Thoughts re. Skeleton Rider and Bone Knight

[Spannerbag]

Hi,
Apologies if this isn't the right place to post this.

Just noticed that Skeleton Rider and Bone Knight are now included in the game core.
Both have movement_type=mounted and {ABILITY_SUBMERGE} but the former means that they cannot ever utilise the latter unless they are created in deep water.
If this is the intended behaviour, fair enough.
Note that they also move a lot more slowly in water terrain than other skeletal undead (and have slightly different defense too).

FWIW I have tweaked these in my campaign so both can move (barely) in both deep water and mountains as the scenario requires this.

Code: Select all

  [movement_costs]
    deep_water=5	# Otherwise cannot use submerge ability (movement_type=mounted) unless placed in deep water (other skellies=3)
    mountains=7		# So can move (slowly!) over mountains
  [/movement_costs]
  [defense]
    deep_water=90	# Same as other skeletal undead
    mountains=90	# Same as deep water (why not? :-)
  [/defense]

Cheers!
-- Spannerbag

[Atreides]

I noticed it perforce as well. Their inclusion I mean. They exist in a lot of custom eras. That may explain the inconsistency (not that the core is above errors!) because of their origin.

In any case thanks for pointing this out, I will modify the ones I'm responsible for. Unless they differ... heh, will have to see.

As a tangential thought I have seen movetypes with defenses for terrains units can't move to. But there are ways for a unit to get moved to terrain it can not enter on its own. Usually a bug but can't rule out it being done intentionally.

P.S. : ) I checked and apparently this was known in the olden days already. The three (!) eras I maintain which have these units all had either a custom movetype with deep water mov 5 and def 90 or a macro submerge terrain that did 3 mov and 90 def.

These units apparently originate in a core camp called Liberty. Checking I see that in 1.16 core it was the skel rider that has this inconsistency of mounted and submerge. Bone Knight didn't have sub. although the custom era ones do.

P.P.S. Further research (!!) indicates a further inconsistency in the 1.17 core. The Chocobone which can arguably be called a mounted unit simply has the undeadfoot mvtype. Perhaps the skrider and bknight should have that as well. The argument will no doubt be about the number of legs... ; )

[Spannerbag]

... In any case thanks for pointing this out, I will modify the ones I'm responsible for. Unless they differ... heh, will have to see.

I just hacked them so the units worked as I wanted in my campaign, it may well be that for "generic" usage different values are needed

P.S. : ) I checked and apparently this was known in the olden days...

Ah, I remember them well... err, what was I talking about?

P.P.S. Further research (!!) indicates a further inconsistency in the 1.17 core. The Chocobone which can arguably be called a mounted unit simply has the undeadfoot mvtype. Perhaps the skrider and bknight should have that as well. The argument will no doubt be about the number of legs... ; )

I did also wonder about the choccy and whether it was meaningful for the various skele-types to have different movetypes.
However the walking corpse/soulless variants have differences based on their original race so I suppose it's consistent for skellies to do the same?
But I thought I'd save that for later...

On a related note, this only came up because the campaign I'm working on (well, specifically campaign #1 as I have a few on the go) has been hovering around 95%+ complete for ages but I keep finding obscure bugs and snags that need fixing (please don't look too closely at my WML...) and it's taken so long that I thought I may as well migrate to 1.17, which was when I discovered that the skele rider (and dwarvish miner) were now mainlined.
Only thing is, in my campaign the miner isn't a miner and is 0 level. Oh well...

Also, the changes to unit_types affected the difficulty of a few scenarios significantly, especially those involving dwarves, which seemed noticeably more challenging (I partly offset this by upping the gold but this isn't ideal).

Cheers!
-- Spannerbag

[Atreides]

... In any case thanks for pointing this out, I will modify the ones I'm responsible for. Unless they differ... heh, will have to see.

I just hacked them so the units worked as I wanted in my campaign, it may well be that for "generic" usage different values are needed :)

I reported this on github so they may make some changes... that would only affect your units if you used a base unit version but of course they can be modified more as needed if they change the movetype. In my case it was irrelevant since they were copy paste jobs. Some of the stuff I work on predates base unit tag I think!

Oh and thanks for the pointer about the dwarf miner being mainlined. I was using it's sprite for a custom era and now the 1.17 addon can use the full core animations instead. Nice.