Mod: Padmassa, the Black Coven - Alpha

[DrPraetorious]

Brief strategy guide -
Try an awake red dragon with fire 4, turmoil 3, productivity 3, growth 2 and luck 3.
He gives you fire magic, and if you hand him your starting troops he can walk into a province site-unseen on turn 1.
The turmoil/luck gives you an excellent shot at Padmassa's very powerful national heroes.
Buy the mad priests on some turns to save up for expensive national mages on other turns. The priests have only a 50:50 shot of doing anything useful on any given turn, so you'll need a fair number of them.
Turn your scout into a prophet and have it fly around animating corpses. When you send people site searching, they can pick up the undead on their way.

The attached mod file includes only one pic - Amos did a very nice Asi for me, and Frank is also working on some graphics (of Aurochs, mainly).

If anyone else wants to contribute art, great - I can't draw at all.

I'd like feedback on the game balance and on the flavor text, mainly. The position seems balanced to me (even slightly weak) but YMMV. I'm hoping to set things up so that players are encouraged to pursue a blood economy *early*. Let me know if people think that is a viable strategy or not.

If anyone can suggest some evil which they're not doing, I'd love to hear it.

Padmassa, the Black Coven
Advantages: Awesomely powerful mages of blood and death, powerful and inexpensive national summons.
Weaknesses: National troops are expensive and have poor morale.
Race: Humans, mainly
Military: Cowardly human mercenaries, once-human thralls, cross-bred creatures, demons and undead.
Magic: Blood, Death and Earth, limited access to Astral and Water.
Priests: Weak, insane. Can perform blood sacrifices and animate the dead.

0.11 Changelog:
- Fixed a few typos.
- Befouled priest is insane again (oops.)
- Horror Ridden and Possessed Aurochs now have poison clouds and coldblood, like Hags.
- Thrall Children no longer recruitable - Hags spawn them in your dominion.
- Fixed description tags on the Aurochs.
- Added Gore attack to mounted villains.
- Mounted Villain I is now mace/whip instead of spear/whip.
- Adjusted cost of Gray Men.
- Removed bite attacks from the Faceless. Giving them poison spit causes them to use it, so they'll just make do with fewer weapons.
- Removed low % randoms from the Conjurer and Circle Master.
- Improved undead leadership on the Witch - lowering it makes early soul-less economy very hard to manage.
- Changed one of the heroes. "Great Hag" is now "Mistress of Ararat" - has a different schtick, no longer thugable, really. Powers you actually care about remain the same.
- Added Amos *****in' Asi sprite. Trying to keep custom graphics to a minimum, though.

[Sombre]

A new mod nation! And it isn't in the LA! Madness!

I'll check it out right away. This is your first nation right?

[Amos]

To encourage early blood economy in my Insectoid mod, the nation is heavily dependant on dominion through the use of #sacrificedom, #dyingdom, #nopreach, #domsummon as the main source of the unit recruitment, and the blood magic to summon the leaders.

[Sombre]

Ok, my very first reactions,.....

The conjurer seems sort of cheap, as does the circle master,.. possibly the high circle master too. I suppose this is to encourage using the magic heavy part of padmassa though. I still think maybe they could all be upped a touch. I'm also not entirely sure about the circle master description. I'm not really so po-faced that I can't appreciate a joke in the descriptions, I just think that when you're paying for a top level mage you want to stick with the (very flavoursome) feel of the other descriptions.

I think the Gray Man is also a bit underpriced. I mean as it stands I don't feel compelled to use the knights at all - with the GM you get a much stronger unit with lots of specials who has incredible morale - the weak point of padmassa generally. 50 gold is just too cheap - they aren't sacred (which fits) so you aren't limited by holy resources either when cranking them out.

I really like the combination of bad morale troops and a lack of reliable priests. It puts a new spin on things.

The other thing is that I think the thrall children shouldn't be buyable at all. I really think there should be some sort of child catcher leader who generates them as a domsummon instead - this would stop the AI using them as much (I'm sure they would cause the AI to mess up risk calculations etc) and limit their numbers in a less artificial way,.. it would also be fun to build up squads of child catchers to spawn the little buggers. Makes for a very evil and flavoursome leader unit too.

[DrPraetorious]

The conjurer and the circle master have the same price point as the independent versions. I could (and probably should) strip the randoms off, which I'd originally added to counteract an increased price. Also note that your capital is only admin 10 - so consider that you are very poor, even by EA standards.

The Gray Man is too cheap, that price point is from before he was cavalry. Do you think 70 would be more fair? I don't want to make him too expensive to use.

Dyingdom does encourage bloodhunting - however, it discourages you from spending your blood slaves on troops. In test games I found that I made more buck-imps with dyingdom off.

This is the first nation I've posted - I've made others but didn't like them enough to get them even to the state this one is in.

[Sombre]

70 for the GM is much better. In the vaettihiem mod my wolf trolls were pretty much smashing everything up - they ended up costing 100 each and they're still well worth using. I think the GM is in a similar situation - people are willing to pay for quality and survivability because in the long run it pays for itself, plus it reduces micromanagement.

Definately a very interesting nation and I look forward to seeing them progress. Glad you decided to post it up.

[Amos]

Are the "Venomous Fangs" of Gray Man and Black Rider the same as "Venomous Fangs" for the Corrupted Priest or is it a weapon of their aurochs?

[DrPraetorious]

It's the same as the fangs on the priest. All the faceless get it.

Since some of the faceless are now mounted, I'm considering removing it or changing it back to a poison spit. It's kinda silly to go around biting people from horseback.