Bay 12 Games Forum

The whole "seasons greetings" and "happy holidays" and "merry x-mas" has always seemed inane and a bit insulting to me. Is the world so politically correct or anti-religion that we can't express our wishes that they have a good time on the holiday that we are celebrating, even if the other person isn't celebrating it? I never take offense if a Jewish person tells me Happy Hanukkah, I always just say it back to them. I imagine my Jewish friends would have felt a bit insulted if I had wished them a happy x-kah this year. Anyway...

Merry Christmas! 

- Fixed troop tree display (some were buggy and unclickable due to a coding error)
- Fixed realistic casualties and removed the option since it didn't really make sense to me to be able to disable it.
- Adjusted NPC heroes to have the same # of skills
- Adjusted troop power strike to be a bit more in line with their type (peasant women no longer have more power strike than tier 2 warriors, elite get 4 instead of 3) Also reduced troops with >5 power strike down to 5. Pict elites were the only regular troop with it above 5, so I set them to 5 and gave them 3 points of ironflesh to make up for it. Lords were mostly 10, dropped them to 5 too. If the player is limited to 5 the troops probably should be too.
- Fixed loot wagon/gift caravan conflict - loot wagons will no longer be erased from the game if you send them after you hire a chancellor.
- Reduced hillyness on random scenes
- Reduced elevation of the map to help limit hillyness on random scenes. Still really hilly near the areas with mountainous land, but some of the big open high elevation areas actually generate reasonably flat battlefields now.
- Removed restriction on castles making them very poor income earners. Also buffed blacksmith building a bit too. Combined with reduced wages, castles might actually be able to pay their troop wages now. Maybe.
- Fixed a few minor dialog things - a gender issue in ladies talking about female relations (no more He when referring to a woman), couple extraneous punctuation marks. Not a big deal, but it was an easy fix.
- Adjusted troop levels to be more consistent along upgrade path and between different cultures.
- Adjusted troop wages down, especially for the higher tier troops. Recruits cost 10 now, top tier elites 40. Was 14 and 80.
- Adjusted troop recruitment costs - decreased low tier recruits, increased top tier recruits, mid level about the same. Removed extra cost for mounted troops, they cost the same to upgrade so it seemed wrong for them to cost triple to join you. They still cost more to upkeep. Actual costs are similar to the new upgrade costs, with a little extra tacked on for their preexisting experience.
- Reduced troop upgrade costs.
- Made recruiting higher tier troops from villages cost the total it would require to upgrade them to that level from the basic villager, not including the 10 denar for hiring a basic villager. Hiring higher tier troops from villages still saves a lot of training time, but is no longer an obscenely cheap way to get high tier troops.
- Upped the maximum bet on arena fights to 500. Wager your way to riches! Just don't lose.
- Upped leg armor on the med/heavy armors. Didn't seem right that shooting troops in the feet did noticeably more damage than the body. This probably has the effect of making cavalry harder to kill, but killing them by stabbing them in the toe doesn't seem right either. Ow, my toe! *keels over*
- Changed viking lamellar to medium armor instead of heavy. Also upped its protection value from 42 to 45. You can only get it from fighting franks or buying it from the special blacksmith merchants, so it seemed like it should be better.
- Made all the 350 hp 9 resistance round shields 400 hp 9 resistance like the celtic round shields. They are all round shields that look nearly identical and cost the same, so it seemed they should be equal in terms of utility. Also boosted the heraldic round shield to the same.
- Increased sword thrusting damage by about 15-25% (mostly 3-4 points more). This makes them a bit more dangerous when both troops are heavily armored, since the armor piercing thrusts hurt more now. Cut damage unchanged.
- Reduced one handed axe damage by about 10% across the board (mostly 3 points less). They still pierce armor extremely well, but maybe now swordsmen can compete a bit. Hopefully. I left two handed axes alone - a troop carrying one is already vulnerable, and I figure if you're hit by a big axe like that it should hurt no matter the armor you're wearing. Plus I want to encourage players to run around with big two handed axes. Raaaaargh!
- Removed the 5 relation requirement from the freelancer join dialog. You still need at least 0, but now you can go join whatever army you like right off if you want to.
- Reduced penalty for low trade skill on trade goods a little bit (20 down from 23, -2 per trade skill, so the benefit maxes at 10 instead of 11.5 - but I doubt many if any people actually get 11 or 12 trade skill anyway). Native is 12 with -1 per trade skill, so to be like Native 0 you still need 4 and skill 8 here is now the same as skill 8 in native.
- Completely Rewrote loot wagon selling code to behave as if the player sold the items and the prisoners himself, except using the party member's trade skill who you sent on the mission instead of the whole party's (so no player bonus if you have your own trade skill). It was just a straight item value with a bunch of strange calculations and a bonus for trade skill, which gave mixed results. It didn't take item modifiers or trade prices into account and applied the trade skill bonus even to selling prisoners - so in some cases gave you more money than you could get yourself, other cases much less. For instance, load wagon full of cracked and rusty and such items and sell with wagon and you get values as if the items were normal. Sell trade goods that the town is totally overstocked with and get average value instead. Or sell a lordly/masterwork item with it - d'oh there goes 90% of my money. It also generated revenue for towns, which could be abused by sending it to your own town repeatedly. Now it's just like the npc went in town and sold all the stuff like a player would, with everything that entails.
- Fixed bounty hunter quests from sometimes showing multiple names and glitching out, the dialogs were missing a check to make sure the quest was active - thus putting messages from previously completed bounty hunter missions on the current one if the troop type matched up.
- Reduced relation penalty for bounty hunting missions. -10 seemed a bit extreme for hunting down and attempting to apprehend (not your fault they always try to kill you intead of coming peacefully!) a criminal, even if he had relatives there - you get the same relation penalty for ENSLAVING ten of them or robbing the entire village. Now it only gives -1, the same as if you had robbed and enslaved one of them.
- Reduced the renown requirement for purchasing items from the special smith shops from 700 to 500. 700 just seemed a bit too steep. Many of the lords only have around 500.
- Upped the minimum prisoner limit from 15 to 20, so you can hold a few extra men with a small party. Just for reference, the limit is increased by 10 every 50 men you have, up to 110 at 450 men.
- Halved the effect of player level on the party_get_ideal_size adjustment. Previously it gave them an extra 10% for every 8 levels of the player, so a level 25 player would face parties 30% larger. Now it's 5% for every 8 levels, so a level 25 player only faces parties 15% larger. I never liked level scaling - was going to remove it completely, but I thought some people might like to see the parties grow a little bit over time.