Here is the first topic I'll reply to:

(Luved asks)
"I believe the 2018 approach to cities and villages was OK. You can disagree, it's fine. IMO, if custom factions need 2 cities each, they should not steal native cities. The map can look more densely populated and with more 'content' if you just make new towns and villages. This would break saves potentially, so you could include it in bigger updates that would break saves anyways.

Praven is 'drow' and uses vanilla interior, those cities don't need custom interiors which 'will take 4 months'. Don't be a perfectionist."

The issue here is not whether a town or village could be added, but something more strategic. Towns too close to each other need villages close by, and placing each town, village, and castle needs scenes. As mentioned a scene can be recycled but in 2018 a casual cut and paste of a town with a rotated orientation caused the siege scene to look like an avalanche hit it, with buildings half buried and other problems.

That might be a "feature" if the intention was to show an ancient and lost walled center, or emptied villages, or something like this. But otherwise there is a technical layer of editing height to match the scene wherever something lands.

After that, every new town needs trade routes set up and initialized, and more trade routes mean more caravans or sea traders are created, which increases party count. I don't mind boosting party count as I have tools to monitor the count in near real time, but it remains something to consider.

For now, my greatest concern is "mission creep", where every few days instead of moving the mod to its goal some new things becomes the hot potato of the day and everything gets dropped because someone somewhere (sometimes me) wants to go chase a shiney that could have been skipped in order to make the mod something that would have made sense 10-15 years ago but by now is bleeding my life away to make a mod that will always be second best and feel a lot like every damned mod ever. Why? Is that it?

If I have to monkey with a map, I'd much rather have a tile of maps and flip one at a time (difficult, Warband loads the map early and it is difficult to change on the fly), or at least oversized by pasting the existing map maybe at the right edge over by the shadow portals so it is two height maps looking identical side by side, and now place ruined cities on the "shadow" side with much stronger/dreadful opponents than on the "positive" side. I could then cover that side with fog and let people explore it a little at a time, like in late 2017/early 2018 in the pre v150 series (aka the first 50 generations of my remake of Guspav's mod base). We are at v160 but that hides 30 or so incremental changes, mostly not causing a new savegame layout and thus not changing the major version.

Technically this Steam version "C" should be v161 but I wanted to save that for a coop campaign version this summer, where dynamic dungeons accept a team and the rogue finally becomes useful.

I am kind of disappointed with the tone of all of this, but assuming you really do think my time is worthless and you still consider YOUR time too precious to donate, then I suppose there it is. The so-called "Mexican standoff" so popular in spaghetti westerns.

If you were for example Guspav under a nom de plume, I could ask you why didn't you come backto your own mod and do something with it those 6 years I was gone? But I might as well ask the wind. At least I did something; maybe not the best but something. But jamming me for the mod being "in transition" is a little tight. If you think your vision is better, get out and help. Source is already on your computer - just look for it. I update it EVERY update on Steam.

I've got a few observations regarding the mod's current features/behaviour of which I'm unsure whether they're bugs, Work In Progress, or working as intended.

Mind addressing them? There's no need for a lengthy justification, even just "Bug", "WIP" or "Intended" is fine.
I'll keep posting new things as I find them.

- Players are expected to choose classes on character creation, without any in-game hint as to what the benefits/drawbacks are.
- Fireball and Ice Storm are not AoE spells, despite being presented as such.
- The Four Ways Inn special items merchant, once asked to describe an item, has no dialogue option to return to his catalog, only to either buy or end dialogue entirely.
- The Four Ways Inn gnomish bank won't add interest to your savings after you hit 33k gold, but I don't recall seeing this specific limit mentioned by the NPC.
- The player cannot acquire non-clay golems from the mage faction.

" Players are expected to choose classes on character creation, without any in-game hint as to what the benefits/drawbacks are."
Have you read the guides posted in the "Guides and References" discussions? These have links to google docs slideshows walking through how to use the mod. Some people stopped reading them when one page (of 30! per booklet) bored them. There are > 130 slides.

Fireball and Ice Storm do indeed work as AoE spells, but had a detonation issue where the scale of their radius kept changing. This should be addressed within a few days. It works already for me but I am changing other aspects of magic today and looking at a stability issue seen at mid game else I'd release a patch even sooner.

Exiting the dialog and talking again to the merchant opens the cycle as if you never left. For that matter, so long as you purchase before the next timer update (each 48 hours, but you don't know how far along the timer was when you spoke to the merchant so best to think "maximum 48 hours") you can buy more than one of whatever is listed, one at a time.

33K at the bank was a limitation Guspav had, that I kept for old time's sake. I mention it in one of the patch notes but I could remove that limit to make managing funds easier.

"the player cannot acquire non Clay golems". You can actually. But you have to think outside the box. Clay is offered up until you get +25 faction with the Mageocracy. You could join the faction, rescue their patrols often, or migrate one of your owned towns to Mageocracy faction and start recruiting silver golems. I mentioned that in one of the booklets but in passing, and nobody actually reads them, they just come here to claim something is bugged when that something is reading homework.

I was thinking about your belief that area effect spells do not detonate, and if after today's update you STILL do not see the spell detonate, maybe you are wearing heavy metallic armor and it is pulling down your effective magic ability to below the minimum needed for the spell to perform the magic layer, and thus only seeing the non magical container damage. Look at each armor slot you wear for minuses on magic, and add up the pluses and minuses from gear, divide by 3, and add to your magic skill. This is how the mod calculates whether to boost or weaken your spell's base damage, but also AoE spells have minimums to detonate the magic layer:
Fireball, Lightning: 5
Ice Storm: 6

Take your heavy armor off if in doubt. I don't really care that every mod wants big armor. You want EFFECTIVE armor, and big armor is for clerics that are likely more buff than you are. Your equipped staff adds a small bonus as well, provided you actually have it equipped. It just does not show the value because it is not an "armor".

As for the concept that the mod should not be shared with the public if there isn't a book that lists every detail, well, maybe you're right. Come back in 5-6 years if you want to wait for it to "finish" or if you get tired of waiting on one person to do everything, including spoon feed, hope for some community to step up and help out. Years ago some people helped Guspav, and in the early days there were people willing to write, but I guess once the new mod seemed like an over the hill mod the excitement faded. I'm still here coding but if I made every literature anyone could ask for, it comes at the expense of coding. I guess that means I can play it, and a few others, but someone will always feel left out. As far as a book for how to play each class, I guess that's a great idea for next summer, when I have time. I expect a break sometime by then, but by then a mod or two will have emerged from this, doing new tricks and possibly letting you do it together with friends. Until then, every little detour is a delay.

Right now though there ARE several issues with mid game stability. You will, eventually, crash a bit, usually during a save game. The save actually finishes, but you end up loading Warband and that save and continuing from there. Non WSE2 mode takes almost 50 seconds to load Warband on my SSD enabled I7 desktop. WSE2 mode takes 17 seconds. I'd say that is the main reason I use WSE2, that and it is trivial to constantly make new characters and then load in all the grinding to get the economy built via my custom Lua enabled campaign import and export. But if you trip up on basic how to use the mod you probably will never get to the point of using those.

Maybe I'll write a manual in February. I need to remake book 5 anyway, it is out of date and both the WSE2 experience and the import/export cycle are changed greatly since early summer. I should also write how to tune battle size, something that currently is posted haphazardly on Discord.

I double-checked my previous post.

No, no, I definitely did write "I'm unsure whether they're bugs, Work In Progress, or working as intended - please clarify, don't justify". I did not write "I disagree with your choices, and please write yet more books about the mod".

I will try to be as plain as possible: I am not outright judging your vision for what your mod should be. Hence my request for you not to waste time on explaining it when something like "Fireball and Ice Storm should be AoE spells, check X or Y" is sufficient.

It's not immediately clear what your vision is, because the mod is possibly the most mechanically ambitious yet haphazard work in progress I've seen from one singular Warband modder, even including the fact that you're not the original creator.
That makes it difficult to determine what is and is not intended mod behavior.

The only thing I disagree with you on is the twofold decision of
1.) writing entire books on the mod when you're still changing it so radically, then
2.) storing said books outside the player's field of view.

Yes, a Discord server and even the Guide section on the Steam Workshop forum is "outside the player's field of view".
It really is, because the process of installing and playing Warband and any module does not include showing you which guides are there, never mind the fact of how rare it is that you'd "need" one for a Warband module.

That said, I read your post mentioning "WSE2" offhand and a lightbulb went off in my head. I have prior experience with Script Extenders from other games but hadn't seen any news about one for Warband, never mind a second iteration.
I'm gonna get that set up and then get back to you on my second point - I hope it fixes the spellcasting.

As for your replies to my other points:
- Just put the phrase "Check the Steam Workshop guide for details on classes!" or similar on the char creation screen. That'll do the job for anyone playing a Warband mod in 2025.

- What I meant is that it's convenient to have a dialog option for the specific purpose of going
back from the Inn merchant's item explanation and purchase dialog menu to his item catalog menu.

- Although I personally would like a higher interest accrual ceiling, as I think it fits the idea of a "Powerful fantasy foreign banking organisation", that's not what my observation is about.
I recommend changing the banker's dialogue so they will tell the player the exact interest accrual limit.

- OK, then I'm clearly suffering from a bug, because I've been above 30 relation with the Mageocracy for multiple weeks and still couldn't find any golems except clay golems offered for recruitment in Yalen or Wizard Tower.

All great points.
There was a booklet I started in 2018 that I did not include because it is difficult to show pictures and the in-game help framework is limited to a few sentences. I suppose those sentences could point back to discussions on Steam.

For mageocracy relation, click Reports: View Relations Report (page 2) with prejudices: find the faction you joined and intersect the mages column. "Player relation" shown at left is actually the prejudice score from your current troops composition, but not really showing the raw faction relation to player's faction. Before you join a faction (or create your own) they are fairly neutral; most factions will have a low opinion of you if you make your own faction since you will be weak at first. You definitely need to boost your relation with Mageocracy to see first 3 clay golems at a time as an option, then 2 stone, then 2 iron, and finally at 50+ 2 silver golems.

When you own a town you can "manage town" to spend 15-20K dinars to "migrate the population", and setting the town to Mageocracy will let you recruit as if you were within that faction, only the town relation score is very high when you own the town, so you will recruit from a better standing. You can also lower taxes to a town to boost relation, talk to your chamberlain for that.

As for taking over from Guspav, both of us have as an external reference Dungeons and Dragons from the 1980s and 70s. I suppose that means for the "modern" generation the lore is gone, but it was ubiquitous at one point in time.

The interest ceiling is removed as of yesterday, check your weekly bank statement.
When not whipped into writing books I sometimes code.

theres an missing text in the command when clicking F2 str not found row 1 or something

It's a next week problem, too close to release to chase right now. I have a small patch planned shortly, since it's not February yet.

Bringing a PC Vampire idea over from the general comments, that's something I'd consider funding. I imagine they wouldn't constitute a faction under themselves, rather individuals that blend in with the communities they prey upon. To that end, they wouldn't need any custom armors or weapons. Maybe unarmed has a Leech Sword effect for life drain? Day and night strength and weakness buff. Spells would make sense for the rest, unless you wanted to make some Vampire-exclusive spells, like a Life Drain effect with a wider range of bats, more like a shotgun. I doubt a Haste with a bat swarm form would be easy to do, however cool it would look. Would it be possible to be a necromancer without becoming a walking skeleton/zombie as a consequence of already being undead?

Perhaps I could find someone else to make some custom faces, if needed, though it might be as simple as some glowing eyes on otherwise normal faces.

Anyway, I'd be more than happy to discuss this as a commission, if that's how you like to handle it. And I'd be delighted to help with the writing. I've been writing for TTRPGs for over a decade, and it would be nice to put some video game writing on my resume, even if it's a mod rather than a whole IP for a company.

Does this sound interesting at all?

However you slice it, this is an amazing mod, and my hat's off to you, even if this proposition isn't your kind of thing.

I will consider it for 2025 version, which I need to focus on for a couple weeks. We can talk about it next month, on discord perhaps.

I'll reach out then and there. Looking forward to it!

Thanks so much for bringing this mod back to life. Your efforts are appreciated.
Rivacheg sieges don't work right now, the troops just stand outside town and never try to climb the ladder. NPC clerics can kill 30 enemy troops around them with one flamestrike. Makes sacreligious fundamentalists even more frightening, and the blazing order downright impossible at maximum difficulty. The player's cleric abilities seem to be nerfed pretty hard, however. It may be how you want it, but positive energy is not worth using at all and there is no turn undead at all that I can see.

Turn undead happens by timer and probably 30 troops falling at once is coming from all of the clerics casting spells by timed action at the same time - both harm as a point blank AoE and flamestrikes which are always single targets per caster, but which also will happen by timer. If you had 30 different clerics casting flamestrike then you could have 30 different targets, sure.

Turn undead for the player is shown for paladins only if they have not used their lay hands, as they share the same timer. The timer resets each 117 seconds by the way, and again outside battle after about an hour.

The blazing hand should be frightening if you are focused on undead.
Otherwise my advice for clearing sacreligous fanatics is to build 1/3rd mages, 1/3rd clerics and one third tanky troops. You could recruit elves, drow, or mage factions to flesh out the mage portion, and there should be more cleric support now when recruiting from the town recruit menu option if you have high relations with the faction.

As for Rivacheg, I will look at that later. As you know, I will be busy with a new version the next few months so updates to 2024 will be infrequent. I did catch a few mistakes at 2024 so far but do not want to lose focus on what I am doing NOW for something that I am replacing soon enough.
If Rivacheg is truly broken I can swap it for some other town, Sargoth for example. I'm not married to any of Guspav's locations; I do mechanics, not lore or scenes.

For 2025 I will add a value to battles to cut magic or cleric effects by some fraction, depending on the date and location (there may be blessed or cursed locations nearby, checked once at start of battle and then placed as a global variable for the duration of the battle). Even adding a single global variable breaks savegames, so remakes of entire systems because someone feels they are too powerful means everyone loses their game in progress. I'd much rather put it into 2025 and then at least it is a planned break in the savegame.