Lord Vetka

The map is coming along fine, we are at the point of doing some online testing, maybe by the end of the week or... you know how things can go:-) Those close up screens look good, Nigel you take better screens than I do, it would be good to have a few more like that in the gallery. Today I will finish cleaning up the iron and stone areas and remove some of the farmland as well making you need to take the village sooner. For now each village will deliver 3 goods, food and ale. We could add in some weapons work shops and deliver some weapons as well, or any other goods, any thoughts? Keep in mind that the cities have been divided into to 2 villages, so there are 4 villages on the map, one for each player.

Now that the subscribe system has been up for a while now, I see a bit of a problem, I check the site every day and see all of the new posts, but I also get each new post in an email, not so good, I would rather be able to just get new messages from the down loads and turn off new subscribed messages from the forums.

It seems like a problem alright, I put a ticket into FireFly about it and they did not help at all, I guess we are on our own:-( From what I can tell is there are no instructions built in for the invasions, they do not know what to do, if you use the skirmish then the AI gives the invasions direction, but in the invasion scenario, the trigger is "start invasion" so the troops move to the designated flags but there is nothing to direct them to invade, to "finish the invasion". Micha!, the map you made does have the final invasion sort of working, they did invade but not all of the troops, the siege equipment did what it was supposed to do. I think I will make another test map and systematically try one thing at a time, I don't know what else to do!

Mathew I finally got a chance to put the "Abisat" zip together and get it posted. Thank You for the story! Hopefully someone will have something to say about it:-)

Yes it is a good article, it helped me to get the invasions to work and siege equipment to attack like they should, lots of people could not get the siege towers to work, this tells you how to get them to work and more! "Adnan" is a good example of the siege towers working, they come to the walls and the enemy troops climb onto your walls and you are in for a fight! "Adnan" is posted in the war scenario section of Stronghold Heaven.

I found that the troops walk past the villages, no defenses, and in range of any living unit they will fire at or attack, they can shout threw buildings and walls, they walk outside past the walls and shoot villagers in the village, it does not make sense but that is the way it is and we have to deal with it. I did notice in your first post that the village is a neutral estate, did you color neutral ground for the village or use village estate 9 for the village? The only thing on the map that is neutral is the map that you colored in as neutral, the villages are not neutral as far as I can see. Your welcome to send the map over to me for a look, maybe I could see something you missed.

I have been playing around with the Two Cities map and found the same thing, at first we had archers on the towers, any troops going by would get archers shooting at them, AIs would come and attack the village, but AIs walking past the city walls will take a run at the gate and shoot at villagers, but continue past. I think it's the way it is because player or enemy, you do have to fight for the village, you can't just put troops on the hall and take the village, can you place some walls to direct troops away or terrain maybe, use some pathing to make the troops go outside of the attack zone. I hope that will help.

I have done some more work on the map, and thought I would post a screen so you guys can see the progress, we now have Two Cities, one is Crusader and the other is Arabian, the map is coming along fine!

OK I changes the setting, I'm not sure if I want to be subscribed to every post I make though.

That's a great feature, like you said checking every file once in a while is a pain, this will make it much better, Thanks Chris! I will have to start using this feature, then I can bug you with stupid questions! Like to have the comments from my maps do I subscribe to each map or all maps, and from now on as I post maps should I subscribe as I upload them?

Welcome to the site Duc Vautour, good to see more map makers come to the site, need any help along the way just ask in the forums> Another writer, I might take you up on that, I did get a volunteer to write a story for an SHC map, maybe I could ask you some time. I write my stories but can't say that I have ever liked having to write any thing.:-)

Lord Chris I just wanted to say thank you Lord Chris for making this site and all of the hard work you have been doing to make it a great place to be, you are working behind the sceens mostly and deserve a Thank You! Thank You!!! From Lord Vetka

So you got the game, good for you ! I will admit that I did not stay with the game for all of the patches, but I doubt that it would interest me to play it again, maybe after C2 wares out a bit, for now I have to many projects going on with C2 to start with SH3. The editors are almost the same, maybe you can talk me into a custom war scenario for you. If you want to try a war scenario that is not to hard "Brukner" is posted in the downloads, the win condition is for popularity, so you can win right away but you will miss the fun! There are two versions normal and hard. That is what I meant, save the money for C2, but your right, C2 is to much money and no hard copy to boot:-(

On the bar above the map is the move, rotate and scale buttons, these are used to move certain things like trees shrubs rocks troops buildings ect. I found if you click on the object you want to move in the tool tray, then click the map and make a small box around the object you want to move it will give you a tool, this tool has 3 arrows and a box, the arrows can be held with the mouse and moves the object left and right north and south and up and down with each color, to remove the tool hold the shift key and make a box on the ground and release the mouse button, do it twice to clear the tool off of the map, you can use the same tool to rotate and adjust the size if objects. An example, I had some archers on towers and wanted to remove them, I used the tool to move the archers off of the towers and then deleted them, another is some trees that got placed in the water, I used the tool to move the trees back up on the land. Play around with it and if you have problems ask and if you find more please let us all know!

Speaking about "Crac des Chevaliers", at "Heaven games" in the Crusader war scenarios, WarLord designs has a couple of those maps posted there, if you are interested, type Warlord designs into the search box.

I played around with this and now I have invasions that work:-) A bit of an unusual way to make it work, I did try this already, the part I left out was making the map a skirmish map, I thought there had to be a disconnection between the invasions and the AI, it seemed like there were no instructions for the invasions to follow. Odd now that when you want to play the war scenario you have to start in skirmish and place an AI into the spot you make for the AI, but it does add something as well, the invasions almost seem different with different AIs. Thanks for the tip, it makes the invasions a pleasure to make now! I have a ticket at FireFly, I will explain what the problem is and the solution, maybe they can find a way to fix the editor and get the invasions to work in an invasion map. I will quote your explanation, if that's OK with you Micha!

Thanks EaglePrince, it's starting to look like a map now, still lots of work to do. There is a bit of a problem with the editor, the buildings get placed on the plateau, if you raise the ground a little and place a keep there, in game you can't get up on the top, the sand is blocking the door to the top of the keep, I found this on a few maps I've made, a bit of raised ground and the keeps do not work properly, to fix the problem I've lowered the ground back to plateau and the keeps work fine. So any kind of texturing you do to the ground becomes useless where the keep is placed. Most buildings placed in game will show them sitting a bit low on textured ground but they do still work, kind of like the walls sinking into the hills. We are experimenting with the village to see what will work best, this village has 2 village halls, they work fine, and 4 village barracks that don't seem to work, Nigel managed to figure out how to get the carters to transport the goods you want, that is setup in the editor, to bad you can't place any thing in the village when playing the game. How do you guys like the look of the village, the buildings were placed more for perception and to test the village, there is one more village needed on the other side of the river, Nigel I have an idea where we can color in 2 villages in 1, it might work if I take the existing village and color in half of it making 2 villages with 1 wall. Ideas are welcome from other players, we are almost done with this map, that does not mean we can't make a new map! Or changes to this one! Nigel, I saw your email and the map, I made a few changes to the stairs and towers, took the troops off of the towers, what a bear that was, but it can be done, this has been a learning experience, in a good way! Now I'm going to post some tips on using the editor in a thread I saw earlier.

I do not remove uninstalls from programs, I believe this was caused by the HD patch, never had a problem before, now with the patch, I have no uninstall, I think the best way would be to remove all of my older Crusader games, clear every thing left over and start again, I will do that soon, to busy for it now with C2 out now! I did download an uninstaller bit it will not remove the files until I pay for it, but, it does show me the files that will be removed, so I think I will run it and record the files it shows so I can clean every thing out, then a new start! Thanks for the effort guys!

Well I got into the editor again and put all of the farmland and trees in plus the stone and iron, gave the landscape a bit of texture, added in the Castle estates and made one village, all that is left is to make the 2 villages and put in the final detailing, here's a screen of what I have been up to.

I did make this map with version 1.3.1, this is the first we have had about crashing, your probably one of the few people to try playing with version 1.4, 1.4 is not stable at all, patch up to 1.4.1 and it should be fine, if not lets know please. I hope that helps. Lord Vetka

I do have hidden files showing, I looked for the uninstall where you pointed EaglePrince, but I did not find it there. I have tried a few things to get it to uninstall, tried the setup from the disc, no luck, can't reinstall from setup, I do have the Extreme uninstall in the folder, but each time I try and uninstall it tells me I have to remove 1.2 first. I tried reinstalling the 1.3 HD patch again but no luck, before doing that I moved my 1.1 exe out of the 1.1 folder and now can't find it either, I did take the 1.2 exe from the disc and replaced the exe, now when I start the game it does tell me that it is 1.2 now, but I have not tested it online. I did download an uninstaller from the web, but it would not remove the file until I bought the darn thing,Arg! I think I might just remove all traces of Crusader from my computer and start fresh. I Thank You for the help guys!

I don't have to much experience with any thing new, I did use a mike for talking on Skype while playing SHK a few years ago, it was OK. My cordless land phone ecos when there is any sound, tap the table and eco talk and get a bit of an eco, glad you fixed that problem.

That looks good, in my mind I was thinking of the slight bend I put in the river and that along the river would be farm land, so the city walls would be back a bit and the city stretched out more. The cities will need extra care in building them, I believe that for each good you might want to city to produce you will have to make sure each good has it's own setup from farms to carter post, so for bread you would have to have a few wheat farms a couple of mills some bakeries and carter posts as well as the villagers and their needs filled in order for the city to be able to send the bread to the castle, and the same for each item you would want the city to produce, and that will also determine the placement of the walls and buildings within. But yes it would not be very good if the city towers were in range of the cities! There is the possibility that the cities will be in range of the castle towers though. I will add in some grass land and see how the cities will look adjusted for farms. Another thought to is the walls do not need to be conventional straight walls, maybe a zigzag across the back would be interesting and fit in with the extra raised ground you are concerned about, we have lots to play around with, it should be good when we are done.

Here are a few screens of the map I have for you, it's the basic start of the map, no detailing of the terrain, I wanted you to see this part in case you wanted to make any changes, I will also send this map to you for a closer look. The screens are zoomed out to fit the screen and leaves the water looking odd, it looks good when zoomed in, any changes you want let me know, changes are easy to make so feel free to ask. The castle estates will be on the high ground at the back and front of the map and close together and the village estates can be in the middle by the river, the iron and stone for the castle estates will be in the hills in the corners, each castle estate has 5x5 squares clear for building, that should be enough, 5x5 is just the main area they do have more room, the village estates have 5 squares from the river to the high ground and from edge to edge W-E if you want.

ervinjok, welcome to the site, I have your map and will find the time to check it out and get it uploaded for you, hopefully very soon. Thank You for posting your map here! Lord Vetka