The Lizardmen challenge roleplaying scenario: You are the Lizard King!

[TwilightSparkletheAlicorn]

It's not fun unless you use something tricky and complex, which is mostly fixed at 1.40. Or reduced to more straightforward and easy ways instead of the trickier ones. If only there was "AI-improving-only" edition of it.

[I like Serena]

I see your point. I miss building roads over water.
Btw, I also don't mind that we don't get crashes anymore, like the one the Call Lightning bug used to guarantee.
And I don't mind that the to-hit of units is shown, and that the user interface has been extended.
Oh, and that we now have stuff like huge land mass and revolting raiders.

Which fixes should be reverted (including of course building bridges between land masses)?

[Seravy]

Which fixes should be reverted (including of course building bridges between land masses)?

My problem with 1.40 was this one

Positioning of hometowns / fortresses is improved.

...but not anymore, I fixed (undid) that. Crashing on map generation 50-99% of the time (depending on landmass) wasn't funny.

Also, not sure if this is 1.40 or the original did it too, but nodes are guarded by way too strong armies, even more than the wizard's capital. I have no problems with anything else in 1.40n...but I can't say the same for 1.40o, I definitely don't want a half functioning queue system, nor archers that move close before shooting.

I wonder too, which changes did you not like?

btw the most abuseable trick still works, summoning outside the battlefield.

[TwilightSparkletheAlicorn]

Unreachable summons, unsuccessful attacks on chaos flyers, undispellable Guardian Wind, Web+Flight dispel interaction, city walls every encounter, prayer -1 enemy to hit, battlefield enchantments affecting MagIm units, a couple certain death spells piercing Death Immunity, 5 item properties, plane shifting node meld and maybe something else they fixed and I forgot. Is the 0.5 movement still present on windwalker stacks? Used to enjoy quick building with this one.

By the way, road building is still possible in 1.40, but only on tile by tile basis, with Plane Shift or Planar Travel so no continuous build.

In original nodes were obviously stronger than neutral cities and enemy capitals, large stacks of Sky Drakes, Great Drakes etc. This is why 11 book strategies worked: Wraiths, Gorgons were a good rush for you to capture towns, while IEGS is plain unbeatable by your opponents by the time you create it; they simply cannot yet defend against this one.

[Seravy]

Unreachable summons, unsuccessful attacks on chaos flyers, undispellable Guardian Wind, Web+Flight dispel interaction, city walls every encounter, prayer -1 enemy to hit, battlefield enchantments affecting MagIm units, a couple certain death spells piercing Death Immunity, 5 item properties, plane shifting node meld and maybe something else they fixed and I forgot. Is the 0.5 movement still present on windwalker stacks? Used to enjoy quick building with this one.

By the way, road building is still possible in 1.40, but only on tile by tile basis, with Plane Shift or Planar Travel so no continuous build.

In original nodes were obviously stronger than neutral cities and enemy capitals, large stacks of Sky Drakes, Great Drakes etc. This is why 11 book strategies worked: Wraiths, Gorgons were a good rush for you to capture towns, while IEGS is plain unbeatable by your opponents by the time you create it; they simply cannot yet defend against this one.

Unreachable summons : no one fixed that yet, I know where the code related to that is but no space to change it and I would need to add a lot of extra checks for it. Gave up without trying, not worth it. I rather just not summon there.
unsuccessful attacks on chaos flyers : no idea what this is? If you attack a flying unit without being able to do so, you still do 0 damage.
undispellable Guardian Wind : not fixed (you can dispel it but missile immunity granted stays, now that I think about it that's weird, I thought battle stats get refreshed after a dispel. How is this bug even possible....I have to investigate.)
city walls every encounter : I fixed that, Insecticide didn't, even made the walls stronger.
prayer -1 enemy to hit : ok this one is actually fixed but that's for the better. Unless you play Life and halflings in every game.
battlefield enchantments affecting MagIm units : You mean like black prayer and stuff? I don't think anyone changed that, at least I never noticed, nor do I remember any such checks in the code.
a couple certain death spells piercing Death Immunity : Word of Death, the -5 save one still does so, not sure what else did.
Is the 0.5 movement still present on windwalker stacks? : This has been on my "to fix" list for a month, meaning it wasn't fixed in insecticide either.

"In original nodes were obviously stronger than neutral cities and enemy capitals, large stacks of Sky Drakes, Great Drakes etc. "
You mean the AI wizards guarded their nodes with that? Or that's the neutral stack before conquering. My problem is they have 2 storm giants in their capital, and 6 on the nearby node they own...not the right priorities, those. The node doesn't even produce enough mana for keeping 6 giants. Or when my last opponent in the last game summoned 2 sky drakes and moved it to an army stack still gathering units...and they never got used in battle, I won the game 10 turns later.

[TwilightSparkletheAlicorn]

Oh, you're talking about the guardship. Well, neutral before-clear nodes are certainly potentially stronger than wizard stacks. Then, even in 1.31 certain personality enemy wizards did tend to gather up a hell of a lot of Fantastic Creature summons at the nodes, while gathering up heroes in their capital.

[Hadriex]

Sorry it took me so long, here's my first crack at the Lizardman Challenge. I had attempted it in a stream last week, but technical difficulties screwed that up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcWhAaFJCE

[TwilightSparkletheAlicorn]

I guess we have been rickrolled in some unusual and nonclassic rickroll way.

[Tiltowait]

Yeah, the link is wrong, but I found the video on youtube. If you haven't watched it then there are spoilers ahead.



Sending single settlers only wasn't part of the challenge. Nowhere does it say they can't be escorted! Of course they need escorts or they'll die to random monster attacks. Also it doesn't say you need to found 5 cities, it means you need to HAVE 5 Lizardmen cities total, in case you got a neutral or something. Maybe I should make that more clear in the instructions. The found your cities on/near swamps thing was from the optional challenges. And if you misclick and shoot your javelins too soon, big deal. The soldiers just get a retraining course back at home.

Yeah, I was screaming to take the neutral cities right away at the beginning. Lizardmen spearmen are great for this kind of early conquest. They just bearhug anything the early garrisons can put up. Producing settlers is a priority, not being *kadaver gehorsam* (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders). If you think you're losing and falling behind, change strategy and do whatever you need to live. When things calm down, go back to the strategy. I'll clarify that.

Some of those mercenaries you turned down were pretty good! High Men cavalry and Horsebows are both great at the beginning of the game.

Try right clicking on stuff to see the changes by PLIGHT. A lot of the spells, unit abilities, city functions, etc. I like the one for hero levels. You can even right click on things like "OK" and "cancel".

That demon you lost to had Weapon Immunity, and Lizardmen can't build Alchemist Guilds. I don't know what you were doing attacking a ruin with a settler stack.

It's Draconians you can keep, not Dark Elves.

LOL @ the heretic Lizardmen tribe living on the desert. I laughed for like five minutes at that one. That's where you get to make those *role playing choices*.

You should have just hoovered the whole map with Earth Lore, especially the other plane, and not bothered with so many spirits. If you look at the F2 world map it is easy to spot where to cast. Although, spirits are indeed good for stomping on outposts and limiting the CP's exponential growth.

There was one cool part where the water-walking hero stack used its swimming movement capability to get past a desert bottleneck. That was exactly the sort of gameplay effect this set of arbitrary rules was meant to create.

That was funny when you got 10 gold, the minimum possible amount, for clearing a ruin. The tragic part was 10 gold was actually useful at that point.

Getting Pestilence cast on your capital was horrible. It sucks when the computer does crap like that early in the game and you can't do anything about it. It was on Hard, too, so the CPs don't get all those huge bonuses that they do in Impossible. If you try again, don't go all the way to normal difficulty, that's easy peasy and the CPs don't even get more books than you. You really had no chance once your capital was Pestilenced, that was game right there.

Well it wouldn't have been a challenge if it were easy! Don't feel you need to do it again if you hated it. I tried it and thought it was fun for a change.

[Hadriex]

Oh man, I did not intend for that to happen at all! But when I saw 'we were rickrolled in a nontraditional way' I immediately clicked my own link. And then when I saw the result started laughing.

I am sorry 'bout that though.


Well, I didn't enjoy trying so hard to put out settlers at the start, and the whomping they got.

If I can play early aggro and worry about the settlers later, well then that's a lizard of a different color.

I'll give it a try on Sunday.