Sentience
 

Sentience (with CBM in mind)


This little mod is a simple attempt to introduce a new aspect that will hopefully change some of the standard pretender choices and game strategies. My idea to achieve this is the introduction of a national Gift of Reason spell called Sentience. The image in my mind is that our powerful demi gods would seek to utilize all resources available to achieve dominance and that would include promoting outstanding subjects for greater service.

This new spell gives pretender designers a new decision to make; the magic path for it is not native to any nations mages, so it is a pretender skill that must be paid for at build time, further competing for the precious points that generally go into good scales or a bless.

Because it is created as fundamentally a pretender skill, its use has all the attendant opportunity costs for the pretenders time per turn. So it is not inherently unbalancing, just another arrow in the quiver so to speak.

The Sentience spell is available at Ench 0 and on average has 3 levels of a particular magic path and cost 5 gems a pop. It is there to encourage further diversification and availability of potential thugs, which provide further custom options for ones armies. It is not meant to supplant the standard thug complement, merely enhance it, but it does mean that all nations have the opportunity to build thugs from early on in the game.

I have arbitrarily assigned a magic path to the spell for each MA nation based loosely on each nation’s natural mage access. (Mictlan was tough!) This could be further tweaked as they may line up with classic favored bless paths for a nation – incurring little relative costs, so any input would be very welcome.

The gem costs could be altered depending on the perceived strength of each nation for a further balance.

Nation Path
Arco A3
Ermor A4
Pythium N4
Man E2
Ulm N2
Marignon N3
Mictlan D4
Tien Chi D3
Machaka B2
Agartha B2
Abysia D3
Caelum E3
Ctis E3
Pangaea S3
Vanheim N3
Jotunheim A4
Bandar log A3
Shinuyama B3
Ashdod A5
Atlantis N3
R'leyh N3
Oceania S2
Eriu S3


The idea of this mod is to just mix the pot a bit in terms of summons and thug usage and to expand the potential thug pool open to players, inherently opening up new avenues for strategy and scheming.

Hopefully someone will give it a shot and provide some discussion.

Re: Sentience
 

I like it. I like it a lot.

I'm all for making our Pretenders more important and special, and this seems like it would go a long way towards fulfilling that purpose.

Yeah, I think the typical pathing choices for Pretender builds should be extensively researched, and a lot of testing should be done to make the costs for this as balanced as possible, but I think this could have the potential to add a whole new dimension to MP.

One thing I'd like you to consider is that, if some Pretenders have this power, the ones that don't may have other strengths/abilities that could balance against this. I realize that there's a cost in points, but if there's a choice to make, say, a Dagon with the "sentience" ability, then Dagons without it might have better stats or additional abilities to compensate. In other words, it wouldn't always have to be a tradeoff in *just* the points involved.

On the flipside of that, there might exist a class of new Pretenders that are specifically "sentiencers", or whatever you want to call it, that either have that ability as their prime ability, or as their only real ability (outside of whatever magic paths they might have).

Re: Sentience
 

Problem is you're consuming a *lot* of spells slots out of a very limited number available.

Re: Sentience
 

I totally agree that this has the potential to open up MP in new and damn fun ways - encouraging more summon usage and thug diversity.

Perhaps a good way to go about this would be to find out what the typical bless nations are in MA and what those typical blesses are..

I'll have to go a looking to see how one goes about modding actual pretenders - but having pretenders that have the sentience ability would be the best option - having scentience as an actual pretender skill, like summon allies for instance, would ensure that it stayed a pretender ability and not leveraged in to by a nations mages later on.


Ok. How dificult then would it be to mod the actual pretenders to have this as a specific skill devoid of magic picks? As Honeybadger alluded to, this would be the best means to introduce a scentience capability ensuring it stays strictly a pretender option.

Re: Sentience
 

This sounds very useful. Could allow TC for example to leverage its forging w/out putting death on its pretender, by "sentiencing" its celestial summons for ex.

Re: Sentience
 

A quick question, do all the Nations have at least one national only pretender? If so, then as a start perhaps this chasis could be a focal point for creating a sentiencing specialist.. (Where would one find the unit numbers for these pretendes?)

What i am thinking is giving this chasis H4 + the required path to the level, then altering the costs of adding new paths pertaining to overall national strenght. This way, you could control access to the spell as definately pretender only. Man and Ulm for eg could have access to a cheap national rainbow sentiencer, whilst Ashdod has to take a expensive limited one.

This should enable lower amounts of the spell slots needed...6 nations need access to nature for sentience for example, so they could all share this spell in the Mod (or 3 of them, if #restricted only allows for 3 nations to use it) This would cut down on hogging slots per Chris' observation.

Would holy on a pretender be an issue? I don't see why the pretender shouldn't have access to this path - i mean if your god can't bless you, who should be able to?

Re: Sentience
 

I've just opened up CBM and found a handy list of all pretenders. So short of going through each nation in game to find out, is there a handy list available that lets you know what nation has what unique national pretender?

Thinking about it a bit more, wouldn't it make sence for pretenders to have access to H5 magic? I mean in all seriousness, shouldn't the pretender be the holiest of all a nations units?

Anyways, i'm going to experiment with a pretender making it H5 + required magic for a sentience chasis.

Re: Sentience
 

The pretender is not given holy magic for what Kristoffer considered thematic reasons. However, I don't see that it would be a terrible thing to give them holy magic.

You could just give all pretenders H5, and make only a single Sentience spell, as a H5 spell. That would be very much simpler than alternative plans (and simple -> likely to be good).

Of course, only pretenders with magic could actually cast it (pure priests have no "Cast ritual spell" option). I don't think that would be a bad thing though.

Re: Sentience
 

I just tested, you can give a pretender H5 no problems (make sure you give him #holy too). He can never be blessed though (a good thing).

You can't do that.

Edi's database may help (it is a must for all modding efforts). Other than that, no.

Re: Sentience
 

Just what i was up to this little while!! This is a far more efficient way of doing things..

#modname "Pretender Sentience"
#description "Pretenders with the Sentience ability."
#domversion 3.21
-icon "TBA.tga"

#newspell
#copyspell "Gift of Reason"
#name "Sentience"
#descr "Allows the prentender to grant sentience to a unit."
#path 0 3
#path 1 8
#school 4
#researchlevel 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#pathlevel 1 5
#fatiguecost 100
#end

-Great Enchantress
#selectmonster 485
#holy
#magicskill 1 1
#magicskill 8 5
#end

This is a far more efficient way of doing it and it only take up one spell slot.

Now, what would this kind of pretender look like? Would it be available to everyone? What nations should have access to a Great Enchantress Sentiencer?

Re: Sentience
 

I think Freak Lord would make for a more interesting "sentiencer". Great Enchantress is useful for her gem generation, Freak Lord is pretty much useless. Besides, I think Nature 1/Holy 5 Sentience would fit better with the Nature-based Gift Of Reason.

In theory, it's possible to get a prophet up to Holy 5, but it's not easy, he'd still need magic and at that point it'd just be another Gift Of Reason caster, so probably nothing game-changing.

All nations probably have Freak Lord, so you can just replace him. The worst you can do is Gift Of Reason hydras or some other strange beasts, or get one more commander/turn without building a second castle.

Re: Sentience
 

Good one, Freak Lord it is...

He is now (on top of CBM)
Cost 100g
Path Cost 40
New paths - S3, H5 (so this gives the Freak Lord 1B 1N 3S 5H - might be a bit too tough for the price, will play and see)

I've changed the Sentience spell to be 3S 5H, so there is little to no chance of any other unit being able to cast it.

Re: Sentience
 

Hmm... can't seem to work out how to edit an attachment, anyway the file above doesn't open, try this one.

Re: Sentience
 

As interesting a game change as this might be, does it really fit the mission of CBM? CBM has in the past argued that it does not seek to create a new game but to only balance features of the original game or something along that line.

On the surface this feels like other suggestions which were forced to become standalone MP mods. If you want fast discussion on it as a CBM addition you should go into the dominions IRC channel and propose it.

Gandalf Parker
--
pin drop

Re: Sentience
 

I'm not quite sure I follow you, this is a standalone mod. The only reason i mention CBM is because that is what i am testing it with.

Re: Sentience
 

I think Gandalf has misunderstood something.

Re: Sentience
 

++1

Re: Sentience
 

Here are a few additions and summary of where it is at.

Sentience is an S3 H5 spell which effectivly gives the pretender a readily available Gift of reason spell. The spell has been made available to all nations through the Freak Lord pretender, but specifically, Man, Ulm, Agartha and Oceania have been given a national option through a unique pretender:

Man - Partholonian Sorceress
Ulm - Master Alchemist
Agartha – Risen Oracle
Oceania - Neriad

The idea behind this is to open up the thugging area of the game as a way of diversify national armies with an emphasis however, on giving the above nations easier access to this capability than everyone else.

Re: Sentience
 

Risen Oracle is very, VERY powerful already. Unless you removed its immortality, I'd suggest not boosting it any further.

Re: Sentience
 

Thanks for this hEad. Quite an amusing little mod that actually does help out some of the nations without easy access to thugs.

I have a game going now with MA Pan and have used sentience on an Ettin and a Grotesque thus far. :D

Re: Sentience
 

I agree with Endoperez: The Ancient Olm might be a better choice for Agartha?

The Olm could use a boost, anyway.

Re: Sentience
 

Glad your enjoying it BandarLover - thanks for trying it out!

Endoperez and HoneyBadger, yep i agree. The way i was looking at it was that the Risen Oracle is a good SC but a lousy mage - expensive paths etc and in essence, if he was selected for use he would have other jobs to do rather than hanging around sentiencing thugs...

However, the Agless Olm seems to fit the bill better with cheaper paths therefore making access to a more diverse range of summons and potential thugs, i'll change it.

Now what about Machaka? Any suggestions on a chasis for them?

I eventually want to have a crack at designing some of my own pretenders for these nations once i get my chops up using paint shop pro, so any ideas about who an what would be appreciated.

Re: Sentience
 

Interesting mod, presumbably this may give the non-giant races a bit of a boost in thuggery

My only concern would be that by allowing this diversity, to all nations, you break down some of the individuality. Also lack of diversity or thugs may be important to balance a nation. Specifically aquatic nations and powerful human nations lick LA Ermor may get too much of a boost.

Re: Sentience
 

Does Machaka get the Sphinx?

I feel the Sphinx would be a good choice for this ability, although I'm not sure I could explain my reasoning...

Re: Sentience
 

Machaka has the Colossal Fetish, which could work.

Re: Sentience
 

The way I am looking at this is that, unless you take a Freak Lord, Ermor wont have access to sentience, so it is not an ability for all nations – realistically, when you consider pretender build requirements for particular nation talents.

For the other nations that have a national sentiencer, they still have tendencies towards what are the typical summons given the paths of their mages and gem income type. Therefore their thugs will reflect that – earth nations like Agartha will tend towards troll and construct thugs - Man with nature will, have a nice collection of Vine ogre thugs + with access to a rainbow other summons depending on the magic on the pretender etc.

It is really an attempt to put thugs in the hands of those nations that “generally” perform less than satisfactory – or that the consensus on their power, rates them poorly.

Here is the next update:

FreakLord S3 access reduced to S1
cost bumped a bit 50-80

Ageless Olm replaces Oracle

Machaka now has the Fetish!

------------------------------

So in summary:
Everyone - Freak Lord
Man - Partholonian Sorceress
Ulm - Master Alchemist
Agartha – Ageless Olm
Oceania - Neriad
Machaka - Colossal Fetish

Re: Sentience
 

I don't really see the Colossal Fetish being the best choice, thematically speaking. Fetish is an SC, so already useful (not that it couldn't be make better, like most SC Pretenders).

I'd think the big giant head (tm) would make the better choice for Machaka?

Re: Sentience
 

Wouldn't it make more sense to use the monolith and oracle as the preferred chassis? Since everybody can get them, including the underwater nations. Also it would limit where you could grant sentience to your followers (for awhile at least).
Just a thought.

Re: Sentience
 

I suppose the monolith would be a bit of a nod to 2001/space odyssey.