Hey, just wanted to let you know infestors cannot infest inland hamlets or ports.

glad to hear you like it, and yes that makes sense to me, I'll add it right now

Fantastic mod! I wouldn't have guessed it was your first. I've only tried Zerg so far and had one request. Could you give ultralisks trample?

Technically they have 1-3 +1 by default which really just means 1-4. So they do almost as much damage as crossbows while attacking every turn instead of every other turn. Plus they have the small shield which blocks some missile damage. I think you're feeling the lack of frontline more than the power of the marine themselves, but hopefully that point of armor is helping

Just to elaborate on my comment, comparing stats ingame the crossbowmen have 1-5 dmg while the marines have 1-3 but have like 2 more health which in my experience meant they died in anything less than 2-1 ratios.

Ah okay still a neat mod otherwise, thanks for the response!

the ai can use them but it doesn't really understand the building system or other special mechanics very well. I've done some work to keep it functional (for some reason the zerg were spamming overlords at one point) but ultimately the mod is doing things coe was never designed to do, so I can only take the ai so far

Will the AI use these factions and if so how consistent is it?

honestly I don't see a good reason for crossbowmen to fold marines. marines are basically longbowmen with a couple extra hp and a small shield. Not saying I don't believe you, just confused about how that's happening. I'll give them a point of armor, that should help.

Ok so been playing a few games with this mod now, and i dunno if im doing something wrong but terrans feel suuuper weak early game because I need to have good RNG and be isolated or I get shafted by the fact that the AI will always seem outnumber me and marines get folded by crossbowmen like they are naked peasants with sticks and not soldiers in 7 foot tall half ton power armor lol

Would be great to see the sprites in previews :)

the other dragoon attack is actually a melee version of their ranged attack. The ui just doesn't show it very well

Ahh, and perhaps I should highlight something. Ethereal units can pass through most walls. That means that protoss melee handles fortifications astonishingly well. You just float through and start carving the archers up.

I've played one round with the Protoss so far, definitely fun, but the sprawling complexity of the faction is gonna take a bit to wrap my head around. Dragoons being 2x2 squares makes me unsure if they are worth investing in. They may have two attacks on their sheet, but I only ever saw them shoot once per turn. Cramming four supplicants into that space instead seems like vastly better value

whoops forgot to remove the protoss mod file, but I fixed that

Hitting a critical mass of summoned supplicants was quite important. With 10 or so, I was reliably coming out of fights with a few extra dispossessed spirits to screen for the expensive mages

Initial impression: quite fun to play! Massing supplicants with my high templar lets me go surprisingly far with just 5 zealots in the initial stack. Probes have wonderful strategic flexibility and are tough enough to survive getting attacked by *one* bandit.

Looks like this is currently 2 mods? Starcraft and Protoss. If I toggle them both on I get a duplicate Protoss faction. Assuming that I should just use the main one as I test

Woohoo! Rave time~!

Serve the hive, feel the groove, I control the way you move~!

The moment we've all been waiting for is here, the protoss have arrived on elysium! *blows party horn* I hope you guys enjoy and as always, please report any bugs or issues you might find.

I like the ethereal option because it feels very thematically appropriate to protoss tech. Especially since this is set 1k years in the future. Also while that would be a cool idea, it definitely sounds like a hassle and would probably be really buggy.

A suggestion regard protoss' shield ability. Instead of being ethereal, maybe give them two form, first form give them regeneration and affliction resistance 100, second form remove those two traits. In my opinion it is more akin to their shield in Starcraft. However, I know it's much more hassle in coding than just give them ethereal.

While I was at it I did a small patch that should stop exploding dice from happening to unit summoning rituals and exploding my game balance

I replaced the unit models for the terran heroes so that you can tell them apart from regular units. Also, I'm close to being done with the protoss. You guys can see the teaser in the mod description if you're interested.

good point, I'll have to fix that

Definitely sounds like some positive changes. Will have to give this another play soon. If you get the chance, a change to the hero unit sprites would be helpful. Even just a change in color, I repeatedly ran into issues playing terran where I would send the hero SCV somewhere having forgotten that it did not have access to regular SCV abilities

Finally I added infestors, which are a drone-morphed building that slowly freespawn infested terrans. They can only be built on human settlements, and they also have rituals to terraform those locations into infested versions which have less gold but more sacrifices. Later I'll give terrans and protoss rituals to clear infestation and revert the tiles. It should make for a nice tug of war between the factions. (note that relics are actually scaled to sacrifices for some reason so you might be giving el a big boost here) They're relatively cheap by building standards, they don't cost vespene, and they should go a long way toward filling the missing zerg niche of early game ranged units.

speaking of which I increased the spawn rate of the infest terrans ritual by +2 flat increase because spending 25 sacrifices to get basically a couple archers is sad.

I fixed the overlord issue. The ai should only think about spawning overlords 10% of the times they would normally think about it now.

I also changed the ritual weight so queens should spend most of their time pushing out the creep. I honestly don't know whether this will be a good change or a bad change, but the code is very binary. Either they actively plan to do it at all times, they do it some percent of whenever they can (which would basically be never since creep has to be adjacent to other creep, hence why this is binary and only works when the ai is actively planning to push creep) or they do it the default amount. There are guardrails in place to make sure they don't just paint the entire map purple, and they should ignore most gold producing sites, citadels, mines, etc.

I'm happy to hear you like it :) I'll definitely have to look into the overlord issue. I actually haven't touched the ai very much, so it's probably a good opportunity to fine-tune things

Overall, I definitely like how this mod makes CoE into a different kind of strategy game without bogging things down in *too* much mechanical bloat. And it keeps stuff on the same scale as Elysium's inhabitants, so you can still meaningfully engage with the world. Very interested to see where it ends up once all three factions are present.

My main concern right now is that the AI really struggles figuring out how to play Zerg. Lots of accumulating overlords in the main base to no purpose. Maybe it would be possible to code AI ritual priority in a way that nudges them away from stuff they won't use well... I hear that the C'tis lizard king mod's swamp spreading rituals work OK in AI hands, but I'm not sure how transferrable their methods would be to the creep here.

in addition to ghosts I fixed every caster with a ranged weapon

oh thats awesome to know I'll fix the ghosts in a second. I can understand the frustration, but it's intentional for the zerg starting citadel to be hard to insta-wipe early. the races in this mod don't operate like other races, every regular building represents 100+ gold, possibly also some vespene and iron, and they literally can't function without them since there are no citadel recruits. If it was too easy to snipe the main base early then they could never get off the ground because even if they had a spare drone roaming around to make a new hive, it would be such a massive setback that it would basically be impossible to recover the loss. Later in the game it should be entirely possible to wipe them with a doomstack. Terrans have good access to siege weapons, strong flying units that can ignore walls, and are just generally designed to be good at sieges. It's just set up this way so they can't be wiped instantly in the early game.

Rushing Zerg citadels in early game is really odd right now. You wipe out the zerglings no problem, but the main command building has the regen, HP and armor to keep 10 marines from effectively damaging it. The zerglings you killed keep popping back up again behind you due to regen as the spore turret slowly kills all 11 of your army. Base buildings, walls, and turrets are an absolutely lethal combination when your headquarters can give the turrets a few dozen turns of extra attacks.

Unrelated, but a previous comment brought up Ghosts being unable to shoot. I believe you can fix that by making the "rangedweapon" into "rangedweaponbonus". According to the modding manual, 'This weapon will be used in addition to
any other attacks the monster has.'

In the interest of not flooding the comments with patch notes I'll just say I've been doing a proper terran playthrough and did a ton of micro-patches to squash bugs and address balance, so if you were avoiding the terrans because of the awkward state they were in they should feel way better now. There are actual patch notes in the patch notes section if you want the details

for some reason the patch notes was giving me an error code when I tried to describe this as a patch note but: I fixed a problem some zerg units were having when trying to summon things where they could only summon them on top of themselves.

np :)

Thanks again!

also fixed the missile turrets

It's not a bad thought, but I don't want to make terrans too powerful on defense given how cost-effective missile turrets and bunkers are.

Missile towers' fragmentation missiles are melee attacks with a range of two squares.

Hello. Any chance that you might give the command center a cannon add on path in exchange for it losing mobility?

I have to be honest I have no idea how to fix that since there's no way to script combat ai.

I've been noticing that leaders that can cast magic and a ranged attack/move(like the support ghosts and queens) can only cast spells and never shoot. Had a ghost put two bandits to sleep and still died because they never use the gun they have, continuously choosing not to cast a spell when there are no valid targets for spell casting

I'll admit I don't really see the range problems. ship lasers, tank secondary cannon, vulture canisters, and firebats are basically the only shorter range weapons aside from the backup melee weapons some infantry have. everything else have 6+ range, (regular archers have 5) which is pretty solid. (the lasers are canonically short range)

I'm making some buildings and units cheaper, which is the main problem I can see. It looks like I overcorrected trying to balance out the economic ramping. infantry also all got a +1 to the base summoning quantity

have you been making sure to build scvs and supply depots? They have gold/iron bonuses that are intended to make things progressively more affordable as you build up your territory. They're intended as a way to ramp your economy so that you can afford the relatively expensive costs of things.

I fixed the hive summon ritual, there was a typo on the drone's name.

whoops, the test ritual was actually a bug. It's been removed. I'll have to do some testing on the terrans. My wife just went back to work so I've been really busy watching my daughter, and havent had much time to tinker.

Also, the Queen ability to spawn a hive only wastes sacs, it doesn't do anything

Do not play the terran or let them in your game. At the moment they are very weak, prone to extreme friendly fire, to low damage, to short range, and several other problems. If they are in the AI, there is a 1 cost ritual that the AI will spam, that gives them hundreds of resources for free, and they can use it 3x a turn. This allows them to overwhelm even with the really bad units.

Zerg seem okay. A bit strong so far, but I've seen them get stomped on.

tldr; terran rituals are fixed now

anyone who's played terrans may have noticed the rituals were entirely fucked. This is because I forgot to account for a rather odd decision on the coe devs part. Basically any time you add a new ritual school, it gets assigned a number. If you add one to the top within the original document, that's fine. number goes up. But if you add one to the bottom, everything above it goes up by one. (why not just let me give it a number myself? smh) So, where I messed up is I wrote all the terran documentation in a separate file (so I could still update the main mod) and then copy pasted it over to the main file, at which point I forgot to change all the numbers for ritual schools on the units themselves. (copy paste is the best friend and worst enemy of programmers everywhere)

Anyway, everything should be fixed now, terrans should be playable.