Mod: Disband mod: Final Sacrifice

[llamabeast]

Following a suggestion by MaxWilson, and making use of DrPraetorious' excellent work on spell modding, I've made a mod that effectively allows you to disband units.

What it actually is is a version of Flames from the Sky which costs no gems or research, and only affects your own units. So, you just need to herd your chaff into a province, make sure you have noone important there, and fire away.

Initially I had it only as a holy spell, before realising that only mage-priests can cast rituals, and not all nations have them. So now it is also an N1, F1 and D1 spell, so everyone should be able to cast it one way or another.

I've made two versions of the mod. The one attached to this mod should be seen as the canonical one. However, the flavour text is a little dark, so those role-playing a benevolent god may prefer the second version. It will be interesting to see which gets more downloads.

This is the text for this one:
Name: Final Sacrifice
Description: "Even the bravest and most loyal of soldiers may one day cease to be useful to their God. Perhaps they are injured, diseased or simply too far from the front lines to make a difference, and finally they become nothing more than a burden on their empire. It is to these servants of the new God that the priest offers the opportunity to make a final sacrifice. He calls down enormous divine fireballs from the sky, composed of a magical fire will only affect loyal servants of the new God. The fire will incinerate them utterly, such that even in death they make one last contribution to the war."

[llamabeast]

And here is the benevolent one:

Name: Disband
Description: "Eventually even the services of the bravest and most loyal of soldiers may no longer be needed, and yet they may be far from home or otherwise unable to make the return to their civilian lives. It is on behalf of such individuals that the priest intervenes. He calls down huge balls of magical fire from the skies, striking the soldiers' encampment. Once the flames have cleared only their weapons and armour remain, untouched; the soldiers
themselves have disappeared. A casual observer would surely think them killed. Yet, by the divine magic of the priest, the soldiers have in fact been transported home and freed of their duty. They have made their contribution and may now retire to whatever peace they can find in such turbulent times."

[llamabeast]

The one disadvantage is that the AI will sometimes cast it against you. It doesn't do any harm, but the message can be slightly distracting.

[Poopsi]

well, you can always save, load the mod, vaporize the nusiances, save again, and unload the mod... (right?)

[vfb]

Cool, I tried it out, and it's great!

Too bad the spell report description ("Suddenly a storm of fireballs ...") can't be changed too ... if it could, then in water you could do something more fun like have the denizens of the depths summoned to eat all your excess troops. Oh well!

[MaxWilson]

Awesome, thanks! Great flavor text, too.



-Max

[MaxWilson]

Poopsi said:
well, you can always save, load the mod, vaporize the nusiances, save again, and unload the mod... (right?)

Not exactly. You can't load/unload mods in play. You could start the game with a blank mod and temporarily paste in this mod for a couple of turns, then delete those extra lines when you're done. Maybe that's what you meant.

-Max

[Poopsi]

no... I actually thought I could load mods in game. But I just tried and I cannot

[Jazzepi]

Is there any way you could make it a level 1 spell for all magic types? I'd hate for a nation to not have access to it because they don't have the requisite paths.

Jazzepi

[llamabeast]

Yeah, I could do that easily, but I was thinking having so many redundant spells would annoy people. I reckon it's pretty unlikely that you can't get at least an N1 caster by the point in the game when you want to be disbanding people. Also, I _think_ that pretty much every nation has access to at least one of the spells (taking randoms into account). I haven't gone through and checked though.