New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

This thread is dedicated to brain storm ideas for new unique nations for dominions.

The nations uniqueness should manifest roughly in the following traits:
A. Non human nation.
B. Economy is not gold based. Gold is either not used, or population dies or upkeep costs are very high etc.
C. Apart from the above, an element that will make the mechanics of playing them different. Something equivalent to free spwaning, SC centric with no or little troops recruiting options, no/limited magic etc

Hopefully we will be able to agree on the outlines of one or more such nations. If so we will somehow need to solicite one of the master modders to take interest in it or even better one of the IW gods.

A sort of preliminarily discussion has already begun here

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Long time ago I've started to make a nation named Tartaria with the following stats...

- very few troops (iirc it just had 2 human slaves units for PD and emergency recruitment, something like a militia and slingers, and sacred gold golems a mindless expensive holy unit)

- the commanders were a race of sacred titans last remnant of the tartarians, all were sacred and had blood and holy 1 magic (only, except for the best mages who had a FWE random)

- the concept was this race using its own sacred blood for magic, more often than using standard blood magic (hard to developp as all commanders cost was 400 or more gold) ; they had (or should had, I never finished this mod) national spells requiring blood & holy 1, using no blood slave and spread in all schools (not blood), with an unusual repartition : alteration school was used for battle summons (with descriptions saying things like "the titan cut himself and each drip of his sacred blood touching the floor takes the form of a monster" -out of sacreds and commanders used as thugs the main part of this nation forces would have been the battle summons-) ; conjuration for most battle enchantments (with description saying like "the titan uses his sacred blood to contact the spirits of his tartarians ancestors and ask them to call a storm on the battlefield"), etc...

... but the 30 or more national spells this nation should had was a long work and I have too many dominions projects so I stopped before finishing them.

Other unique nations I've not finished are the evil nations for the Greyhawk mod.

The nation for the temple of elemental evil use capitol ressources by hundreds for ceremonies to summon elemental lords costing no money. The choice is recruiting the good capitol only mages/priests and humanoids troops normally or spend about 4 turns producing nothing in the capitol and get an upkeep free quasi SC. Of course out of capitol mages and troops are very weak so the choice isn't too obvious.

The nation for Iuz has normal units but rather weak, the best units are special demons, not national units but produced by national pretender using summon allies. The nation has a blood version of gift of reason and must use it to have these demons become its best mages, and make them able to summon more and new types of demons.

As a less unique (human) nation but with an original concept is the Greyhawk nation : no gem income at start but a recruitable merchant producing gems instead (expensive, old, capitol only, with no magic and rather useless as commander, so the choice is "do I recruit my best mages or add 1 to my gem income for some years ?").

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Conflux! With all elementals, maybe some really lesser elemental freespawns. Unit upkeep in research points.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

I've got a great one for you. An atheist nation. They have no sacreds, obviously, instead they have various weapons and spells that make sacreds largely useless against them by using the bane of heresy, halt sacred etc weapons and abilities. Rather than priests they have heretics, in fact most of their commanders are heretics, reducing dominion where they go. Of course they keep dominion in their cap - they just try to reduce it to 0 everywhere else.

And the big reason they want to reduce dominion to 0 or as low as possible everywhere else is partly because their commanders domspawn liability units - religious scroungers and conmen that can't do much of anything useful, but cost a whole lotta upkeep.

They have a special immobile pretender with a very high level of holy magic in order to preach at their home town and keep the dom up there.

They don't have to be human based at all - in fact they might be better off being very alien indeed, since they are so strange compared to other dom3 nations.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Perhaps the race itself starts underwater, but the conmen are mostly humans. That'd keep the capital from being filled with neverending horde of dangerously costly individuals.

I remember seeing some artist's renditions of a fish that wore priestly gown and carried a miniature gallows as a symbol of its status. In various pictures, these fish-priests wandered among humans, accepted children given as tribute for their might empire, etc etc. It had a staff that ended on a miniature gallows. I couldn't locate the site any more.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Maybe I should give some of my demons anti-sacred weapons. Then the Hellgate mod would be pretty close to what you are describing.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

I really got into the dragon idea I was daydreaming about in the other thread yesterday.

The mechanics would be similar to LA Ermor, but without the free chaff and death dominion (and so would be quite different). But basically you need an awake pretender with specific paths to get started, and you have no recruitable units. Instead, you can summon dragons and dragon-kin (humanoid dragon-like creatures). Young dragons are your standard mages, dragon-kin are commanders and priests. After some conjuration research you get access to the ancient dragons, at a very high gem cost, which are prebuilt SCs and powerful mages. Your troops would be groups of dragon-kin - flying, high attack skill, strength and MR, mid-range protection, low defense. These would also be a 0 conjuration national summon, and the gem cost would have to be carefully balanced to make early expansion possible without being overpowered later.

I'm also thinking the nation would have a few different paths along the lines of the existing dragon pretenders - fire, water, nature, and death, at least. Each of those paths would have national summons for troops, priests, mages, and SCs. Each one in each path would be similar, but somewhat different. High attack skill on fire, high def on water, death are undead and cause fear, maybe some regen on nature (or something else). And of course the summonable mages in each path have different paths themselves.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread *DELETED*
 

Post deleted by mathusalem

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Twan, your ideas are very neat and it seems to me that you have a clear picture in your mind of how you want those nations to be, so I can only hope you will sometime be able to complete one or more of them.

Sombre, I like your idea of an atheist nation. Do you have plans of actually making such a mod?

Xavier, Do you think you can come up with an initial breakdown of commanders of troops for your draconian nations. If you like you can send it to me for a review or or something alike.

Please don't get the wrong idea here, Its not my intention to manage neither this thread nor any mod that may come out of it. Its just, since I know my modding capabilities are limited at best, I'm trying to contribute in whatever small manner I can.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

will do, thanks. probably gonna take a couple days though, I've got RL work to be doing here. should be fun though, when I get to it.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Conquest of Elysiun had draconians. You could check that for ideas, and for sprites to base your graphics on. They'd be about half the size of Dom3 sprites, or worse, but I know there are e.g. copper/bronze dragons (they guard iron mines I think) that are smaller than the drakes of Dominions.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Two word for that atheist nation: Stealth. Preachers.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Nope, I'm not making it.

My plan is to update my mods and continue working on warhammer nations for the next few years, basically. So you won't see anything like the Atheist nation from me. Although I am introducing some weird play mechanics in the warhammer nations, like the Dogs of War getting their paymaster and unique commanders.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

A crystal nation based on Earth and Astral magic (potentially blood and/or death equally). Slowly kill population, domspawn/summoned allies (with more population killing like ghouls), strong but few unit, use of conjuration.

History: The origin of the crystal nation lies in a meteor wich strike the world in past eons (accompagned by some calmars with feet). Quickly, primitive humans begins a cult to a strange luminiscent crystal. These tribe make humans sacrifice to the new and indifferent god. Sacrifice after sacrifice, something awake in the crystal, an alien consciousness, tainted by the sacrifice.

The new god quickly break and dominate the weak human spirit, and make them touch the crystal. The crystal devoured them, soul and flesh. After that, the crystal begin to growth and attract other animals or humans. It devoured all life wich touch him and began to devour the world.

Some ideas:
-Special unit, create by conjuration, who generate pearl but kill population more quickly. It is an immobile unit. The pretender god can be an special unit of this type.

-crystal mutant: Unit conjured by blood magic, it is a generic type of monster created by the implantation of a crystal in the corpse. The crystal infect the subject and devours his soul and knoweldge. These can give different spells: a spell like cross breeding and a spell to create assassin/spy.

-crystal unlife: These creatures are skeletton with crystal in the eye-sockets. They can have life stealing capacity at range.

-An idea for a hero: a crystal mage who touch voluntary the crystal and are ascended to a new form life.

It is a rough sketch. These ideas are quickly find, without balance reflexions. I'm not able to make a good mod because I'm very very bad to make graphism.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

I've been kicking around an idea for a plant based nation for a while now. I'd try to keep away from the generic fantasy tree-man archetype, and instead fill it out with hyper-specialized units like a "Siege Vine" which would be completely worthless and weak aside from its massive siege bonus. Basically the whole nation would tend towards having a slow early game, relatively poor offensive skills, but be a defensive monster until late game, when various investment summons like a creature that can't move or do anything other than freespawn immortal chaff finally build enough to just boil over and tear apart everything. I think a general jungle plant theme would be pretty sweet, along with stuff like parasitic fungi with a mind control attack, ranged units that spray flesh-eating spores, and maybe something like a fire cult (they're plants so they naturally fear and respect fire) to make them stand apart from Pangaea as far as the whole "we love us some nature magic" thing goes. Too bad I'm completely terrible at making sprites or I'd probably have done something by now.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

Ow I can think of a great idea, I like this challange
first of I'm ignoring most of the "background" we might be able to think of wtf this race actually is later.

1. A race of immovable creatures which teleport (not by spell, just mapmove 1 and combatmove 0) from province to province.

2. No recruitable troops, just commanders

3. a commander for each magic type, has 2 power in that magic group.

4. The commanders do not attack in melee, they are immovable. They have an aura that deals damage or a mindblast, or will have to cast spells. So ultimate no melee nation.

5. they need a lot of combat summons, one for each magic level for each path.

6. combat will be through the aura's and mindblasts etc of the characters and their in battle summons.

7. No ritual summons for this race

8. no research, they know all spells, or all spells are in spell level 0 for this race

9. no item slots on our commanders/characters, no need for forging and equiping.

10. use for gems: only to upgrade your characters (empowering)

11. Leaders are 0 gc, just get one each turn from a fort

12. forts would be summons, their price combined with 0 gc leaders would be a major balance thing IMHO

ok that are the basics

what do you end up with. A race of immobile magicians who can only increase their strength by
1. getting more characters
2. empowering characters (which takes a lot of gems, which takes time)

this is equal to normal races in the sense that normal races can obviously get more troops
or make their troops stronger (usually indirectly through items, spell research which takes a lot of time and is not possible from the start

expanding:
move on or more of your immobile characters (which do have a mapmove of 1) onto an enemy province

combat:
your immobile (and completely immobile in combat) characters have several options
1. attack directly
2. summon troops
3. buff troops

obviously the "fun" thing would be to let each type (and type means the magic paths they have) have a different "niche" so let fire and blood have the strongest direct attacks (AoE would be nice)
others the better summons
and others the best buffs
and yet again others the best combat spells.

of course this would get boring and too easy.

So if your characters are UPGRADED (maybe each level, maybe every 2) the "niche" they have would change

So after 2 empowerments maybe blood and earth have the best summons, and air and fire the best buffs etc
(only the attack could not be changed, and, since it would have to be balanced from the start of the game it would probably not be competative anymore later in the game)

So choices for the player in a game are.. do I empower 1 character very high (LOADS of gems) and do I use my other characters as the standard lvl 2 pplz or several a few levels, or all only 1-2 levels?

Obviously the higher level character would be able to summon stronger troops, buff them better etc etc etc but he'd only see chaff and weak spells from the low levels characters....

This could go well with a kill population dominion, but would not be needed, IMHO they should just get no income at all if somehow possible.. or a MAJOR upkeep so you'd loose all cash each turn (no giving away all cash in MP) Pretender would just be a normal leader, but maybe with a lil higher magic level (3) of one of the types but which would cost a huge amount of points and a huge cost for new magic level. (no standard creation since then you'd be able to start with a level 9 who'd already have all major spells the rush would be too easy)

basicly you'd just be able to switch a bit of scales around and get more positive scales if your pretender was not awake.

now to give it some racial background, I'm thinking it could be a race of crystals in each color (not very original) or metals (also not very original) or elementals (again not very original) or (only a bit better but my favorite) monoliths with strange carvings (obviously there is room for improvement here.

IMHO this is the most original race posted yet

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

I think if you set AP below 2 it is reset to 10.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

I think background must be the first thing to define for having a nation with a flavor. I can't think about unit or else without a background optic. Stats and other are secondary in my mind.

For the stats I'm totally agree with 1, 3, 4, 6, 12.

For point 2 and 11, I think there are not recruitable unit at all. The gold are useless for this entity (so is connected with 11). But spawn a mage leader by turn by fort is largely too powerfull and give no choice to the player. The player haven't any control on the troop he can have.

For point 5, 7, 8 and 10, I think the opposite. Majority of summons are ritual summons. The crystal unit growth "slowly". And research is needed because the Crystal entity (or his master if it is another pretender) need to make experiment to create new monster type. The crystal entity doesn't know all of his capacities at the start. Furthermore, this give to the player control on what he can summons, and better control on his strategy.

I have some more background ideas, based on the fact this presentation are for the EA. For the MA, the crystal mage hero betray the crystal entity, contains it and use it to create an empire. More classical nation, the cristal entity lost pearl production but doesn't kill population anymore. Crystal mage, crystal knight (hight cost, very good garning, hight MR), less special summons (no more crystal leaders but always crystal monster like elemental or crystal mutant).

In the LA, the crystal break his containement. There is a fight between it and the hero crystal mage. During this fight, the crystal mage severly "wound" the crystal entity. Energy flow by the wound and the entity became insane. His insanity strike equally the mage. For this age, it is the same logic of the EA, but with dom insanity and some new unit ethereal unit spawned by the energy flowed by the wound. These unit are auto-spawned. There is equally madness flagellant created by the crystal capacity to break human mind.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

How about a province conversion stealth preacher. He moves in a simply causes them to rise up and change Gods?

How about a national summons by the preachers? He converts the province and can summon units through prayer. Maybe stealthy and commanders at higher lvls. Holy units. An angelic army thing.

Could do multi turn summons for higher etheral, awe type units. Just when you think their down they pop up out of nowhere.

A raiding unit from on high rather than hell. Your PD becomes theirs on conversion.

Probably based on a home province preacher unit.

Antiblood and death nation.

Re: New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread
 

A Magical Technocracy:

a nation run by a small elite of magical leaders, without much support from the people or the religious establishment of the nation they control. they have very poor PD, possibly some kind of dominion penalty and have trouble reducing unrest.

their armies are magically animated golems created by the national commanders. other than the basic chaff units, they have a hefty gem cost and, if possible, increase unrest in the province where they are created in line with their gem cost.

as the main restriction on golem spamming will be gems, the commanders need not be particularly powerful mages, while the properly powerful dudes could be very expensive indeed and old age will be rife.

Also, I like Aezeal's idea of summonable fortresses. this nation might possibly have a normal fort that could summon the basic chaff spammers, just to keep the locals unhappy, whereas the better commanders could only be recruited from summoned fortresses - which would necessarily compete with your army for gems.