Alfred The Baker

Ive noticed the issue, i think it happened since i pasted my images from discord when i was writting the whole thing and then google just turned it into WEBP, cursed format, ill see to resolve this as yeah it is annoying to read.

Leb here from Reddit, this is gonna be a long one. EDIT: Also apologies the images don't seem to loading properly, you will have to click on them, i am not sure what is causing this At first i have wanted to make this castle for Alfred, as why not. This is what i ended up at first, it looked a bit weird but i paid no mind to it at first. Well that is a bit annoying. What i noticed is that in game the keep is 12 x 8 tiles while in the image its 13 x 8, the top row is completely empty while bottom row should be marked This is roughly how it should be, but this problem is not that bad but alingment can be annoying at times. Bigger issue was that any form of rally points, wether its Defence or traps, just do not work and will be unable to save [however Firefly's castles don't seem to suffer from this iirc] This is bit annoying, since Legends AI for pre built castles on maps will man towers with archers automatically, but they will not do the same with AIC castles and will leave them empty. There is also a shifting problem with some of the buildings. The barracks has shifted position, if it faces Left it goes 1 tile to the left. Ive then moved it one tile to the right and it corrected this, however i experience a different bug where this layout would not actually load in the game anymore, i don't know what caused this as it is the same layout except i moved Barrakcs 1 tile to the right. Until i moved the 3 buidlings away from the keep, but this might have been a screw up on my end. I have also noted here that compared to what is in Editor, it seems Armory Kitchen and Guild have shifted a position down but that only happened when i moved the Barracks... I have no idea what causes this. Since on the ABOVE template which had the barracks shift its positions, it gone into the game fine, after i adjusted the barracks, it would not load at all, and after i moved the 3 buildings, they proceeded to shift 1 tile down, its awfully confusing. After this i have paused for a bit There is also a bug where if the Castle gate faces DOWNWARDS [which i think is North in the editor?] The gates will shift 1 tile down. The gate one the right should not be poking out, but should be going inside of the castle, this is the one that is turned DOWNWARDS in the AIC [TO AVOID CONFUSING, the gate one the right is NOT actually facing downwards, its actually facing upwards and it kept its correct position, the AI has turned its castle around to fit the AIC on that territory, so its actually a DIFFERENT gatehouse facing UPWARDS and not DOWNWARDS] Also the AI seems to refuse to use anything but 01 castle, if i named castles 01 they work fine, but they will never read 2 or 3 [from Stronghold 2 i am aware AI will always use largest castle if it can, however in this game unless i renamed the files the AI would never use said castles] If there is any confusing, this is curently fresh on my mind, it is a big info dump. image.webp image.webp image.webp image.webp image.webp image.webp image.webp image.webp image.webp

Legit game changer, not only for having more control over AI but also having bigger castles as Legends only has tiny ones. Is AI capable of building any of the troops you specify? Like giving Lancelot defensive crossbowmen, would that work? Or does it best work with like Creatures since they do not need weapons. Also i like how visuals don't overlap and there are grid lines, its something very annoying with the SH2 editor and i found myself always having buildings not placed due to overlap.

Hello, in my exploration of old versions of the game for both nostalgia and trying to find some things out, ive found numerous things. Battle music in Skirmish sometimes working , different worker behaviours, different AI behaviours and how they functino [as well as their stone cheat] GAME SPEED NOT BEING TIED TO FPS, slower game speed overall, different lighting settings and i guess shaders overall that affect insides of the buildings [and it not just being textures] and even building pricing. One oddity i found is that if you copy gamerules.dat from 1.0 to 1.5 old AI functions will come back, they will have gong and rats as well as crime [but you cannot see if their buildings have gone bad in 1.5] and will do odd things like build stables but not use Knights, as well as them not being able to immedietly errect Stone walls, which is really fun to see AI use these things, granted it requires editing the castles since all of them had Courthouses removed, but almost all AI except Olaf use all forms of civilian buildings. However other things are far more interesting and i have sadly not figured it out. Lighting inside of the buildings i don't know what i need to change, and i sadly cannot just copy over original files, and going trough 1 by 1 shader to see how to make the game look similar is a difficult task. Fog too i really don't know how to enable it, and its bloody annoying Firefly removed it. Also stone structures not costing my entire stone economy is really nice, even Hunters being useful and delivering, honestly even more food than other buildings is great. Also the ability to build stockpile near ANYTHING is a very good feature that seems to have been taken out the very next patch 1.1 which is annoying. And then there is game speed. I was honestly quite shocked when i booted up 1.0 and saw that game speed is actually not locked to framerate. You can lower the speed as low as 10 and still run a, high framerate for however Stronghold 2 engine allows. The downside is that general game speed is different, 50 is not same across the games. 90 is quite fast and its faster than the normal 50 in the game now but i do not know what the exact numbers between each other are. Either way i find it baffling that Firefly chose to do this, as i feel this works far better than what we have currently. Its hard to say when this change occured. I remember 1.4 having framerate lock, but i could only test 1.2 as i could not use the 1.3 patch and i lost my original 1.4 CD, and in true Firefly fashion you cannot access the original SH2 and Legends on Steam. But i have a feeling as the balance changes have happened in 1.3, that so did the gamespeed and framerate change happen as well. I also worry this is buried in the EXE or the DLL files unlike visuals or some mechanical things. No idea about music tho, i once installed the game and Battle music in Kingmaker worked, but now it stopped again so i really have no clue. Now wether i COMPLETELY think 1.0 is better played than 1.5 is different. AI is more agressive but it also sometimes struggles with armies and in general game is less stable than now. But current Steam release has oddities and i would like to somehow be able to make 1.5 have things 1.0 have.

Here is something i cooked up. I sadly do not have the 15 Olaf map anymore. This map has 2 of each AI except Barclay, the map does not look good and 1 of the bulls builds the small castle but otherwise it should provide a decent enough example of how it looks like. When 1 AI is defeated all of his clones get defeated as well [so defeating Bull will kill both bulls and make them Castle Estates] Its chaotic but its nice seeing units all over the place and so many buildings at once, its like having 8 players up close on Crusader maps except now its 16 and your framerate is dying. The Crowning Duel 16 Player.s2m

I said on other places that i am fine with things like AI being the same, and i ultimately never expected something like a Skirmish mode. However exploits need to be adressed, at least some of more serious ones that could break, or even crash the game. I am also not a fan of lack of certain information, most of the stuff was said outright [which i did not expect personally] however some things felt avoided like stuff regarding 'modding' as Nick only really talked about custom maps. As well as what bugs they are fixing. No information about stuff like Multi Team, Player keep position, switching keeps or player change colour like from the latter games was even mentioned. Still, 15 euros is a fair price, even if they don't change much the native Steam MP support and Workshop will be nice enough, and i enjoy the visuals, especelly on the buildings.

I hope we can convince Firefly on Discord to perhaps remedy this, Warlords already solved this issue in like one of its first patches so they clearly seem to have knowledge to make changes, though generally i am happy with SH1 siege AI, they work well on most maps and its more about them going on in Numbers.

Hmmm, is this still being worked on? I think this is a very interesting project but there is 1 issue that will be annoying. AI Seemingly only read Castle01, and will ignore 2 and above. Ignoring of course Tiny and Keep only castles this means that if we want AI to actually use any other castle, we would have to constantly rename Castle files to be used. I find this odd as Stronghold 2 supports up to 4 AI castles per AI, so i don't know what Firefly changed, nor am i sure if it can be changed to allow more than 1 castle to be read.

Proper MP is one of the only things they actually mention in the trailer so you are covered on that. As for AI who knows. Collisions i don't think would be possible since SH1 had no collision system at all, hell there was no collision system of any kind in these games unti like, well Warlords. You can already cap abandoned siege machines and any unit can already take over gatehouses, i mean its what siege tower is for, to allow you to acomplish that. Knights and Siege engines can already walk on walls if they are on same height plane [although i think this is just a bug rather than something intended, but it can happen] We already have different towers... I really don't get some of you points since they are already in the game.

So 1 thing i always liked in something in AOM was more than the standard 8 players allowed, that being 12, its a nice thing but very rarely games implement such a feature, and this series even ending up lowering the total player count. One workaround is actually creating a War Custom map, there are 10 coloured shields you can put, of which 9 are AI, allowing you to have a very quiet but still a 10 player match, although you are limited to 9 Campaing AI, so you cannot have Queen and Bishop there. Plus you can only have 3 teams and neutrals, so Allies and 2 enemy teams. Though another interesting thing you can have is have 16 territories with all being AI controlled, normally you can't have multiple castles of same AI but if you first make them villages, paint over a certain shield, then place over Castle flags, you have now just made castle territories. 15 Olafs is not a pretty sight [ill put an image, you can only see 4 but trust me there are 15]. The problem with this is that technically this is all 1 AI, so if you take out 1 all will become Castle Estates under your control. This does not work with players, you will just get another estate with another Lord spawned but you cannot build any structures like Barracks or walls, while still taking your resources. One workaround i thought was to give some AI only 1 additional clone, so if one dies only 2 estates get turned over rather than over, so it would be a 8 player match with adittional castle each [which is very weird] Sadly Kingmaker is an issue, you cannot add more than 7 AI, and the game crashes if you Dice roll the game crashes if there is but 1 more Castle flag on the map. Ive tried some workarounds like praying to Jesus, MP match with MP AI mod, and not much else i could think off. I do not expect that game could actually handle more than 10 UNIQUE colours [i mean there should be only 10 Campaing colours, and black and white i presume] but if there was a way to SOMEHOW allow the game to do this, we could have 10 or 12 player games, maybe even 16, with all the AI rather than just being restricted to max 8 players or having only 9 campaing AI in War Custom. I am really wondering if there is anything that can be done to prevent that Kingmaker crash on dice rolls, even just that would be cool.

Think ill start with FSB thing since that is more of a concern for me than MakeV currently. I want to edit and add audio to existing FSB files of Crusader 2 and Warlords, while the tools provided allow me to extract something like Overlord speeches, i have not found a program that allows me to put in new MP3 files and then Compile/Pack the FSB. The reason i want this is because i am thinking Crusader 2 and Warlords clearly do not want to read audio that isn't packed into an FSB [so just having MP3 files alone isn't enough], so i can't add something like Lord speeches or names without having packed them into an FSB I have noted that listing in the Overlord.Lua appropriate code for a new blank AI makes the game Look for said Quotes in order to play them [so when it wants to play an audio it will say in the corner WO_Anger_1 something something] but it seems as long as the files for said Quotes or such aren't in FSB they won't be read, and i don't know of an alternative way to make the game read maybe specifically MP3 files, so i want to try to compile/pack new MP3 files into an FSB, be it a new FSB or unpack the Lord speech that has all said audio and pack them all together. However FMOD is a paid program for developers, and another program a friend reccomended me does not work.

I have come across your post about using MakeV with older versions of the game, but that is not the issue, game hasn't been updated recently [or in the past few weeks i have used the tool] No advertisement updates or such, i can't be using an outdated .V considering that. While as i said above i have a workaround where i just don't try to create a new Zip and convert it, and instead i just put edited files inside of the Zip and having it overwrite the data inside it, its slightly annoying and would be much easier to just Pack up a new archive with edited files and then have game read a converted .V from that, but i am unable to do that and i am unsure whether or not its a WinRar problem. Same with PACKING FSB files, i know how to unpack them using the tool and following instructions, but i am very interested in PACKING new files inside those Audio files for the game to possibly read them, like adding new music or even new AI voicelines [or even replacing them], and unfortunately that tool does not work to pack the audio files.

I have been playing around the idea of modding this game [and Warlords and in future perhaps SH3 to some degree] however i am having issue with MakeV. I convert the assets file, then extract it, make my changes, zip it up, and then run it trough MakeV again, however this results in the game crashing. Ive then figured out that i don't have to replace Assets.v constnatly and that i can have a new .v file that has only things i need. [i list this file in config.xlm and put it above the other .v files so it has a load priority, well i assume at least] however the changes in that new .V do not apply [in this case i have increased troop and building limits to 5k each] However workaround i found is if i keep the zip, extract the files and edit them, so again editing options.lua in scripts to increase limits, then place that file Back in to the Zip and using MakeV, it works and changes apply, plus they work in game [no more 50 buildings on 8 players]. But i obviously shouldn't put files directly into the Zip, so i am wondering why if i extract the files, and then Zip those up, the game wont load them. So i am wondering what is the issue to me just zipping those files, since if i didn't have this problem i wouldn't have to do the Workaround [which while not time consuming it is annoying] Tool i use is Winrar for this. - The FSB packing, i have thought of adding new Audio, be it extra messages or such, however while i can certantly unpack the FSB files game uses, i have no idea what can i use to do so, since tool on the site only extracts the files, and does not pack the back up.