I found a way to fix the Tome requirements, thanks to "Tome Limit"

Uploaded it here: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3313196020

I thought I found the option to increase the tomes needed for the next tier, but whatever I change in there, it does not change the amount of tomes required in game.
I couldn't find a mod that changed the amount of tomes required as well or I would have "stolen" it from there.

If anyone has more ideas or find a mod that does exactly that, I wouldn't mind changing this mod to "fix" the tome requirement.

(2/2)

This Mod adds a new Tome to grant all the abilities to the Heroes therefore no second Tier 1 tome is needed to get to choose a Tier 2 tome.
It would be possible (and easy) to change all those abilities to a different tome and remove the tome it grants extra, but then everyone would be forced to choose this Tier 1 tome or miss out on background skills alltogether.
It is not possible to just add the skills to all Tier 1 Tomes without creating all 73 skills 14 additional times from scratch as there is no copy/paste function and then also add all those new skills in the exclusion list of each other, or you could end up choosing the same skill or multiple skills as many times as you have Tier 1 tomes. (The AI will certainly do that)

(1/2)

Hello,
When I have this mod enabled it appears to be changing how the tome progression works, and is only requiring completion of a single Tier 1 tome before Tier 2 tomes are unlocked. I'm guessing this is unintentional.

For reference, normally you need two Tier 1 tomes before Tier 2's are unlocked.

And just to confirm, I tested this with ONLY this mod enabled and NO other mods, and it was still causing this behaviour.

I also like the idea @GorishiDan proposed

@J I had this too. I hope this could get fixed because I hate the RNG with the hero bacjrounds and how its also impossible to cycle the pool of heroes. This mod is great for that but i dont want that random tome buff

Doesnt work. Maybe because i cant even recruit lvl 1 hero, they all above that all the time.

@J & @General Jah
Changing the way how the skills are unlocked, or increasing the amount of tomes needed for the next tier by 1 would probably both work. But I don't know if the latter is even possible with the tools and the first option would probably mean remaking the mod from scratch. I'm not familiar enough with making mods for the game to try either.

@glaikit Were you able to find a fix for this mod? Seems awesome and I want to use it but not if its bugged.

thanks!

@Glaikit Mayfly
Did you happen to find a solution?

@J
I had the same issue. Dug around the mod files and the skills are unlocked through a tome given to everyone. So you start with an extra tome, making all tiers unlock a tome earlier.

So im having a really weird bug, dont know if it is a mod conflict but it only happens with this mod. When this mod is installed as soon as the first tome is installed it goes straight to tier 2 tomes. Have anyone else experienced this?

Taking @GorishDan's idea, could you make one that limits it to 2 background skills, so that both we and the Ai gotta be picky about how where we want to focus our heros ? and maybe only allowing the ruler (if doable) to have 3. that would help making our rules more valuable and unique when compared to heros, and not just one more.

One of my favorite mods and I agree with GorishiDan's idea. That's exactly what I thought of too.

I agree with @GorishiDan so that we can make better choice.

I agree with @GorishiDan as I had been thinking the same thing.

could you make a version that limits it to 1 of each? like only 1 governance, 1 leadership and 1 combat. max of 3 background skills. 1 of each category. there's a lot of cool traits there and limiting to only 1 amongst so many doesn't feel fun and unrestricted is broken as the AI will just choose a barrage of background traits

another middling version would be

1) hero can pick a max of FIVE background traits
2) picking a background traits will no longer exclude it from other empire heroes

if a middling version of your mod is not created I will try the unrestricted version to see how OP it really is

to be clear this version of your mod allows a hero to pick ONE trait from among the governance, leadership, & combat trait categories (what you call the background traits) but allows a hero to pick anything (with vanilla game prerequisites in some cases) from the warfare, battle mage, & support trait categories. once ONE background trait is selected that trait is not available to other heroes in your empire

while not wanting the other version of the mod which places no restrictions on background traits I would like a version somewhat in the middle

1) hero can pick a max of TWO background traits
2) picking a background traits will no longer exclude it from other empire heroes

with these restrictions I can put preacher & resourceful on 2 or 3 heroes to lead 2 or 3 army stacks

Very considerate of you to offer a mirror for the previous versions!

@Ghoulvarine
Sadly, I do not think anyone has made a full list of all hero traits. The available options in the hero skills menu is probably the only easy way of getting information on all the background traits right now.

Heads up, update probably requires a new game. The old mod files are available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tLkGW0GA7OZ8-quyXQuXjpM4eiVs3uaH .

Awesome! Thanks again for your great work!

Where can one find a list of all the hero traits? The wikis don't seem to have this info. It would be nice to be able to read up on all of them instead of having to look for them in the recruitment pool.

If anyone experiences any bugs with the latest version please let me know!

@アンジェル
Done!

Awesome! Many thanks on behalf of the GOG.com and Epic Games Store players!

@アンジェル
I will look to upload my mods through Paradox either today or tomorrow along with a new update.

The new update will allow for players to have heroes with the same background hero skills and make all 73 background hero traits into hero skills. I had previously stated that incorporating affinity-related background traits would be impossible. However, after I played around with scripting, I was able to make a somewhat janky solution. I will make each of these affinity-related background hero skills unrespeccable and only unlockable by 1 hero per player.

Hi Anooooj, would you consider sharing your Age of Wonders 4 mods via Paradox Mods as well? That way players who uses the GOG.com and Epic Games Store version of the game could enjoy your mods too. A few players have expressed their interest but could not reach out to you because they do not own the game on Steam (so they cannot download or comment on Steam Workshop for AoW4). What do you think?

Thanks in advance!

Thank you for your response!

Entirely reasonable.

Also, bonus affinity background traits work differently from all other traits, so it is currently impossible to turn them into hero skills given the available modding tools. (Hero skills are hard-coded to grant unit properties and colony properties. On the other hand, background traits not only grant those properties but also grant player properties. Affinity bonuses are player properties.) To make it so that all recruitable heroes are equal, I went ahead and decided to make the traits not appear (as I did for all other background traits.) Even if it were possible to make the affinity background traits into hero skills, there would be serious balance concerns, particularly since they could potentially be respecc abused (by getting an affinity hero skill, picking a high tier tome, and then respeccing.) I could potentially try and give every hero an affinity background trait, but then recruiting heroes would become RNG again.

Since it has been requested so much, I will remove the restriction on players having heroes with the same background skills sometime soon (unless there are other opinions.)

I just want to note that the affinity bonus as governor trait contributes to tome unlocking and not just empire tree bonuses. Depending on the playthrough, this could be very important, so I am not sure removing them is the best idea (sorry if I misunderstood, but it sounds like this mod removes those traits). I can see that this could be abusable, and I am not sure if there is a way to implement it in a way where it can't be abused (maybe only can be picked once for your whole roster? Not sure if this is possible...) Just wanted to make you aware.

Agreed with Thekiyokid, by vanila I believe you can have redundent hero skills, so I don't mind and infact would enjoy the ability to stack up heroes so I could say, recruit ogres in all my cities.

Similarly, it would be cool to have the 'affinity' traits available as their own mutually exclusive, you can pick just one of the six, traits, so they could be acquired on heroes.

Fully unrestricted feels very unbalanced, but those two changes would be cool, that said I appreciate this just being available in general so thank you!

Tight mod! Thanks for making this! Would it be possible to make this exact mod (Most restrictions are vital) but where multiple heroes CAN have the same background? The unrestricted version is a lil much, but I love the idea of identical heroes

No worries. I actually partly thought it might have been a mod conflict on my end. I don't have any mods that alter skills or heroes, but you never know. Thanks for the quick reply, and I'll add that I really like this mod!

Actually, after testing, it turns out that you cannot queue abuse these units so allowing respeccing isn't that much of an issue.

Respeccing is now allowed so it should be fine. The only reason I have been concerned with respeccing is because skills like Friend of Ogres allow people to spam their draft queue with ogre units (up to tier 4 at level 1!) and then respecc. I will look into AI changes in the future.

That is a good point. I put the AI preference for background skills on high for this version since I wanted AI (non-player) to pick the skills first but forgot about higher level heroes... I will change it for respeccing and test other AI settings.

I've run into an issue. I just recruited my first hero with this mod. Heroes have assigned skills if they're beyond level 1, so I didn't get to choose which background trait to add. I attempted to reset the skills to choose, but the mod doesn't refund the point spent in background traits. Further, since it's no longer a background trait per usual mechanics, you can't see which trait the heroes have prior to recruiting them. This makes this mod, outside of level 1 heroes and the leader, marked worse off then vanilla. Let me know if I got something wrong.

I'm also leaning towards uncapping another one at, say, every 5 levels, similar to the special abilities we do get.

Ah, gotcha. Yeah I'd like that restriction removed since we're already skewing the vanilla balance. I do respect the reasoning though!

Since there are 73 different background traits in vanilla, it is incredibly unlikely that you will get the same background traits on different heroes. Additionally, since some background traits are significantly better than other ones and there is no RNG anymore, players will naturally select only a small subset of the available traits. To try and maintain a somewhat vanilla-like balance, I made that restriction.

Looks good! My one gripe is this restriction "For each player, any 2 heroes cannot have the same background hero skill." Any balance reasons behind this?

Thank you very much!, Anooooj.

Excellent mod, thanks for this! Constantly rerolling heroes and useless rulers were bugging me beyond belief.

@xT0RMENTORx
While I can't really check if a hero meets a certain level. I can check the number of skills they have learned, so it is basically possible.

@Farsight
I made a quick unrestricted version of the mod. That version has no cap on the number of background hero skills you can get (since any cap other than 1 is more time consuming to make.)

Would it be possible to make the second become unlocked at a certain level? I think it'd be pretty reasonable to have say something like level 10 unlock it. A higher level so not every hero has 2 but also allows for you to still be able to reliably get two. Not sure how feasible it is modding wise though