Re: EA Game: Where are the Gnomes?
 

By which we mean about three whole crushers who hold off the elephant army while a few mages blast them from the back lines. Or, if you are too cheap for that, a whole bunch of slingers or archers blast them from the back lines. Soul slay is a great spell, if you have Panic you are even better off, elephant retreats are hilarious.

Of course, there are ways around any of this. The crusher strategy stops working once your opponent starts bringing in the mages and giving the elephants flight en mass, anyone able to cast soul slay is able to be on the receiving end of magic duel, slingers or archers are rendered largely irrelevant by stone skin, iron skin, whatever, and Panic can be held off by a priest spamming Sermon of Courage, assuming you don't have someone there capable of using Fanaticism instead.

Re: EA Game: Where are the Gnomes?
 

There are several troll poptypes, but only one of them can appear randomly (the one with no spellcasting commanders). Even that one appears so rarely that you need to play dozens of games on faiurly large maps to ever see it.

Counting all my games from DomPPP to Dom3, I've seen that poptype only four or five times.

Re: EA Game: Where are the Gnomes?
 

I don't think spamming Sermon of Courage actually works. It does give them a +2 morale, which certainly helps, but it's a one-time bonus. Panic, or other fear effects can just keep driving morale down.
Standards do counter fear nicely. They keep pushing morale back up every round. You do have to keep them close though.

Re: EA Game: Where are the Gnomes?
 

You can use map editing to add whatever defenders you like (that are in the game.) This includes gnomes, dwarfs, lizardmen, trolls, goblins (bakemono and vaetti), elves (Sidhe and Tuatha), etc.

You can't mod the poptypes though (only choose from the available list), so once you defeat the defenders (say, a pack of gnomes) so if there's no matching poptype then you'd still be left recruiting e.g. standard light infantry.

The non-human poptypes (from Edi's db) are:

Tritons (various options)
Raptors
Lizards
Hoburg (various options)
Shamblers
Vaettir (optionally + Trolls, Dwarven Smiths, or Svartalfs)
Ichtyids
Asmeg
Mermen
Atavi (ape-men)
Pale Ones (Agarthans)
Cavemen
Kappa
Bakemono
Ko-Oni

Also using Map editing commands, you can add certain magic sites that allow recruitment of additional non-humans. Check out the magic sites tab of Edi's DB.

The SemiRand project is an attempt (in part) to create provinces where the recruitables (via either setting the poptype or the magic sites) match the defenders. In addition, some of the custom "Scenario" style maps out there do this too.

Check out the utilities in Ballbarian's .sig if you're interested.

Re: EA Game: Where are the Gnomes?
 

Great info all. Thanks much for the help.