old school Lom

[messatsu]

Hi guys

Seems like I am returning yet again to this game, so many years on!

I now finally modded using Mantera's mod, completely much more polished - great job!

I had a question that when I used to play LoM as a kid, it was never LoM:SE. Other than the fact it was buggy as hell (lifebreaker hack or your last 3 in the retinue spawning behind enemy lines) I used to remember nearby cave encounters were completely faction-based. What I meant by this is that Death fought against Water, Water against Death; Order v fire, Fire v order etc. It made for some incredibly memorable and tough encounters. I also remember the AI used to spam buying mercenaries as you went to attack them so as to defend themselves and factions would actually kill other factions pretty easily and/or liberate their allies temples. There were certain things you would hate and love, like Chaos mages casting vortex or death mages always casting either dark shade (sp?) or golgoth's gift...

Other than the cave encounters now using it from the "neutral race", and it could also be nostalgia or I could be a lot better, but I find the AI in LOM:SE is a lot more meek, chilling around their town, not doing... much? I find this in both the modded and unmodded - am I doing something wrong perhaps?

What are your thoughts and experiences on this?

Not looking for any trolling - just pure discussion.

Regards

[lemminkainen]

If you want faction based cave encounters you could always manually place water encounters in the death region, death encounters in the water region, etc. thanks to the editor. It would indeed create a classic LOM feeling.

Now for the current design of Boaster's mod regarding encounters I found it weird initially, too. One thing you should keep in mind is that everything is VERY carefully balanced by Boaster to make more strategic fights. If you look closely, you'll notice that most encounters contain a balance of neutral units, your faith and opposing faith. There's a reasoning behind this: these three types of units have very different resistances to spells from your faith. They also contain a balance of infantry, cavalry and archers units. Again here their resistances to your different types of attack are very complex and variable thanks to this system (archers are weak to cavalry, cavalry to infantry, infantry to archers, with some exceptions though). These are only examples of a very well-thought system. Overall, I'd say I like what Boaster did. One thing I miss though is having a risk of running into a whole archer or infantry or cavalry army, which sometimes made encounters unpredictable and ridiculously hard or ridiculously easy.

I think you should play around with the mod more and you'll notice that all epic classic LOM things are still around like Chaos vortices or Golgoth's gifts. In fact, Boaster added so many things that everything feels new and less common, but all classic stuff is still there, just more randomly placed.

Now for the AI I think Boaster made it so they're indeed less likely to die. It means that in AI vs AI battles the AI lords have an increased chance of escaping a lost fight and thus surviving. It still happens, though. I used to actually be annoyed as a kid since sometimes by turn 50 every faith but death was gone and there was no more trade possible, and no more war possible except against the big ennemy. Overall the AI shouldn't be weaker or avoid sending defensive troops (or I did not notice). Are you sure you chose hard mode by the way? I guess you could also do like me and just play without using last save.

[messatsu]

Sorry for resurrecting this thread, I periodically pick up the game still... I played a fresh playthrough now with Air on GSZ.

Does anyone know the name of the original Urak map or how to extract it from the save games? For e.g. if you load up the original savegame tutorials that comes with a fresh install, that was the original Urak I had remembered. Although the encounters are still not quite faith-based as described originally in my post. Although using the F9 hotkey, it seems like that map is extremely desolate. I used to remember that there was a village and some caves above the water city and one of the caves had the chain lightning scroll in it.

Also, does the AI's ability scale with game difficulty? I have read within the forums that everyone says to start the game on hard, but does that improve the AI's decision making?

[Boaster]

Nov 3, 2024 12:43:13 GMT -6 messatsu said:

Sorry for resurrecting this thread, I periodically pick up the game still... I played a fresh playthrough now with Air on GSZ.

Does anyone know the name of the original Urak map or how to extract it from the save games? For e.g. if you load up the original savegame tutorials that comes with a fresh install, that was the original Urak I had remembered. Although the encounters are still not quite faith-based as described originally in my post. Although using the F9 hotkey, it seems like that map is extremely desolate. I used to remember that there was a village and some caves above the water city and one of the caves had the chain lightning scroll in it.

Also, does the AI's ability scale with game difficulty? I have read within the forums that everyone says to start the game on hard, but does that improve the AI's decision making?

Nothing drastic. No overhauls. Just minor improvements to AI.

Urak.scn and UrakII.scn are the originals.