Core Tier II
Core Tier II
Goal:
This mod is intended to improve pacing and unit scaling into the late game while limiting changes to the overall dynamics or balance of the base game.
It does this by providing Tier II upgrades for all cultural Tier I units, excluding Scouts.
The mod is intentionally limited to Tier II units to assist in pacing in the early game where you can run out of steam between Tier I and Tier III depending on cultural units available. And to help in the late game by extending core troop builds a little further before becoming obsolete.
Expansion for Core DLC units: Core Tier II – DLC
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3080275633
How it’s implemented:
All Tier I Cultural units (excluding scouts) have been copied and scaled to equivalent Tier II stats.
Part of this scaling is handled by the game (changing Tiers automatically assigns defence, resistance and health bonuses).
The other parts (damage, recruit costs, upkeep, unlock buildings etc) have been manually applied by following patterns in the games existing units.
On the whole, a Tier increase (from TI to TII) results in a roughly 20% damage increase, as well as potentially a new passive or active skill (this mod doesn’t add any new skills to the Tier II variants).
Each units’ appearance has been adjusted to make them look slightly more elite (in my opinion) and hopefully visually distinct enough to cue the player on the tier of the unit.
The units still retain the same names of the original Tier I units, but obviously come with a Tier II tag.
AI can recruit the new Tier II units and they will be distributed to the spawn points (on new game).
Note: Tier II Peasant Pikeman has Low Upkeep which reduces its gold upkeep by 25%. This replaces Feudal Training. Tier I Peasant Pikeman still evolve into Defenders.
Side Note (hopefully helpful for other modders):
This mod also fixes the skin bug for mystic arcanists and projections, as well as any other unit using the same overlays.
Removes ‘Colorize’ option from “Component: HandShader – Lightning”, “Component: HandShader – Spirit” in the “Shared_Modularity.rpk” under “Shared Enchantments” so the hand shaders don’t cause unit arms to stay beige regardless of unit skin colour.
Compatibility:
Only the base game is required.
This mod is compatible with all base game Languages.
All unit assets and text are copied from the base game.
This mod makes changes to the Mystic subculture ability links, and as such will not be compatible with mods changing the same entries.
In general this mod should still be highly compatible with all other mods.
The fix removes ‘Colorize’ option from “Component: HandShader – Lightning”, “Component: HandShader – Spirit” in the “Shared_Modularity.rpk” under “Shared Enchantments” so the hand shaders don’t cause unit arms to stay beige regardless of unit skin colour.
This is unlikely to be touched by any other mod, and worse case the bug will just reappear.
Modified Culture_Mystic.rpk, category ‘Culture – Mystic’, entries: ‘Mystic Subculture – Attunement Seekers – Unit Properties’, ‘Mystic Subculture – Spell Arcanists – Unit Properties’, ‘Mystic Subculture – Astral Summoners – Unit Properties’. This was required to add the damage plugin for the TII Arcanist that changes based on culture but retains the animations of the original ability.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
