[HOM Edition] [Stable] Harry's Overhaul Mod for At the Gates

[Harry]

Like many of you, I found the fundamentals of the game solid and ideas intriguing. Thank you Jon for getting it to here largely by yourself! However, many aspects are lacking, and as design decisions (such as food-stored-as-quantity VS food as number of turns) shifted, occupations, pricing, difficult arc and many other aspects quickly got very unbanlanced IMHO.

So I made a mod for myself in order to enjoy the game. After spending many, many hours on it, I figured it makes sense to share it with everyone! You can get it here:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/hom

This mod uses exposed configs to balance the game without changing its feel, providing more mid game challenges, reward strategic/long term decision-making, and put fun and balance above all else. The mod is also more stable than base game (so LESS CRASH).

Main features:

• New professions, new events, differentiated resources.
  
• Reworked most professions to include synergy and side effects
  
• Buffed some early professions while drastically lowering the effectiveness of top-tier professions for a challenging mid and late game experience
  
• Better goody huts
  
• Rebalanced clan traits
  
• More player choice events
  
• More diverse occupational effects
  
• Clans can have more traits and clans are more differentiated
  
• Family size improves production (so large clans do more than just eat more food)
  
• Slow clan growth early game, much faster late game compared to vanilla (the 80th clan requires 13K of fame instead of 1.5M, for example)
  
• Caravan prices and behavior adjustments
  
• Faction unique power balanced
  
• Addressed some base game bugs (such as a degraded logger getting a tiny fraction of timber instead roughly half)
  
• Settlement starts packed; takes 2 turns to unpack
  
• Differentiated livestock (now cows != sheep)
  
• Animal stock grows organically
  
• Rebalanced resource deposits' exhaustion, decay and weather-related behaviors

It seeks to rebalance the professions, food, clans, fame etc for a more engaging gameplay. I plan on updating it rapidly as feedback comes in, and appreciate any help making it more complete (Top of the list for missing features: updating all the in game help text to reflect more accurate what does what)

Known issues:

• The game concept type of help texts are not exposed to be updated, as a result some of them are out of date (for example, punishing a clan results in -2 mood change, not -1 as in game text suggests)
  
• The game engine does not force player to make a choice for choose-one events; it could be skipped. This is likely a bug. Please do not exploit it.
  
• Some effects (such as traits that require upkeep or provides resources each turn) does not always update right away; this is again a bug in the base game. Making the settlement produce fame and $ will trigger a recalculate and fix the error. (clicking that button will do the trick; you can immediate change your mind and tell your settlement to do something else)

Download, play & enjoy
-Harry

Like my mod? Buy me a coffee! Thanks :) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/harrygames

[clayffo]

can you provide a more detailed explanation of how to and where to paste this data into???

[Harry]

Game directory! So if you are using steam, right click on the game (same for any steam games), Properties, Local Files, Browse Local files. It should take you to the game directory (you'll see at the gates.exe among other files). Paste into there. The mod will overwrite some files inside of /Content, so it's recommended that you back it up first. (If you didn't, you could always revert simply by going back to Steam, right click on game, Properties, Local Files, Check game integrity.

Hope that helps!

BTW, new version just posted.

[clayffo]

i extracted the zip file into C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Jon Shafer's At the Gates and nothing happened. i also copied the files into the content folder to see what would happen. it added some files but nothing really happened. opened the game again and it's the same.

this is not my thing. i'll jt play vanilla and move on

[Harry]

You didn't get a "Replace or Skip Files" warning about 70 files of the same name already exist? You should extract the zip file (which contains /Content folder).

[clayffo]

I did some web browsing and I think I got it to work. There are some obvious changes like lorekerper costing 5 parch

I’ll play it a bit later tonight and give feedback

[clayffo]

Here are some of my opinions of this mod. i will update this as i go

Likes
- increased wood gathering is good, could be better though. at least it's progress
- same with iron
- overall the game is much more playable. difficult on hard but not stupid difficult like 1.3


Dislikes:
- everyone -1 happiness. The thing is there is not a way to do a group happiness buff unless you get a good roll on a clan. If you're going to do this, add a perk into the skill tree

- loremaster parchment is an unnecessary barrier to slow this game down. lvl 1 skills should not be impeded like this because the game takes too long as it is.

- scribe was my go to from lorekeeper for 50 parchment. not happy this changed. 20 fine cloth is an end game kind of training cost
- i don't care at all for 2 turns to pack up a tribe
- war horses seem kinda broken to produce. ive had numerous ocassions where i'll have 20 horses but it will say there's a lack of source material?
- with Lombards (who can't gather), logger should produce higher wood count. it's actually less than a wood collector.
- I don't know if you have access to this or not, but it would be nice if the galley could hold more than 1 clan at a time? maybe 3 or 4?


RECOMMENDATIONS:
- There needs to be a way to make money in the game other than cheesing the broken pillage mechanic on other players. Traders should get +25 gold / turn to start and 50% buffs for each upgrade after that + apprenticeship bonuses and guildmaster

- gold mines should pay out better. a standard gold mine having 25G/ turn not upgraded is not so great considering it's a gold mine. if a piece of fruit costs 1 gold, then a nugget of gold should be worth a lot more.

- game does some whacky things with this mod. for example, if you have animals in your inventory, you get growth from a ranch, even if you don't have a ranch for that particular animal. also, if you spawn a rancher, sometimes it will give you credit for animal growth without having any ranches

also i built the gold mine and automatically went to 1000 gold?

I was building war horses as my cash cow. it was doing some odd things like sometimes it would make 9.7 / turn , sometimes 8.4 / turn. sometimes show as can't make them even though i have horses. dont' know if that due to winter production issues?

I don't know if you have access to these files or not, but it would be nice to add a + happiness trait to the honor professions. maybe priest or guildmaster?

PLEASE POST UPDATES FOR THIS MOD. i found 3.1 by pure accident

[Harry]

Thanks for the feedback.

I believe you are right on the -1 happiness; it was meant as a quick and dirty nerf across the board (that I only wanted to apply at higher difficulty levels, but at the moment that's not possible to mod...###Jon, wink wink, in case you want to expose a few more xml tags to difficulty levels that'd be FANTASTIC). I'll remove it once I find another way to balance the mid game.

I understand your points on the slowdown of research. It was deliberate; I enjoy a slower paced game which is in part what this mod allows you do (you can, for example, go up to 100 clans each holding 30 families if you had a serious fame engine, whereas in the base game you really can't ever get past 60 even if you throw half of your clans towards fame). I'll consider making a fast-paced variant down the road (### Jon, "game speed" seems like a request for the base game rather than mods.).

I'm heartened by "overall the game is much more playable" :)

Finally, there are so many ways to make a stupid amount of money in this mod compared to base game. I recommend you explore some divergent strategies beyond Trader, such as livestock breeding (animals now slowly but surely breed), OR warhorse/wool collector/cheesemaker paths (depends on the animals around you), OR caravan arbitrage (Caravan now pays 3X for goods it needs instead of 2x, and shortage/excess odds increased), OR "dieting" (fruit are $1 each, whereas fancier diets are $3. Eating cheap stuff and selling fancy food nets you some money if you have the food surplus to pull this off), OR one of many, many mid-to-high tier professions that now provides money....there are other less obvious ways to get rich that I won't list here for you to discover.

[clayffo]

yes i'll play the mod more tomorrow and continue with my comments. i'm only at about turn 80 so far .

updates will be edited onto the existing list

[geepope]

TBH I'm not sure this mod sounds like it's for me, making "hard" difficulty easier and longer is exactly the opposite of what I'd want out of the game. Still, glad to see people are taking things into their own hands, good luck with the mod!

[Harry]

Originally posted by geepope:

TBH I'm not sure this mod sounds like it's for me, making "hard" difficulty easier and longer is exactly the opposite of what I'd want out of the game. Still, glad to see people are taking things into their own hands, good luck with the mod!

Thanks! Your comment made me realize that I should probably actually sit down and list out main features and design decisions done.

To clarify, the mod does not actually make the game easier or longer; it seeks to balance the mid-late game. So it's "easier" in that it smooths out the difficulty curve a bit (so early game is easier, but plenty of additional challenges in mid game on) and it might be "longer" as a result of...well, you surviving a couple of winters before the game kicks your butt in, say, year 4. I expect a "full game" to last no longer than vanilla. Of course, like any other mod makers out there, I'm doing it for myself and there is no reason to assume it'd be everybody's cup of tea :) I just want to make sure you skip it for the right reasons!

[ephemeraltoast]

This doesn't sound like exactly what I'm looking for ("Clans can have more traits and clan management becomes a bigger deal" oh good more epicure lepers to send off to die in glorious battle lol) but I'm happy to see people taking the fine base material here and trying to hammer it into a full and finished game. Thanks for posting.

[FunkyGroovyGuy]

Harry - Thanks for doing this! I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I agree with ephemeraltoast; I love that people like you are putting some time in to improve a great game that is really unfinished. Looking forward to giving it a try!

[Harry]

Originally posted by FunkyGroovyGuy:

Harry - Thanks for doing this! I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I agree with ephemeraltoast; I love that people like you are putting some time in to improve a great game that is really unfinished. Looking forward to giving it a try!

Thank you Funky (and Ephemeral and rest of ya :) for your support! Looking forward to feedback and, at least for the foreseeable future, I'll be continuing to use the feedback to enrich the mod and go from bugfix/balance mode quickly go into visions a bit more grand!

[Ryan42]

Thanks for doing this! Finally an actual mod!

I've also done similar things although mine is far from finished and I didn't get to text changes.

But looking at the one XML file alone I found that this has to be too easy. 7% resource production per family? That's just crazy. I experimented with 1% and it was already too easy and it made the numbers too ugly (which I suspect Jon can't handle, nor many other players)

now Fortunately this is easy to change for myself.

I think an easier way to to make early game easier and mid to late game harder is to increase the max numbers of family and increase both the newFamilyAfterTurnsBase and subsequentFamilyArrivalDiscountPercent to compensate for that so that it spreads out. Spreading it out also allows you to increase the Familyfoodcost to levels much higher to make it harder. I'm playing on 0.8 right now, I give every clan a little extra food to start, but generally this method only work if resourceproduction per family is 2% or less, as else it will just scale the food food production too much

[Ryan42]

On a more positive note, some of your changes are really creative and complex (compared to my changes) and I'll definitely copy some of these methods. So really thanks for that, it's awesome!