Help with Fortress Guardpost

[Triumvere]

Help!

Can anyone help me modify the Guardpost?

I love the expansion, but I truly hate the unbalanced dwarfpile that results from the guardpost.

100-200 dwarves in the first few months, 600+ in the third? Its rediculous and game breaking.

No, the guard post is not insurmountable; I may not be a particularly good player (I play on hard and my games ususally last 3+ months) put I'm not a bad one either and have been playing HoMM since the first in the series. I have defeated dwarfstacks over 2k in size; it can be done, but it is frustrating and highly unbalanced.

For mere 1000 gold and 10 wood (I think) the dwarves get a nearly unsurmountable defense which often renders their towns immune to all but the most powerfull attackers. No other town gets anything close to that sort of advantage.

Now, I appreciate that this may have been balanced with heroic players in mind, I find the guard post to cripling in some games. I am not alone; another not so heroic player, the AI, cannot handle the guardpost whatsoever and will commony destoy itself assualting guardpost protected towns.

I dearly hope that Nival reduces the power of the guard post, but barring that I would be truely apprectiative if some of the modder on this board can tell me how to reduce the number of dwarves from the guard post.

Idealy, I think that a flat 150 dwarves, with 0 increase would be best, but I will settle for a markedly decreased rate of accumulation.

[Triumvere]

Help!

Can anyone help me modify the Guardpost?

I love the expansion, but I truly hate the unbalanced dwarfpile that results from the guardpost.

100-200 dwarves in the first few months, 600+ in the third? Its rediculous and game breaking.

No, the guard post is not insurmountable; I may not be a particularly good player (I play on hard and my games ususally last 3+ months) put I'm not a bad one either and have been playing HoMM since the first in the series. I have defeated dwarfstacks over 2k in size; it can be done, but it is frustrating and highly unbalanced.

For mere 1000 gold and 10 wood (I think) the dwarves get a nearly unsurmountable defense which often renders their towns immune to all but the most powerfull attackers. No other town gets anything close to that sort of advantage.

Now, I appreciate that this may have been balanced with heroic players in mind, I find the guard post to cripling in some games. I am not alone; another not so heroic player, the AI, cannot handle the guardpost whatsoever and will commony destoy itself assualting guardpost protected towns.

I dearly hope that Nival reduces the power of the guard post, but barring that I would be truely apprectiative if some of the modder on this board can tell me how to reduce the number of dwarves from the guard post.

Idealy, I think that a flat 150 dwarves, with 0 increase would be best, but I will settle for a markedly decreased rate of accumulation.

[KingImp]

150? How is that going to help? They'll be dead in one, maybe 2 attacks tops.

For the record, this is the equation for how it's determined.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content"> Number of Defenders = 10 * Town_Level * Month_Number </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Personally, I like it and think it's a good equation. It's about time they made something (besides Neutral stacks) that grows with time to match your growing army as well. How many Crypts, Elemental Stockpiles, Dragon Utopias are easily beaten late game because they don't grow as well to match our armies? Those things become easy money after a while. To me, that's unbalanced.

[Triumvere]

And what happens if your army is decimated by a phyrric victory and you only have one or two weeks worth of troops to work with? Or you lose your most powerful heroes? Say you are getting hammered and your enemy has 3 towns to your one and you are desperate to turn things arround?

Against any other town you can do it, but against the dwarves? Its very hard.

Balance has to do with the sides being equal. Having 2000+ built in defenders who are automatically ressurected free after each battle is not an advantage which any other side gets close to getting. Thus it is unbalanced.

I can apprectiate that you are playing on heroic using massive stacks and high level heroes. Against a full late game army 150 dwarves is nothing. But the games I play last longer and have a lot of attrition. I also guess that you are playing multiplayer, however against the AI the guardpost is invincible. The computere just cannot deal with it. Thus it is broken.

150 dwaves would be useful early game and would prevent small wndering armies from taking an otherwise undefended castle (say with a new hero hired to guard it becasue the dwellings are depleted.)

What it would not be is a massive wall designed to stop late game armies... while you may enjoy the challange, you can't really say that paying 1000g 10wood for hundreds of dwarves is balanced, can you?

Non-increasing crypts are indeed balanced because all players can raid them equally. (they may not be fun, but thats a different issue). All players do not get a guard post or even anything remotely comparable.

PS, you don't happen to know how I can alter the formula, do you?

[KingImp]

No, I have no idea if that formula is able to be changed.

As for the problems you brought up, here's something that could easily turn the tide in your favor. Frenzy and/or Puppet Master. If you have it and cast it on them, sit back and watch as they do the killing for you. Or you could use Blindness as well. They'll never get to go, unless the idiotic Ballista targets them or if the enemy hero wastes a turn taking it off.

Sure, this would require you to have Dark Magic, but it can be done and would be very effective.

I will agree with you on one point. That is the resurrecting of them after a battle. I've never tried it, so I don't know exactly how it works, but say you flee a battle and then come back immediately. The amount that was there when you left should be what's there the next time and it should continue to grow from there. Going in, seeing 2000, killing 1000, leaving and then coming right back the same day or the next to find 2000 of them again is silly.

[gurbak]

The whole idea of the guardpost goes against some of the oldest tactics this game has to offer - rush and surprise attack. It may not be very virtuous, honorable... whatever but it is a way to win and in some cases it is the only way.
So I think that Nival should either remove the guardpost or give it to all the factions thus removing some of the possible strategies in the game. Otherwise it makes Fortress a privileged faction. 2000+ defenders might not be a big deal, but their presence urges me to use a large part of my army in battle and I really don't find it too elegant to walk around fully packed. This is the only way to deal with Fortress though, unless I have some powerful spells and a lot of spellpoints. Moreover 100+ in week 2 ARE a big deal, especially on Heroic.
HoMM2 addressed this problem too, but there you were only able to use 5 of your 6 unit stacks, having you leave one in the castle as a guard all the time. But that guard depended on creature's growth and was paid for. This makes a world of difference.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content"> Going in, seeing 2000, killing 1000, leaving and then coming right back the same day or the next to find 2000 of them again is silly. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
Silly indeed. I remember this one time I was playing Fortress and my town got attacked. There were 1000+ defenders inside who did the trick with some losses. A few days later I got attacked again and look!- there go those 1000+ defenders again.
As for crypts and utopias - yup, they are really no fun later in the game, but then again, who waits that long to loot them? The bonus they give is vital only in the beginning.

[Triumvere]

Indeed, dark magic was the way I defeated the 2k stacks... Ironically, in that game the enmey had something like a dozen cities loaded down with elite troops (it was the map with the warring dwarven clans) which I would not have been able to defeat if it weren't for capturing a scroll of frenzy from a powerful demonlord...

[Normandy09]

Just recently i fought some dwarves. And to me it seems the easiest to kill them as academy. Because what I did, was I had a few stacks of around 170 master gremlins, 3 to be exact, and one stack of 117 or so upgraded golems. And all I did was constantly pound the group with my golems, and once I had lost quite a few, I would use my master gremlins to heal them (one stack could heal around 890 damage). That combined with the spell that makes a copy of the selected stack (for some reason the name escapes me), and a few mages killing maybe 16 per attack, really did the charm. Escpecially because I caught them right outisde the gate, preventing any large creatures to help them, and any time a small one would come, my unlimited retaliation would pound them to pulp. That is the most recent case of my killing 600 something defenders that summoned form the guard post.

[KingImp]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by gurbak:
As for crypts and utopias - yup, they are really no fun later in the game, but then again, who waits that long to loot them? The bonus they give is vital only in the beginning. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

You don't wait that long, but I do have to disagree on the only vital in the beginning part.

Take a map I made for example. I personally hate playing maps that have little gold or resources, so I made sure to load mine up with both, plus mines everywhere. I even placed a $10,000 gold stack in front of each starting town to give them an extra bonus. This map has 16 total towns and it takes a long time to finish. 12 months in, I was stil running out of gold because of all the troops I had to buy and if not for the Dragon Utopias or other money generating dwellings, I would never be able to keep up.

It really isn't fair late game knowing that I can easily get the gold I need because these dwelling won't give us a challenge. Either it's my fault for not managing my money correctly or there just isn't enough on the map to survive, but that doesn't mean there should be an easy way to remedy that.

[PhoenixReborn06]

I do agre with King Imp that dragon utopias and guard posts should scale over time. The dwarven treasury does but not enough. But this discussion is seperate from the guard post discussion. Indeed, a long time ago I started a poll on celestial heavens about the topic and nearly everyone thought there should be some scaling.

A smart human player will have a somewhat built ingvar with expert runelore sitting in a castle and that's just ridiculous trying to tackle. Rune of charge and bam/all your paladins are gone.

Puppet master can be resisted.

[PhoenixReborn06]

To modify the guardpost you might look at this line:

&lt;BaseCreatureToPlace&gt;CREATURE_DEFENDER&lt;/BaseCreatureToPlace&gt;

&lt;CreaturesPerTownLevelPerMonth&gt;10&lt;/CreaturesPerTownLevelPerMonth&gt;

You can change it by changing the 10 to a lower number. I haven't tested this but it should work.

To get to that line of text open the dataa1 folder. Open a1p1 data with winrar. Go through gamemechanics/rpgstats/default.xdb which can be opened with notepad or a .txt editor.

So change the line I posted about and then save and update. Then boot the game and see if it worked.

Changing this file makes it so you can't play multiplayer.

[Triumvere]

Thanks for the tip; will give it a try!

Unfortunatly, it seems that it will be difficult to alter the formula. It seems from that line that all I can do is change the multiplier.... if I make it real smal then the GP is useless at the begining of the game...

Will let you know how it goes...

[Triumvere]

Ok, so I'm not quite clear on how to do this Winrar thing. I can find the file. I can extract it and edit it, but how do I put it back? It seems there is an update function I am missing...

[PhoenixReborn06]

Ok, if you are doing it that way, in a seperate window double click the a1p1 data pack, and copy overthe modified defaultstats.xdb into the original one that you doubleclicked open. That should update it.

So: Modified file. Open the data pack. Find location gamemechanics/rpgstats...defaultstats.xdb. Copy modified file to original place.

[Triumvere]

I'm back with my report:

A smashing sucsess!

Thank you all for your help in this matter! Once I understood how to modify the file it was quite easy. I reduced the multiplier by half, from 10 to 5. While this is still more dwarves than I like, it is managable and provides a viable defense for fortresses. I may tone it down further in future, but for now it is good.

When I showed up at the end of month two at the doorstep of my enemy's 37th level fortress he had a mere 360 odd extra dwarves which I was able to defeat handily. I no longer fear the fortress!

[PhoenixReborn06]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by KingImp:
It's about time they made something (dwarven castle guards) (besides Neutral stacks) that grows with time to match your growing army as well. How many Crypts, Elemental Stockpiles, Dragon Utopias are easily beaten late game because they don't grow as well to match our armies? Those things become easy money after a while. To me, that's unbalanced. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

I wanted to revisit this idea after thinking about it some time. As I said earlier in the thread I definitely agree that those adventure map buildings should scale to provide challenge even in late game.

However, the thing that does scale is a faction-specific defense that can be extremely strong both early and late game. The faction that gets the MOST benefit is the dwarves, and they are only 1/7 th of the factions. Not fair, not "balanced" towards the others.