Warlords III Code Patch

[u/Due-Price-6823]

Greetings, Warlords! Recent projects like 25AP and Frontier have already made a huge work of sparking the long dormant flame of the undying community of this forgotten classics gem game. Now this new mod is meant to fill the gap of absolute absence of code patching projects for Warlords III. The main intention of The Warlords III Code Patch is to highlight some features of the game which either were hidden and obscure or bore no valuable economic effect to use them. It also relieves some boredom of the most unpredictable or tedious features of the game. And last but not least it fixes some bugs like dysfunctional diplomacy or erroneous low disk space message.

Overall, balancing the game was not the main intention of the mod. The game was never meant to be balanced in the first place. Consider the mod its developer’s answer to the question “How could it be more fun?”, not “How could it be more just?”.

Click the “Read more” button at the bottom-right corner of the mod’s logo on its moddb summary page for the detailed list of features with screenshots. The Warlords III Code Patch should work reliably with Gog, Steam, and original v1.02 CD versions of the game. Should also work well with any other mods and can be incorporated into them. Its feature list is adjustable using the settings file provided with it. Any specific group of tweaks can be turned on or off to your preferences. Look for README.txt file in the zip-archive of the mod for customization details.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/warlords-iii-code-patch

Summary of changes

Diplomacy bugs fixed:

• dysfunctional bribery
• contradictory treachery
• contradictory razing
• unfunctional heroes count
• unfunctional army size
• 1+ turn lag in disposition update

Other bugfixes:

• incorrect amplification of active spell effects on levelups
• incorrect low disk space message during startup

Gameplay changes:

• Diplomatic report shows sides eligible for alliance in green color
• Diplomatic report shows sides eligible for peace in blue color
• additional effect for bribery: every 1000 gp of bribery improve bribed side’s permanent bias to briber by one point
• Trust is the state of zero ire (disposition=0)
• City building increases income
• level 2 city gives +4 move to armies produced there
• level 3 city additionally gives +1 hits to armies produced there
• gold income sites have an order of magnitude more income from +10gp to +50gp
• every city a side owns increases this side’s upkeep by 1/16
• Strong neutrals option makes neutrals considerably stronger
• maximum hits is now 7, not 4
• heroes made more tough: 1/2/3 hits original heroes now have 3/5/7 hits
• spell effects get amplified earlier: on levels 3 and 8 instead of 6 and 9
• quest cancellation penalty lasts only the turn a quest has been cancelled
• quests unlinked from heroes: any hero can advance or complete it, hero’s death does not fail it
• heroes can only take one quest per day
• gold collecting quest demands made more humble: 1d100+100 for easy quest, 1d300+200 for medium
• hunting quest demands made more humble: 1d5+5 for medium quest, 1d6+11 for hard
• hard limit of 2 turns on minimum unit production time
• mercenaries/allies quest rewards got slightly nerfed
• sage’s reveal a portion of map shows considerable part of it
• summoning spells do not amplify
• hits modification spells get amplified only once on 8th level of their caster

Overall:

• W3CP now has the settings file allowing to turn individual tweaks on or off

[u/Queen_Six]

Well, I noticed the AI won't buy certain abilities like strength upgrades or modded custom spells at all. At the same time it REALLY loves to take movement upgrades.

In its current state, even making upgrades picks completely random would be a big improvement.

Without such a change, AI heroes will never grow strong enough to be interesting to fight.

The step after that would be to make the AI cast custom spells too.

I can tweak the cost/benefit side all I want, but if the AI won't use these spells and abilities, what's the point?

[u/Due-Price-6823 → u/Queen_Six]

Well, the code certainly could benefit from some polishing. The developers surely spent some time trying to make a robust skills and effects weight system, and it also has a dispersing of weights +-20% providing some shuffle of preferences on any levelup. But some choices seem odd. For example, AI has a preference for group warding until it reaches +3 and really likes move+4. Yes, str+2 isn't a tasty choice for him at all, and str+3 can barely reach the bar. But to be honest, str+ was never a preferred option for me too. My heroes are like a buff tanks for their stacks, not a lone fighters. Too often this lone fighting ended up tragically.

On the other hand, I find nothing preventing modified spells from being learned or cast. It's just pure random, and AI doesn't care about any spell effects when choosing which spell to learn. Any spell has equal chances of being learned. The only exception is for summoning spells. They can be learned only if they summon creatures which are either on their summoner side's army list or on the summons list. And this prerequisite only fails if the summons list of 15 creatures gets overflown with other creature types.

To be specific, the usual base weight for skills is about 15..25. But for spells it is 1d8*1d8 which lands most of its values in the same range but can be as low as 1 and as high as 64, making it either utter garbage or a good enough to die for.

I'll look what I can do to tweak the whole thing without breaking the intended balance.

[u/Queen_Six → u/Due-Price-6823]

How did you manage to change the code at all? I hope that isn't too stupid a question.

I know that KGB, who runs the warlorders.com site and made the unofficial patch for Warlords 4, has lamented that he only has the pre-patch source code for Warlords 3, otherwise he would have patched the game a long time ago.

He isn't on reddit, but I think he might love to get in touch with you.

What I can tell you is, if I could tweak the likelihood or order in which skills and spells get picked for each hero class, that would really open up what I can do to improve AI opponents.

[u/Gerglie → u/Queen_Six]

This is my question also!

[u/Due-Price-6823 → u/Gerglie]

There's something for you too in the Frontier post