I'm generally against modding games, but while I was playing vanilla with the scorge lord class I really liked the ''ghoul'' monsters... because they turned my enemy into zombies... Anyway.. from there I found this mod, which is very professionally made, without any significant changes to CoE5. All game mechanics are preserved and the class is balanced and great to play!

Also most animals if possible could be converted into ghoul variant, maybe even the dragons. would make class much more viable early game cause animals more common.

The Hunt forest enchantment only seems to turn off ancient forests and not actually give you any zombie animals

The mod hasn't been working in network for a bit

hunting grounds dont work in mp

Just played as Ghoul King and I like the faction. I like the hunting grounds as they are similar to Troll Forests but you can pick up the spawns. Best of both worlds. Though Hunting Grounds don't spawn stationary defenders and can't be retaken if lost. The ghouls upgrading system is neat too. Though I think I slept on the huge ghouls a bit. I had a start with barely any Hand income.

Some things I noticed:

Hunting Ground can be cast in Ancient Forests and Tribal Villages and Bandit Camps, but doesn't seem to spawn an units there. I assume the Dyrad Queen's Grove and the Druid's Hut will also fall in that category.
Hoburg Villages do not create ghouls. Not even little ones.
Trolls turn into normal sized ghouls.
The mod Zombie(Patient Zero) from King_Nichola has infected animals turning killed animals into more of themself. Some units even turn everything living they kill into more of themself. Maybe a loot at that mod or a talk with the developer could help with that issue.

Hey like a ghoul faction is a pretty neat flavour of undead, issues I had with the mod was mainly to do with early game I would loose my ghoul lord trying to expand way before I could upgrade him so never really got to test him out, any troll big or small solos him and normal base line ghouls with battle fright have more moral than the lord does.. so any fear spell has the chance to ruin him, maybe some rituals to power up his stats abit? Or the ability to eat corpses to heal afflictions and then I would feel more confident using him as he always gets crossbow bolts to both eye sockets :/

Can you change the Ghoul Lord to mid rank? He constantly dies otherwise. No point in having him lead armies if he constantly dies.

Fun mod eventhough I feel like something is missing in "late game". Also its almost gamebreaking that one cannot ghoullify animals. I know its hardwired that way in the game but still something that is very frustrating. Nice job on balancing the mod by the way :)

I think updates unfortunately break all or most saves. Try making a new game and see how it is?

Looks like the most recent update might of messed up your mod. I loaded my game and tons of my units are different and my main base was gone.

Ahh I see thanks for explaining. Watching my ghoul army convert my enemies is the most fun I've had in a long time.

you could ask for reanimateanimal command on the modding wishlist thread.

Yeah. Sadly I cant fix that since the reanimation ability it is using is hardcoded and we cant mod new abilities just yet.

please note that the throne does not animate animal corpses, the sense dead will show skulls even though you can't animate anything because there are animal corpses.

They reanimate any corpses laying around. Once corpses are used up you need to relocate them to a new source of bodies from a recent battle or something. At the top right it indicates if the throne senses dead or not so use that as an indicator.

Hey I'm loving the mod! I do have a question about the reanimation thrones though. I'm not sure if they are working as intended or buggy but when I put them in a village or whatever they produce a lot of longdeads pretty quick and then just sorta stop producing all together. Either way thanks for your great work!

I went a head and added the Ghoul Bear Rider to the recruitment menu. You just need a Ghoul Bear, and you will pay the cost of the ghoul to be mounted on it. The Bear Rider isn't much stronger than the standard Ghoul Bear so it isn't class breaking or anything, but a neat thing you can do if everything lines up right.

that sounds the worse, i wouldn't bother making them since chasing down 5 would be too much effort, i would rather pay extra hands then try to gather randomly generated units that scatter themselves to the wind.

It definitely is a pain in the ass to gather semi stupid units, but I imagine that´s why he made Ghoul Captains 4 AP commanders that are often available. It seems to be a feature of the class to have to gather units in the right places to use them, given all the upgrade recruitment as well.

Yeah my concern was more if I could do a double reclimiter statement for example requiring both ghouls and bears as a recipe to create the end product being a mounted ghoul. Ive only ever done it using a single unit requirement, ex. ghoul.

Right now ghouls mounted on horses exist as the captains and the bear mounted ones can be obtained through rituals. If I could balance the bear mounted ghouls properly I might consider moving them off being exclusively ritual summons.

even though i don't like the idea of ghoul horses i do know how you could do it, make the ghouls horsemen have reclimiter "=ghoul horse" and have a cost of gold iron and expendable units, you would "lose" 5 ghouls and promote 5 ghoul horses into horsemen, the annoying part is gathering randomly generated semi-stupid ghoul horses, that just sounds like a pain to me, i would rather the ghoul cavalry be an upgrade to ghouls that takes more hands instead of iron.

Not a bad idea. Ill have to see if the modding tools support that. Not sure if you can have two separate unit types as requirements for another but ill experiment.

Very nice mod. I think a neat addition would be if you obtained ghoul horses from the animal-related rituals and then you could use those plus ghouls in the recruitment centres to create ghoul mounted knights. Could even do it with the existing ghoul bears, considering the ghoul mages end up mounted on them anyway!

I am going to play with the numbers more on the Giant internally but if I do make adjustments it will be minor. When I did it at first the fact it takes a few turns to get the giant set up was taken into consideration.

The reasoning behind the slower bite attack is the limited range it has compared to even claws. The initiative wont make that much of a difference in the long run shown via testing.

The way modding works is the classes are just assigned a number based on how they load. There are current 27 base classes so if you only have one class mod then it will be assigned as number 28. You should approach the quickstart guy and ask him to assign spawning stuff for extra class mods instead. If he adds in 28 to 40 that should cover up to 12 modded classes.

Hey Maverick00053, thx for your quick answer.

I played a lot of Dom3 but i'm new to AOE5 and i hope i wont tell to much bs...

I understand the choice of the badass lord in front line by design ;)

I tweaked the files for testing purpose, giving 3 init to ghoulbite since i cant imagine a bite striking the enemy before a longsword/lance attack and it seems ok to me, it's still quicker than a claw attack but not too OP

After further testing, it seems the giant is your bread and butter for early game so i would not nerf it too much.

For the quickstart mod: i just copied the "newmonster "Avatar"" paragraph and the "addstartcom "Avatar"" command in your mod file because i dont know the "selectclass #" of the Ghoul faction and it works fine but it will be messy for future updates :p

I suppose it would be better to add in the quickstart mod:
# Ghoul Lord
selectclass ?
addstartcom "Avatar"

i hope it helps you ;)

i don't think the ghoul giants need to be more expensive since you can only make 1 per turn, it takes time to make them so for me it is fair, in 1 turn you can get 1 giant or 5 ghoul knights, both are good units but 5 knights can take 1 giant in a fight, and to outfit the giant is another turn plus 50 gold and up to 20 iron, so minus the base cost for ghoul, 1 ghoul juggernaught is 2 turns 10 hands 50 gold and 20 iron, vs 10 knights that is 2 turns 100 gold and 50 iron, 10 knights can take 1 ghoul juggernaught, the giant might be better then 1 knight but took more time to make them, so to me ghoul giant being 10 is fair since it takes more time to make them geared out or mass them at all.

Hello Mollari - Ill look into increasing the cost of Ghoul Giant since you arent the first one to mention it. The Lord is much like the Baron in that he is quite strong, and fairly cheap to rehire when and if he dies so him being in the front lines is by design.

As for the quickstart mod. I took a glance at it and it would depend on how they went about adding the defenders with the gold boost, if it is via an event script then there shouldn't be any capability issues running both of these at the same time. If it is through manually adding the units to each faction then this faction wouldn't receive the defender or massive gold spike. Ultimately you just need to test them both together and see.

I just tested an hour and here is my feedback.
Ghoulbite may not be 5 init but rather 2 (or 3 max)
Maybe give the lord a way to heal afflictions (like fastheal) because he is 1st rank or make it midrank
Ghoul giant is a little OP, it may cost 15
Can i make your mod working with "quickstart" mod without merging all text in a single file?
Thanks for your work, i love the concept of a ghoul/zombie apocalypse :)

I have seen that one, I'm not as impressed, I think this one is more interesting and the dragon one was a bit overpowered.

I haven't seen everything in this mod but I would say that the ghoul giants seem strong for their cost, I'd offhandly suggest making them clumsy or cost a bit more.

Also noticed some of the animal sprites like the ghoul bear has a weird sprite in combat.

Good suggestions. Ill see what I can do about the scout and adjusting item slots.

They could use a scout to see stealth as Raven Spy now has farsight instead of acute senses, And as Carrion doesn't have anything ether. The Ghoul Captain could use more item slots then just the basic misc slots, Bit strong to have all items on Giant Ghouls but that's up to you. Last thing having Ancient Forest be eligible for free spawn from Hunting Grounds would be nice, All ready like how it can capture Ancient Forests.

I appreciate the feed back! You should check out my other mod that I did. Dragon Fanatic is the name of it. I tried to make that one unique, and fresh too. It goes about adding Dragon commanders in a unique fashion without being too overbearing.

This is the best class mod I've seen here, most of them are incredibly unbalanced and overpowered. I really appreciate the effort you've put in to make unique mechanics and nice sprites.

I custom built some of them but a lot of it was modified parts from CoE4-5 and Dominion 5. If you go to the guides section there is a lovely post there about modding and it has sprite dumps for all the games. You can use a program called GIMP to customize colors, change pixels inside the sprites, etc. It takes some practice but there is a lot there to work with.

Did you make these sprites or are they modified from CoE4? I've got so many ideas for mods but I'm limited in what I can do sprite-wise.

Thank you! You got an balance feed back/concerns or bugs to report please dont be afraid to mention it.

Is a really neat mod, playing it now and its pretty unique.