Total War: WARHAMMER II

Total War: WARHAMMER II

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Knights & Nighthuntresses - A Sisters of Avelorn Expansion
   
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Tags: mod, Units
File Size
Posted
Updated
4.240 MB
2 Nov, 2021 @ 10:03am
29 May, 2022 @ 10:15am
3 Change Notes ( view )

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Knights & Nighthuntresses - A Sisters of Avelorn Expansion

Description
The position of Everqueen comes with much influence over the kingdoms of Ulthuan and it's inhabitants. But being responsible for so many souls often necessitates dealing with threats abroad and gathering infomation about the course of events in the wider world. Thus the Nighthuntresses work directly with the Everqueen's Court to evaluate potential threats to the safety of Ulthuan and deal with them appropriately. Whereas the Everqueen's handmaidens deal with matters within Ulthuan, the Everqueen's nighthuntresses deal with matters without.

To better support the Nighthuntresses during their time abroad, sisters are receiving training to fight while mounted, and further enchance the enchantments of their bows, to disrupt the magical defenses of the enemy.


With the rosters of all races receiving updates and maturing, I thought there was room to elaborate on the Sisters of Avelorn unit concept, while adding some more variety for High Elves players.

This mod adds 1 new unit, 1 new legendary hero, 1 reworked regiment of renown (Sisters of Avelorn) and 1 new regiment of renown, for the High Elves



Knights of Avelorn - Unit
Sisters of Avelorn that are skilled on horseback will take to the field mounted on armoured elven steeds - should the situation call for more protection and speed.

How to Acquire
This unit can be recruited from the same building your faction would recruit Sisters of Avelorn, plus an additional building requirement of a Farrier (level 3 cavalry building) in the same province.

This unit can be recruited by all playable High Elves factions

In-Game Effects
Knights of Avelorn are a higher tier of the Sisters of Avelorn unit with a few important improvements - they are much faster and their attacks apply the debuff Dampening - that weakens the magic resistance of the unit they are attacking, meaning more damage for any units in your army that do magic damage.

Notes
Ranged attacks from this unit create a small explosion on impact, dealing damage in an area, rather that a single entity. This should be considered when attacking a unit that one of your friendly units is engaged with, as friendly fire may result should friendly projectiles collide with friendly forces.



The Frostmaidens - Regiment of Renown (Knights of Avelorn)
The stretch of northern Avelorn that borders the Annuli mountains can be particularly cold and teeming with chaos warped beasts. These sisters have overcome both dangers to guard Avelorn's beauty.

How to Acquire
This RoR unit can be found in the recruitment pool for every playable High Elf faction and is unlocked for recruitment once one of your lords reaches level 24.

In-Game Effects
These Knights of Avelorn trade their Dampening attack debuff for the Frostbite speed debuff, along with aura that further slows the speed of nearby enemies. Knights of Avelorn already provide a great opportunity for High Elf players to have high tier cavalry archers that can kite enemy units when used properly. The Frostmaidens further emphasize controlling enemy movement with those sorts of tactics, and trading away some damage in the process.

Notes
KNOWN BUG: The 10 turn respawn timer that affects when a RoR can be recruited after being disbanded or destroyed is broken for modded RoRs. As a result, you'll be able to recruit the unit again without having to wait until CA fixes this bug.



Naera the Nighthuntress - Legendary Hero
Naera's time as a nighthuntress has brought her to every continent in the old and new worlds - tracking skaven warlords in Lustria, hunting down vampires in Sylvania, eliminating khainite assassins in the northlands and disrupting WAAAAGHs in the badlands.

How to Acquire
Naera replaces the generic Handmaiden hero that Allarielle starts with and is thus only available to the Avelorn faction starting out.

In-Game Effects
Being a nighthuntress, Naera represents a more aggressive and direct version of a handmaiden - serving the Everqueen far afield from Ulthuan and its armies. Thus they fight more flexibly, dealing with each mission uniquely, ever ready to dispatch dangerous foes with their Starfire bows.

On the campaign map, Naera has a unique set of character actions that are useful in any situation, whereas she plays much like a Wood Elf Waystalker in battle, being able to get into position unseen, then deal big damage at range.

Notes
Naera is only available when starting a new game with this mod enabled. She will not appear in a game that is in progress



Naera's Nighthuntresses - Regiment of Renown (Sisters of Avelorn)
Particularly dangerous foes can attract the attention of multiple nighthuntresses, who call a night hunt to bring the foe down.

How to Acquire
This RoR unit can be found in the recruitment pool for every playable High Elf faction and is unlocked for recruitment once one of your lords reaches level 32.

This unit replaces the Everqueen's Courtguard (Sisters of Avelorn) regiment of renown for all high elf factions

In-Game Effects
This unit is unique in a few ways, containing far fewer elves than most other high elf units and Starfire - a more powerful version of Dampening. This is because this unit a group of nighthuntresses, each as capable as Naera in battle. As such their numbers and potential are adjusted accordingly.

Developer Commentary
Regiments of Renown are a bit of a weird niche in TW - in a large pitched battles, they kind of get lost in the maelstrom of combat and their uniqueness is less important than the fact that they are just more bodies on the field. But in smaller battles they can be the difference between victory or defeat.

All that being said, I didn't really feel like the Everqueen's Courtguard was all that unique or effective. Their RoR buff Banner of Avelorn is certainly powerful, but winds of magic buffs can be gotten many different ways now that the game is much more mature than at release, so unit felt like wasted lore and combat potential to me.

Conversely, diving into the nighthuntress lore to bring a few of those expert operatives together into a group that would be truly renowned amongst the Sisters of Avelorn - the most experienced, powerful and well travelled of their number, is a more worthy use of RoR slot - in my opinion ;)

Notes
KNOWN BUG: The 10 turn respawn timer that affects when a RoR can be recruited after being disbanded or destroyed is broken for modded RoRs. As a result, you'll be able to recruit the unit again without having to wait until CA fixes this bug.



Thanks and Acknowledgements
Below are a list of great groups I collaborated with and asked questions to get this mod finished:
- Cryswar for the awesome guides they have written and published on steam
- Da Modding Den discord [discord.gg] for helping me troubleshoot issues and give me direction to solve problems that came up when making this

Reported Mod Conflicts
Below is a list of mods others have mentioned had some sort of conflict with this one. See the comments for more details to see if it could apply to your situation should you have troubles:
- Ultimate Lighting + Random Weather Effects
24 Comments
Utopiaone 31 Dec, 2022 @ 10:39pm 
Porting to wh3?
wibble 1 Jun, 2022 @ 8:38am 
Thank you to @yeeclaw & @sillybrit for the conflict fix. Appreciate it.
NeoKorp 30 May, 2022 @ 12:01am 
Tried this with SFO

To be precise, I start a new campaign to see if they are there as Avelorn and other High Elves Faction.

The mod works as far as I can see but I haven't really tried playing with this MOD plus SFO extensively. More testing might be needed to check for errors, bugs, and ect.
yeeclaw  [author] 29 May, 2022 @ 10:19am 
Hey all,

Added a community fix suggested by @sillybrit to fix conflicts with another mod, thanks for putting in the research. If anyone notices anything amiss after updating, as always feel free to sound off here.

Also, I wanted to mention I'm currently working on porting over all my TW:W2 mods to TW:W3. You can expect those versions to be available on the steam workshop shortly after the assembly kit is released (tentatively at the same time as the immortal empires beta in Q3).

Peace
sillybrit 24 May, 2022 @ 8:59pm 
I fixed the conflict with "Legendary High Elven Characters", by removing campaign_group_member_criteria_subcultures & adding campaign_group_member_criteria_factions (with an entry "sunstrider_enable_hef_aethya_hero", "wh2_main_hef_avelorn").

As a note there are also 6 outdated tables: agent_subtypes, ancillaries, land_units, projectiles, unit_special_abilities & unit_variants_colours. They don't have to be updated, but still a good idea.
RedDragon0908 8 Apr, 2022 @ 5:55am 
Hello, I'm the creator of the "Legendary High Elven Characters" mod.
Since I got some conflict reports regarding your mod I decided to contact you.
First of all: i don't looked through your files to narrow things down but I read you writed a script that searches for a generic handmaiden hero and replace it...
My I suggest you use the basic agent spawn script which just adds the hero without deleting any other.
Sure Avelorn then will start with three or two agents at campaign start but is shoul be the most compatible solution aside from writing an submod.
Багряный 26 Mar, 2022 @ 6:08pm 
The only drawback is that the mod conflicts with "Legendary High Elven Characters (Legendary Lords and Ladies)" and Naera dies forever.
Багряный 26 Mar, 2022 @ 5:54pm 
A very good mod, this is exactly what Averlon lacked. CA has lost a lot of its roster. Great job, thanks:steamthumbsup:
TebiCake 25 Nov, 2021 @ 8:19pm 
Soooo remember I love sisters of avelorn? I've been running this extensively on a campaign

Naera isn't immortal. Really feel like she should be
Especially during skirmishes in tilted terrain, knights of avelorn will often do friendly fire even to the same unit
Naera's Nighthuntresses are excessively OP when fighting ranged but will get rekt like they're nothing in melee.
Both RoR dont' have the 10 turn cooldown when killed or dispatched. Feels like a cheat
yeeclaw  [author] 22 Nov, 2021 @ 8:08am 
@All - thanks for doing the debugging with the other mods you are using to figure it out incompatibilities and post them here. As these incompatibilities come up, I'll start adding them to a section in the mod description so it's clear to new users what could cause issues