Vlad Enemies Lord Pack

[Sir Windows 32]

Good day everyone,

some time ago I made a lord pack adding Radu into the game. After some time I decided that the other enemies Vlad faces in his campaign would also make for interesting AI opponents.

This new lord pack replaces three existing lords in custom skirmish with three enemy lords from Vlad's evil campaign. The screenshots show each new lord's respective castles and the siege armies of Radu and the holy knights.

Transylvanian Lord

Difficulty: medium

Preferred troops: swordsman, man at arms, Round Table units

This lord replaces Arthur. The Transylvanian likes building a large and well fortified castle. He might not be the fastest attacker, but his siege armies are strong, and he uses the round-table to its fullest extent. His castle design is based on one of the three castles used in the third mission of the evil campaign. In the campaign mission the three lords run on the Arthur, Lancelot and Alfred AI respectively. As such, I mostly based the siege roster on the scripted invasion during that mission, augmented by round-table units.

Radu

Difficulty: medium

Preferred troops: crossbowman, pikeman

Vlad's brother replaces Lancelot. He is a formidable foe and an aggressive attacker. His castle is small and quickly finished, as such his raids and sieges commence rather soon. He's mostly unchanged from his appearance in the older lord pack. Some changes include the removal of knights and macemen in order to keep him from being too similar to the other lords in this pack.

The Holy Knights

Difficulty: hard

Preferred troops: knight, archer, trebuchet

These crusaders hail from across Europe and replace Dietrich. Their castle is simple, and they despise all kinds of magic & witchcraft. One shouldn't take these knights lightly, as their industry and siege craft is unmatched. By far the strongest lord in this pack. The holy knights need some time to get going, since they use some very expensive units, but once they attack be prepared for a fight. I wish they could've also been part of the good faction, but with only two slots available they had to end up in the ice faction.

General Hunyadi

Difficulty: medium

Preferred troops: light cavalry, pikeman, crossbowman

Protector of the Hungary, regent of the kingdom, General Hunyadi replaces Siegfried.  He is a master defender and deadly skirmisher, seeking to undermine his enemies before they can become a threat. The general doesn't think much of glorious combat in open fields, instead preferring to cripple his enemy with his deadly light cavalry raids. His castle is a formidable fortress that will cause many attackers heartaches. Still, one shouldn't underestimate his siege forces either.

Vlad & Mordred

These lords are not replaced by anyone. Vlad remaining in this pack needs no explanation. Mordred doesn't really fit in but there wasn't really anyone to replace him with. He's received minor updates though.

Vlad - Vlad is now the true master of evil. His Saxon warriors are replaced by werewolves across the board. It always struck me as weird that Vlad doesn't use werewolves, which play a central part in his campaign. 

Mordred - Since Vlad is now the werewolves master, Mordred will be using Saxons instead. Thematically it fits better with him since he was allied with them in Arthur's campaign. His men-at-arm are upgraded to pikemen for more staying power. 

Spoiler

A Transylvanian castle

 

A castle of the holy knights

The holy knights make ready to siege.

Radu's castle

Radu's army on the march.

General Hunyadi's castle

Hunyadi's light cavalry ambushing unsuspecting archers

 

[IgnasheunKnight 9]

Awesome! I can't wait to try it out!

[Sir Windows 32]

Glad to hear it!

I've tried getting as much use out the voice lines from the campaign as possible. At least Radu should mostly taunt the player with his iconic lines.

 

 

[Lord_Chris 267]

This looks amazing! I definitely need to give it a try 🙂

[Sir Windows 32]

First update to the lords is out!

Thanks to @ Asophix  and @ IgnasheunKnight  for the initial feedback. The first update addresses issues with the holy knights and Transylvanian lord.

Holy Knights

1. Slight redesign of his castle with the goal of reducing stone cost and improving the economy. 
2. Engine tower with dragon harpoon removed in favour of more archers
3. Number of lumber mills and quarries increased
4. Number of weapons workshops reduced
5. Apple farms added to food production

These changes should hopefully help the knights get set up a bit faster. The reduced weapons production should get balanced out by more income from wood/stone/food which they can use to buy weapons. The engine tower+harpoon was a heavy investment which usually didn't pay out. Its removal should allow the knight to get things like a church built much earlier.

Transylvanian Lord

1. Number of lumber mills and quarries increased
2. Number of bakeries increased
3. Number of weapons workshops reduced
4. Poleturner added
5. Raiding behaviour and troop types changed
6. Macemen removed from siege and raid rosters
7. Men at arms added to raid and siege rosters

The Transylvanian lord was by far the slowest and most sluggish new lord. Higher lumber and stone production should allow him to get his economy going and his castle completed quicker. Bread should provide him with a new income source as well. Men at arms were added to his roster in order to give him a cheap unit option for raiding and assembling a siege army quicker.

[Asophix 98]

Some feedback regarding the V2 lords:

Radu

• Just like his original incarnation, he is considerably steady at building up. So far he is the most consistent lord.
• He builds no breweries for the Inn.
• I barely saw any harassment groups from him, apart from a few pikemen and archers. I could like a few more macemen, or more of the archers. 🙂 

Holy Knights

• The defensive positions are manned well, however he is still conflicted between raids and armies. He forms his siege army fairly late.
• I recommend toning down the steamroll group to streamline his raids.
• The granary could be leveraged more by adding a gate, or pre-placing it in the AIC.
• The armory could be turned outwards for smoother weapon influx.

Transylvanian Lord

• He is much better now, but still takes quite some time to build.
• The siege force is quite formidable (more threatening than vanilla Arthur!).
• The castle layout seems to be suffering from the fact that the walls greatly prolong travel time for workers. This is barely mitigated by having access to a second gatehouse.
  • His pace could be enhanced by adding a gatehouse to the rest of the cardinal directions each.
• Men-at-arms could be used more in the raid groups.

Overall it's a great improvement and can't wait to see the rest of the upcoming lords in the roster. 😉 

[Planewalker 14]

Fantastic. Glad to see this kind of work coming along after the recent editor improvements. :D

[Asophix 98]

Hey, can we expect to see updates soon-ish to the existing or the newfound lords? 🙂 

The lords each have been given a lot of custom content, so I take it is no small effort to get everything in place. 

[Sir Windows 32]

Well, yes you can indeed.

This update took a bit longer since I got distracted by something else but here it is. Many thanks @ Asophix  for making it possible with the newest version of the lord editor.

Radu

• builds breweries now

Holy Knights

• granary will now be built outside the castle in order to reduce walkways for farmers
• steamroll group slightly adjusted

And now to the biggest change for this update: a brand new lord is added to the roster!

General Hunyadi

Difficulty: medium

Preferred troops: light cavalry, pikemen, crossbowmen

Protector of the Hungary, regent of the kingdom, General Hunyadi is both a mighty warrior and a cunning general.  He is a master defender and deadly skirmisher, seeking to undermine his enemies before they can become a threat. The general doesn't think much of glorious combat in open fields, instead preferring to cripple his enemy with his deadly light cavalry raids. His castle is a formidable fortress that will cause many attackers heartaches. Still, one shouldn't underestimate his siege force once he decides the time has come to strike at his enemy's castle.

 

[Lord_Chris 267]

Interesting thought @ Sir Windows ….. Would there be any other changes which would make your mod better? Ie other aspects of the game you’d like to customise which haven’t yet been found?

[Sir Windows 32]

Light cavalry was made possible by @ Asophix  hard work as he found the unit codes for the unit in the gamerules.dat.

I noticed a minor issue though. The animation of the horses doesn't work, despite all the files being present by default in SHL. I wonder if this could be fixed somehow. Initially I thought maybe the SHL files are somewhat incomplete/broken, so I replaced them with the SH2 equivalents for the light cavalry. Unfortunately, it didn't help. Still, it's only a minor issue, as the rider's animation work fine. 🙂 

[Asophix 98]

Thanks for the acknowledgement, @ Sir Windows ! Hálás vagyok a magyar ellenfélért!

Hunyadi feels kinda slow to build up, but he is fun to play with once he gets stabilised. It's hard to find a map where he plays on full swing. His consistent attack rate is something I like, kinda like Lancelot. He may be in need of more farms, as he tends to break even on consumption sometimes ~ selling food for gold could improve his standing.

Holy Knights with the update is way more consistent, he actually attacks very fast now. His raids are also somewhat annoying, as you can never suspect him bringing out a mounted knight, or just a small band of archers.

As a footnote: I noticed some minor graphics differences as well, even though I don't know how the animations work in either SH2 or SHL. In SH2 Steam Edition the swords texture is consistently missing from the armoury, but not in Legends. Simply replacing the one from SHL did not resolve the problem.

 

[Lord_Chris 267]

Have you tried looking at the .uni files? They contain at least from my investigations lists of all the files needed to load the model correctly. You can open them in Notepad++, or use the Granny Viewer 2 software: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/article/62-adding-units-from-stronghold-legends-into-stronghold-2

[Sir Windows 32]

I'll take note of giving him more farms. He should have plenty of peasants at the campfire for some more food production anyway.

Yes, I've looked at the .uni files before. All the files listed in the .uni are there so the issue must be rooted somewhere else. I've also looked into the AnimList.csv and AnimList.anl. At least as far as I can tell everything is where it's supposed to be.