Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

Surely this would favour the strong early game nations even more?

To be honest I'm not really aware of much turtling in this game. Winners almost always have powerful starts and expand aggresively

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

Any idea in how to do this mod-wise? I´m a little weak in the modding part of Dominions, but would like to try a mod like this against the AI... and would it be possible to do it in Dom2 too? (my notebook only handles Dom2 - weak processor).

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

As far as I know, you'd have to modify each mage separately, be it national or indep, plus create new researcher unit. Good luck Jim, this mission, if you accept it....

I do think too it would entirely screw many nations. And make others totally ubber, like Nielfelheim, as they don't normally have access to cost worthy researchers. Maybe make one researcher per nation to keep the balance.

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

The research difference would be simple to maintain. Just make a different research unit for each side with more or less research.

A more difficult consideration is the cap-only-ness. For some nations this is not a problem, but for nations with lots of cap-only recruits you are still forced to decide between research and deploying units, ony this time you have a unit that can ONLY research vs a unit that can ONLY fight. I think it would unfairly disadvantage them.

I would suggest editing it in as an auto-summon or a summon-allies.

I encourage you to look at modding. Making such a research summon (or adding it as an ability to every pretender) shouldn't be that hard. The hard part is going through the DB and giving an RP malus to all the mages out there (I suggest getting EDI's excellent DB for this).

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

The original plan was to turn around the cap only stuff by making them recruitable in a prov next to the capital, which would require map modding.

The whole idea still seems to me like loads of pain for small benefits...(if any)

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

You can't summon allies commanders. I already outlined how to do all of this stuff that's being discussed in IRC and can't really be bothered to repeat it here. Suffice to say - start with F1H7 unit, he can cast a spell that summons whatever researcher unit. If someone wants to do it, it's all doable with current mod commands. It's just a matter of deciding exactly what you want to do and actually committing to do it. I (or any other modder, really) can tell you /how/ once that's decided.

So stop worrying about the exact method.

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

Actually this is the easiest part. Takes about 10 minutes.

A) Find someone who can use perl (or some other coding ****, I don't really know about those)

B) Have the said guy generate you a mod that gives researchmalus -50 to all dom3units.

Actually, Lch did me one a couple days back. According to IrC log, it took him under 20 minutes to do it.

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

Yeah, would only take a few minutes.

Everyone should learn Perl.

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

My impression is that turtling is only really a game-winning strategy when an underwater nation turtles and clams. Arguably that's mostly a problem with clams, not turtling.

-Max

Re: an idea to reduce turtling
 

Download the Debug mod from the mod forums and remove the spells to summon the Debug Sensei. I've considered playing this way in SP too, because I think a large part of the AI's weakness is that it tends to be at e.g. Conj-9, Ench-4, EverythingElse-0 when I'm at Alt-8 Conj-6 Thaum-4 Ench-3 Evoc-7. Also, I like the idea thematically (powerful pretender mages SHOULD already know spells) and it might give me an incentive to take an Awake pretender for once. However, removing research from the game will also radically change the way the game is played, so I haven't ever tried it yet.

-Max