Mod: Season's Greetings and Ninja Robot

[Endoperez]

This is a good thread. I'm the first one to complete a mod based on its ideas. Ha!

It has four seasonal spirits and one improved Mechanical Man commander. I've tested the units and they should work fine, and the spells appear, but I haven't tested if they summon the correct creature (or anything at all).

The mechanical giant is non-unique, has full slots, full immunities and enc 0, but 40 hp and mr 12. It might still be too good for its price (15 gems). The seasonal spirits are also non-unique, and might also be too good for their price: 150 gems. Yeah!


Primal Hunter: Water 4 Air 3, paralyzing melee attack, armor-piercing bite, chill 19 and host of winter wolves. Stealthy, fast, sailing.
Thunderbird: Ethereal Great Eagle with undead secondshape, Air 4 Death 3 and armor-negating AoE lightning attack. Flying, even better mapmove.
Golden Lion: Ethereal lion with huge poison aura and fire shield 10 and bite with Deadliest Poison.
Great Bear: Green, ethereal bear with even more hp than the others, N4 E3, trample and regeneration, good prot, huge strength, heals its own afflictions. I'll give it reinvigoration if it's too weak.

All summon fitting beings: summer lions/green lions, spring hawks and great eagles, fall bears and earth elementals. Primal Hunter summons only Winter Wolves, but it gets 5 of them every turn. All cast Living XXX in the beginning of every battle.

[Tyrian]

Death for the spirit who reprensent spring and nature for the spirit who represant automn? It seems a bit strange for me.

[Endoperez]

I wanted to make the Fall spirit Earth/Nature/Death, but I was talked out of 9 picks of magic per spirit. And after than, I couldn't really drop Nature because the bear was all about regeneration and rejuvenation and reinvigoration.

I considered changing the bear into an undead form (double-size LA Atlantis undead bear remote assassin), but I didn't know what to give for Spring then. Also, Spring Hawks have few hp and Fall Bears a lot, and extrapolating from that otso is much tougher than the thunderbird.

[Aezeal]

still you should give spring rejuvenation, reinvigoration and nature.. even if they have low HP and it stacks less well wit eachother. Give them more attacks to fit with the reinvigoration.

Give autumn spirit mostly earth and air and a little astral (no leaves on trees = see sky better.. ok a bit farfetched but not much else fits) and maybe a life drain attack or something to combine with small amount of death. If it's still to weak maybe onebattle spell storm to fit the air magic

Winter should have mostly death (> fall), water and cold aura, maybe life drain too.

[llamabeast]

I really like what you've done here Endo, it's thematically really cool.

I'm planning to make a big endgame summon mod soon. I've already largely finished my grendelkin, roc and ent units, and have a few more planned. I wonder if you would be happy to have me include an adapted version of your summons into it? I would probably change things a little and also redo some of the graphics (I think you won't object to me saying that the summer lion in particular has some potential for improvement), but only if you gave your permission of course. But I think the stuff you've done is so nice I'd really like to include it.

I sort of agree with the points that it's odd that spring is more death-y than autumn. However, the thunderbird as it is is really really cool!

One question about the thunderbird's attack graphic - when it attacks, its shadow disappears from the floor but it leaves a shadowy afterimage. What effect were you aiming for here? I'm not quite sure what it represents but it looks very nice.

[Endoperez]

llamabeast said:
I really like what you've done here Endo, it's thematically really cool.

I wonder if you would be happy to have me include an adapted version of your summons into it?

I sort of agree with the points that it's odd that spring is more death-y than autumn. However, the thunderbird as it is is really really cool!

What effect were you aiming for here? I'm not quite sure what it represents but it looks very nice.

Thanks!

If having end-game summons is important to people, having one big mod for several end-game summons would be a good thing. I doubt I'll be doing much more for this mod, so I'd be grateful if you did an exetended version. And yeah, I first tried making a green lion, then red-green lion, then finally ended with gold. I mean, Green Lion's description is awesome! How am I supposed to write something even better?!

I wanted to give all or most of the seasonal beings access to teleport. I didn't want to use Astral because of Magic Duel. That's one reason for Winter having Air and Fall having N4 (Moonvine Bracelet is enough for Faery Trod). Death doesn't have miscellanous boosters, so D5 is out of the spirits' reach...
IMO, Earth/Nature fits spring better than Air/Death, but I can't really change those around, can I? It seems Spring Hawk is some faery tale (http://www.mordante.demon.co.uk/Albi.../SpringHaw.htm), BTW.

As for Thunderbird... I was aiming for a "it looks very nice" look. After I had done it, it looked a bit like some after-image very bright light might leave for a moment. I'm quite annoyed with the sound for lightning, it isn't timed well with the hit. Same with explosion sprite. First the Thunderbird hits, then you hear the thunder, and THEN the light appears...

[darloth]

Is there any way to make the Primal Hunter not available as a god? I mean, with a cost of 0, it's waaay overpowered compared to anything else, and if you add cost, it gains gold-upkeep if summoned.

I worked out that it happens because you're copystatsing from the Father of Winters - is that really necessary?

Also, in my initial tests, they don't seem to summon.

[darloth]

As far as I can tell, I fixed the problems - The summoning is now dominion related, but they also have the Summon Allies command to speed things up. Not what I would call a GOOD use of such a commander, but you never know, could come in handy. None of this applies to the Primal Hunter, who just has the auto-summon 5 per turn ability for wolves, and nothing else.

I am unsure of the balance of this (maybe that's why the summoning was removed in the first place) but for 150 gems at conj 9, they really ought to be good. If you don't want it around, PM me and I'll delete it anyway, but hopefully it'll just be a bit of work you didn't want to do / forgot about that I've done for you.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by darloth

I am unsure of the balance of this (maybe that's why the summoning was removed in the first place) but for 150 gems at conj 9, they really ought to be good. If you don't want it around, PM me and I'll delete it anyway, but hopefully it'll just be a bit of work you didn't want to do / forgot about that I've done for you.

In fact, I had pretty much abandoned this project. Thanks for your interest, and update. I didn't realize I had made Primal Beast a pretender - shows how much I tested this mod.

I threw this mod together quickly, hoping that we would get an actual mod out of the supercombatant discussion. I hoped that if we got some big "Super-Combatant Balance" mod, the author(s) of that would incorporate the working ideas from this mod and that this would be quickly forgotten. Obviously that didn't happen, but I think there's still demand for a mod that adds balanced thug/super-combatant chassises for the paths that currently can't get any. I'm pretty sure someone was/is still working on a mod like that, but I can't remember who it was...

[Sombre]

Honeybadger was working on something, for what that's worth (nothing).

llamabeast told me he's actually far through doing his big summons mod, but I guess he's stalled a bit recently, like me.