New Challenge Mod

That sounds great, really looking forward to it.  Hoping to start a game with your improved units mod soon.  To answer your question, I think replacing "Resource Harvesting" is absolutely fine.  I agree it's rather useless.  As an aside, I'm guessing there isn't a way you could fix Peregan's skills (especially quickfire)?  If that was possible to fix it would be great, as it appears Stardock keeps forgetting to fix it (though I haven't tried it post 1.4). 

OK, going to make my first publish of it tomorrow.  It is basically pulling a few things I've worked on together into one patch, adding Thecw's mods and seriously overhauling the Priestess.  She'll have a modified skill tree for her sovereign (which at least seems less random where things are) and at least one new skill choice in the skill tree (Divine Items).  It also redoes her spellbooks (3 Chaos, 1 Summoning, 4 Enchanting), fixes some errors in the skill tree, and I'm really hopeful to give her new starting choices for things.  Tomorrow I'll post it up (with images of her new skill tree) for people to start playing with.

Next week I'll work on another sovereign (kind of deciding between Commander and Tinkerer).  I hope to redo one Sovereign a week and maybe even replace one of them with something different.

Tyrants could get some improved pikemen (call it Phalanx or whatever), to fit with the Krax style (plus no other class gets improved infantry). Also does the Guardian not already get marksmen or something? (I've never played one yet). Tinkerer could get catapults!

Ok, here is the first release.  This does some general combining of mods and also begins reworking some of the sovereigns starting with the priestess.

Download: New Challenge Mod

List of Revisions:

• Bunch of unit revisions
• Added two mods by TheCW for making Glass Flagons and Radiant Gems.
• Priestess Revisions
• Changed Clairvoyance III to Clairvoyance II
• Changed Clairvoyance IV to Clairvoyance III
• Reduced Summoning Spellbooks to 1 (from 3)
• Increased Enchanting Spellbooks from 2 to 4.
• Added recipe for Staff of Life for Priestess
• Added recipe for Guardian Blade.
• Added recipe for Axe of Holy Fury.
• Added recipe for Bow of the Fallen Star.
• Added Staff of Life, a staff which not only does increased damage vs. shadow creatures, but also can heal all your allies during combat.
• Tweaked Guardian Blade, a blade which makes the wielder more likely to counterattack those who attack him
• Added Axe of Holy Fury, an axe which rallies against the damage inflicted upon the World of Elemental.
• Added Bow of the Fallen Star, a powerfully accurate bow which does not like the Undead.
• Added Fallen Star to the list of craftable ingredients.
• Renamed Inquisition to Clerical Sanctuary
• Moved several skills around to make them line up in logical paths.
• Added Plate Boots, Plate Helm, and Plate Chestplate (only sovereign without even chainmail armor in the forging skill)
• Added Iru Elixir to Priestess
• Created new skill "Divine Items".
• Added Staff of Life Recipes, Guardian Blade, Axe of Holy Fury, and Bow of the Fallen Star to Divine Items ability for Priestess.

Generally the Priestess Sovereign paths are for using Destiny, improving army and other stuff.  She's got better crafting options now (she couldn't craft armor before) and her spell selection will be different (with less Summoning and more Enchanting).  Her divine items are pretty nice too.

Gonna start working on a different sovereign this week, maybe the Tyrant.

Ok, so totally got an idea to replace the Tyrant.  I'm not sure to call it the Usurper or the Betrayer, but it's basically a Fallen Apprentice type who betrays the Sorcerer King at the very end and claims the Forge.  He'd keep a lot of the Tyrants skills, but he'd have a different starting army (more trogs and the like) than the others.  His starting quests would be different too because of his background.

Thoughts?

sounds great to me (both what you've done and the Tyrant changes).

Hi bmorris2,

i am going to give the priestess a go tomorrow. Just fiddling around just now i noticed that spells now cost double mana (try bountiful harvest on the starting city for example). So proably the CoreSpells.xml will have to to into the ..Sorcererking/Data/English folder instead of the mods folder.

The changes look good, maybe chain recipes would be enough instead of plate, she is a healer after all

I am tinkering around with replayability too, what i want to do is making the heroes which can be earned by allying with minor factions available as starting heroes (and tweaking them a bit in the process).

Since i was already using your modified CoreUnits.xml, would you mind incorporating my changes (when they are finished) in your mod?

Right now i am trying to figure out how to make the heroes available as a starting group in the "Customize Your Sovereign" screen at the beginning of the game, maybe you have an idea how to do that?

Yeah, I noticed that too (concerning spell costs).  I know how to fix it, so I'll do it for the next one.

I gave her plate to make it a little different than everyone else.

I saw some of your changes and planned on incorporating them in.  This week has been a bit more hectic than I wanted with work, so I'm a little slow this week.

I'll look into it.  I think I know how to do it, let me double-check and I'll get back to you.

Ok, figured out the how to make the other champions a starting champion choice.  You will need to look in CoreUnits_Champs.xml.

It's relatively simple to change, but I'm not sure what it will do if you also have that faction in the game.  To add a leader as a new choice, add this to the unit at the very end

That should allow you to have them as a choice to start the game.

Any chance of adding in allowing using 2 iron to craft 1 fine iron, 2 horses to craft one Wolf pelt/hide (representing leather from cows and horses) and somewhere between 2 and 10 crystal to craft 1 Fine Crystal?

Also will this mod work with SK 1.5? (Also thanks for making it)

EDIT - tried it with 1.5 and it works fine

Also where do i install it to? Can't see any mods folder in the sorcerer king folder

p.s Thanks again for making this mod - before the Priestess was pretty mcuh useless - now a lot of fun to play and very different from the other sovereigns

The Divine Weapons are a nice idea - i like it - but they aren't nearly good enough. The Guardian Blade is no better than a Hunter's Shortsword (in some ways worse as +10 extra vs beasts is more use than 2 extra counter-attacks and they each give +6 attack vs all.

The attack on the Bow is pretty good but what use is an extra bonus against undead? Only undead in the game seem to be skeletons which are very weak (unless harbingers are undead?)

Maul on the axe is nice but its other stats aren't good enough that i'd replace say a serrated shortsword or a shadow broadsword with one.

The Divine Weapons should all really be better than any weapon you can craft or get from drops ordinarily imo.

The Tower of Prayer and Temple buildings seem to be broken - can't build them anywhere once i get the sovereign skills for them. The Holy Wrath spell doesn't seem to show up in the spell book anywhere either.

Would this mod work with The Rivals?