New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread

[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.

[Shovah32]

Two word for that atheist nation: Stealth. Preachers.

[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.

[TheMenacer]

I've been kicking around an idea for a plant based nation for a while now. I'd try to keep away from the generic fantasy tree-man archetype, and instead fill it out with hyper-specialized units like a "Siege Vine" which would be completely worthless and weak aside from its massive siege bonus. Basically the whole nation would tend towards having a slow early game, relatively poor offensive skills, but be a defensive monster until late game, when various investment summons like a creature that can't move or do anything other than freespawn immortal chaff finally build enough to just boil over and tear apart everything. I think a general jungle plant theme would be pretty sweet, along with stuff like parasitic fungi with a mind control attack, ranged units that spray flesh-eating spores, and maybe something like a fire cult (they're plants so they naturally fear and respect fire) to make them stand apart from Pangaea as far as the whole "we love us some nature magic" thing goes. Too bad I'm completely terrible at making sprites or I'd probably have done something by now.

[Aezeal]

Ow I can think of a great idea, I like this challange
first of I'm ignoring most of the "background" we might be able to think of wtf this race actually is later.

1. A race of immovable creatures which teleport (not by spell, just mapmove 1 and combatmove 0) from province to province.

2. No recruitable troops, just commanders

3. a commander for each magic type, has 2 power in that magic group.

4. The commanders do not attack in melee, they are immovable. They have an aura that deals damage or a mindblast, or will have to cast spells. So ultimate no melee nation.

5. they need a lot of combat summons, one for each magic level for each path.

6. combat will be through the aura's and mindblasts etc of the characters and their in battle summons.

7. No ritual summons for this race

8. no research, they know all spells, or all spells are in spell level 0 for this race

9. no item slots on our commanders/characters, no need for forging and equiping.

10. use for gems: only to upgrade your characters (empowering)

11. Leaders are 0 gc, just get one each turn from a fort

12. forts would be summons, their price combined with 0 gc leaders would be a major balance thing IMHO

ok that are the basics

what do you end up with. A race of immobile magicians who can only increase their strength by
1. getting more characters
2. empowering characters (which takes a lot of gems, which takes time)

this is equal to normal races in the sense that normal races can obviously get more troops
or make their troops stronger (usually indirectly through items, spell research which takes a lot of time and is not possible from the start

expanding:
move on or more of your immobile characters (which do have a mapmove of 1) onto an enemy province

combat:
your immobile (and completely immobile in combat) characters have several options
1. attack directly
2. summon troops
3. buff troops

obviously the "fun" thing would be to let each type (and type means the magic paths they have) have a different "niche" so let fire and blood have the strongest direct attacks (AoE would be nice)
others the better summons
and others the best buffs
and yet again others the best combat spells.

of course this would get boring and too easy.

So if your characters are UPGRADED (maybe each level, maybe every 2) the "niche" they have would change

So after 2 empowerments maybe blood and earth have the best summons, and air and fire the best buffs etc
(only the attack could not be changed, and, since it would have to be balanced from the start of the game it would probably not be competative anymore later in the game)

So choices for the player in a game are.. do I empower 1 character very high (LOADS of gems) and do I use my other characters as the standard lvl 2 pplz or several a few levels, or all only 1-2 levels?

Obviously the higher level character would be able to summon stronger troops, buff them better etc etc etc but he'd only see chaff and weak spells from the low levels characters....

This could go well with a kill population dominion, but would not be needed, IMHO they should just get no income at all if somehow possible.. or a MAJOR upkeep so you'd loose all cash each turn (no giving away all cash in MP) Pretender would just be a normal leader, but maybe with a lil higher magic level (3) of one of the types but which would cost a huge amount of points and a huge cost for new magic level. (no standard creation since then you'd be able to start with a level 9 who'd already have all major spells the rush would be too easy)

basicly you'd just be able to switch a bit of scales around and get more positive scales if your pretender was not awake.

now to give it some racial background, I'm thinking it could be a race of crystals in each color (not very original) or metals (also not very original) or elementals (again not very original) or (only a bit better but my favorite) monoliths with strange carvings (obviously there is room for improvement here.

IMHO this is the most original race posted yet

[Amos]

. A race of immovable creatures which teleport (not by spell, just mapmove 1 and combatmove 0) from province to province.

I think if you set AP below 2 it is reset to 10.