Update 5.32 on May 21st seems to have entirely broken any monster requirements/restrictions attached to the farsummon ability. Unfortunately, this is a large part of this mod. We've contacted Illwinter games about fixing it, but there isn't much we can do from our side without refactoring the whole mod and how much of it works. Due to this bug you may see the following problems:

- Incorrect statues being summoned when requesting patronage
- May randomly summon Typhon unchained
- Might just get soft locked due to some other farsummon bug

We're super sorry about this and we'll keep seeing if we can get the devs to fix this or find some suitable workaround. Until then, just save-scum a bit if you're going to use this to try and get the right thing when using any ritual with farsummon.

I play on empire and the biggest world size all the time, their late game is slower to get to as well as being more overwhelming. They get easily destroyed by factions with strong late game units with huge spells like demonologist, necromancer and tribal king for example. A lot of factions have their late game when you didn't even reach it with Spartans. IMO one of their biggest disadvantage is being unable to change the terrain or build stuff like the Senator or Baron who uses the same kind of strategies as Spartans army wise.

Hey mrcoolize, all of those bugs you're citing appear to be recent developments. My guess is they are the result of modding regressions introduced by the recent May 21st update to COE5. I'll take a look and resolve them when I have time.

The one feature you mentioned that isn't a regression is the training ground range. The balance for it absolutely depends on the world size and society/era you're playing in. If towns and city are plentiful, then they are abundant. Otherwise, you may want to bolster your armies using Perioikoi or Helots until you can request a god's patronage. In my own testing, I felt it was a delicate balance but didn't feel weak. But I'm curious about what scenario you were playing. Do you know what society and world size you were on? Also, were you playing the vanilla game or also using the Complete Overhaul mod?

range of 7 square per training ground is insane with their slow spawn rate considering they also needs to near a town or city (and that spartans can't build any), summoning the patronage of Artemis and Apollo spawn a statue of Athena, the rituals for Hades, Zeus and Poseidon are always greyed out, if the priest die after using the patronage you are hardlocked on your units that resist magic (as spartans sucks at it) until someone destroy your statue (aka take the city of Sparta)

All in all a pretty lackluster mod where you will field a single type of unit until you ask Ares's patronnage (which seems to be the only one working properly somewhat)

Very flavorful. Would be cool to have other greek city states. The UI gets pretty cluttered with more than one temple. Maybe restrict it?

Way to costly spartans and too slow spawn of youths

Ah, I enjoy the Desperado mod... Glad to see y'all are still working on it lol

@Lupus its on our list of things to add to this mod when we get back to it. For now though, we're finishing up our Desperado mod and going to be starting another mod

are the titans pland to?

@MadJingoism There currently isn't any more content past the Olympian Gods. If you kill them, you get Zeus's weapon, which is really powerful, but the mod progression was designed to only reach that at the very end of a game. Basically, we anticipated a game pretty much being over if you can kill Zeus and his army.

Question, what happens after I kill all the Olympian Gods? Apart from getting the cool Zeus lightning.

01/14/2024 Mod Patch Notes
- Fixed the Bolt of Zeus
- Added the Aegis as a rare magic item
- Added a new event based around the goddess Aphrodite
- Added a new Lyrist unit to the Apollo path
- Improved the sprites of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades

A couple more events may come in the near future, but they need some work. After that, any more further changes to this mod will likely be minor bug fixes.

@[Nova]Stryker I'll be pushing a small update within the next week or so with a fix for the Bolt of Zeus, as well as a few sprite improvements and maybe even some new gods content. The issue should hopefully not persist after that.

@bsteltz2 He shows up in an entirely random location, so that's totally possible, just super lucky!

I had two instances of Hephaestus show up by my capital as a necromancer however he only had 6 health and was overran immediately by a starting force I also got two magic items from him I assume this isnt the intent

The Bolt of Zeus item is behaving strangely. Units refuse to attack with it unless there is an enemy within 2 squares. I'm not a modder but I suspect 1 of 2 things is happening. First is that the "long" keyword/tag might be screwing with things. The other is that you have coded the Bolt as a melee weapon. However the base game has no melee weapons with a range greater than 2. So the game isn't telling the unit to attack until it gets withing vanilla melee range. At which point it starts blasting enemies 10 squares away.

@RALATHEHUNTRESS That's a really good idea honestly that we didn't think of, we will look into that right now!

So far loving this class and the paths you can choose with it, as well as having a end of Elysium event like Voice of El. The only thing I would change/suggest is that I find it weird that Typhon and the Gods are on the same faction, shouldn't Typhon be horror or special faction so that he would be hostile to the gods and visa versa? Just how the event states it, I would expect the Gods to be on a different faction than Typhon but other than that the mod is overall perfect. Have no issues with the class and I like their playstyle, I will ensure this class/mod will always be enabled in my games.

@Wheraboo Hesphastus is an independent unit and can't be controlled. But yes, Poseidon and Zeus will eventually show up, so long as Typhon remains a threat in any of the planes of existence.

How to get Hesphastus??? Also if I just wait around than Posidan and Zeus will show up? Currently have Hades walking around

@Upsilon The logic sequence is essential this: Typhon breaks free and becomes Independent -> If Typhon is independent, then Mt Etna is formed on that tile -> If Mt Etna exists, then Mt Olympus and Hades appear. The gap between losing control of Typhon and Hades appearing should only be 2 turns.

I'm not sure why it never triggered for you while on Elysium, but upon reviewing the code I now see that the check for Mt Etna only checks if it is on Elysium, while it spawns wherever Typhon is when he turns. So, if he's in Agartha or somewhere that isn't Elysium, Mt Olympus and the subsequent events will never trigger...

If I threw Typhon into the Primal World plane and had him destroy the portal back before he became unchained, will that stop the Olympians from triggering? I tried testing on a save where he stayed on Elysium and spammed through roughly 20 turns or so and the Olympians didn't trigger. I figured maybe it can just take a while for it to happen, but I'm not certain on that.

@Devolops It's something we have been trying to figure out for a while. For the moment, it should work outside of Illwinter's hosting. That's about as good as it gets. We will definitely keep trying to figure something out, but for now, you'll have to host yourself to play multiplayer if that makes sense.

This isn't the only mod that seems to be incompatible with multiplayer hosting. Has there been any progress in that area for a while? Or at least does anyone has some idea of what/how a fix would involve?

@zecrayz Hephaestus is meant to not only be a useful almost farm, but to push you to keep progressing. If it really bothers you, feel free to edit the mod on your side for you to play with. We will keep an eye on him, but he's likely to stick around.

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@Glitchtrap That's a cool idea, we will definitely take a look a that!

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@Something Familiar glad to hear it! aom is one of our favorites and definitely something we took some inspiration from!

Idk if this is a valid suggestion but is it possinle to add a few titsns in Hell (tartarus)?

Thought an apocolyptic event may be fun as well, another God vs titan war

How would I go about disabling Hephaestus from spawning in the world map? The mod is great and I love the class, the lore, how it plays, everything really! All except Hephaestus, his spawning has proven to be a great annoyance, and I need to either turn him off and make him not spawn, or unfortunately have to uninstall the mod.

You just single-handedly brought Age of Mythology into CoE.

We originally wanted to have the Olympians as stupid commanders sided with Sparta, but quickly realized that if you had more than one Spartan Kings class in the game, they would have no control and be locked out of late-game content if they weren't the one to summon Typhon. We made the design change to enable more late-game participation that actually depends on resource control.

@Urzamax No they aren't mutually exclusive.

Some time after Typhon Unchained begins to roam Elysium, the gates of Mount Olympus will appear from which the Olympians will appear in the order shown in order to "hunt him down." We felt the Olympians themselves would be insanely powerful to control and it wouldn't really make sense with Greek Mythology, so we made them roam as an independent army (think Voice of El Horsemen). However, once they are present on Elysium, the Archpriest of whatever patron path you chose can pray to them for divine aid which will grant you with powerful late-game units/armies.

So, for Hades, read the graphic as: Hades is independent but his presence enables the summoning of all the units below him. And so on with the other gods. I tried to indicate that with the grey line, but it's admittedly not clear.

Also, question about the high Olympians (ie Hades and his brothers): Are they also mutually exclusive like the initial patrons, or do you have to take them sequentially, or can you just grab all of them in any order you like? The graphic up top isn't very clear about it.

Actually makes a ton of sense historically to allow Famlands on dead forests, aye--the nutrients from the burned trees make for great fertilizer and increased crop yields!

I'll be honest, I didn't even know the Skiritai could burn jungles and forests. But yeah, allowing us to build farmlands (and temples/training grounds, I suppose) on burned woodlands would be helpful.

@Feraa Another benefit of keeping farmland burnable is sometimes players don't think to plan a spot around each town/city for a temple. Temples can only be built on plains-like terrains, which is a group I unfortunately can't add new terrains to, so you can't build them on farmland. But by keeping them burnable, even if you surrounded your city with farmland, you could always just burn a spot for a temple if you need it.

And I like that idea for the burned jungles and forests. I believe one of our original intents behind giving Skiritai the ability to burn was to facilitate farmland spread, so I'll look into that.

Damn, so I was just unlucky with my recruiting early on haha.

I don't think the burnable farmlands thing is unbalanced at all. I just wasn't sure if it was intended or not, as it surprised me lmao It actually might be helpful in some cases, in order to reposition Granaries. That said... Maybe y'all could allow us to build them on burned forests and jungles?

In regards to the item limits, understood. Just curious, so now I know lol

No problem for the slow update. I'm a gamer. I'm used to mods taking time. I once waited 3 years for one of my favorite mods to update on EU4 lmao

@Feraa Mod is updated. Sorry it took so long, we were working on playtesting and balancing.

@Ferra also, the spartan youth are not tied to nearby farmlands. As cool as that would be, it's currently just a chance to get 0-3 spartan youth per training field per turn.

@Feraa in response to your last post, we made the farmlands and granaries burnable just as some kind of check that other players can oppose on you. They are fairly cheap and have rather loose placement requirements so we figured they would be pretty spamable. This is just kind of something other players can use to keep that in check. It doesn't seem to have a major impact either way, but we can always take a look at how necessary it really is.

As for why normal troops have so many item restrictions, that is mostly historical. A lot of the strength and culture of the Spartan army revolved around their uniformity and their shields. We wanted to carry that over into the mod so we restricted most item slots on the basic troops to reinforce the idea of uniformity if that makes sense. Most if not all commanders should have all item slots though. Hope that makes some sense.

Me again. Two points this time. Firstly, is there a reason Farmlands and Granaries are burnable? I was running around burning nearby forests with a Pyromancer I was fortunate to spawn, and I noticed one of my Granaries on fire. I moved my Pyromancer onto a Farmland and was able to manually burn it. Is there a reason for this?

Secondly. I can somewhat understand not being able to equip the various troops with weapons, but why can't we equip them with other armors other than accessories?

A query of my own right quick. Is there some hidden factor determining how fast the Training Fields recruit Youths? It may just be a coincidence on my end, but it feels like they gather Youths faster when there's more farmlands around?

Right. Like you said, Ares (and the other gods) would spawn units in random player's temples, which ended up with occasional battles between units spawned by the same patron god(dess). The Ares temple, to continue with that example, ended with the Mare and amazons fighting another Mare and more amazons. The same thing occurred in 2 other temples throughout that test-game before I backed out. Probably would've happened to the 4th, had I played long enough.

Good to know you've got an idea as to the issue with the patronage rituals. As soon as you let us know it's updated, I'll start a new game to try anew. It's a promising mod, especially considering my love for all things Spartan lol

I see the issue with the Request Patronage ritual. I hadn't tested that far with 4 Spartan Kings classes. Fixing the logic now.

Edit: Fixed. I was checking for no other statues in the world rather than owned by the current player. It was meant to prevent having more than one patron god, but prevented others from progressing once one existed.

Again, the fix will be delivered once Potatosarus and I finish this large content update. I'll try to have done today or tomorrow.

I've considered a balance pass on patron costs, so I'll look into that. I think I see what you're saying about the Temple of Ares spawns. You're saying that Ares was spawning units for each player on someone else's temple, right? If so, I must just have the logic wrong on the event and it's not checking that the current player is the Spartan Kings class AND owns the temple. Should be an easy fix.

Now, here is where I run into issues. Apollo's civilization was able to become "bonded" first. Everything went fine. Athena's group was able to get their needed resources next. But the ritual was grayed out. I move on, after a fair bit of confusion. Artemis's was the same way. Eventually, I got the sacrifices for Ares, and it, too, was grayed out. None but Apollo were able to become patrons. I dunno if I'm doing something wrong, or if I'm just misunderstanding something?

Speaking of, Ares's patronage seems a bit expensive compared to the others? Sacrifices are a fair bit more difficult to get than herbs and gems, with relics being somewhat on par, if not still easier than sacrifices, but we need sacrifices 3 times as many sacrifices than relics and gems. I dunno, this may be on purpose. It just seems excessive. Lol

Yeah, I've been playing a 4-player Spartan campaign. All 4 were able to eventually build a Temple of each type. However, this is where I ran into issues. As you said, they started sending troops to "bribe" the players, causing the first built temple (The Temple to Ares) to fall to each player's hands at least once even though no one had met each other yet. Only the Gods that had a Temple built attempted to sway the nations, and only on their own Temples. Once the players had Temples of their own built up, the Temple of Apollo managed to form a Pact first, thanks to a wealth of gems and fairly cheap price of only 25 gems. Took them 4 turns to gain the needed gems lol

Hey freten, thanks for catching that! I've corrected it and will push it in the update we plan to release later this week...along with quite a few other things, so keep an eye out

Hey Feraa, yes.

There can only be one instance of each statue type and each temple type across the entire game. There can't be more than one Temple or Statue of Athena, Ares, etc. Each god can only be the patron of one civilization. That means that if you for some reason played with 5 Spartan Kings classes, the last one to ask for a patron would be out of options since all of the 4 god options are taken. No Spartan King can have more than one patron god, though.

Here's how it plays: You can build one of each temple if you want and get one new unit recruit from each of the gods. Until you choose one as you patron god, the gods of the temples you have constructed will try to entice you to ask for their patronage by gifting you units you don't have access to (like a sneak peak of what you'd get from their path). That stops once you choose a patron god, but you get access to a number of new unit recruits as well as progress to more late-game stuff.

Hopefully that makes sense lol

The primitive catapult does not have the "attack once every 2/3 turns" string (great mod I´ll continue)

So one Spartan group can only go down one Path, from my understanding?

ok Snorkel...I see it now. I had to restart steam for it to properly download it so it was not a problem on your part. Thanks for the quick reply. I look for to playing your mod :)