Artefact Deployment on Custom Maps

[mohraine]

Hey everybody,

I'm a long time player of Lords of Magic: Special Edition. It's a fantastic game, and to Mantera and this community I am very grateful for keeping it an active niche in the gaming world. I use Mantera's mods for the sake of building my maps - it is a magnificent installation, and with it I have created 3 maps through which I cycle whenever I come back to the game.

Like everybody else, I go back and tweak this and that about my maps as I notice through gameplay what works and what doesn't. One of my maps uses larger dimensions, as enabled by Mantera. Perhaps as a consequence of the fact that this means there are a lot of level 7+ dungeons in the transitioning zones between 1 faith's kingdom and another, I find that artefacts are very hard to find on this map.

I was wondering: is there any tip or logic to where artefacts will appear? I started to notice a couple of dungeons where I could reliably count on acquiring a Greater Artefact for Fire; another for Earth; and another for Water, but when I went into the editor again to tweak this or that, the deployment of items seemed to change again, and these dungeons were no longer reliable sources of artefacts.

If there is any trick to knowing where items will spawn, I would be very grateful to anyone that could advise me! I use Mantera's mods for map building, but play these maps using the unmodded version of LoM:SE with its latest patch.

[Boaster]

If you're using the mod to create maps for unmodded versions of the game, you will run into problems when the map size is larger, or smaller, than 128x128.

Artifacts are distributed depending on the dungeons level and how many dungeons are in the area, and the difficulty mode.

Now, I suspect that with randomly generate dungeons, the encounter type (cave, hut, burrow and other sprites specific to regions) are generated depending on the capital they spawn around as well as the terrain which underlies where the dungeon is randomly placed.

So, it could be such that if an encounter is generated near enough to water terrain, the faith type of this encounter generated would be "water" and perhaps might spawn artifacts relating to the Water Faith. This is not exact.

I recommend using pre-placed dungeons for maps.

On hard mode, I think it's the first lowest 6 dungeons do not spawn artifacts or scrolls.

[mohraine]

Thanks for the tip!

I have been placing my own dungeons in the maps that are of my own creation. I noticed that the Fire Statue (lvl 11) on one of those maps reliably drops one of the Greater Artefacts of the Fire faith, and that a Life Keep (lvl 11) did the same for the Life faith. A Cyclops Cave (lvl 11) gave out Chaos Greater Artefacts at one point, however when I edited the map, the deployment of artefacts seemed to have shifted and now the very same Cyclops Cave does not give out anything.

It may also be of interest to people to note that a Shipwreck (lvl 11) is currently providing one of the Greater Artefacts for the Water faith on this map, whilst high level Dragon Lair dungeons tend to give out a Water spell scroll.

So there appears to be some rhyme or reason to how the Greater Artefacts, if not all artefacts, are deployed across the map. I haven't entirely figured it out yet, owing to the fact that small changes to the map seem to have prompted a reshuffling in some of this instances. Notably, the Cyclops Cave no longer gives out a Chaos Greater Arefact, but the Life Keep (lvl 11) has never stopped providing a Life Greater Artefact across multiple edits of the map.

Hope this is helpful to somebody; feel free to add your own observations here if it can help us all come to a better understanding of how we might be able to deploy these locations intentionally for ourselves when we create our maps.

[Boaster]

Highest level dungeon closets to a capital will spawn the Greater Artifact. After this, it is more fluid.