Age of Wonders III

Age of Wonders III

Ayalin Premium Tribe Invasion
 This topic has been pinned, so it's probably important
Ayalin  [developer] 9 Mar, 2023 @ 9:14am
Future updates
There are actually quite a lot of things which I feel enthusiastic about-

- First of all, balance and fix updates for sure.

- Creating one adept+master set of spec available as starting specializations for each tribe (Blood god and Conflux are already done). And potentially giving the unlock unit tech from the start if you have chosen the right specialization, but this requires more thought.

- I have at least two other tribe ideas in my boxes- Keeper of the Wild (forest guardian thematic) and Heralds of Apocalypse (theocrat thematic). Tribes can generally be linked to one or two existing classes (Blood god is warlord, Miracle Court is between Rogue and Dreadnought), but I noticed that Theo is not really there in any of the first 5 tribes so I may want to add the Heralds at least.

- More and more new neutral sets not related to tribes and exclusive to a given location (includes more work being put into redesigning vanilla sets). The mod actually already contains 2 of these- the Stone Troll for the Flowrock quarry, and the Vault Guardian for the Vault location. Each of them proposes a different battle than usual and you will unlock the unit encountered if you manage to beat the set (same principle as for tribes). Ideally, I would like to reach the magical number of 6 very distinct adventure sets for any given medium-to-hard location, 3 of them belonging to a Tribe, and 3 of them being exclusive to the location itself. So far, I am halfway through (all locations have 2 tribe sets and the vanilla slightly reworked set).

- Adding new map structures is on the menu too (it’s actually easier than units to do), but before doing that I need to make sure I understand properly how the RMG system works regarding the randomization of Structures as I really don’t want to mess things up. I was thinking of adding “Very Hard” spawner locations structures (like Castle of the Blood god), which would have the fortress battle map, which is in my opinion a very cool but underused battle map, and would constantly spawn small armies with a very high range of action (most spawners are limited to ~~14 hexes of action in the base game).

- It is a bit linked to the point above, but I have some ideas about implementing true “Boss fights”, with T5 units which would be the Tribe Leaders. These Boss units would have insanely strong and complex abilities to deal with, and they could be located in the Very Hard spawner structure location described in my previous point. And they might reward the Empire upgrade allowing the production of Tribe T4 units or a Legendary mount, who knows?

- I reallyyy want to put my hands on the Cosmic event system- the Tribe theme would perfectly fit in. And with all the content already available to me with all the different mods, I am sure there is tons of fun stuff to do with cosmic events.

- Items- ah items… reworking item sets was actually part of the original scope of the mod, but I didn't do it in the end as the required amount of work was too big if I wanted to stick to my original ambition, aka creating many new items related to tribes. The biggest issue is with the creation of item icons- I was hoping to easily color swap existing items so that I will have dedicated new icons (I did not want to have one icon for several different items), but after some research it felt like too much work. But the will is still there, and I might start doing it but progressively instead of all in one go.

- I am also interested in boosting the Neutral factions (Fairies, Giants, Dragons etc) cities. This would include adding new city upgrades through my Empire building mod, upgrading a little bit existing units with more “trademark” abilities, and adding a few more units to their roster as well. From a more general balancing perspective on things, I would like these neutral cities to become more important and more valuable than what they are currently, so that these locations become much more contested points of pressure on the map.

And that’s it, that's all the ideas lingering in my head right now. But the first steps will be to play my own mod “seriously” myself, listen to feedback, do some fixes, test Age of Wonders 4, and I will have a better picture of what I really want to do for the future.
Don’t hesitate to bounce back on these ideas and why not give your own :)
Last edited by Ayalin; 9 Mar, 2023 @ 1:14pm
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That Human 24 Mar, 2023 @ 1:56am 
Just some things!

Note that when using dilaguna's content that, while it is very well done and I have a lot of respect for the work he put into it, some of it is very badly optimized with some textures being enormous for no real reason. I recommend looking through the textures and making them smaller if you haven't already.

Also CI also got a unit called Arcane Guardian (great minds think alike!) as a High Elf Sorceror unique. If you want to change the name, here are some ideas. If not I will pick one for CI instead:
-Astral Guardian
-Eldritch Guard
-Mana Hulk
-Mana Primordial
-Magic Guardian
-Esoteric Protector
-Esoteric Guardian
Last edited by That Human; 24 Mar, 2023 @ 1:57am
Ayalin  [developer] 24 Mar, 2023 @ 4:22am 
I am not entirely sure what is exactly "Dilaguna's content", but I did notice in many of my investigations on various unit mods a lot of issues in terms of tris count for certain models (like 9k tris for a helmet lol), and also like you said textures being too large. Last but not least, many modders not using dependancies properly and copy pasting vanilla assets when it's not needed, resulting in mods weighting wayyy too much.
I think yours (CI) actually is the only one which is properly optimised.

Regarding Arcane Guardian, I am not entirely sure, do I have one too?
I can recall Arcane instability & Arcane monstrosity, and the Vault Guardian, but I don't think I have an Arcane Guardian, although the Vault Guardian is pretty close to that.
Ayalin  [developer] 24 Mar, 2023 @ 4:24am 
You want 512x512 resolution for most models except maybe some very big ones, and 256x256 or even 128x128 for equipment pieces unless one texture is being used on several pieces of equipment (which is what the vanilla assets do).
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