Re: almost OT
 

How are you going to prevent them from attacking with hordes of cheap indies plus hordes of weak-but-fast units that turn into hordes of heavy PD support afterwards? I'm skeptical that this can be made to work within the context of Dominions.

-Max

Re: almost OT
 

Well you'd make it impossible to have other troops (other than some summons, mostly later game) with the gluttony/NNE combo. Seems like an effective way to make indies rather useless.

Re: almost OT
 

I think the trick here is that since our hypothetical hordes of freespawn are going to be late game units, getting a giant horde of indies to back them up would be a huge waste of time considering the high level battle magic that's going to be whipping around. The freespawn would remain effective in the late game because even though they would certainly die in droves, they're so replaceable that their controller isn't even really supposed to care. A horde of indies that you've spent turns and most importantly, gold on is much more of a big deal when some tartarian rolls into town and kills 80% of them with a single spell.

Re: almost OT
 

I would assume that a nation of fungi would have way too much trouble communicating with independent nations to want to bother with them-gluttony/NNE works here as MaxWilson states. But even if they did, those hordes of cheap, mobile units could still be balanced out the same way any other nation's units is balanced. They'd perhaps have no PD to speak of-which is, for some nations, quite important. They'd also turn into immobile units (as in no teleport), which is going to drain your army, and then those units-while they might be relatively good-are going to only be good for defending that specific province.

If that doesn't work for you, then just force them to change in combat to their immobile form, when the first form is killed, which then causes you to more or less randomly lose mobile units to PD while attacking.

Re: almost OT
 

Did you know that, genetically, fungi are closer to animals than plants? In fact, some fungi are closer genetically to humans than some animals.

Re: almost OT
 

And what did you mean by "genetically closer"? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smirk.gif

Considering limitations - I wouldn't say that fungi should have no PD - logically they should have relatively strong PD, possibly with Dominion bonus: they are grown in their populational centers, after all...

Re: almost OT
 

Unless you mean something odd by "genetically closer", no fungi are genetically closer to humans than some animals.

Plants did split off earlier, but all animals share a common ancestor more recently than they do with fungus.

Re: almost OT
 

That was pretty much my idea, in my hypothetical plant monster nation, the fungal chaff plus a strong PD were going to make the nation a defensive monster, but mobility issues and difficulty keeping immortal units alive outside of their dominion were going to make them significantly weaker on the offense unless there was heavy investment into pushing the dominion. I was going for the idea that these plants, being plants, grow slowly as a nation, but once they start moving it doesn't particularly matter how many times you chop away at them because they're going to grow back.

However, in the case of a hypothetical factory summon to buff up the nature path in the late game, they wouldn't necessarily be held back or helped out by weak or strong PD, particularly as I'm not seeing fungus as being anything other than a universal summon as opposed to a national summon.

Edit:
On that note, I wonder if factory summons would help out any other paths. Not that I want to see the endgame switched from "everyone has tartarians" to "everyone has freespawn", but I wonder if having an ever-growing horde of monsters would make sense for any path but nature.

Just a thought, although it doesn't specifically have to be fungus that're the end result of a factory summon, it'd be a neat way to shoehorn redcaps into the game. I had always sort of wondered why evil fairies that wander battlefields and dip their hats into the blood of the fallen weren't in Dominions 3, and having them show up as some kind of freaky mushroom monster that has a bright red "cap" would just be tops.

Re: almost OT
 

Hmmmm, this gives me an idea, for a thematic way to slow their progression, and perhaps facilitate this whole immortal troops thing -

Make them totally unable to make temples (give them 1 in their home to start). So first, they are pretty much locked in to starting with 10 Dom, if they want to survive. But second, if some of their commanders had auto-temple-checks like the pretender and prophet, they would have the ability to push Dominion in the direction that they wanted it to go. Also, you could give them summons of course that were immobile, and provided temple checks. (I know, I said earlier make the best freespawns out of a fort with temple, but could they just be flagged to need a lab?)

Re: almost OT
 

I am not sure they can be flagged in such ways at all (unless we replace some of existing freespawn nations with them). But the idea of no temple is cool.
Redcaps idea is also good (& faeries CAN be linked with fungi - what is faeries' circle, after all? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif ).