Expanded Nations Packs released!

[llamabeast]

Over the last few years the dom3 community has made some amazing mod nations, which to me add hugely to the enjoyment of the game. However, I think new players often find it difficult to find the good mod nations amongst the confusion of this forum, so I thought I would make some compilation mods.

These mods are collections of my personal favourite mod nations. I should emphasise that the choice is completely subjective, and in fact I haven't been able to include all the nations that I like. I'm hoping that players will find these packs a useful starting point, and will be inspired by them to check out other mod nations, and indeed to make their own! The best way to browse other nation mods is Globu's Mod Catalog (I particularly like the online viewable version).

It's very possible to combine mods from these packs with other mods to make your own combinations - I'll talk more about this in the second post. This has all been made possible by Sombre's fantastic Mod Compatibility project, without which making this mod would have been nigh on impossible.

There are two packs:

Pack 1

This pack consists entirely of mod nations based on or inspired by nations from Warhammer. I've put this as pack 1 partly because I hope that players who aren't interested in Warhammer won't overlook it, as I think that the nations by Sombre and Burnsaber in this pack are probably the finest mod nations which have yet been made. There are also two mods by me in the pack, but obviously I can't comment on their quality. All nations are added to the Middle Age.

Preview picture:


I'd recommend checking out the individual preview pictures in the links below, as I was only able to squeeze a tiny fraction of the awesome new sprites into this picture.

Contents:

Itza, Servants of the Old Ones by Sombre
Bretonnia, Knights of the Grail by Burnsaber
Nehekhara, Tomb Kings by llamabeast
Skavenblight, Rise of the Under-Empire by Sombre
Ogre Kingdoms, Gathering of Might by Sombre
Dwarfs, Grudges of the Ancestors by Burnsaber
Altdorf, Pride of the Empire by Sombre
Sylvania, Vampire Counts by llamabeast

Comments about the nations should be directed to the individual threads, rather than here.


Pack 2

This pack adds nations generally themed around real-world cultures, like the base-game nations. Three of the nations are actually "alternative history" versions of base-game nations. There is a more Byzantine Pythium, a "good" LA Ulm and an "evil" LA Jomon. All the nations are compatible with base game nations though, so if you want you can play the two Jomons against each other, for example.

Preview picture:


Again, I'd recommend checking out the links below for more complete preview pictures.

Contents:

Early Age:
Haida Gwaii by Foodstamp

Middle Age:
Shangri-La, Hidden City of the Secret Masters originally by Nounours, extended and maintained by Globu
Al-Nadim, The Thousand and One Nights by elmokki
Svarogia, Dark Forests by Executor
Arga Dis, Blood of Warriors by Sombre
Pythium, The Second Empire by Burnsaber

Late Age:
New Ulm, Iron Faith Reborn by Sombre
Vaettiheim, Exiled Tribes by Sombre
New Jomon, Broken Sword by Sombre

Again, comments on the nations should be directed to the threads themselves rather than here to make sure that the authors see them.

While I'm writing a long post about mods, I also highly recommend the following mods which affect gameplay for all nations:

Conceptual Balance Mod 1.84 by quantum_mechani
Holy War: Lesser Edition by Burnsaber, with minor tweaking by llamabeast
Cross Path Combat Spells (CPCS) by Burnsaber

Enjoy!

[llamabeast]

Until recently it was very hard to use multiple mods at once, since the chances were that they'd clash. However this has now become much easier thanks to Sombre's Mod Compatibility project ([MC]. All the mods listed there work together straightforwardly.

In order to make these packs, I mostly just put all the mods listed on the [MC] page and stuck them together. The only additional work was adjusting some mods so that they were compatible with the [MC] project (and making the preview pictures).

If you want to make your own combinations of nations, all you need to do is get the .dm files for the individual nations, and enable the ones that you want to use. The Mod Compatibility project page is the place to find the individual mod files, although right now it is slightly out of date (since Sombre has not internet at home at the moment). Purely for convenience I'll also attach all the files I used to make the packs to this post.

Now, there's one caveat to all this loveliness of compatible mods: it turns out that there is a limit to the number of mod sprites that dom3 will load at once. If you try to get it to load more then it will crash.

Pack 1 is reasonably close to the limit - you can enable Pack 1, CBM and Holy War Lesser Edition at the same time, but if you add much else it will crash. Pack 2 has a bit more space, so for example you could easily have 1 or two Warhammer nations enabled at the same time as Pack 1. Ultimately if you want to combine bits of the two packs, along with other mods, you're probably better using the individual nation mods rather than these packs. These packs are meant to be a starting point, not a finishing point.

[Michaelangelo]

Trying to create a game with pack1 loaded results in an error message entitled 'Nagot gick fell' that says 'too many sprites in mod'.

[llamabeast]

Do you have other mods loaded as well? Pack 1 is fairly near the sprite limit, so you can l't combine it with too much else unfortunately.

[Fantomen]

Why make it into single big mods?

Wouldn't it be more practical to make them packs of nation mods adjusted to work together, but with separate .dms?

[llamabeast]

Fantomen - yes, for convenience I'm going to attach all the individual .dm files to the second post this evening, and the great thing is that they are all mutually compatible (thanks to Sombre's Mod Catalogue project), so for people who want to spend time picking and choosing it'll be fully flexible. However I thought that for players who haven't delved much into mods before there's a lot to be said for convenient compilation mods. In fact there's a convenience benefit for everyone - I will be pleased just to turn on Pack 1 whenever I want to play around with Warhammer nations rather than looking through the whole vast list of mods.

[WraithLord]

Another plus 4 the big .dm file is that you don't run so fast into the annoying game mod limit.
For me it got so bad that I'm always moving mods in and out of circulation

[WraithLord]

Yeoman outrider costs 1g. got to be a mistake.

[Joelz]

Actually, I think they're meant that way. Ogre's and Skaven's national scout cost 1 gold as well. From what I remember, this was to make recruiting them suck less. There is usually more than enough indy scout provinces to recruit from and Warhammer nations all have good capital only commanders.

[WraithLord]

Oh, I thought there were meant to be more or less balanced against normal nations.