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Impeding Mountains

7/14/2016 Breaking News! At long last the cries for a more reasonable and balance version of this mod have been answered, and the best part is I had nothing to do with it! I encourage everyone to take a look at :Quenchie:'s work over here https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=724082032
What it lack in true dwarven stayouttamymountains-atude it makes up for in balanced gameplay and a lack of cosmic event breaking spawn rng, you know if your into that kind of thing.

Anyways moral of the story is be lazy and ignore peoples requests long enough and eventually someone will get fed up and fix it for you!
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Mountains have always held strategic value, but I never felt they went far enough. I enjoy a good choke point and found myself playing on underground only maps quite a bit as a result. I don't know if it'll be to everyones taste but I wanted to bring that style of play to the surface world. To that end I've removes the ability for basic walking units to cross mountains at all, and massively increases the costs for Mountaineering, flying and floating.

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The base cost to cross mountains has been bumped to 40, basically impassable.

With basic Mountaineering this cost is reduced to 16. As larger armies are likely to have at least one unit with a move count of 28 most forces are reduced to a single mountain per turn, although armies built to the purpose will manage more.

Improved Mountaineering pays 8, so they are (relatively) quite mobile by the new standards.

Float is increased to 14, most float units have a base move of 28 and I wanted them to be a tad faster than Mountaineering, so any floating unit should be capable of moving two mountains per turn.

Flying I bumped up to 8 to make them on par with Imp Mountaineering, again quite mobile compaired to the rest.


Disclaimer, I gave very little thought to racial / class balance with these new numbers. Dwarves obviously now have a huge advantage on mountain heavy maps, and anyone lacking flying units is in for a rough ride. But at a certain point I'll happily trade a bit of balance for what I consider more flavourful gameplay!

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Do it yourself!

By request if anyone wants to toy around with these values they're pretty easy to tweak!
I'll assume you know the basics of how to launch the Package Manager and open an .RPK If not checkout http://aow.triumph.net/data/Modding/Modding_Guide_v1.pdf start around page 6, you only need a few pages to get the basics

Anyways the bulk of it is in the AoW_UnitProperties.RPK under Movement Abilities. You find Mountaineering (16,17) and Improved Mountaineering (23,24) in here. You want to change the Cost Override, the base cost for most movements is one and this seems to add to that, so if you wanted a move cost of 20 you need to set the override to 19. And make sure you change the value for both Mountains and Coastal Mountains!

A bit farther down the came category you also find the base cost for mountains (97,98). Same as above hit the Cost Override to the turn one one less then the cost you want and make sure to do both normal and coastal.

Next, while still staying in AoW_UnitProperties.rpk we change the category to Requisite Races & General
This is where Float is stored (69,73) Same as above Cost override, one below desired, both mountains, you get the drill.

Finally to change the values for Flying units, and to make sure our mountains actually list the new cost, we open up the AoW_TerrainLogic.rpk and go to the Overlays category.
We want to edit entires 20 and 25, this time we need to change two values in each.
The first is Flight Cost Penalty, now this behaves differently then the rest because it operates from a base cost of 3, so for a value of 20 you would want to set it to 17.
A bit farther down we have Interface Movement, this changes what movecost value you see when you hover over the tile.

There are some other interesting options in this section, you may notice Block All Unit Placement, use this if you just want mountains to be permenetly impassable to everyone forever. The Hazard value might also lead to interest results, I never played with it but it might be possible to make crossing mountains cause damage. And while I have no idea visually what it would look like you can enable roads and structures in your mountains if you so desire with the flip of a switch!

Congradulations, you now have the power to render my mod obsolete!