Mod: New Nation: Sanguinia (Update v1.1)

[Taqwus]

I was fiddling with this nation in a game that got interesting before it ran into a crash bug.

Some comments --

It's easy to spam the Hall of Fame with recruitable immortals, since dying over and over makes you famous. Helps balance their cost.

No randoms, death or nature make for pretty limited magic. First summons with paths that you don't start with might be at the Heliophagus level. No Death is a little weird because the traditional vampire summons are blood/death. No death, air, or fire means no access to the common research boosters. It might be best for the pretender to have some death or nature magic; not sure that fire/blood helps that much. Death in particular is easier to bootstrap; a D2 mage can summon a D1 mage and build a 10-gem D booster for another D2 mage, and a D1 mage can find more sites remotely.

Reeves are ugly in drain scale. Poor research, and reanimation ceases to matter when there are no corpses left -- both ghouls and soulless require bodies. And if the bloodletters are better hunters for the cost, that may leave either not taking drain, or using the reeves HOF spammers to take advantage of their immortality. So... hmm, avoid drain scale, or I need to find a better use for them.

I have a suspicion that immortal assassins and spies would be annoying to enemies in MP. At least the assassins aren't astral... immortal, horror-marking assassins would be truly annoying.

The temptation with this nation is go take advantage of immortality and go commander-heavy... especially after HOF spamming.

[Shovah32]

My advice: take any pretender with e9(cyclops is good) and any paths you want for forging (i also suggest growth both for blood hunting and to make back any corpses you 'make' through pillaging ect) and, once your do some research in alteration your counts in friendly dominion are like gods.

To put it simply:
High prot armour+e9 bless prot+prot spells+regen+lifedrain+immortality=good. Thats not including any equipment you put on them. If your facing bigger armies you could always send a few (i suggest 1 for every 40 or so enemies) and script them with: summon earthpower, invunerability, bladewind, bladewind, attack closest, make sure some-one blesses aswell. Any vampires who get good heroic abilities (ie obesity, legendary cruelty ect) may be ready to get equipped so load em up with a charcoal shield, horror helm, boots of quickness, pendant of luck and anti magic amulet and send them out to destroy in the name of their god.

[zepath]

Taqwus, you've pretty much got the idea. Sanguinia is commander-centric to the extreme. The only really viable troop recruits are the Blood Drakes and they are also expensive. As recruitable immortals, the Sanguine vampires are nearly gods themselves. Whichever pretender you choose has simply beaten them to the punch and acquired their loyalty. Thus, if I gave them access to yet more paths (Blood, Earth, and Astral are quite robust) I think they would be well over the top. If you want Death, take the Vampire Queen.

In the play-testing I have done, the Death Dealers are quite nasty against AI players and I can imagine the pain they would be in MP. Waiting to hear if anyone ever uses this nation in an MP game...

Also, was the crash bug in any way related to this mod?

Shovah32, I still haven't been able to sufficiently play-test Sanguinia as I've been giving LA Man and my other nations Teutanion and Sylvania a decent run-through while building two other mods (including a revival of the Underkings from Dom 2). I have noticed that the AI is not very good with Sanguinia -- having thoroughly trounced it twice while playing as other LA nations. It takes a skilled human player to make this nation shine. But shine it apparently can! Thanks for your continued interest and the strategy suggestions!

[Taqwus]

I don't know if the crash bug was related, since it hasn't been diagnosed or fixed -- but I've had two games crash during computation in 3.01, and the only common mods in use were Worthy Heroes, Hunter of Horrors nerfing, and Standards and Streamers. Seem to recall reading that there may be an issue with #clearmagic as used in Worthy Heroes, so I might need to fiddle with that and see what happens -- after a holiday trip, that is.

Personally, I would be annoyed if I had to kill the same pesky assassin over and over again. That alone might be worth something in MP if it affects a player's judgment.

[zepath]

I loaded up Sanguinia today to get some play-testing done as I've been terrible about testing my nations much after releasing them. Shovah32's strategy of tricking out Sanguine Counts with decent magic items and letting them loose on an enemy army with a blessing and Stoneskin or Ironskin is pretty nasty. However, I took a Death-5/Blood-5 Vamp Queen as a pretender instead of a high Earth magic god as Shovah suggests. Still, I didn't have to worry about the spread of my dominion most of the time because the Counts simply would not die. The Counts were given Heart Finder Swords, Lead Shields, the cheap strength-boosting boots, and attack/defense skill boosting misc items. With PD 35 (thanks to a random event) in the home province, I had very little trouble scooping up blood slaves (taking ~10/turn) to make items and then to sick Infernal Disease on enemy commanders. Stalkers, who could cover the entire map in two-three turns in bat form, were given the disease-spreading amulets and sent to the AI capitals. I culled two AI nations in this way -- weakening their base and then invading with uber-Counts supported by Blood Drakes -- before being obliterated by another of my mod nations, Sylvania, who simply had many more troops and those (damn) Aspect Archers.

[DireAussie]

I tried this nation today but commanders dont cast holy spells even when scripted - to see this start a new game and use the first commander to attack and script him to bless himself. He wont do it.

[Sombre]

That sounds like it might be a result of bless not working properly on undead, unless the nation has a hidden #undeadnation or #unholy tag, which Sanguinia doesn't.

There's a hotfix available in the Black Tome of thingjig mod, made by Dr P.