Comments - Lazybuttons

Okay, and? AI gets free resources and bonus exp in disciples on all difficulties. That behaviour exists in vanilla too. As long as the AI is in the fog of war, it gets free exp every turn, and levels super fast. The only major difference is that in this mod, it does it faster to keep pace with the player.

Unfortunately that's just how the developers made it. There is no way currently that I know of to change AI scripting and decision making for computer controlled players, other than making them slightly more aggressive and giving them more resources. I can't just script a better/smarter AI because I can't access the scripts and the code that actually control it. I can only change the numbers that go into it.

Honestly, what you're describing sounds like it's working exactly as intended. The whole point is to make the AI spam magic like crazy and have overpowered troops.

Very hard is supposed to be nearly impossible unless you have perfect map awareness/control.

Maybe try a lower difficulty instead of jumping on very hard? It is very hard for a reason :)

Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed it. I am actually working on an update that will hopefully include some QoL fixes from the new modding toolkit, as well.

thanks, I found it already; I saw the implementation myself and I will be adding that feature in future versions;

just install the campaign files then :)

the campaigns from Dark Prophecy are perfectly playable. if you feel they are too hard, play on a lower difficulty setting. I haven't changed them in any way, they're supposed to be reasonably difficult and you need a level 10+ hero to start them.

This mod already allows you to import heroes into the main saga. You can even bring in a level 15+ leader if you so desire.

Fixed up some bugs and edited some units for consistency and enhanced flavor. There were a lot of oversights in this version, mainly around the dwarves, but some undead units too.

Never heard of the mod before, do you have a link?

Yeah, that happens sometimes, nothing I can do about it. The AI doesn't get stuck so just use AB to get past the hump. Just tap A on your keyboard twice

I honestly don't remember it's been so long.

Haha, yeah, after a million years

No idea. Have you tried it without the mod, does it work then?

Alright. From a little tweaking it looks like the mod works on Steam version. But. Only if you do not replace the .exe file.

So, if you want to install the mod on the steam version of the game, copy all of the files except for the executable. As I expected the edited executable that the mod contains is incompatible with the steam copy, because it's a different version. I will attempt to release a steam-compatible version of the executable later.

I got the steam version recently and will try to see why it doesn't work.

I guess I'll have to see for myself if/when I get a steam copy of it, thanks!

Hello there. Unfortunately I don't have the steam version right now, so I can't test it. I'll try and see what the problem is when I get one.

Does the steam version work normally without the mod and without the wrapper? If it doesn't then the problem is just with the game version itself, and you might need to use a different copy (GOG, etc)

Have you checked that the game actually runs without the mod?
It can be a corrupt/incomplete install.
Are you using a Steam or GOG version?

I used DBF Commander and HxD editor to make changes to the files.
I won't be changing thief stealing percentages.

The Empire is a bit weak, but far from unable to survive. I've played through the sagas as a mage lord as well on the hardest difficulty, and was able to do just fine.

I'll try and make the Empire a bit less weak in the future patches, when I get back to modding.

If you mean the Add-On Sagas, such as Guardians of the Light and Servants of the Dark, then yes. There is a way. However they would only work as Custom Sagas, due to the limitations of the game's .exe file and my own modding skills ;)

Thanks for the idea!

- I'm sorry I haven't been replying to any comments in this branch of the mod. ModDB UI is a bit wonky, and I guess I didn't know how to handle it, so I didn't get any updates or comments about people posting about my mod. It means a lot to me to see that people actually download and play it, and I'll make sure to take all of those suggestions into account for future releases, once I get back to modding Disciples 2.

- Thanks for bringing to my attention the issue of the Empire being extremely underpowered in the low-level missions. I noticed that issue myself, especially when playing on maximum difficulty. It's true, the Empire units are a little too weak early on! I had to abuse thieves, magic and even potions, just to squeak by. I'll make sure to think about some way to fix that.

- 'When installing I get an error saying shw32.dll not found, and it closes, I am on windows 10, trying to install to my GOG copy of Disciples 2: Rise of the Elves '
Does your game run normally without the mod being installed? It should work on GOG copy just fine in any case. Someone else had a similar issue, and it turned out their whole game installation was just weird. Do you have the Disciples 2 GL Wrapper installed? It's a very useful, almost essential patch for Disciples 2 that makes it run more smoothly on modern systems.
Shw32.dll should come with the base game. If it's not in your game's directory, then something did not install correctly in your Disciples2 install.

Hello there. It's complete and playable. There may be future updates if I get any good ideas or suggestions on what can be improved. There hasn't been much in the way of continuous development due to covid-related issues.

Thanks a bunch, that helped! Embarassing I haven't figured it out myself.

So I've played The Protectors for weeks now, and it runs fine usually, but now the game crashes whenever I try to access the World Options in Campaign (any campaign).
I've read this is due to garbage data, and I tried rebooting and restarting my computer several times as well as opening other apps, but I still seem to be getting the same error.

Is there perhaps a way to tweak the campaign options via some configuration file? If not, then perhaps you could consider making it an option in the future versions of the game? We already have various advanced options available for tweaking via the .json files in the protectors app data folder, would it be too complex to make it work with campaign files?
It really sucks not being able to tweak the fog of war options because by default it's set to "Hidden Map + Fog of War" which is probably the most annoying combination.
Alternatively, perhaps you could change it so that the default option is "Hidden map + No Fog of War" for the campaign, at least, for future versions? I don't think I'm the only one who dislikes the WBC3 fog of war.

I.gyazo.com
Another small bug. What are these invisible items? O_O I am intrigued.

"Oh, great, this cool item I've picked up is heavily cursed, but I don't even know what the curse does. This isn't annoying at all."

The easiest solution would be to just publish a list of all cursed items and the negative/positive effects they provide. That way players can make an informed decision instead of being frustrated and forced to do busywork.
Alternatively, you could add the cursed items effects to the Etheriary. Right now, Etheriary is... not very useful, to say the least, which is a shame considering the great amount of work put into it.

The whole concept of Etheriary is weird. It's some kind of completionist encyclopedia, but there's almost never a reason to actually look into it because you only unlock things in AFTER you encounter those things in game. Like, say, you want to learn what stats a frost dragon has? Well, first you have to find it in game and kill it, then you can look it up in the Etheriary.
Except... at this point you don't need to look it up. Because, well. You literally just killed the thing, what's the point? You already know everything you need about it. Same for items/artifacts and buildings.

I feel like Etheriary is just wasted potential. It would be so much more useful if you could just... use it as an in-game database/wiki, so you could look up units, their stats, and learn about cool items you might find in the world.

The Protectors in general suffers from a lack of transparent information on the new mechanics. Like... what does minotaur rage do? Maybe the Etheriary explains it.. oh no, nope, it doesn't.

And it doesn't even share information between different characters!

I haven't played much of The Protectors campaign, I've only done the Dragon's Maze part of it, and got the prologue's 'bad' ending. In my post, I was mostly referring to the vanilla WBC3 campaign (Hero of Etheria / Fifth Horseman)

Don't get me wrong, I really like the challenge posed by the improved AI, but on the other hand, yes, it unintentionally makes many of the vanilla campaign missions extremely brutal. Early low-level play is very hard - no crowns, no artifacts, weak hero, and even on the lowest settings the AI kinda outclasses the new player at every turn.

I'm not saying the entire campaign should be made much easier as a whole, but maybe the first few missions could be tweaked a bit to give new players a fighting chance. As it stands, there aren't too many missions for new players to get the hang of the game, or try different strategies.

More feedback:
I managed to get the Fifth Horseman campaign to work properly thanks to reading a comment here.
Really love the way you can give tasks to your Retinue.
Upd: some of the message pop-ups say 'Your retinue <Name> did this and that (healed, returned, retrieved, got injured)'. Which reads a bit awkwardly. Maybe change 'retinue' to read 'retainer' in that case?

Cursed items are... Weird, to say the least. I'm not sure I know what they're supposed to do. Some of them seem to have.. absolutely no negative effect? Is the 'curse' just that you can't unequip them?

And now for a grain of critique.
Difficulty wise, though, the campaign is now much more brutal than the original WBC3. Unless you start out with an already leveled character and some artifacts, I'm not sure how you're supposed to deal with early AI rushes and heroes that exceed you by 5-10 levels (when you're level 1-2). This is greatly exacerbated and made worse by the fact that you're kinda crippled, development-wise, until you can amass enough crowns for a tier 2 research; because the AI has no such restrictions.
For example: I shared the info about The Protectors with a friend, telling him how much I enjoyed the game, and he got interested and wanted to give the game a try, but after tutorial and the first mission, he got destroyed when he tried to do the second mission (Recapture the Rift), because the AI had a much higher level character and just steamrolled him with an early rush. So, that turned my friend off the game in general I think. Which is a shame.

Also:

Small bug: One of the 'ambush' maps (where you get attacked by creatures from the Realm of Famine on your way north from Al-Diraq) doesn't allow retinue, or army setup. The ambushing party meanwhile has a hero with a retinue, which makes it a little hardcore. Not sure how someone is supposed to win it, unless they have a really OP hero.

I.gyazo.com

So the drop item to replace it with an item you get from a quest/mission screen is broken now. It worked fine in 0.8.9, but latest patch screwed it up.