Why no love for Warlords 3 Darklords Rising?

[weirwood]

Hi folks,

I've decided to indulge my nostalgia for the Warlords series by making a rebalance mod for Darklords Rising, as it turns 25 this August. I've had some good feedback from a couple of the old guard over at warlorders.com, but a few people here might also be interested.

The main focus is an overhaul of all the units and heroes in the main game, so you can replay the single player campaigns and scenarios and have a fresh,and hopefully more challenging experience. Competitive multiplayer isn't my highest priority, but the feedback from veterans has been invaluable for tweaking the balance of units. Additional views would be very welcome.

It's very much still a WIP, but I've had a first pass on all units, which you can review here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...cEPeUJaEhka1-WAWjEnx8ozw6C-z0jE5XKgJ/pubhtml#

If you're more interested in hands-on playtesting, I should have something uploaded in the next couple of weeks.

 

[weirwood]

Reposting this from warlorders.com to hopefully get a bit more feedback.

I think now that a rough outline is in place, it makes the most sense to follow a top-down approach - balancing from the strongest, most expensive units downward. I'm almost completely happy with all the Dragons' abilities and stats as they are, now it's mostly a question of fine-tuning the cost, upkeep and setup.

So here are my main questions:

Black vs Blue - We know that there are two bugs that affect lightning; first, it seems to ignore warding when the lightning unit is one the attacking side. A bit fringe, but beneficial. Second, if an acid attack triggers, a lightning attack no longer can. So in a direct duel, blackies completely outclass blues.

Knowing this, do blue dragons even have a chance to be competitive? And either way, what's a fair difference in price to address this discrepancy?

Blues are still meat units, and lightning is still useful, though I would rate even lightning 5 below trample 1 vs ground units. One thought I've had just now is to increase Blues movement to 30 so they can match Silver Dragons, but that would shrink the niche of my rebalanced Air Elementals further.

I've tweaked the upkeep costs, but upkeep only plays a role for regular units.

Next question, Green vs Red, aka Fear vs Chaos. Chaos is the dedicated anti-hero ability, while Fear counters a smaller selection of heroes, but also the ubiquitous Morale units. It's an open question to me whether Leadership 4+ or Morale 4+ is more common in competitive hero stacks. High Leadership usually costs a significant amount of AP, while high Morale can be achieved by combining a L6 spell with an Archon or Unicorn, or even weaker units if an item comes into play.

I'm still in flux with my hero rebalancing, but the changes in my first experiments tend to favor generally cheaper access to either (and Fortify too) for different classes. I'm in favor of Red and Green Dragons, and Chaos and Fear, having the same cost. I haven't been consistent about making Chaos cheaper on lower tier units, but that's the way I think I should go here.

Green vs Gold: We've talked about this before. There's an asymmetry in the benefit of negative modifiers, which get capped at -1 no matter what, and positive ones. Yet, Greens completely neutralize Golds while still reaching that -1 cap. The way I understand it, Gold Dragons' role is more to lead powerful non-hero stacks in the early expansion phase so you have fewer losses there. For min/maxed hero stacks, their Morale 4 is overkill. But for the former reason, I'm wary of buffing their Morale to 5. So my concrete question is, should they be cheaper? 1400? If their best notional use is to build more strong stacks than your opponent has heroes, should their upkeep be lower?

Some hero classes don't have good access to positive modifiers, so maybe there's a niche for them there?

Silver Dragons don't have a uniquely powerful ability, but they're a bit faster and cheaper, while still having dragon combat stats. Here, it's a question what the proper price points between them, Archons and Unicorns are, to make them worth considering as a replacement. I think 1200 plus the dragon tax is fair. It's hard to beat the price of summoned units, though. One thought I've toyed with is to give the Paladin a summoning spell for Silvers that would be more expensive in both AP and mana that the Priest's Divine Aid.

I like Undead Dragons as designed. 4 hp doesn't help against missiles but makes them tougher than other dragons against everything else. Curse isn't useless, but it's a good thematic compromise for a dragon that no longer has a breath attack. They had very low upkeep. I understand the theme behind it, but I've still increased it to not be completely meaningless for their tier.

 

[thesheeep]

I've had some good feedback from a couple of the old guard over at warlorders.com, but a few people here might also be interested.

So THAT's where KGB went.
I kind of remember him from the old I2 forums.

I must admit I've never been too deep into the non-WBC Warlords games, but if you do finish this one up to some kind of beta state, I'd be willing to give it a go and share my thoughts.
But I just don't remember enough about the game to go on descriptions alone.

 

[Jugashvili]

Thank you for your work and for keeping W3 alive, I'll give it a try and provide feedback. Re: balancing dragons, are you talking about gold costs (as in buying production in-game) or point costs (in designing factions)? I understand why you're starting from top to bottom but I'd argue dragons and elementals are the least important things to balance since not many factions can produce them (unless you're making custom factions) and they mostly come as rewards from quests and ruins and thus involve some level of randomness. Summoning is the biggest risk for unbalancing here and in this case undead dragons are very easy to produce with a lvl 5 necromancer, at no cost in mana. Re: fear vs. chaos, for heroes I usually go for leadership since morale is often redundant due to morale-boosting units, so as a hero killer I'd give chaos the edge. As an all-rounder, though, I think fear is more useful.

 

[weirwood]

Thanks. Most of my feedback is coming from a multiplayer viewpoint, where you absolutely make custom army lists. But my own focus is on the pre-made campaigns and scenarios, so I'm trying to square the circle somewhat. Gold cost and army point cost are directly related - you divide the former by 11 to get the latter, with a bunch of additional rules. You can look up the details here:

http://www.desjardins.org/david/dlrinfo/sides.txt

One of the final touches will be a theme-focused recreating of the random sides, according to my finalized rebalanced unit costs. The idea and hope is that you can start up a random game, pick any side, and have an interesting and balanced army set and challenging opponents to play against, without having to set up custom army lists first.

 

[Grape_You_In_the_Mouth]

Just to add some quick thoughts if you want any:
- Morale +1 on ogres appears odd thematically and my preference might be trample or city+1
- Green slime seem a little underpowered
- Paralysis is pretty useless imho
- Missiles +4 is extremely overpowered. Missiles are actually one of the best bonuses in the game by far

Something interesting is that I've noticed other people really love a faster playstyle than me for Warlords. The movement and turns to produce units seem so fast to me, whereas lowering those values increases strategic possibilities in my mind.

Cheers, Warlorder!

 

[weirwood]

Hey! I'm not here frequently, so I missed your reply.

• I get what you mean about ogres. I think it was originally a balance issue; they're the only evil-themed unit with a morale bonus. I can fudge a thematic explanation - they're too stupid to feel fear, and others find that reassuring.
• Green Slime got buffed significantly in my current version, maybe even too much. I've run a lot of AI-only games to see which units get built, but I haven't put together custom army list for that yet, and slime is rare in the random sides.
• Yeah it is, but it has a niche. You can put a string of paralysis units on a road. Human players either have to fight them and risk getting paralyzed, or move next to the road and move slower that way. The AI will run right into them, of course. In my mod, cockatrices and medusae are T2 units with good stats for their cost, and goblins have one point of Paralysis, just to occasionally screw someone over who beats them.
• Agreed. There's a pretty big snag here: Missiles got strongly buffed in the patch, but the AI was never updated to put much value in missiles, so it will rarely build those units. Or rather, in order for the AI to build missile units, their cost has to be so low that they're OP in multiplayer. Of course, there's a reason for the AI to disregard them: since you can make your units immune to missiles with spells or items, a player would be able to completely run over an AI that focuses on missiles.

At one point, I've toyed with the idea of cutting all heroes' starting movement to 16, and adjust the rest of the units downward, to make it play more like W2, but I've scrapped that. I think that would be rejected by most of the few players remaining, and you never know how it could screw over the AI. One thing I did do was cap the movement speed for land units at 28. There are still a bunch of (combat-weaker) flyers with 30 or 36 though.

Anyway, I originally came back here to post that, while I hadn't worked on my mod for a year, I've made significant progress in the last few weeks. It's still a work in progress, but I appreciate some feedback from volunteer playtesters, especially since I've remade all heroes practically from the bottom up. (taking some lessons from the K4 mod). I haven't written up a changelog for them, so you'll have to go in blind.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/604z...ey=pj8gzl5oe175y8f00sga4vshy&st=ixypcj6g&dl=0

For the units, I do have a google sheet I keep up to date; there's a few differences to the dl version already from my work today, but nothing too significant. You should get a picture of what 'I'm going for, if you're (very) familar with the game.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pQCk7emldGZtOzBTe_OvLJ1Xc_5Br7VbtEVefLyRd2o/edit?usp=sharing

 

[weirwood]

AI woes

I decided to be a bit more radical in my testing to better understand AI behavior. I reduced the gold cost of all units to 1, just to better see if there's a random factor in its decision-making, or if it will always build the "best" unit as it sees it.

It's a bit of both. For T1 and T2 units, I saw some variety, but at T3, it will really focus on the strongest units. So dwarfs will build griffons rather than siege engines about 90% of the time. This is bad news for units with good stack bonuses but lower combat stats.
There's also a limit to how much it upgrades city production, even when it's effectively free. There were a lot of cities that would only construct T2 units. There may be a time factor involved, so it will only buy T1 units in the first 5 or so turns.

The bad news is, while stack bonuses do matter to the AI, though maybe not quite as much as they should, it seems to pretty much ignore most (all?) other special abilities. I've had a really hard time trying to get it to produce missile troops, so I increased the missile attacks of archers, dwarf crossbows and elven archers to 9. It still wouldn't build them. Next, I tried giving them a +5 vs city bonus - same result.

So all this cool variety in the game, that really let's you fine-tune your army lists and stacks, will mostly be ignored by the AI.

It's a bit of a 'back to the drawing board' moment. On the one hand, understanding the AI's limitations lets me balance units just for players, who will get to decide which units to build in which situations, without having to worry about getting the unit cost "just right" so that AI will build them too. On the other, I do want to increase the variety and challenge of the AI.

Right now, the best path forward for that seems to be to modify the default army lists with that understanding in mind. So units with special abilities that the AI would rarely build can still be put in mercenary and ally slots, and enter the game that way.

 

[weirwood]

I've been busy.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/25th-anniversary-project

A bit bare-bones, but more convenient than sending out dropbox links.

If you want to (re)play the campaigns or scenarios, it's good to go. What I haven't finished yet is overhauling the sides for random maps. That's 64 different army lists, so it's going to be a while yet. And ideally, I'll get some feedback about my changes to heroes and units first, so I can fine-tune things a bit more.

 

[Jugashvili]

I'd love to give it a try, but lately I've been having issues with a really bad memory leak after playing Warlords III that would make everything crash and hang up, perhaps due to the change in resolution. Any idea how I might fix it? Maybe running it in some kind of emulator or virtual machine?

 

[weirwood]

The best I can offer is that I know the GOG and Steam versions have been updated for modern systems by different teams/persons, and the Steam version is supposedly more bug-free and stable. But that depends on whether you're willing to spend some extra money on a decades-old game. I never had any of the problems you describe with either version, but I'm still running Windows 10.

You could try running it with -wincursor, as I think the software cursor caused some problems in earlier non-GOG/Steam versions.

Or run it in windowed mode? Steam has ddraw.ini, GOG dxcfg.ini for the settings.

 

[markec]

Does anyone remembers this.

I started playing the game again and I remember when I played it years ago that on the first mission there was enemy reinforcement in form of a single top tier unit arriving somewhere around turn 3.

Playing now on the GoG version this no longer happens, no matter difficulty setting.

Im wondering is this was some earlier game version and it was patched out or just a bug.

 

[weirwood]

I know if you play that mission as a single scenario, there's a lone Slayer Knight at the top of the map, next to a neutral city.

 

[markec]

I know if you play that mission as a single scenario, there's a lone Slayer Knight at the top of the map, next to a neutral city.

I knew that the expansion changes some map details but I wasnt sure about that unit. Looking at the footage of the original game it seems I was right. Now I want to play the original game just to see all the differences.

 

[timewind]

Inspired by people mentioning W3 here, I installed it on my 86Box today and enjoying it, so far. I have fond memories of long hours with W2 Deluxe seat to seat with my brother in the 1990s. SSG was making great things back then.

 

[weirwood]

Th original is a simpler game, with fewer units, heroes, spells and special abilities; but it has its own charm. The UI, fonts, music and landscape graphics are all different. One pretty significant balance change is that the permanent buffs you get to assign to your units between missions are significantly stronger in DR. But I think that also applies to the buffs the enemy gets.

There's something I just remembered, though. I think most scenarios have some minor possible variation in their starting setup. Different cities will be occupied by a side or neutral at start, that kind of thing. So that may be the explanation for the missing unit.

If you're only going to play one version of W3, DR is superior, but if you're a fan of the series, giving RoH a try doesn't hurt. You'll have to start it with the -wincursor command, or the game will crash, however.

Another thing that was missing in Darklords Rising were text introductions to most of the scenarios. I suspect they removed them to shave off localization costs. But my patch restores those.

Oh yeah, and I nearly forgot: You had priceless videos of a Skeletor-cosplayer trash-talking the player.

 

[markec]

Th original is a simpler game, with fewer units, heroes, spells and special abilities; but it has its own charm. The UI, fonts, music and landscape graphics are all different. One pretty significant balance change is that the permanent buffs you get to assign to your units between missions are significantly stronger in DR. But I think that also applies to the buffs the enemy gets.

There's something I just remembered, though. I think most scenarios have some minor possible variation in their starting setup. Different cities will be occupied by a side or neutral at start, that kind of thing. So that may be the explanation for the missing unit.

If you're only going to play one version of W3, DR is superior, but if you're a fan of the series, giving RoH a try doesn't hurt. You'll have to start it with the -wincursor command, or the game will crash, however.

Another thing that was missing in Darklords Rising were text introductions to most of the scenarios. I suspect they removed them to shave off localization costs. But my patch restores those.

Oh yeah, and I nearly forgot: You had priceless videos of a Skeletor-cosplayer trash-talking the player.

I played both original game and expansion when they were released but after expansion was released I never went back to the original. I played DR so much I knew precise location of every city and dungeon on campaign maps with fog of war.

Would still like to play original just to compare the scenario layouts and see all the changes to they made. I'm actually disappointed with the removal of that one unit since it made the scenario much easier. The logic behind the decision was probably that since it's a first mission it should be easy and act as tutorial. After comparing the both games and if there are lots of changes I would hope for a mod that undo any changes like that that makes the game easier.

And I loved those cutscenes, the hero was some normal looking guy in a cheap armor costume and in the combination with the guy with the rubber monster mask it was just really campy and fun.

When the game was released on GoG I made a thread there asking where are the cutscenes. It seems they are in the folder and you can play them directly but they don't start ingame.

 

[Jugashvili]

The best I can offer is that I know the GOG and Steam versions have been updated for modern systems by different teams/persons, and the Steam version is supposedly more bug-free and stable. But that depends on whether you're willing to spend some extra money on a decades-old game. I never had any of the problems you describe with either version, but I'm still running Windows 10.

You could try running it with -wincursor, as I think the software cursor caused some problems in earlier non-GOG/Steam versions.

Or run it in windowed mode? Steam has ddraw.ini, GOG dxcfg.ini for the settings.

Thanks, I'll give the Steam version a try. I believe there's a mod that lets you LARP the original W3 in DLR, right? I enjoy both but always end up returning to the original for some reason.

 

[weirwood]

The link should be one or two pages back. It changes the UI, and there should also be a download link for the original soundtrack somewhere. Unit stats won't change, though.

 

[weirwood]

https://www.moddb.com/mods/25th-anniversary-project

20/11/2024


Version 0.7


I've been fairly occupied with work for the last couple of weeks, but prior to that, I made solid progress.
SSG co-founder and AI programmer Roger Keating has very generously taken some time to explain some of the code and AI behaviour to me. With additional input from warlorders.com host
KGB, I now have a pretty comprehensive understanding how the AI evaluates its units and chooses which ones to build. I have adjusted a lot of units to better match that behaviour.


The other big change is an adjustment to hero abilities. It became evident that AI tends to overspend ability points on increasing its movement, even once its heroes outpace any of its units.
To curtail that, I've increased the base movement of heroes slightly, but made buying additional movement points prohibitively expensive. (16 move for 4AP - if you buy this once,
heroes can keep pace with Eagles and Air Elementals, the fastest units in this mod.)
Under most circumstances, AI heroes now shouldn't spend AP on movement before they reach level 8, which should be pretty rare.
I've made some additional tweaks to hero abilities and spells, that hopefully will improve their picks, but hero behaviour and spellcasting is still one area I don't understand very well,
and for the time being, I won't be able to do much playtesting.


A change to 25th.rul - on suggestion by KGB, I've changed the negative bonus limit from -3 to -1. The AI is poor at assembling synergistic stacks, so toning down the advantage a human player can get should
keep fights from becoming too one-sided.


No changes to items. I'm happy here.


No changes to random sides. That's still on my to do list. I may be able to work on that and release the next version during the Christmas holidays.


As always, any feedback is welcome. It's been about a month, so I thought you all deserve an update.

 

[weirwood]

Does anyone remembers this.

I started playing the game again and I remember when I played it years ago that on the first mission there was enemy reinforcement in form of a single top tier unit arriving somewhere around turn 3.

Playing now on the GoG version this no longer happens, no matter difficulty setting.

Im wondering is this was some earlier game version and it was patched out or just a bug.

I just started a new campaign game, and this time the unit was there. As I suspected, there's some alternative starting setups in campaign scenarios.