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Per the thread below, I did a patch changing angels to Ainur/Maia in Vanilla.
The patch is available here:
A couple notes:
The patch is based on the Angband/Staging branch at github, downloaded today (September 4).
The changes in the source are simple. Basically a search and replace of AInu for Angel. That being said, I couldn't get Angband to compile with makefile.win, so I didn't get a chance to test this out. My apologies if it requires a requires a little fixing to get working.
I attached the replacement files, as well as a patch so you can see the differences.
I tried to make the monster changes as simple as possible, pretty much a straight change in name, with only obvious changes to monster flags. They should be roughly as powerful as the monsters they replaced. But I am sure thier spellsets and flags can be greatly improved in terms of flavor and gameplay. I did this for two reasons: 1) I spend most of my Angband time tinkering the NPP source code. I have no idea how Angband plays these days or what a balanced monster list should look like (On a side note, I *really* need to play a couple games of the current vanilla.) 2) I am sure there are going to be lots of different opinions on what the Ainu/Maia monsterset should be, and plenty of the Angband dev team will want to play with it themselves, just because it is so fun creating new monsters.
I am tileset challenged so I didn't touch the pref files that handle the tilesets. So the tiles are that of the old angels.
A while ago I did a patch for Angband that pluralizes the monsters names. That patch was set up to handle all of the Ainu names below, unless somebody removed these monsters thinking they weren't needed.
Here is the list of monster changes in this set. (I am sure if you asked 100 different Angband players what this ainu monsterset should be, you will get 100 different answers, but here is what I did.)
# 289: Angel --> Lesser Maia
# 311: Archangel --> Maia
# 350: Cherub --> Greater Maia
# 415: Seraph --> Blue wizard
# 455: Archon --> Istar
# 509: Uriel, Angel of Fire --> Arien, Maia of the Sun
# 510: Azriel, Angel of Death --> Osse, Herald of Ulmo
$ 513: Gabriel, the Messenger --> Radagast the Brown
# 435: Knight templar: I removed the summon_angel flag. That doesn't seem to make sense for them to summon Ainu. The other creatures that summon angels (like the Qs and other A's) now summon Ainu.
A case could be made that Sauron, Sauraman, and Morgoth should now be A's. I think it should be this way, but I didn't change this in the patch.
If there is ever a desire to add more deep monsters to vanilla, I do recommend that the Devteam take a look at the complete set of A's in NPP. Instead of sets of Maia, I have 42 different A creatures: Greater, lesser, and regular servants for each of the 14 Valar. It adds alot of Tolkien flavor to the game, and also helps the problem that there are barely any new creatures past 3000'. But it does mean the tilesets would need alot of updating, so I can see why the Angband devteam would want to keep it simple at this point.
Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help out. I am not sure why Angband wouldn't compile for me (using Cygwin). Is makefile.win current & tested?
The patch is available here:
A couple notes:
The patch is based on the Angband/Staging branch at github, downloaded today (September 4).
The changes in the source are simple. Basically a search and replace of AInu for Angel. That being said, I couldn't get Angband to compile with makefile.win, so I didn't get a chance to test this out. My apologies if it requires a requires a little fixing to get working.
I attached the replacement files, as well as a patch so you can see the differences.
I tried to make the monster changes as simple as possible, pretty much a straight change in name, with only obvious changes to monster flags. They should be roughly as powerful as the monsters they replaced. But I am sure thier spellsets and flags can be greatly improved in terms of flavor and gameplay. I did this for two reasons: 1) I spend most of my Angband time tinkering the NPP source code. I have no idea how Angband plays these days or what a balanced monster list should look like (On a side note, I *really* need to play a couple games of the current vanilla.) 2) I am sure there are going to be lots of different opinions on what the Ainu/Maia monsterset should be, and plenty of the Angband dev team will want to play with it themselves, just because it is so fun creating new monsters.
I am tileset challenged so I didn't touch the pref files that handle the tilesets. So the tiles are that of the old angels.
A while ago I did a patch for Angband that pluralizes the monsters names. That patch was set up to handle all of the Ainu names below, unless somebody removed these monsters thinking they weren't needed.
Here is the list of monster changes in this set. (I am sure if you asked 100 different Angband players what this ainu monsterset should be, you will get 100 different answers, but here is what I did.)
# 289: Angel --> Lesser Maia
# 311: Archangel --> Maia
# 350: Cherub --> Greater Maia
# 415: Seraph --> Blue wizard
# 455: Archon --> Istar
# 509: Uriel, Angel of Fire --> Arien, Maia of the Sun
# 510: Azriel, Angel of Death --> Osse, Herald of Ulmo
$ 513: Gabriel, the Messenger --> Radagast the Brown
# 435: Knight templar: I removed the summon_angel flag. That doesn't seem to make sense for them to summon Ainu. The other creatures that summon angels (like the Qs and other A's) now summon Ainu.
A case could be made that Sauron, Sauraman, and Morgoth should now be A's. I think it should be this way, but I didn't change this in the patch.
If there is ever a desire to add more deep monsters to vanilla, I do recommend that the Devteam take a look at the complete set of A's in NPP. Instead of sets of Maia, I have 42 different A creatures: Greater, lesser, and regular servants for each of the 14 Valar. It adds alot of Tolkien flavor to the game, and also helps the problem that there are barely any new creatures past 3000'. But it does mean the tilesets would need alot of updating, so I can see why the Angband devteam would want to keep it simple at this point.
Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help out. I am not sure why Angband wouldn't compile for me (using Cygwin). Is makefile.win current & tested?
(I won't hold my breath, though)
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