library: C:\PROGRAM FILES\AGE OF WONDERS SHADOW MAGIC\IMAGES\UNITS\1.4_NIGHTMARE.ILB
Missing Image Library: C:\PROGRAM FILES\AGE OF WONDERS SHADOW MAGIC\IMAGES\UNITS\_B_BUGBEAR_CAPTAIN.ILB
Missing Image Library: C:\PROGRAM FILES\AGE OF WONDERS SHADOW MAGIC\IMAGES\UNITS\_B_DROW_FEMALE.ILB
Missing Image Library: C:\PROGRAM FILES\AGE OF WONDERS SHADOW MAGIC\IMAGES\UNITS\_B_ELESSIME_1.ILB
...
"

The mod was installed successfuly. Any ideas?

Thanks

Small potatoes but.. When you hold the cursor over the red dragon summons it tells you "summons the fabled dire penguin"

In the final release of dwiggs dwarven crossbowman were downgraded from level 1 status to level 2 status. A unit with level 1 cost but level 2 upkeep etc and level 1 1/2 stats that you have to wait till war hall to get. (personally I most always build siege workshop first so the fact you can one turn it at 40 gold and no order shrine or construction skill is usually wasted on me)

I was going to suggest a slight downgrade in stats along with level 1 status. But I thought of a more creative approach. As a level 2 unit it requires more experience then its human level 1 crossbowman counterpart to upgrade. So maybe we could improve its medal bonuses. Marksmanship at silver, then at gold maybe either enchanted weapon or marksmanship (along with the traditional poison immunity of course)

Granted, its the unit meant to be rushed in for town defense, not necessarily kept around long term. But since it requires warhall to build, a little extra medal bonus to make it more worth keeping around wouldn't be too much, would it?

[This message has been edited by TruePurple (edited 05-23-2006 @ 05:19 PM).]

dwarves have compensation in mighty cavalry available in barracs, it has stats and price of lev2 and upkeep of lev1

Dwarven crossbowmans stats are between that of a level 1 and a level 2. Closer to level 1. Well technically less then many dwigg level 1s. but they got the crossbow range as well. So do you think marksmanship at silver would be too much for them?

Compare to that of of the elves wildblade. Wildblade is much tougher, only a level 1 and doesn't require war hall. Granted its range of throw blade (which gets three shots) isn't as good as crossbow. But still.. elves are suppose to be the quick scouters, not the toughies.

Or to human crossbow which dwarves have 50% more upkeep then, takes twice as long to medal, gives twice as much experience to the enemy when killed and less mighty meek friendly. Yes the human crossbow unit doesnt have the same defenseses, but its meant mostly for behind walls anyways where range is usually what mostly matters. Both pretty weak for melee anyways.

What about for dwarven crossbowman
@ Silver: UG concealment.(and/or marksmanship)
@ Gold: Enchanted weapon (instead of marksmanship? I don't see + marksmanship being too much personally as long as both medals don't have it, and of course poison immunity)

--------------

Also, could the gyrocopter unit, as well as perhaps other dwarven machines.. get night vision? It would make sense since dwarves would be operating those machines, right? But more importantly it would help better establish UG as dwarven territory. Perhaps dwarven engineers could build watch towers with night vision?

[This message has been edited by TruePurple (edited 05-23-2006 @ 06:34 PM).]

Quoted from Timelord:

Regarding the whole enchanter/enchantment cost debate, Timelord pretty much nails what I was hoping for with the original set of DMs. I originally played around with trying to make Enchanter "useful" via enchantment cost a bit, but really, I agree with the overall assessment that the hard-coded values and mechanics of the skill are such that it won't ever be a "useful" choice comparatively.

Not everything can be changed, and there will always be casualties when mods work around preexisting rulesets with limitations to what they can tinker with. The original DM's intent was to make large-scale unit enchanting a viable course if you build the infrastructure first, rather than "standard procedure". (Just to clarify since TruePurple made some guess as to the original intent. )

Already downloaded the fruits of Stranger's labor, and looking forward to a few sure-to-be-nostalgia-filled nights with the good old Emperor AI.

Even if it were possible to make enchanter reduce upkeep, I'm not sure I'd want it to. Its not a hard coded issue. Maybe EW could keep its low cost, high upkeep. But I feel most enchantments should get a boost to cost and a reduction in upkeep. Not just for enchanter skill sake. But for the sake of dispel, steal enchantment, multisphering and so on. (insert all the reasons I mentioned before)

Large scale enchanting is not viable, even with immense mana resources. With upkeep as it is you got to have a ton of mana income as it is just to enchant your heroes and main army, especially as a multisphere (I usually pure sphere anyways, but still) Summoning becauses a much better use of mana then enchantments for the most part.

BTW, you know dwigg I can't ever remember hearing from you or seeing you in GS before. I sort of knew the mod was named after you, but really I had the feeling they pulled the name dwiggs out of thin air as quiet as you are Where did you get your handle from anyways?

[This message has been edited by TruePurple (edited 05-24-2006 @ 02:21 AM).]

A couple things I noticed:
-The bottom-of-the-screen description for the Shrine of War scrolls off the side of the screen.
-There is no icon for the death spell "Pestilence"

Thanks Kalindor for the Shrine of war note. I'll see if I can fix that.

On the Spell Icons, we simply forgot to package them with the mod! But they are made and will be included in the next patch

TP, I'll reply to the points you raise when I have a bit more leisure.

Izaq, those lines you get are for units that I originally hoped to use in the mod and so generated unit bodies for. If you open the mod in the editor, you will see some blanke spaces in the "unit bodies" section because I did not use all the units I generated. So, I don't think this issue should affect the mod play at all. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, though. I'll talke to Time and see if we can prevent if from happening with the patch install, as it's a bit of nuisance.

Cheers, guys, and it's great to see you posting, Dwiggs

BJ

[This message has been edited by The_Stranger (edited 05-24-2006 @ 05:49 AM).]

Blue brims around the dragon lairs should be fixed now. Me and stranger will be playing tonight at 11 PM dutch time/ 10 AM new zealandish time, so if anyone would like to join they are more then welcome to.

Joep, I'll be there! Just wait for a little while as I am sure to be in another game...

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Again, it's really just a philosophical design issue. In general, upkeep is the main limiting factor when it comes to enchantments; the lower you bring it, the more prevalent wide-scale enchanting is, and vice versa.

Enchantments also have more of a sliding scale of usefulness than summons, IMO; a summon is an extra unit of set value, whereas enchants can vary from pretty cost-ineffective (Liquid Form on your Pony Riders) to tide-turning (a contingent of Longbowmen with Enchant Weapon). Because of that potential (and the fact that competitive players are extremely quick to locate and make use of those tide-turning situations ), my goal was to make that kind of wide-scale enchanting something that needs to be worked towards in the late game.

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Shortly after my last DM release, RL intervened and moved me from Hawaii to California, where I've been busy with school and work and life in general, so I haven't been around as much as I used to. WoW also sucks up my free time as well. Dwiggs is just what all of my friends call me, my real name is Dwight.

Quoted from dwiggs:

A second contingent of fire sprites would be much more tide turning then EW.

It depends on the situation, True Purple.

Having 2 stacks of enchanted weaponed shirers and slingers behind an enchanted Air sphere wall is much more effective than an additional stack of fire sprites. The point is - if there are easy ways to exploit the system, experienced players will do so. And new players will have a severe disadvantage - which is what will happen if upkeep is low enough.

Now, however, anyone who has a reasonable understanding of how structures in Dwiggs helps can have a long-term strategy of heavily enchanted units - you just need to plan the additional infrastructure. Today, in a game, Merk had a whole stack enchanted with Bless, Stone Skin and some with Free Movement or Enchant Weapon. I myself had 3 stacks with Stone Skin and Bless. I am not trying to be arrogant here, just pointing out that if you build the infrastructure, you can do it (and I had only 4 towns).

Even now, by turn 50 or so (in multple games), I have seen Air cast mastery, haste domain, watcher and have 2 karagh stacks enchanted with wind walking (sometimes, the units and enchants vary, but I think you get the picture). So, if you understand how its done, its doable - which is why I always say, you have to adapt to the game, shouldn't expect the game to adapt to how you play.

Btw, if you check the properties of the DM1.4.xls, you will find who Dwiggs really is!
Nice to see you still keep an eye on things here, Dwiggs!

Quoted from TL:

Except 2 stacks all EW'd would have almost twice the upkeep as a stack of fire sprites. So your example doesn't quite apply.

EW might at max add say 3 damage per 3 shot attack (3 extra potential damage per 3 shot attack but potential doesnt means necessarily but then you figure in slightly more attack )

Sprite with hurl firebomb can do up to 10 damage per attack, assuming it only hits two units each attack (where it can hit more, plus it forces units to keep spread apart) Plus it causes stuff to burn.

So adding EW to a stack of shires verses a extra 7 sprites, the sprites will be a much bigger boon.

[q=TL]The point is - if there are easy ways to exploit the system, experienced players will do so. And new players will have a severe disadvantage - which is what will happen if upkeep is low enough.[/quote]

We can find a middle ground between low upkeep and high upkeep, low casting cost and high casting cost. Theres allot to be said (and I've already said much of it) for preventing "exploitation" through CP as much as upkeep.

[This message has been edited by TruePurple (edited 05-25-2006 @ 03:57 PM).]

Some things seem bit overpowered at 1st sight.

- Dark elfs priest should lose their magic relay if spider queens have it too.

- Tigrans and (Elfs?) bonuses to mana and research seem too good when we compare other races, prolly easiest solution to this is that they lose some growt, so u cant get uberleet research and mana production only building more citys.

Hi all,

1) First, I'd like to say that I am surprised about how balanced Dwiggs seems to be overall. I played the regular versions of the game for a long time (more than any AoW junkie would like to admit ), so I'll say humbly that I have a lot of experience to be making this comment.

- I think it's a Mod that needs a deeper look. Of course, there can be some unbalances, which is perfectly normal because playing online against humans has absolutely nothing to do with playing AI, in my opinion. For one, AI won't complain about overpowered Units, and will cruely attack your hidden cities even if he could not know where they are

- The inherent gold bonus of cities being set to 0 really enforces strategy to build, instead of mindless city massing. While I would never like this even in an unofficial patch (Argh stop talking about 1.5 with Dwiggs features!!! ) it works good in the context of the other changes the Mod makes.That's why we have regular game and Mods: one thing called diversity

- Races like halflings finally make sense, and come to life, with Mighty Meek, and the fact that their stats reflect the chareacteristics of the race (Hp, Res, etc)is awesome.

2)About Munataros comment on racial bonus, I have to say I played Archons against Timelord (he was humans) other day (same game he mentioned about enchants we both had en masse in a post he made here). The gold penalty Archons have was quite harsh in my opinion... while I am somehow learning to play Dwiggs - I let cities Grow making few or no gold generating Structures - the fact of that gold penalty made my income miserable, even with like 12 cities

I do know that on screen in-game it shows only 2 racial bonus/penalties because of space constraints, so I took a look at the editor now and realised that Archons have no racial bonus, only penalty? I was surprised to see that they actually lack Research bonus they had in regular game... so they are a race without any bonus, were they supposed to be that (weak) way??

3) Cooments about some Units:

- Garden Cart's path of Life doesn't seem to work. As far as I know and tested, those Path of Decay/Frost/ Life don't work if the unit has transport ability.

- Salamander having Poison Strike seems weird to me, as much as it also feels too powerful for that particular unit.

- Lairwatch unit (Told Stranger already posting just in case) has in description references to 'Copper Drake' and probably gas breath and venomous spit which unit lacks.

4) How can Spell Icons be changed? I am modding (and new to it too) so I'd like to know, e-mail me please, or maybe post in the thread http://aow.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=ct&f=33,4724,0,60

5) CRUCIAL POST EDIT QUESTION:
After I installed Dwiggs_1.4, my AoW game will not run from CD... the option: 'Run AoW:Sm' is grayed out.. any ideas??? :-(

thanks,
Merkraad

[This message has been edited by Merkraad (edited 05-25-2006 @ 12:02 PM).]

archons have bonus of holy strike and holy imminity on all units without any weakness and strongest units at all, its more than enough. elves and tigrans already have the slowest growth rate, 30 turns to grow from outpost to village without housing and expander. another question why other extra slow growing races have smaller bonuses like frosties and dwarves. salamander is ok compared to boar if u compare it to zephir bird situation will be different but the question if lev1 summons need to be useful for fighting or not.

Sinse i know tigrans growt is average, which mean u get sphinxes fast when u build monastery 1st and prolly no nature srhine needed.

Salamanders 2 different strikes sound strong, but they arent so good at battle. It will win pig tho. But example some poison imm races low levels kick them.

After checking bonuses appeared that they are arranged very strange : tigrans (+2)(+4)(+8)(+15) both mana and res with average grow, elves (+5)+(10) mana (+15 mana+10 res) (+20 mana+15res) slow growth, demons and fey folk +5+10+15+20 mana, average growth, frostlings +0+5+10+15 mana slow growth!, dark elves +0+5+10+15, average grow, all gold bonus races get +0+5+10+15 while its easy to notice that mana and res more valuable and can be got in lesser quantity and prod bonus races get only +0+0+5+10 so all these huge mana and res bonuses are out of the context. lizards have fast outpost growth as the only bonus, but then their cities grow slow. btw most important is speed of growth outpost->village so races with slowest growth outpost->village must get highest bonuses and now everything is misplaced. Even in dwiggs 4.5 situation with this was better, all races had very small bonuses like +10 mana in city and it had some sense, though it made fast grow races much stronger if idea was to fix it, better do it in proper direction slower growth->larger bonus with counting of overral army strength so elves and halflings can get more than others while archons can be happy with their bureacrat . but numbers of 30-35 power bonus to city is too much i m sure.

Quoted from air:

Dwarves are even slightly slower then that. 33 turns. Though this is reduced to 11 with house building. I find nature shrine almost manditory for them.

What about what I was saying about dwarven crossbowman and nightvision dwarven machines?

[This message has been edited by TruePurple (edited 05-25-2006 @ 04:01 PM).]

Air I noticed the population bonuses are alittle out of wack as well, the hast expanding races like goblins dont seem to get the bonus they used to (unless you compare them to a veru slow expander), vs the huge mana bonuses.

Though I have to admit that the elves in my opinion need the help anywhere they can get it, same with the fey folk.

Btw I probably have to postpone this friday's games unfortunetly, it seem Xmen3 is out in theatres and I'm onliged to go see it with friends, If we get back around 12 we will pop in and see if anyones playing.

Cheers
SB

I think there may be some confusion on the bonuses....but I have changed them a bit. Bonuses are not cumulative. So you don't get 40 mana for having a city if the city has 20 mana bonus, town 10, village and outpost 5. You only get 20.

The changes and comments: Tigrans are now slightly below average in growth. Demons need their mana bonus because they have "summoned" units. Goblins are still easily the fastest growers. Elves now only get mana bonus; by accident they were getting some research as well. Fey Folk have a lesser mana bonus now but also some research. I'm not sure why anyone (except Air ) would complain about Dwarvish bonuses. They are the slowest growers but also have the highest production and gold bonuses. The Dwarvish City bonus is 15 gold and 15 (not 10) production.

I will be on tommorrow (friday for most of you) from probably 9pm Gmt and hope to see you for a game. If you want to know your Gmt (Greenwhich Mean Time) time, go here:

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/

BJ