Okay, time to update this thing. I recently sacrificed one MP game of mine to test how easy it really is to attack UW with a land nation under the new magic item settings. The results proved to be very disencouraging.
I was Shinuyama and had access to Kappas, most of the water breathing items, undead summons and all sorts of stuff to get UW access. Basically, my UW access was a lot better that of a average land nation.
And I had no shots. Total of 0% chance of winning against the organized defense of the UW nation. Many things contributed to this fact:
1) The Poor Ambhibian pelaties from magic items are absolutely crippling. Note that the penalties from water breathing items are NOT the same penalties received from being natural poor ambhibian. For reference:
Poor Ambihibian: Att -3, Def -3, enc +1, AP -4
a troop under water breathing item: Att -3, Def -3,
enc +3, AP -6
That's right *****es. Encumberance +3. I mean WOW. Sure, if you have access to niefel giants of something, it just *might* be worthwhile to bring them UW. Under those penalties, anything else just dies against the basic Triton. You might be able to take your first province by suprise, but once the UW nation just beefs up his PD, your casualties will be devastating. And you actually have to
forge items with
gems for the priviledge of getting your units killed.
So, I'm going to make a new special combat spell that gives units underwater with breathing items get +4 attack, +5 def, +4 AP. So with that buff they would get total variables of: +1 Att, +2 Def, +3 Enc, -2 AP . You can live with that. I think that this buff could like W2 to cast and be in alteration or enchantment on level 3 or 4.
2) The combat casting in UW is a total mess. On land your options for good combat paths are mostly in evocation or thaum (only if you have S, though). In UW, your options are alt or thaum (again only if you have S). So, if you are moving from land to water or from water to land, you sometimes have to completely switch research gears to a completely new school of magic.
So to be blunt, you have to forge gems to assault UW *and* also possibly switch research to schools that you don't want go through just for the priviledge of suffering horrible casualties UW. Gah. No wonder that people usually just leave UW nations alone.
So, I'm going to go through all of the spells and make more of them castable UW. I'll leave the things that make absolutely no sense in UW alone, but the rest will be fair game. Rust Mist, Slime, Bane Fire, Sleep Cloud are examples of spells I'll make castable UW.
3) Not enough ambhibians to summon. This is where your options really start to diminish. You basically have Naiad Warriors + Sea Dogs + "some" Undead to summon if you want to get UW. That's about it. What if you don't have access to W+N? Well, you're fuc*ed basically. So what can I do to help?
I'll make the UW breathing stuff make some goddamn sense. Your normal longdead is able to get UW and that makes sense because it does not breathe, but a Bane Lord can't get to underwater altought it clearly does not breathe either. You can't believe how stupid it felt to forge
Water Breathing Rings to my Ghost Generals, who obviously
don't breathe in the first place. It's just pure WTF, from the start to finish. So I'll go through most of the summons and give ambhibian tags with the following principles:
Unit does not breathe: Poor Ambhibian (includes stuff like Bane Lords, Mound Fiends, Unfrozen, Manikins .. etc)
Unit does not breathe + incorporeal: Ambhibian (includes stuff like Spectres, Fall Bears, Winter Wolves, Ghosts)
All spells whose summoned units got UW tags will also made castable UW.
Creatures that have ties to fire & air elements are an exception, since they have an actual *reason* to have restricted UW access.
I'll also give all Vine Men a new water shape called "Kelp Men", making them basically ambhibious. Same thing will also happen Vine Ogres and Ivy Kings. This is to give both land nations and UW nations access to cheap chaff that is able to cross the water barrier and would be a competetive option in both.
4) No PD underwater
Oh boy, this is probably the most crippling of all. No PD means no way to effectively hold captured territory, and because UW indies suck, your defenses will be piss poor anyway. Hence, all the terrain you manage to capture will most likely be easily counter-raided away soon. The only option against this is to divide your forces to defend the territory, which will make you lose the major confrontations with the UW nation. There is not much I can do about this due to lack of modding tools, but I have an idea to alleviate the problem.
I'll make a special remote summon spell that summons a immobile kelp monster to a UW province province. The kelp monster will onebattlespell some kelp men (like 2 or 3) and have all normal + magic + undead leadership. Basically it will allow you to skip the recruitment of a expensive commander and let you recruit the troops that you need to defend the province while the commander itself will give some units too. The summon will only need N1 to cast and will be cheap in gems.
I'll be sure to give UW nations some love too, see the "fix-list" below for more details. I'm also going to stop pushing the alternate "coastal recruit" versions of the nations and push more for a "global" UWGIM mod. The future options will be: UWGIM global (like the old one, no national changes) and UWGIM nations (global + global UW nation changes)
Code:
- New W spell to counter UW breathing item penalties.
- More spells castable UW
- Kelp Men
- "not-breathers" to poor ambihibian or ambhibian
- N1 remote kelp monster summon to get "PD"
- Thetis's Belssing down to Alt 7 or 6
- Give the basic merman commander stealth so that there would "indy scouts" available UW.
- The shielded ichtyid will get a landform with a bigger "Asp Shield" to provide a effective archer counter.
Re: Underwater Gameplay Improvement Mod v0.91 - Quickfix
Linear Mode
