Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.4
 

Lodum : Viral Death is a new nation for the Middle Era. Lodum is a land of living flesh and obscene aberrations pushed forth into the world by the magics of the Allspawn.

Dead, or captured, living creatures are broken down into their constitute parts and recycled into masses of writhing, sentient flesh. Should the Allspawn prevail, the new world would look much different, consumed and reshaped in its horrific image without gender, without love, and without choice, where all flesh dances to the Allspawn's tune.

STRENGTHS
Units regenerate
Cheap fortresses
Units spread disease on the battlefield
Sacred tramplers
Sacred recruitable thugs
Strong magic, good diversity (UWNS)
Sacred mages
Communions
Generally high morale
Units are easy to amass, low resource cost
Easy to get into the water
Poison immune
Units recuperate
Temples cost 300

WEAKNESSES
Expensive, and weak, recruitable priests
25% more damage from fire magic
Generally low attack values
Generally low protection values for an LA nation, almost no helmets for troops
Commanders have strange slots
All units are magical


Currently I'm still working through the very last conceptual steps of creating Lodum. You can see the tasks below that need to be accomplished. While it is far from a finished product, I think it's coming along nicely. I should have plenty of time this coming week to flesh out more of the nation since I'm on break.

Be aware that I've cribbed all the graphics from other units in the game. They're in there as placeholders. Generally the graphics should give you an idea of what role each unit was designed to fill. Feel free to mess around with the nation, but I haven't tried to seriously balance any of the unit costs, though I have spent some time on the individual troops. The sacred tramplers are way too powerful right now, and that's okay, my idea was to create the conceptual first, for everything, and then to start doing real game balance later. My ultimate goal is to have a very well thought out nation, that's balanced in multiplayer, and plays very differently then the vanilla nations.

If you have any feedback or find any glaring errors, please leave a note. To install the mod simply download the zip file and extract it into your mod folder.

TASKS to do as of 3/16/08 (Current Version 0.39)
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- Find a way to remove Ermor's holy spells .31 [FIXED]
- Lock down Slime Balls and Faceless Lords to capital only .32 [FIXED]
- Add one more mid level mage unit .33 [FIXED]
- Add descriptions .4 [FINISHED]
- Add vanilla pretenders .5
- Create custom pretenders, including Allspawn .61
- Add national spells (summons) .63
- Add national spells (BF spells) .64
- Add national spells (rituals) .65
- Add national heroes .7
- Sort out conflicts with other mods, and prep for upload to Llamaserver .75
- Balance nation for MP (Stage 1, staged fights) .8
- Balance nation for MP (Stage 2, real MP game testing) .85
- Add Graphics .9
- Final review and cleanup .95
- Final release 1.0

UPDATES
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3/16/08 - Added a bunch of descriptions. Still not all there, a few more to go. Futzed with a bunch of unit stats numbers, and made everything look nicer in the recruitment queue. Also finalized the recruitment queue.
3/17/08 - Put in the last of the descriptions. Swapped Childern of the Allspawn and Crest for thematic reasons. Lowered resource costs across the board. Lowered a gcost on boomer, slime balls, and one other unit. Removed Awe from Crest. Removed disease cloud from all commanders to prevent unnecessary micromanagement, and losing items from diseased limbs falling off.

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.3
 

Your nation makes me think about the (even more!)corrupted marignon mod someone issued some long time ago. I think it might contain some graphics you could use/modify. Can't remember the name...Ah, marignon,realm of the twiceborn.

I recommend a less extreme choice of colours, as I found it quite painfull to look at my units. Sorts of cute horrors of fiendish darkness would be nice.

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.3
 

Realm of the twiceborn.

This needs a bunch more stuff (like graphics) before I'd want to test it, but kudos for starting a mod Jazzepi :]

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.3
 

Jazzepi: I'll give this a whirl soon.

May I ask how you're supposed to do simple things like build temples without recruitable Priests? I assume there's a summon for it?

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.3
 

I'm going to upload a bit of an overhaul in a few hours. I would wait till then to mess around with the mod.

There's actually one recruitable priest. I almost forgot about him. He costs 450 gp or so, and he's only level 1.

You can always prophetize, though.

Jazzepi

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.3
 

Jazzepi: Er, are there any national summons that are priests?

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

Not any that are planned at the moment.

Also, I just uploaded a new version with a plethora of changes.

Jazzepi

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

Mm. So, if I understand you correctly, the only way to get a new Temple with this nation is:

1) Random event
2) Get your Prophet to build one.
3) Purchase a 450g (presumably mage-)priest for the express purpose of building a Temple.

I take it that this mod is not generally considered to be NI-friendly?

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

NI? I assume that means AI?

No :) I didn't really have in mind for the AI to pickup this nation and play.

Jazzepi

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

Jazz: No Independents Mod. No independents exist.

I'm about to start playing with it, but I'm not too sanguine about the chances here.

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

A few observations so far.

All units have Disease cloud... but are not immune to them. While they all recuperate, and thus can get rid of the disease, this means that random units won't heal from a battle per normal, and the ability to use mercs is incredibly curtailed.

What's the rationale for giving the nation a 10-gem income? I see nothing so deficient so as to justify this.

Are Clams meant to provide an Astral income?

Re: the units, most of them have not enough strengths to counter their weaknesses. I like the sole missile troop (I didn't realize that they did poison damage at first), though perhaps giving them a bit more longevity might be better than the current design. I haven't tested the sacred trampler, but the cost is prohibitive for any sort of early game strategy. I assume it doesn't shrink like its pictured water elemental?

The best 'normal' unit seems to be, ironically, the 10g/14res guy, who is why you need to take Productivity with this nation, it seems. 12Prot, regenerating 6hp/turn, and with a pretty good Broadsword attack, he's at least worth the cost. I think the missile unit (mentioned above) is pretty overpriced for a 'fire and forget' use that then charge into melee and are in serious danger of dying.

The best commander seems to be... the incredibly cheap assassin? 40g (IIRC) for an Assassin with Fear, full slots IIRC, regeneration, and diseases the target if he gets in melee range for a turn without a save?

The mages seem fair... except that I think that the Necromancer is going to the inevitable prophet who (since Undead) should get the Unholy Priest Reanimation Perk that will make the early game much easier.

Anyway, these are my impressions so far.

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

I'm not too concerned about that, really. If you want to keep your necromancer prophet at home, reanimating 4-5 undead per turn, I think that's a perfectly legitimate choice. Especially considering that he is your only priest capable of casting sermon of courage.


I know this sounds sort of strange, but that was basically what I wanted to go after. One thing to remember is that since every unit has regeneration in battle, being diseased will not prevent them from regenerating those hitpoints during combat. Since most battles end with one side fleeing for a few turns afterwards, 95% of your units will be healed to full (The regen is 30% of their hitpoints so they only need approx three full rounds to heal no matter their life total) even if they are diseased. You also run into funny situations where some of your units are walking around missing body parts like flaggies, which I think simulates the whole "organic attackers" nicely.

The only real concern I had about this modeling was the mages, or the SCs. If you lose a limb to the disease, you're going to drop the item that was in that slot. This could be incredibly frustrating, so in the end I might drop the cloud off of the commanders to reduce micromanagement of them, if nothing else.


I need to do a survey of the other MA nations to figure out what regular gem income is. I didn't mean to give them something over the top. I thought I had picked out some MA nation at random and matched gem income with them, but I clearly need to go back'n'look.

Astral is actually, thematically, suppose to come from the Allspawn directly. When I add that pretender in it'll have the ability to generate gems per-turn.

Notably this isn't the only nation with access to astral that doesn't have any starting income in it, and I intended that to be the "weakest" path.


I know the tramplers are expensive, but you should really try them with a W9/N9 bless. I think they're pretty broken as they're currently priced, despite the expense. That bless also goes nicely with the Faceless Lords. And no, they don't shrink! :)

I'm glad you like the Boomer. They're my favorite unit by far. Did you know they slime enemy commanders as well as poison? I think attack/damage values may be a little too low across the board, making it difficult to do damage. My thought process was that I wanted Lodum players to have to rely on attrition more than anything else to get the job done. The disease cloud should help them take out strong, expensive units in the long run, and make fighting Lodum an expensive prospect all around.

Assassins are probably the /least/ used commanders in Multiplayer, outside of assassination spells like earth attack and disease demon. My thought that it would be interesting if you could create a truly fearsome assassin. One that would really make your opponent fear for the safety of his mages. Given the relative power of Lodum's mages, I think that the difficulty of the choice between recruiting an assassin and not is a legitimate one. They could probably be a touch more expensive, but at the end of the day, I do want to see spamming these bad boys as an strategic option, so I can't imagine their price going over 100gp.


I really want to make sloth an attractive option for Lodum, with productivity giving you the ability to raise huge armies quickly. That said, they do need /some/ resource sink amongst their available options. The masses were designed to be arrow catchers, and the classic "heavy infantry". I think if I cut back on their strategic move by 1 it would increase the opportunity cost of including them in an army.


Did you try playing around with the Smokestacks at all? I made them specifically slower than any other of Lodum's units because I wanted them to hang behind and stay out of meele, which is not only thematic, but practical.

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

As far as gem production goes, the default for MA is 5 gems. This is true of all vanilla MA nations, to my knowledge, except Pythium. (And I'm not sure why Pythium gets a pass here.)

Your troops don't need Sermon of Courage, so I would be using the Necromancer to raise Soulless, more than likely. Or Longdead Horsemen if he can do those. 5 Longdead Horsemen/turn is never nothing to sneer at.

The whole disease thing, while thematic, is really bizarre. It seems to serve no purpose. I would suggest either removing it, or giving the nation a national spell to cause large scale decay, which should trigger diseased units to gain a large number of random afflictions.

While the concept of a dual bless looks nice, I honestly don't see how you can afford _anything_ with the scales required to get that bless.

If you intended Astral to be the weakest path, why is there a commander who is guaranteed to get 3S, at a cost lower than other MA nations? Consider that the _best_ Astral nations in the MA (among them Arco, Pythium, and Bandar Log) have their best path being Astral, and their default is... 3S.

The first game I played, I tried taking Sloth. The results were... not encouraging in the least.

Looking to test more tonight.

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

It should be diseasing the enemy. Goombas are size 1 units, so they have the best chance of having their second/first disease cloud end up in the enemy square.

Maybe just giving all of their weapons a decay effect would be more effective.

That's a great point. I did want to differentiate the nation from C'Tis, who has access to pretty good astral through summons, and weak astral through recruits. I could drop the base astral to one for the childern, and add in a random or two.

Jazzepi

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

Also, I wanted to mention that I mostly put out the mod to get a feel for the units themselves, and the theme. I haven't really spent a great amount of time trying to balance resource costs, and such. I'll probably crib a bunch of ideas for resource costs from Bandar and Mictlan who both have very low resource costs and regular get picked with Sloth 3.

Jazzepi

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

Jazz: Oh, I don't doubt that the disease clouds are diseasing the enemy.. but what is that really doing for you? Not many people would want to lose an army to kill an opposing army 10-20 turns down the road.

I can see your concern with differentiating from C'tis (especially MA C'tis). Have you considered switching Death for Blood? I may be just losing my mind, but I can't think of many nations (other than Mictlan, and not in MA) that has good Water, Nature, and Blood Magic. Well, there's Jotunheim, but heims are heims. :p

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

Grrr, I hate double posts.

Anytwo for elevenors?

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

It's not so much the opposing army, really. I was thinking of opposing SCs/thugs. Having every one of your little units diseasing the enemy makes deploying non-undead SCs against Lodum terribly painful.

Notably, it's not just your armies that have disease cloud, it's your PD as well. Even a raiding thug who doesn't mess with your main armies will get diseased.

I messed around with the resource/gold costs, and lowered them across the board. I also made the sacred trampler cheaper. Then I switched the Child and Crest for thematic reasons.

Really I'm okay with them having crazy magic diversity at this point, even if my original intention was to have low levels of astral.

Also, I removed the disease cloud from the commander units so that you can keep them towards the back and prevent them from getting diseased, thus removing some of the annoying micro of checking to see if they're feebleminded or whatnot every turn before going into battle.

I've almost finished all the descriptions, and I'll upload after I do.

Jazzepi

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

I think Lodum might fit better in LA, then MA. It would help to distance them from MA C'Tis, whose disease dominion does vaguely the same thing as the constantly diseased units, but better.

It would also provide a nicer constrast between the poorly armored Lodum units, and the more heavily armored LA units.

Also, the world is kind of going crazy in LA, and a huge Allspawn fits right in ;)

Jazzepi

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

This makes sense. I'll wait until you have another version up before doing more comments. I have at least two other commitments right now anyway.

Something I'll point out, though, is that Ermor will cause great pain to this nation, in LA.

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.39
 

Really?

I've always found having lots of death mages makes Ermor easy to counter. Wither bones is like punching them in the face, and you're immune to darkness.

Jazzepi

Re: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.4
 

OTOH, you have low defense and low prot on almost all of your troops, and no priests to banish-spam.

IF you can get Wither Bones, then you've probably dodged a bullet. I'm not at all optimistic about your chances until that point.