Double the Ulm, double the fun!

[Gandalf Parker]

Which nation generates the most "I bet my strategy can beat up your strategy" wars? I know there was a running battle for most Excellent Ermor for awhile but unfortunately that usually is in the sub-themes.
clamming mega-magic wars using Arcos?

[Endoperez]

Ermor is hard to do right. Its starting spell, Body Ethereal, is quite important for the early game, and it can only be modded to be available to everyone or to no one.

Also, making the unholy spells national takes them away from original Ermor. Because of that all Ermors in game have to be modded ones.

Also, the starting troops are 10xPrincipes, 10xVelite and one Standard Bearer; unless someone has found a way to give nation starting units of many times the best bet is probably to give them 16 Hastati.

The recruitment, sites and provincial defence can be done and I have done that, as well as made the unholy spells national ones. ATM, the differences between playing original Ermor and modded Ermor are the following:

-no heroes
-national spells: no Body Ethereal or better unholy Blessings for the modded Ermors
-different starting units: 16*hastati instead of 10*hastati, 10*velite, 1*standard bearer
-different pretender selection

With modded/original combination, the original nation won't have any national spells besides Body Ethereal, Apostacy and two better Unholy Blessings.

[edit] Sorry about the file, I have to zip it to get it through forum system.
[edit2] typos
[edit3] forgot pretender selection from differences... fortunately, Broken Empire doesn't get any free points so it shouldn't matter (much)

[Zooko]

Whoo! I want to get into the Ulmfest! I've never accepted this whole "You have to magic and priestliness to rule the world." concept.

[Edi]

Endoperez, you can get around the modding starting spell by making a specific map file and specifying startiong spells there. You can add to existing nationals, but can't remove existing ones with the map command (need mod commands to do that, I think).

Edi

[Endoperez]

Okay, thanks for that. So we need that program I mentioned earlier. I quote it here:

"For this to be really worth the effort we (= I, hint hint ) would need a program that chooses the starting provinces of the nations by scanning the .map file and clears those provinces, adds a fort of the right type into it, adds special magic sites and new national starting units as well as the right pretender to it (some might not be needed, though). If that program would be made it would be great if you also were able to make .pr files which would contain province info. It would have terrain needed for the province (eg. forest for druids), rarity, defenders by Dominions name/id and numbers in correspondance to each other/changable variable similar to Dominion's indep. power. Also commander orders and rarity.

Program could be used to create a new, modified .map file in which the provinces would be hardcoded to whatever the program had randomized. Each run of the program would make different maps, even with the same choices and files.

This would make it easy to add quite spesial provinces, eg. "Dragonspine Mountains" defended by Beast Trainer in command of some fire drakes, Abysian Infantries and Humanbreds. There would always be two times as many Humanbreds as Abysians and Drakes together, so their numbers would be 1, 1/4 and 1/4 or something similar. There would always be a Volcano in this Common Unique province, so the map randomiser program would only put one of these in the map, but it would be somewhere almost always."

If we got a program like that we could, as an example, define Unique Quaranteed province Ulm that can only exist on forest, mountain or maybe a province bordering mountain. We would also define the map commands that would be written to the .map file, and with this define the starting spell. Mapping and modding put together, added to a quite a deal of randomization... Any volunteers?

[PDF]

About the heroes issues ; IIRC it's easy to have Ulm heroes with modded Ulmish Abysia, this only requires putting the Ulmish heroes stats/icons with the Abysian heroes'ID in the mod file

[Endoperez]

I know, but this would not work if Ulm replaces something else than Abysia. I wish we will get modding commands for easily creating new heroes, but ATM I won't be doing through the hassle of checking all the heroes of all the nations and see if they can be replaced.