Idea thread: special provinces, unique defenders

[jutetrea]

Just a small comment,

I like the thoughtful approach as well - although while potentially vulnerable to MW - many sites are. Mwinter is a later game spell anyway. If someone wants to try to take down 100+ troops with Fires from afar - I say let them.

The limited list of resistence items is a nice idea though. In my experience (abeit limited) its usually either an SC or an overwhelming army that would take out an a difficult special... and in reality its just a matter of how big the army has to be.

[MaxWilson]

Besides, even if you block MW you don't block assassins with skelly spam/Drain Life banners/seduce/whatever. There's always a way to clear out a tough province if you're patient enough.

BTW, when an indy battlemage is in a province, what determines what schools and levels within those schools he can cast?

-Max

[lch]

Doesn't turning up the heat to protect against Murdering Winter make you vulnerable to Flames from the Sky? And other magic paths have remote spells like that, too (Beckoning etc.).

[alexti]

lch said:
Doesn't turning up the heat to protect against Murdering Winter make you vulnerable to Flames from the Sky? And other magic paths have remote spells like that, too (Beckoning etc.).

It's easy for adepts to have 100% fire resistance and most of their troops is also fire resistant, so FftS is not a big danger. From my (admittedly mostly Dom2) experiences other spells are much less efficient - for example beckoning allows MR and morale check, so it's useless against all those inanimates, and mages have a good chance to pass the checks too.

More dangerous is Leprosy, I think.

But anyway, creating unassailable province was not my goal (if it was I would just put few thousand tartarian commanders there :>), I'm just trying to think how adepts of metal orders could defend themselves best (but within their limitation)

[Ballbarian]

I am not sure I completely understand your idea. Maybe it can done differently: create two such provinces: one with Golems, another - without and then set it so that only one of the provinces is selected for the generated map. Then Golems could have had semi-random equipment. Would it work?

You have discovered one of the limitations of the current design. If you create two unique provinces there is a chance that both could be placed on the same map.

Ideally, I should have treated commanders as objects with their attributes attached directly to their selection instead of treating each line separately. Maybe in future versions I can add support for random sections. This would allow multiple internal province versions... Will have to think on that some more when I am awake.

What I was describing before was that if you had a commander of some sort with no or limited slots (I'll call him "catcher") and a chance for a single golem that might make an appearance as a well armed thug, the placement in the file would be something like this:
#commander 101 -- catcher
@2 commander
471 --Golem
--no Golem
#additem "Horned Helmet"
#additem "Fire Plate"
#additem "Fire Brand"
#additem "Charcoal Shield"
#additem "Boots of Long Strides"

In this example, their is a 50% chance for the golem to make an appearance. If he does, then he will be equipped with the listed items. If he does not then the items would be applied to "catcher". My thought is that if catcher has no slots for these items that they simply go *poof*. This depends on exactly how dom3 handles such a situation and is just theory on my part. If the catcher does have slots, but they already have items, I strongly suspect that the existing items will be replaced by subsequent #additems.

Anyone who has had experience with anything like this, please feel free to correct or confirm.

P.S. Thanks for the program!

Your welcome! (and thanks for the thanks!)

[HoneyBadger]

I think a good selection of equipment for a golem would be:

Horror Helmet
Black Steel Plate
Stinger
Ring of the Warrior
Ring of Tamed Lightning
Shield of Valor
Boots of Long Strides

That way, you've got a very nice selection of reasonably thematic equipment, and nothing *too* powerful, since there's going to be 8 of them.

[Ballbarian]

The point of my reply was to demonstrate the technique I was talking about, not to suggest equipment for a golem. I just copy/pasted some lines from a random file.

Edit- removed the rolly eyeballs. Was having a bad week. (sorry HB...)

[alexti]

jutetrea said:
The limited list of resistence items is a nice idea though. In my experience (abeit limited) its usually either an SC or an overwhelming army that would take out an a difficult special... and in reality its just a matter of how big the army has to be.

This would be pretty tough for solo-ing SC - a lot of unroutable with a lot of resistances, plus horde of mages firing all kind of spells (assuming AI will be casting something sensible).

Increases in army size stop being efficient at some point, there're only so many that can fight in the gates and number of turns in the battle is limited. In this case it's more of a question of having the right army rather than a large army.