New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread

[Sombre]

I've got a great one for you. An atheist nation. They have no sacreds, obviously, instead they have various weapons and spells that make sacreds largely useless against them by using the bane of heresy, halt sacred etc weapons and abilities. Rather than priests they have heretics, in fact most of their commanders are heretics, reducing dominion where they go. Of course they keep dominion in their cap - they just try to reduce it to 0 everywhere else.

And the big reason they want to reduce dominion to 0 or as low as possible everywhere else is partly because their commanders domspawn liability units - religious scroungers and conmen that can't do much of anything useful, but cost a whole lotta upkeep.

They have a special immobile pretender with a very high level of holy magic in order to preach at their home town and keep the dom up there.

They don't have to be human based at all - in fact they might be better off being very alien indeed, since they are so strange compared to other dom3 nations.

[Endoperez]

Perhaps the race itself starts underwater, but the conmen are mostly humans. That'd keep the capital from being filled with neverending horde of dangerously costly individuals.

I remember seeing some artist's renditions of a fish that wore priestly gown and carried a miniature gallows as a symbol of its status. In various pictures, these fish-priests wandered among humans, accepted children given as tribute for their might empire, etc etc. It had a staff that ended on a miniature gallows. I couldn't locate the site any more.

[Amos]

Maybe I should give some of my demons anti-sacred weapons. Then the Hellgate mod would be pretty close to what you are describing.

[Xavier]

I really got into the dragon idea I was daydreaming about in the other thread yesterday.

The mechanics would be similar to LA Ermor, but without the free chaff and death dominion (and so would be quite different). But basically you need an awake pretender with specific paths to get started, and you have no recruitable units. Instead, you can summon dragons and dragon-kin (humanoid dragon-like creatures). Young dragons are your standard mages, dragon-kin are commanders and priests. After some conjuration research you get access to the ancient dragons, at a very high gem cost, which are prebuilt SCs and powerful mages. Your troops would be groups of dragon-kin - flying, high attack skill, strength and MR, mid-range protection, low defense. These would also be a 0 conjuration national summon, and the gem cost would have to be carefully balanced to make early expansion possible without being overpowered later.

I'm also thinking the nation would have a few different paths along the lines of the existing dragon pretenders - fire, water, nature, and death, at least. Each of those paths would have national summons for troops, priests, mages, and SCs. Each one in each path would be similar, but somewhat different. High attack skill on fire, high def on water, death are undead and cause fear, maybe some regen on nature (or something else). And of course the summonable mages in each path have different paths themselves.

[mathusalem]

Post deleted by mathusalem

[WraithLord]

Twan, your ideas are very neat and it seems to me that you have a clear picture in your mind of how you want those nations to be, so I can only hope you will sometime be able to complete one or more of them.

Sombre, I like your idea of an atheist nation. Do you have plans of actually making such a mod?

Xavier, Do you think you can come up with an initial breakdown of commanders of troops for your draconian nations. If you like you can send it to me for a review or or something alike.

Please don't get the wrong idea here, Its not my intention to manage neither this thread nor any mod that may come out of it. Its just, since I know my modding capabilities are limited at best, I'm trying to contribute in whatever small manner I can.

[Xavier]

will do, thanks. probably gonna take a couple days though, I've got RL work to be doing here. should be fun though, when I get to it.

[Endoperez]

Conquest of Elysiun had draconians. You could check that for ideas, and for sprites to base your graphics on. They'd be about half the size of Dom3 sprites, or worse, but I know there are e.g. copper/bronze dragons (they guard iron mines I think) that are smaller than the drakes of Dominions.

[Sombre]

WraithLord said:
Sombre, I like your idea of an atheist nation. Do you have plans of actually making such a mod?

Nope, I'm not making it.

My plan is to update my mods and continue working on warhammer nations for the next few years, basically. So you won't see anything like the Atheist nation from me. Although I am introducing some weird play mechanics in the warhammer nations, like the Dogs of War getting their paymaster and unique commanders.

[Tyrian]

A crystal nation based on Earth and Astral magic (potentially blood and/or death equally). Slowly kill population, domspawn/summoned allies (with more population killing like ghouls), strong but few unit, use of conjuration.

History: The origin of the crystal nation lies in a meteor wich strike the world in past eons (accompagned by some calmars with feet). Quickly, primitive humans begins a cult to a strange luminiscent crystal. These tribe make humans sacrifice to the new and indifferent god. Sacrifice after sacrifice, something awake in the crystal, an alien consciousness, tainted by the sacrifice.

The new god quickly break and dominate the weak human spirit, and make them touch the crystal. The crystal devoured them, soul and flesh. After that, the crystal begin to growth and attract other animals or humans. It devoured all life wich touch him and began to devour the world.

Some ideas:
-Special unit, create by conjuration, who generate pearl but kill population more quickly. It is an immobile unit. The pretender god can be an special unit of this type.

-crystal mutant: Unit conjured by blood magic, it is a generic type of monster created by the implantation of a crystal in the corpse. The crystal infect the subject and devours his soul and knoweldge. These can give different spells: a spell like cross breeding and a spell to create assassin/spy.

-crystal unlife: These creatures are skeletton with crystal in the eye-sockets. They can have life stealing capacity at range.

-An idea for a hero: a crystal mage who touch voluntary the crystal and are ascended to a new form life.

It is a rough sketch. These ideas are quickly find, without balance reflexions. I'm not able to make a good mod because I'm very very bad to make graphism.