Wow, that was a brilliant number of comments just for one skeleton - thanks guys!
I'll post another preview in the next couple of days. It's coming along quite well, I'm enjoying doing the graphics a lot more than I thought I would.
A warning again before I say any more - I'm deviating a bit in places from the Warhammer nation, mostly for reasons of making it work in Dominions but also a bit just because I want to. Hopefully this won't be too annoying for anyone.
The design of the nation is an interesting challenge. I want to make it feel very different to Ermor. The idea is not to have unending hordes of chaff - I see the Tomb Kings armies more as normal armies, except to their horror they find that they're all dead, and reincarnated not as they expected but as fleshless skeletons. Also they don't explicitly hate the living, they will just kill anyone who would try to steal their treasures, or prevent their attempt to reclaim the glory of their ancient empire. The one thing they do hate is the people who unleashed the enchantment that made them this way - not Nagash but... Ermor.
How to limit their production is the first question. From the army book you get the impression the vast armies of the Tomb Kings can just get up and fight whenever their king wants to. Obviously you can't have instant free armies in Dominions, and I don't want a repeat of an LA Ermor style summoning chain, so I decided to have them 'recruitable' in the normal way. The justification being that reviving them from their millennia-long sleep requires long rituals which are use costly incenses, balms and other materials, so gold and resources are still required. To be honest 0 resource cost would make more sense, but I don't like the feel of that. I'm imagining many priests slaving away endlessly carrying out the rituals of reanimation, so raising an army shouldn't be that quick.
In Warhammer the magic of the Tomb Kings is all priest-based, and is largely buffs of their own troops. To represent this I'm adding a number of holy buff spells, so that priests will be a critical part of a Tomb Kings army. Ordinary magic is also important in Dominions though, so I'm adding 'Buried Sorcerors', mages who were valued by their king to such an extent that, willingly or not, they were buried alive in his tomb when he died, so they would be with him in the afterlife. At present I've given them F2A1D1 (fire and air seem kind of deserty to me, and being as they were a death-obsessed nation even the sorcerors would have had some knowledge of death magic, though that was mainly the preserve of the priests). I'm not sure if that'll be too powerful (Aim + Falling Fires), we'll have to see. Also I intend to give the Tomb Kings themselves powerful magic, and the higher level priests will have death magic up to D2. Since there will be priests in abundance, that means the main magic will be Death followed by Fire, with smaller amounts of Air and some chance of random Earth and Astral picks on the Tomb Kings.
I've done the graphics for 1 infantry and 2 archer types so far, plus the Buried Sorceror. Still to go - heaps of stuff. 4 more infantry types I think, 2 cavalries, a chariot, tomb swarms, tomb scorpions, bone giants, ushabtis, three levels of priests, a scout and the tomb kings. But I am getting faster and using previous units as templates for new ones, so I am optimistic it will come along fairly quickly.
Re: Evolution of a longdead
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