Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

As most of you know, Illwinter has made it possible to mod this great game. I used these modding tools and created a mod that replaces Abysia, or any other nation you want, with Ulm or one of its special themes, Iron Faith or Black Forest. Ulm vs Ulm? Possible, at Last! Ulm vs Ulm vs Iron Faith vs Black Forest? YES! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

You can use many of these mods at the same time if you want, as long as they won't replace the same nation. You can also replace Ulm if you want, but then you won't receive any heroes and they have little extra resources.

Excerpt from the readme:

There are few quirks to remember before using this mod:

The new nations get no heroes. Not the ones of Ulm but neither those of the replaced nation.
Pretender selection is different.
For Iron Faith and Black Forest, the scales aren't forced anymore. To play them as they were meant, use atleast Death 1, Misfortune 1 and Magic 1 for Black Forest and Order 1 - Drain 1 for Iron Faith.
Ulm or themes that should get resource bonuses from castle (all of them?) won't get them. Because of this, they start with Iron Mine in their home province.


Well, what do you think? Should this be done for all the nations? Is the idea good? Are there bugs? Do you have something else to say? If so, please use this thread or e-mail me at the address in the readme.

Endoperez

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Excellent work! I think this is great (wait, this concept feels familiar. Wasnt I too lazy to do this?) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
There are three things I like about creating MODs which duplicate the nations we already have.

1) MOD tutorial. Looking at one will be easiest to understand what it is doing. And making one for a nation you know well would be a great way to break into MODding.

2) The Challenges of the Experts. Those who feel that they are the ultimate player of nation XXXXXX nation but cant seem to agree with other ultimate players of XXXXX. Now they can go head to head to prove who is Ulm Ultimate! I can see some of the Ermor vs Ermor, or Arcos vs Arcos. Anyone want to test their "I play Pangaea like a poor mans Ulm" against my SuperStealth tactics?

3) No more bickering if two people ask for Ulm at the same time in a game. Just pick one of the unchosen nations to set the Ulm Mod to replace. (Isnt it limited to replacing land nations?)

Oh yeah, with the new command-line switch to set mods for a game, it should be possible to have the web server recognize and allow multiple Ulms in selection. And do the slight rewrite to slideit into an unused nation slot.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Thanks!

I didn't think about underwater races, but I quess that they won't work at all. There was no #underwater or similar tag for nation modding, so Atlantis-Ulm would start underwater... And everyone, *maybe* excluding the pretender, would die.

Ermor themes can't be doubled, but the Broken Empire can, and Broken Empire vs Ashen Empire or/and Soul Gate could be an interesting game...

If we just would get heroes, national spells that don't overwrite disallow spells and could choose the pretenders available then this would be much more balanced. With Ulm there isn't too big a difference, but there nations that NEED their starting spells. Mictlan, for example, will be hard pressed to research for Fiends and get some expansion, especially if game is at hard research. Other than that most of the races can be doubled to the state of "playable" in the least.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Ok... so I guess the question everyone is asking now, is when will we have the Ulmfest? Kingdom of Karan, very hard research, few sites, indy 9, and nothing but standard Ulm and Iron Faith allowed... I would also suggest the use of the Ulm champion pretender.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Heh - nice!

Who will win the title of Ulmtimate? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Hmm, for an Ulmfest game, the Ulm national spells' requirements could be turned off, so everyone can cast them.

PvK

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

PvK: That's a good idea! If the Legions of Steel is made Constr. 0, all Ulms can use it! Now if you just invented a way to make it work even when there are some other nations in the game...

Also, any wishes for the second nation?

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Which nation generates the most "I bet my strategy can beat up your strategy" wars? I know there was a running battle for most Excellent Ermor for awhile but unfortunately that usually is in the sub-themes.
clamming mega-magic wars using Arcos?

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Ermor is hard to do right. Its starting spell, Body Ethereal, is quite important for the early game, and it can only be modded to be available to everyone or to no one.

Also, making the unholy spells national takes them away from original Ermor. Because of that all Ermors in game have to be modded ones.

Also, the starting troops are 10xPrincipes, 10xVelite and one Standard Bearer; unless someone has found a way to give nation starting units of many times the best bet is probably to give them 16 Hastati.

The recruitment, sites and provincial defence can be done and I have done that, as well as made the unholy spells national ones. ATM, the differences between playing original Ermor and modded Ermor are the following:

-no heroes
-national spells: no Body Ethereal or better unholy Blessings for the modded Ermors
-different starting units: 16*hastati instead of 10*hastati, 10*velite, 1*standard bearer
-different pretender selection

With modded/original combination, the original nation won't have any national spells besides Body Ethereal, Apostacy and two better Unholy Blessings.

[edit] Sorry about the file, I have to zip it to get it through forum system.
[edit2] typos
[edit3] forgot pretender selection from differences... fortunately, Broken Empire doesn't get any free points so it shouldn't matter (much)

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Whoo! I want to get into the Ulmfest! I've never accepted this whole "You have to magic and priestliness to rule the world." concept.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Endoperez, you can get around the modding starting spell by making a specific map file and specifying startiong spells there. You can add to existing nationals, but can't remove existing ones with the map command (need mod commands to do that, I think).

Edi

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Okay, thanks for that. So we need that program I mentioned earlier. I quote it here:

"For this to be really worth the effort we (= I, hint hint ) would need a program that chooses the starting provinces of the nations by scanning the .map file and clears those provinces, adds a fort of the right type into it, adds special magic sites and new national starting units as well as the right pretender to it (some might not be needed, though). If that program would be made it would be great if you also were able to make .pr files which would contain province info. It would have terrain needed for the province (eg. forest for druids), rarity, defenders by Dominions name/id and numbers in correspondance to each other/changable variable similar to Dominion's indep. power. Also commander orders and rarity.

Program could be used to create a new, modified .map file in which the provinces would be hardcoded to whatever the program had randomized. Each run of the program would make different maps, even with the same choices and files.

This would make it easy to add quite spesial provinces, eg. "Dragonspine Mountains" defended by Beast Trainer in command of some fire drakes, Abysian Infantries and Humanbreds. There would always be two times as many Humanbreds as Abysians and Drakes together, so their numbers would be 1, 1/4 and 1/4 or something similar. There would always be a Volcano in this Common Unique province, so the map randomiser program would only put one of these in the map, but it would be somewhere almost always."

If we got a program like that we could, as an example, define Unique Quaranteed province Ulm that can only exist on forest, mountain or maybe a province bordering mountain. We would also define the map commands that would be written to the .map file, and with this define the starting spell. Mapping and modding put together, added to a quite a deal of randomization... Any volunteers?

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

About the heroes issues ; IIRC it's easy to have Ulm heroes with modded Ulmish Abysia, this only requires putting the Ulmish heroes stats/icons with the Abysian heroes'ID in the mod file http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

I know, but this would not work if Ulm replaces something else than Abysia. I wish we will get modding commands for easily creating new heroes, but ATM I won't be doing through the hassle of checking all the heroes of all the nations and see if they can be replaced.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

I'm not sure I follow you... Anyway your mod have to be nation-specific, and the hero description you have to put in the mod don't change, only the ID has to... Where's the problem ? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif
Sure that not getting heroes isn't a big penalty to Ulm and its crappy heroes, but for nations such as Jotunheim it would be more of a problem.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Hmm. If you're going to use a modded map, one approach would be to give everyone the heroes they need there, from the start.

Otherwise, I didn't think you could mod the heroes without hijacking the existing unit numbers for a nation, which meant you needed to create new copies of their bitmaps, which I anyway found to be a big chore.

Anyway, I'd suggest the general approach that if there is something that is hard to give to a clone nation, try giving them something else that is thematic and similar but slightly different. For example, if you don't have a good way to give clone-Ermor Body Ethereal from the start, maybe let them recruit Shadow Vestals instead. Ermor seems like one of the hardest to do though because they have special spells and undead effects.

PvK

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

If there was a program that could write mod files, changing the heroes of nation with heroes of other nation, I might go through the heroes of all nations and create a file(s) for it to work. But I'm not going to do 17 Versions (one replacing heroes of one nation with the heroes of the nation that replaces it) for every nation replacement mod I will do.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

And no one would take Luck? It would suit some games, but I wouldn't like it so I won't be making it.

Ouch, I hadn't thought of that. Some new modding commands would be a bLast. If #school -2 didn't take the chosen spell away from its normal place and we had command for adding heroes cloning nations would be much easier.

Ermor is one of the worst, but the fact that makes it *really* hard to clone is rather hard to get around... They have three spells named Unholy Blessing. They can only be modded to have the first. Body Ethereal can be added through map commands, and unholy spells can be modded in without changing anything.

If I were to change something I would change the special unit they get from their two temples to something tougher. Maybe just giving it more protection, maybe special ability like paralyzation, high fear or even awe.

Thanks for your comments!

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

It seems that many people would like to play a game of Dominions II that would
be more about national armies than about magic and summoned creatures. I do
not think that it would be that hard to have a setting which limits the
research level. For example, with research limited at 3, there would be no
false horrors, no battlefield affecting damage spells, no drain life... armies
would matter a lot more, especially if supercombatant pretenders are forbidden.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

There is a setting for research difficulty. Presumably if you set it to "difficult" or "very difficult" then this would have desired effect.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

heh no.

going "very difficult" research does increase the longevity of national armies, no doubt.

but, perhaps paradoxically, it almost makes research more important, since if you get behind it is almost impossible to catch up; or if someone researches a devastating combo, you will be unable to research it's counter.

Re: Double the Ulm, double the fun!
 

Heh, I never thought people *want* the level-4 cap of the demo! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Well, it is quite a bore to go through manually, and I don't have an easy way to get list of spells (ordered by school or even research level) that a simple program could make into a .dm file. I think I will just mod a nation or two, I'm working with Abysia and C'tis ATM.

If/when we get more modding commands, does anyone else have any wishes? You might want to take a look on some of the wishlist threads before suggesting, though. The ones that came up in this thread were:

#addhero id|name
#startspell name
commands for editing the pretender list of a nation, including commands for clearing, adding and (maybe) removing pretenders from that nation's list
ability to give nation more than one different types of starting units (eg. 10 city guards/ 15 light infantries for C'tis)