Kristoffer's encouragement thread

[NTJedi]

The movie 300 has been released in the USA this weekend... not sure how long before it arrives in your country, but watching this movie might also spring new ideas for the upcoming patches.

[Sombre]

I was thinking of doing a blood-favouring war-hungry EA arco replacement nation myself. Not inspired by 300, but similar themes I suppose.

[Gandalf Parker]

If you do then you have two choices (probably more if I thought about it).

(1) a balanced nation suitable for playing against other unmodded nations in the game

(2) a wildly unbalanced nation meant as a more powerful AI opponent

Both have their difficulties. With (1) its hard to do good balance. With (2) its hard to get it to make best use of the AI code.

[Endoperez]

I like the descriptions the most. I don't actually have time to play much now, and haven't actually played that much in years - but I've enjopyed the stories and the developing world quite a lot. While modding has added a little to this since DomII, most of it has been done by Kristoffer, not Johan.

As for what I'd like to see, I'm most curious about between-ages things like what really happened with the Seal in the caves of Agartha, or some explanation about the origin of the Umbrals. Heroes are the simplest way of adding nation-spesific, semi-hidden descriptions, of course. *hint hint*




P.S. I'd like to add that there was a really cool piece of news about Sweden in Finnish television today. Your country has a great immigration policy, and I'm not sure if Finland would be ready for a black woman as minister. Finland is a long, long way behind Sweden in accepting different people. It seems Vanheim is overpowered even in the real world.

[Sombre]

That's a strange thing to say to me Gandalf. There are several mod nations which attempt to be balanced against the vanilla standards, including my last 3. I haven't seen any which were designed to be used only by the AI (although Amos' nations aren't balanced to vanilla standards).

[Gandalf Parker]

Wasnt it DrPraetorious that did a bunch of nations which sparked balance discussions. Based on back-and-forth discussions I thought he had decided to leave them unbalanced. In fact, I thought the whole thing culminated in
Mass Mod

[Sombre]

Right, but I don't think he's working on it any more because of the graphics limitation coded into dom3. I could be wrong.

I've personally come to the conclusion that it's sort of pointless as well - combining Amos' mods with other mods doesn't make that much sense and you can simply find or edit mods that work together as combos. Plus there actually aren't that many 'serious' nations added for each age - for example the late modcombo I listed is only missing Frank's Amazons (excluding Amos' LA nations, which I believe should be used as a seperate combo).

As for the doctor's nations - I only see the two recently released ones, both of which are in beta, lacking graphics etc. The nations he listed in the combined mod proposal, as far as I know, haven't been released. It's possible that there are a great many mods which people have half finished or not gotten around to posting up, many of which could be very good. I prefer to let people play while I knock up new versions, but some people prefer to wait until they're completely (or very nearly) finished before uploading, such as Zepath.

[merlinme]

To return somewhat to the original theme: Kristoffer was hoping for some inspiration to get him into writing some fun new background stuff for Dom3. A couple of ideas that spring to mind (dunno if they're practical but hopefully they're at least slightly interesting):

1) how about a nation which worships horrors? complete with the option to take a pretender based on a horror chassis.

2) how about a nation based loosely on the Wizard of Earthsea series? I realise copyright is an issue, but in any case there would have to be significant modification to fit it into the Dom3 setup, so it would be more in the way of inspiration. But you could (for example) combine it with Greek legends of sailing to beef out the land troops and so on. The basic idea would be a sailing nation with strong wizards. The wizards would be air/earth/water, perhaps with a bit of death thrown in. Perhaps you could make it an undead nation in one of the ages, say a necromancer has been successful in subjugating the archipelago, and the dead now rule.

The best wizards should be capital only, to keep them expensive (and rare), but much weaker witches and warlocks should be easily available. Priests should be average or weak, but capital wizards should have weak priestly powers as well (to represent their powers over spirits, and the respect in which they are held).

If you brought in inspiration from sources like the Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts, or even Sinbad the Sailor, I would have thought you could have a nation with a really interesting background.