Re: What happens when you don\'t mow the lawn
 

Poptypes have never been moddable. So I suspect the empty ones are there so that the devs can add more if they want or need them.

Edi

Re: What happens when you don\'t mow the lawn
 

DrPraetorious,
I have converted your provinces over to "Gans", but it will be tomorrow before I get them uploaded to the library.

I am looking forward to more of your sets. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

(I worked them in before the others because they were already in map format which made them easy to add.)

Re: What happens when you don\'t mow the lawn
 

Added to library here.

Re: What happens when you don\'t mow the lawn
 

I'm still working on the readme, Ballbarian. I'm about halfway through but it's going to take me longer than I thought since there's a lot of dense text to go through, some of which is taking me a while to decypher. At the very least, it should help me to understand how your fine program works http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: What happens when you don\'t mow the lawn
 

That is great news HB! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
I will be uploading a new version (likely this weekend), but everything in the readme still applies. If there is anything that you need me to clarify, just drop me a PM.

BTW, I updated two of DrP's provinces on the server to correct a couple of my typo's. I have also updated some of my own junk province's, and added some more, but I will save them for inclusion with the next version upload.

In keeping with the spirit of the thread, here is one of them in GAN format:

Terrain: Penninsula, Unique, Large, Plains

Re: What happens when you don\'t mow the lawn
 

I uploaded a map for viewing all Dom3 magic sites. Anyone interested in designing provinces might find it useful until Edi's spread sheet is complete.

It can be downloaded from HERE.

Re: What happens when you don\'t mow the lawn
 

The SemiRandom project is coming along quite nicely.
Im afraid that I havent been able to look at it lately. Where are we now?

Do we have enough provinces?
Do we have enough semirandom gods?

Re: What happens when you don\'t mow the lawn
 

Lair of the Pack
1x Commander Son of Fenris
5x Commander Werewolf Add magic to these E4A4 to some and N4D4 to others so they can buff the rest a bit
10x Commander Werewolf
50x Wolf

What I notice in this thread is that most provinces made seem very very strong so if there are only these strong provinces in that program and it randomized them to 25% of your lands won't that be... well annoying and possibly causing the AI to loose precious commanders etc on the province and setting themselves back a lot. Apart from the fac that empire expansion might be very hard .

Sounds like I don't like a challange if I read this back.. which is not the case I just think a few thematic yet easy provinces might be nice to.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Things seem to be slowing down in this department. Come on people. We need more provinces. They dont have to be killer provinces that it takes the whole game to kill (thats what themed scenario maps are for). Just design some interesting place to come across using the normal Dom3 populations, sites, units, etc.
:bump:

Re: design just ONE province
 

I'll create another province if you create a dom3000 nation :D

Re: design just ONE province
 

If you had a province with regular units, say Blood Druids, and lesser horrors, would the lesser horrors attack the Blood Druids?

What I was thinking was: your army just walked in on a failed Summons. There'd be an immobile monolith Pretender chassis, surrounded by several Blood Druids and a bunch of lesser horrors, and you'd think "oh no! they're going to eat my army!" except that the horrors start eating the blood druids and attacking the monolith-turning what might otherwise be a fairly tough encounter into a fiasco for the enemy and an easier encounter for you.

Re: design just ONE province
 

It might work if the Blood Druids had horror marks. It would have to be tested, though. Some non-unique, horror-marking items:
Lifelong Protection, Crystal Sphere, Lightless Lantern, Robe of the Magi. The Robe would be very useful if it's found, so perhaps a single normal-sized Horror should be added.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Maybe Lifelong Protection, since the imp spam would be a nice cover fire, giving the Blood Druids time enough to be eaten by the Horrors. A regular Horror would work too, I just don't want Doom Horrors present.

Also, it might be fun to have a 'Stonehenge' province with just 9 immobile Monolith-chassis Pretenders present. They don't start off with much magic, so it wouldn't be overpowerful, just difficult to take out because of their resistances.

For that matter, a Sphinx province would be fun, with a single Sphinx modified to produce Mummies in combat. Maybe equip the Sphinx with a ring of regeneration and an amulet of MR to make it all the harder to take out. The province could also include a smallish force of horsearchers, as guardians *against* the Sphinx and it's mummies, ala "The Mummy" (one of my favorite movies).

Re: design just ONE province
 

Couple of ideas-hopefully funny, as opposed to over-powered:

'Land of the Blind'
Plains province: This consists of 12 cyclopes, each equipped with one of the 'Eye' artifacts (so they're blind), and a Hammer of the Mountains. They're led by another cyclops modified to wear a crown, to have 100% Darkvision, and to cast 'Darkness' at the beginning of battle.

2 'Grave of the Ancestors': This is a mountain province containing a single giant head Pretender (as per Mictlan-I forget their names). The giant head Pretender is modified with a Secondform, so that if it's destroyed, it turns into an Ancestral Spirit (as per the Tien'Chi national). This Ancestral Spirit is furthermore modified to produce more Ancestral Spirits, which are themselves modified to produce Ancestral Spirit-producing Ancestral Spirits. The province itself contains 4 Graveyard magic sites.

Thirdly, I'd like to see a forest province named 'Bel'Shamharoth', that would consist of an independent Temple, an 'Ancient Temple' magical site, a group of icthytosians-some modified to have Holy/Blood magic, a handful of bloodslaves, and an Ancient Kraken (named Bel'Shamharoth) with 8 levels in Astral magic, equipped with an amulet of the fish and a ring of regeneration, modified to have only 1 eye (not disabled, just modified in this manner from the standard Ancient Kraken).

So you'd have:
64 blood slaves, just milling around
48 regular Icthys,
32 armoured Icthys, as guards
16 Icthy captains (these might be equipped with Stingers to give some magic weapon support, but it's unnecessary)
8 Icthy captains modified to have 2 Holy magic and 1 Blood magic,
and the ancient kraken itself.

A challenge, admittedly, but not something that would require an alliance of several late-game Nations, I wouldn't think. And a fun Terry Pratchet reference.

Re: design just ONE province
 

In reference to the horrors, in Amos' horror scourge mod I noticed that my horrors would attack each other when I used them together. My theory is that horrors will always attack all units on the battlefield. Of course, giving units horror marks would make the horrors go after them first.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Some interesting ideas but unfortunately modifications of units falls into mods, and is not possible by the map commands we can use here. Basically we can only place things already in the game (sites, units, equipment), name things, and decide which units are gods/commanders/troops/bodyguards.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Well, I have a thought that might get you more "business", as it were. I can't currently look at the names of actual Provinces on the Dom 3 maps, but I know there were some really evocative ones-ones that I've been drawn to take over, just because the Province name made me wonder what was there. If you were to list a selection of those, say half a dozen at a time, and ask people to match the names up with what they think should go there, it might help motivate and inspire people to come up with ideas, since it would give a starting point (and also, allow them to recognise Provinces they themselves have found familiar and/or interesting).

The 'Land of the Blind' (should read 'Country of the Blind', by the way, but I can't edit it any longer) can work just fine as it currently is, if you just ignore the modding suggestions. Same thing with the 'Bel'Shamharoth' Province. I made up both of those before I thought of ideas to mod them. The icthy priests could be replaced by Atlantis priests, or some other suitably "fishy" units.

As far as the 'Grave of the Ancestors', you could replace the single giant head with maybe 3-6 of them, and give each one a skelly spammer amulet, and maybe a MR amulet, too.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Perhaps "Cave of the Blind", in Cave terrain, in an underground castle. That way you get Darkness without having to mod anything. IIRC cave castles cause darkness but normal caves don't. I think the King inside should have Eye Shield. :P

You could put a host of mechanical men, enlivened statues and such defending the outside of the castle, with another blind Cyclops and an Iron Dragon and perhaps some Troll Kings or something leading them, so that the whole defending force doesn't evaporate with just two deaths.

Re: design just ONE province
 

All those things would be good, Endoperez, but they'd also make the provinces quite a bit more powerful than is really necessary. I think Gandalf wants some lighter weight independents-things that make sense that they'd be there, or are fun and interesting, but don't take a late-game alliance to beat.

Re: design just ONE province
 

There'd be one army outside the castle, and a second inside it. The outside forces would be mechanical men and such; they are tough, but that's not too bad when the battle isn't fought under darkness. The Cyclops would be inside the castle, just like in your original idea.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Elephant Graveyard....

Respawning Long Dead elephants with the Elephant King able to protect them.

Site gives Ivory (100 gold), 2 death gems. Can only be found in +heat forest.

Elephant King scripted for flight and etherealness on the undead, trampling elephants. Plus if he raises dead he gets more elephants.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Time for a :bump:
We now have online games running which automatically incorporates the SemiRandom program.
http://www.dom3minions.com/HostedGames.htm
And I would like to also incorporate the SemiRandom feature of giving the AIs logical gods/scales.

We need more provinces. More variety.

And more gods. At the moment we have A GOD for each of the middle era nations. But we need early and late nations, and some variety in the middle era.

Gandalf Parker
--
the Socializing Soloist, the Mad Mapper and the Minimalist Modder, the Lord of Chaos, the Prophet for Random, Experimenter of Extremes, He Who Will Not Normalize Standardize Specialize (or Finalize), He Who Public Domains All.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Province Name: "The Golem Heights"

#commander "Golem Crafter"
#additem "Starshine Skullcap"
#additem "Crystal Coin"
#additem "Lead Shield"
#additem "Amulet of Antimagic"
#additem "Earth Boots"

#units 10 "Golem"
#units 10 "Siege Golem"

Magic Site: Meteorite Cliffs (#605)

Poptype: random

Sitemask: Mountain / Boardermountain

Re: design just ONE province
 

Awakened Quarry

5e: (You'll see why).


Crusher Commander (copy of Father Illearth, toned down a tad).
Lead Shield
AMR
Blood Stone
Boots of Earth Power
30 earth gems.

Defenders: 40 crushers, set on Hold and attack in far rear.

Script: Curse of stones.

Angle: Crushers move incredibly slow. Combine with Curse of Stones, and earth meld opponents will rack up the exhaustion, and risk timeout. The slower crushers will not face these problems.







Lab

Re: design just ONE province
 

Father Illearth with Boots? :confused:

Re: design just ONE province
 

Not that I want to toot my own horn, but all the .GOD files I submitted were for late age, and so I believe there should now be at least 2 for each nation in LA. Of course, you may have opted not to use one or another set (one set was "purchasable" at the vanilla point cost, if Imprisoned, whereas the other set was not.)

More would be definitely be better though :-)

Re: design just ONE province
 

Sorry Stavis. I thought I had all the add-on zips.
But you are right, we can always use more. However if you did 2 for each LA nation, and we have 1 for each MA nation, then it appears we need mostly EA gods.

Also I want to make the point that we have many "killer" provinces. IMHO we need to water down the mix abit with just some interesting and logical ones. Same point I guess for the gods. Do not be afraid to turn in a god build because you dont think its a killer god. As long as its better than a purely randomly created god then it will be good to add in. I feel we mostly need variety.

It wouldnt be a bad idea to have each nation-guide represented. Those who did guides, and those who have favorite guides, should make an effort to see that its god/scales are included.

Re: design just ONE province
 

I'd disagree about including gods from most of the guides. Those are often very focused on a particular strategy that the AI isn't going to implement. If you take that god, then build troops haphazardly like the AI does, you're not going to get decent results, possibly worse than random.
Example: Baalz's Eriu guide. The god design is all about getting a bless for Sidhe Lords, so that with minimal gear they can be impressive raiders. The AI simply won't do that, so the bless will be wasted. Used occasionally on the troop sacreds who it isn't designed for.

The AI generally does better with more generic high-scale builds than the more optimized and focused designs.

That said, there are guides that are more general, whose suggestions would make good pretenders.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Plains of the Lion Tribe

Good numbers of lion tribe warriors and archers, plus several lion tribe witch doctors and a dozen or so lions (and maybe even a couple of Summer Lions)

Forests of the Wolf Tribe could be similar.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Now that the terrain for CAVE has started showing up on player-created maps (and I manually add them to the generated maps I offer at my site) we have a need for some interesting cave provinces that are JUST caves. Surely some magic sites and units in the game would be uniquely suited to being found in a cave.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Conclave of wyrms (see balance mod for sprites)

1 D
1 W
1 F

Re: design just ONE province
 

Interesting.
But SemiRand uses map commands, no mod commands.
And I dont think there is a version for CBM.

Re: design just ONE province
 

A site with recruitable mooseknights, duh. Wasn't it obvious? Mooseknight poptype would be ideal. (To hire mooseknights you must prove yourself in mortal combat!)

Re: design just ONE province
 

Colonies of olms or cave drakes would seem logical. Or a tomb of forgotten horrors (othernesses or the like).

Re: design just ONE province
 

I don't think there is a mooseknight poptype.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Maybe there should be <.< >.>

Re: design just ONE province
 

#poptype 71
Troll King, Troll, War Troll & Troll Moose Knight
:)

Re: design just ONE province
 

Only problem with the Moose Knights is that it would have be run on a NI map.

Re: design just ONE province
 

OK the SRAND games on my server
http://www.dom3minions.com/HostedGames.htm
have gotten popular again. And the Faerun map has always been popular for its special provinces. But both have some limited play if there is no variation.

So I am back to asking that everyone create ONE province. Build it around a particular magic site maybe. Name the province, choose its population, its sites, its defenders, its gains and its dangers. This is not modding (not making new things). Use any sites, population, structures, units, equipment that is already in the game.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Hi Gandalf, I have recently added some predefined provinces in my map randomizer at http://dominions.realites.org, you can use them if you wish :

Re: design just ONE province
 

Much thanks. Those look great. I particularly like that they are flavorful and theme based without being killer. We have lots of killer provinces.

Yesterday one of the Dom3 IRC channels went off on the subject also. I have 4 pages of notes! Im really going to try and flesh them out.

Re: design just ONE province
 

Yes, I know. I still have to create the Goons suggestions on specials for RanDom.
OR if one of the goons wants to play with map commands to do it, I will gladly help. See me in IRC

Does anyone else have a pet peeve they have hit when playing? A province where the province name, magic sites, defenders did not seem to make sense together? Something that made you say "if I FIGHT it I should GET it!". then feel free to design the province completely the way you feel it SHOULD have been, and upload it here.