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[Gameplay Mod] Solstice 1.1

By on January 9, 2012 4:54:35 AM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums External Link

Joubarbe

Join Date 06/2006
+1

Hi,

So Demigod is not supported anymore and again, GPG let the community manage their games. It's a shame because I really think that Demigod deserved a larger public, if it received some nice multiplayer features, like League of Legends and other MOBA...

Anyway, I created a little gameplay mod, based on the Pacov's Pack, especially Enhanced AI. I hope it's not a problem that I used and modified some of its files. Also, the mod is not very clean, so please excuse my ignorance in LUA, and my modding methods...

That being said, here is the readme file

 

Download Link (1.1) 

 

Overview
--------

Solstice is a gameplay mod with some minor AI improvements. It creates longer, more intense and more balanced games. Even in Normal mode, you won't have ten levels higher and twice as
warscore as your opponent.
This mod has been made when playing against the AI, so some changes — like the nerf of Oculus — are exclusively made for the AI to be less inclined to die... For example, the health
potions can be cast quicker, as the Scrolls of Teleporting, which the AI buy more often.
Priests, angels, catapultasaurii and giants now come individually, so the end-game can be less chaotic.
See "Features" below for more details.

 

Features (1.0 - not updated)
----------

In the original Demigod, the fate of a game can be decided very soon. If you play badly for the ten first minutes, loosing some DGs and wasting money, you won't succeed. Experience points of enemies will get higher and higher, and you can't do anything about it. This mod is to create more subtle games.

The first idea was to have tougher reinforcements and towers, to let the player the time to build its character, and to be able to flee behind its towers if needed. Being with allied creatures is now more helpful, especially when it comes the time to do some damage at enemy towers, because grunts won't do a lot of damage if they are alone. A balanced game also means that if you do an effort, this effort won't be for nothing... So :

1/ HP and Weapon's Damage of all reinforcements are higher. Besides, Giants and Catapults fire more often, and Angels see farther.
2/ Forts inflict more damage (120 from 60), as well as Beam Towers, which have much more health and more bounty (bounties of creatures have also changed to let you have just enough money to hire giants when the warscore reach level 10).
3/ Beam towers regenerate much (much) more slower.

All special creatures now come individually, so Priests had to be improved :

4/ Healings of priests are more efficient and the heal cooldown has been reduced from 8 to 5.

All these changes have an impact on Citadel's Upgrades :

5/ Fortified Structure now gives less health and far less regeneration. So it's cheaper.
6/ Building Firepower will give you more deadly towers. The reason is that players quickly become a danger to towers, and we don't want to see Sand Castles in late-games.
7/ Currency is cheaper, to increase a bit the gold's income.
8/ Blacksmith is more expensive but also more efficient.
9/ Armory is cheaper but less effective. A way to balance Citadel's expenses.
10/ Graveyard is a lot cheaper, because the effects are minimal. We want to have about same death penalties for everyone...
11/ ... because killing Demigods is no more the key to victory (less XP and less gold received when killing one of them), but you have to pay the price if you die. 45 seconds can be very long.
12/ Priests, Angels, Catapults and Giants come alone, but the price of their upgrades remain the same.

The reason for the last point is that the calculation of warscore is different. It will take some time to achieve the first rank, but after that, it will go quickly to not focus the game only on the map control. But if you reach level 10 before your enemy, it will be very important to take advantage of it, by buying giants as soon as you can, because your opponent won't need 15 minutes to catch up. So :

13/ The first rank of Warscore can be reached at 1100, and the last one at 3000. Having Priests should be your priority.
14/ There is no more bonus related to controlling a % of flags. You won't hear "The forces of darkness control the map !" anymore...

After the level 10, a difference of 3-4 levels can be hard to manage. Also, it was necessary to reduce the superpower of high-level characters, so :

15/ The max level is 15.
16/ Natural health regeneration of all Demigods has been decreased.
17/ Oculus' Blast Off skill has been nerfed a little bit. It inflicts less damage but can be cast more often. Also, Oculus' Rate of Fire has been slightly decreased.

To help the AI to survive, and other things :

18/ Health potions have a cooldown of 15 instead of 8, but the little one now gives 900 HP instead of 750 and the big one has a faster Casting time (1.5s).
19/ Scroll of teleporting can be cast in 1.5s instead of 3.
20/ AI is now more enclined to retreat to health statue and not just wait around the towers, excepting a miracle.
21/ Some other improvements have been made to its behavior : it's buying more citadel's upgrades and using more often health potions, flag's locks and TP scrolls.
22/ I also changed some minor things about the AI's strategy. More flee, and sometimes, instead of fleeing, go capturing, (especially if the enemy has more warscore, as Enhanced AI intended).
23/ Capture lock is more important in late-game. AI will use it, and it now lasts 60s (instead of 45). Also, the range is higher and the cooldown is 30s.
24/ Handicaps for AIs have been rebalanced. Hard is not so hard, and everyone can use good favor items. In normal mode, AI has 10% bonuses (gold and XP).
25/ Demigods see farther, except for Oculus (he's blind after all...). Again, this is to help the AI to decide what to do.
26/ Flags can be captured from a longer distance (AI was staying too far from the flag sometimes) and give much less XP (if you want map control, you can't have free levels !).

Finally :

27/ There is 40s countdown before grunts coming. Now you'll get acquainted with your neighbors before going to a serious war.
28/ The Cooldown Flag gives 30% bonus instead of 15.
29/ The Valor Flag gives 150% damage, 30% health bonuses to reinforcements, and also a -15% cooldowns bonus to Demigods. This is to shorten the late-game. 

 

1.1 Addition :
---------------


30/ Health Pool : you are a Demigod, so you don't have the power of a God, and so, you can't invoke what you want without paying a price. From now on, each time you call a grunt, you tap into the Health Pool, so the more waves you control, the less HP they have. Thus, each controlled portal reduces the health points of your reinforcements by 10%.
31/ Demigods have much less armor and survival is really important, also very expensive if you waste all your money in HP potions...
32/ Catapults are now a more important weapon against Towers because they can fire from a long distance. However, they do not know the word "precision", so there's a bit of chance in destroying enemy towers.

 

------------
Changelog
------------

v1.1

- Capture Lock goes back to normal : 45 seconds cooldown and duration. AI was not better with more Locks.
- Remove the nerf of Oculus.
- VisionRadius increase at 40 for every DGs.
- Level 16 is now the maximum level, so players can have two ultimate abilities.
 - Various AI improvements (fleeing and priorities - more scrolls and HP potions, as well as better Citadel's Upgrades management). Blacksmith will be top priority as soon as allies or enemies have Catapults ; and AI will buy more Fortified Structure. Also, Priests are now top priority at rank 3.
- Much more HP for archers.
- Range of Beam Towers has been increased, especially for cover some inner areas in Leviathan. Also, towers prioritize Demigods and Giants and Healers, and they have a lesser damage radius.
A direct effect of this is that the AI will now attack more often the towers (and don't get kill stupidly, thanks to the TP scroll).
- Adjust starting conditions of AIs (slightly higher).
- Lower the price of some other Citadel's Upgrades.
 - Damage bonus of the Flag Valor has been reduced to 80%.
- Armor values of structures has been increased and Demigod's value decreased.
- HP of giants have been increased a lot. They must reach and hit the towers, and block you the way.
 - Health Pool : you are a Demigod, so you don't have the power of a God, and so, you can't invoke what you want without paying a price. From now on, each time you call a grunt,  you tap into the Health Pool, so the more waves you control, the less HP they have. Thus, each controlled portal reduces the health points of your reinforcements by 10%.
- High Priests Minions from level 2 to level 4 have less effective healings. But Priests can now heal every 4 seconds.
- You'll receive more gold from capturing flags, depending on your level.
- Now you can get the assist reward 30 seconds after you hit an enemy hero. Default : 15.
 - Towers take more time to search for a new target. So they can and must be overwhelmed.
- All potions can be cast in 0.5 second, to balance the reduction of armor (but you still have the 15s cooldown). TP scroll can be cast in 1 sec.
- AI won't buy Sigil of Vitality anymore.
- Sedna's Healings are cheaper and can be cast quicker (5 from 7s). This will give a slight advantage to the AI that can master this spell.
 - Demigods will receive more health at each new levels. Last level will be more digest.
- Oculus and Demon Assassin will now receive a direct heal of 48 and 54 HP at each new level, according to other Demigods.
- Catapults are now firing from farther. They really are "artillery" and they're not very precise... They also have less HP.
- Everyone is very resistant against artillery fire, except structures.
- AIs can now choose from many Favor Items. Some will say that it's not optimal, I agree, but it's more fun, and it adds a chance factor. Edited files are from Enhanced AI 1.3.
- Added a folder called "ExtraMods" ; see Installation.

- Known bugs : some strange numbers appear sometimes, it probably has something to do with the armor values. Also, nearby towers can shoot at each others at the start of the game. Don't really know why. 

 

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January 9, 2012 5:26:28 PM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

must ...try...this...

i like slow and developing.

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January 9, 2012 5:45:43 PM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

Didn't have a chance to read all of your notes or check your mod out yet, but just wanted to throw this out.  Did you create your own UID for your mod?  If not, please do so and then upload that version.  Just checking so there aren't any conflicts between your mod and something that is already out there.  Thanks!  Nice to see a new modder here.

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January 10, 2012 3:32:05 AM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

Hi Pacov, yes I used the UID generator from Forged Alliance.

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January 10, 2012 6:47:00 AM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

Hey great effort man.  I read through some of the changes and I think against high level players you'll find one side getting completely landslided. The towers currently on HIGH can be destroyed fairly easily. In a normal towers an unprotected tower can be wasted in under a minute early game. Slower tower regen will = quick tower destruction by the dominating team. I like the idea of towers becoming powerful late game, It would be great to be able to purchase a tower resurrect.

Also making tower upgrades cheaper is a great idea. Almost every game players buy FS1 and that's it. All the rest are too expensive to make it worthwhile. If there were let's say 20 fortified structure and 20 tower firepower increments, each at a cost of 500 gold - this would be interesting and create a situation where towers level up as the game progresses. Another idea; what if tower strength automatically upgraded with each warscore. A little more health and a little more damage per warscore level.

It looks like you've been beaten by oculus a few times too many. I'm a regular oc player and he is quite powerful for damage, but against UB or DA he can get cleaned up very quickly, and lacking stuns means he cannot stop locking,pots,escapes. His double jump is only useful for big damage if he jumps in place, so he's gotta get right on top of u first for that. If you allow that you deserve to die lol. Nerfing oculus breaks this him i think. 

60 second flag locks, and 30 second cooldown. That means once a portal is taken by the enemy so long as they have sedna or oak there is no way you will ever get the flag back, also if they manage to capture both, one demigod could permalock both flags and you wont get them back. Using silence sedna could walk in - lock one portal, teleport to the other and lock it at the same time. The nature of locks at the moment is only one flag can be locked by each player at a time. Also as rook I would lock the health flag from the start of the game, and you would never ever ever get it back. I could walk to the citadel regen and return before the lock expired, meanwhile lock the exp flag on my way though (on cataract) and still have enough time to get back to my health flag tower farm.

There's some awesome points what you've got here. I agree completely on how once there's a kill or two it's game over. Most high level games 1 kill is all it takes to be a game ender. Also Whoever hits warscore3 first will most likely win. Once currency is in you're creating a bigger gap. The design of this game is whoever dominates in the first few minutes starts a potential snowballing effect for warscore and exp,gold,levels. More gold, more gear, easier to hold flags more warscore, not much can be done about it and it's not like other strategy games where you can change your tactics mid game or end game dramatically to catch the enemy off guard.

 

I always though an interesting thing to do would be to allow a player to change their favor item during play from the shop. Make them buy a favor item switch with favor points (say 60) which would keep people from being able to play every game with a multitude of different favor items.  This way you may want to be a heaven's wraith demigod to get your levels up and then return to citadel to switch to blood of the fallen for some melee battle. Or perhaps you're a vial rook early game, then at level 10 you get a decent hat and switch to a renewal rook. People keep stealing your ports? Change your favor to teleportation amulet.

 

Just some ideas, I don't mean to sound critical of your work I think it's an awesome effort keep it up man!

 

 

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January 10, 2012 7:14:07 AM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

@Running_Lukas_79

 

As I said, I mainly did this mod to create more challenge against AIs. 

The AI will never go in one well organized group to destroy towers. I doubt that players can even succeed it because beam towers can kill you in three or four shots in the early-game.

Citadel's upgrades are meant to have powerful towers in the late-game.  

"what if tower strength automatically upgraded with each warscore. A little more health and a little more damage per warscore level." Well, it's the role of upgrades here : ) If you advance in warscore, you will upgrade your towers, and in this mod, these upgrades are cheaper so you and AI can afford them easily. It's important to not give 100% balanced games to both teams ; it has to be a way to have a bit of an advantage. If I'd want a balanced game exclusively focused on player's skills, I'd make arbitrary upgrades, but I don't think it's a good idea for the dynamic of the game.

 

Yes Oculus has weaknesses, but AI don't manage them and always got killed by the Blast Off skill. So that's the reason for that nerf. Besides, the nerf is not that deadly = )

 

I was just thinking that 60 seconds and 60 cooldown could be better indeed. I have to see what are the effects on the AI, because my hope here was that it can reverse the end-game by quickly capturing an enemy portal and lock it. But I think no player would waste his time locking again and again the same flag. It'd be a waste of time and the enemy would take advantage of it.

 

"The design of this game is whoever dominates in the first few minutes starts a potential snowballing effect" - Yea, and I don't agree with that. It's totally stupid to finish a game if you know after 5 minutes that you'll loose, whatever you'll do. Furthermore, MOBA is actually very frustrating for novices, because if you get kill, the rest of the team is gonna hate you. That is not what I call team-working... But it's a larger debate : )

 

Interesting idea for favor items. However, I think it's hardcoded A way to do it would be to make favor items buyable items, like others. 

 

Critical is good : )

 

EDIT : Hmm smileys are really ugly here ^^ 

 

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January 17, 2012 12:11:52 PM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

I uploaded the Updated version 1.1. See the changes in the first post.

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January 17, 2012 1:17:04 PM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

- Oculus and Demon Assassin will now receive a direct heal of 48 and 54 HP at each new level, according to other Demigods.

This caught my eye and might be something to include in the uberfix mod as it sounds like a bug/oversight.  Are you saying that in the normal, unmodded code that all Demigods except DA and oculus receive that "direct heal" or is that a change you made in your mod and are just now applying it to those 2?

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January 17, 2012 2:48:36 PM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

I was thinking the same thing when I changed these values. When you look at "BuffDefBaseStats.lua" you see that all DG receive a bonus heal from 27 to 72 when they level up... except for the demon (125) and Oculus (120), which is unjustifiable in my opinion. My values are not optimal though, we should calculate this and compare to other datas.

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January 17, 2012 4:26:59 PM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

All of the health levels are commented out, so extra "heal" life added on level up does nothing anyways. This would also seem to be intentional since this file has been worked on multiple times, with new patch features added (adjustHealth = true) and the DLC Demigods having entries added here.

There appears to be no rhyme or reason why some demigods get a bonus amount of mana equal to their pool increase amount, and others do not.

eg: Occ gets +118 max energy (adjusted = true), and 118 extra mana to fill up his pool if it is not full.
Erebus gets +91 max energy (adjusted = true) and 86 extra mana if is pool is not full.

 

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January 18, 2012 5:46:41 AM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

"All of the health levels are commented out"

 

Hmm that's true for original files... I guess I forgot that I changed this. However, it was strange that Oculus and the Assassin get more health than other DGs. Again, I was talking about health, and not mana.

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April 29, 2012 8:29:35 AM from Demigod Forums Demigod Forums

does anyone could say how to remove the level 16 limit ?

and how to up it to 25 ?

 

thanks !

 

actually a very good mod !

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