Project overview and progress

[Catwalk]

Project overview and progress

This is merely a skeleton for now, illustrating all areas of the game that Catnip will affect. I will be fleshing this out soon to better explain what I'm seeking to do. More threads will be set up to discuss these topics separately, please PM me if there's a topic you think I've forgotten or would like to suggest for inclusion.

1) Units - faster movement and more hearts for all units
- Basic: Higher costs of cheap units, small balance tweaks to most stats, higher offense across the board
- Racial: Slight weakening of the most powerful units (especially ranged) and fewer figures for most units, addition and removal of a few units
- Summoned
- Heroes: Big changes to skills and item slots, minor stat tweaks, possibly 3 moves

2) Spells
- Costs
- Effects
- New spells

3) Buildings
- Costs
- Tech tree
- Effects
- City walls (given special consideration): Higher defense bonus, ammo bonus for defenders, AI improvements

4) Races - major rebalancing to bring races closer to the same strength level
- Basic units: Availability mostly unchanged, cost structure changed considerably, big stat changes, many abilities added across the board
- Growth rates: Thinking about increasing growth rates across the board
- Building availability: Major rebalancing
- Special abilities: Might tinker with stuff like mana, gold and production bonuses

5) Wizards
- Number of picks, costs and effects of retorts
- Spell selection: Reverting to the 1.0 system if possible (only guaranteed spells), or possibly a hybrid system

6) Miscellaneous
- Terrain
- Unrest: Tax table, police effect, racism table
- Combat rules: Retreating, no shooting after moving, mana cost in combat
- Lair strength and treasure: No weak lairs
- XP tables: Revamping XP brackets and tweaking level bonuses considerably
- Events
- Alchemy
- Casting skill
- Production: Cost of rushing production, closing loophole, letting production carry over to next project
- Lairs and nodes: Changing monster strength and reward allocation
- Capturing cities: Money rewards (higher if you raze)

[Catwalk]

Started fleshing out entries and posting individual threads, please post feedback in all open threads.

[Catwalk]

Discussions are coming along nicely and I have a good picture of how I want Catnip to turn out. There's a lot of tweaking to be done still, and I need some more volunteers. Deadline for first release will be pushed back at least until January as I've had a lot of extra work lately which will probably continue until December.

Also, I'm planning to implement most of these changes dynamically using I Like Serena's tweaker. Hopefully that'll require less effort to implement and be more stable than direct hacks. It'll also enable more interesting changes to game mechanics.

[Catwalk]

Catnip 2.0 will be released in time for Christmas and will contain the following features:
- extensive unit changes (normal, summoned and heroes)
- moderate building changes
- possibly minor spell balancing
- possibly minor hacks that kyrub can whip out in a hurry

Stay tuned!

[Catwalk]

Past few weeks have been super busy for me. I may need to postpone Catnip until January I'll let you know tomorrow if I can meet the Christmas deadline or not. But other than that, you don't need to worry about my involvement. Just a little downtime right now.

[Catwalk]

I'm overjoyed to see that Vagabond is being slow too So the deadline will be postponed until sometime in January, will post a specific date soon. Might mean a delay for Catnip 3.0 as well. Thank you for your patience!

[Catwalk]

Status update: After a long period of hibernation, I'm ready to resume work on Catnip and expect it to be completed within a couple months. kyrub has confirmed that he's still available to do any required hacks, as long as I'm not in a hurry

Normal units are mostly done, need to look over the numbers again.
Spells are not done, needs more work.
Still haven't specified building details, but have a good idea about what I want.
Same with heroes, need to be given a quick overhaul.

A list of feature changes will be posted as soon as kyrub has decided which ones he can and wants to do.

[Catwalk]

kyrub has informed me that he has a little more time to work on the project, so we'll try to get most of it done in a hurry. We're currently discussing which coding changes to implement, so that's where the focus will be. Tweaks and balancing will be done later. Input is welcome on all topics, so please feel free to contribute.

[Catwalk]

Will start working shortly on implementing the terrain changes described here, please have a look. Will start working on balance changes after that, mainly units and buildings. Spells will be changed later, some hero changes might make it into the first release.

[Catwalk]

This project has been shelved and is currently not active, both due to dwindling interest and because zitro is aspiring to achieve many of the same things that Catnip set out to do. It is not likely I will resume work on it anytime soon, if I get the urge to tinker with MoM again it will likely be in the form of feedback for zitro's mod.