Mod: Dominions 3000 v0.81 - lots of new indies, new map (using the brand new map commands)

[rdonj]

In the version I downloaded yesterday, summon oni dragon was conjuration 1 and costed 4 death per dragon.

Personal Artillery Marines, Ulmish Planetary Guardsmen, Chief-Engineers, Navigators, and Jomon's University Professors all have no melee weapon. Strangely, Jomon's defenders have fist weapons as well as their lightsabers. I have the feeling that probably went away when you changed the #end on their light sabers though. Oh, also Dai Oni have javelins, that's a little weird. The taser is, for the record, so good because even ulm's 25 ap ranged weapons on the artillery marines do less damage per hit than one taser in melee to a space eel.

Definitely haven't seen the tractor beam yet. That could be cool.

I don't really know what kind of projectile art would be good. It's definitely hard to come up with something that would make sense for this game. If you were using bullets it would be easy to say to go for sling stones for the moment. You can't mod projectile art, can you? 'cause if you're envisioning the blasters being star wars-esque you could almost get away with making the shots smaller versions of the fire shot jomon uses.

It was a few turns ago in my game that I last fought dom3 independants so I don't know, but I think it's semi-random because in my ulmish game I had oni dragons in a territory that my jomon game has blue aliens in. I'll go compare maps a sec.

The following provinces have Oni Dragon PD in one or both games: 13 (oni dragons and space trolls in one game, blue aliens and space trolls in the other), 22 (oni dragons, thralls, vampires, space pirates, space station, vampire count), and 1 (heavy infantry, light infantry, crossbowman, space station). There could be more since I haven't explored the whole map in either. I saw a few provinces that had no independants as well, one of which I believe was that planet with every terrain type, connected to the center province of that large planet on the bottom. Also in my game as ulm it seems r'lyeh somehow managed to acquire upwards of 40 oni dragons, though I'm quite certain they don't have the spell to summon them. Screenshot attached, if not pretty.


Edit: Okay that screenshot doesn't really help. But if you look really closely you can see what appears to be the very top of the r'lyeh banner's star above the heads of the dragons.

[rdonj]

Oh. Also, if you do change shield parry values they will start working in melee too, so keep that in mind. And needlers may want to change to AN damage, 1 AP damage isn't really enough to hurt anything (this only affects ulm's med-priests).

I think you're eventually going to have to make the entire magic system over, there are too many things, summons especially, that are going to be all out of balance in this mod. Like summoning longdeads on the battlefield, they're going to be completely useless without 20+ mages summoning them....

[rdonj]

There actually apparently is an invisible flysprite that doesn't hit instantly according to the database. That's 149. The arrow shaped fiery missile sounds promising too, number 426.

[Aezeal]

I don't know why there are oni dragons in those provinces the code for the map doesn't put them there.. someone said that he got a celebrant fo the faith with dragons though.. strange and I don't get it but that could explain something.

You have a version where teh oni dragon is still at test costs.. it will be much harder to get

If magic isn't balanced then that isn't my problem atm.. just don't use weak spells

Ok that twin ship blasters now has nratt 2
The transport already had a tractorbeam (great idea I had)
Prices have been changed, Ulm capitol ship a bit improved
I think most troops that have fists need to have them (mostly those mages) the artillery has their hands fill with their cannon and can't wield melee weapons, just drop the cannon and his, same for mages
Ulm defenders do need a weapon I think so they now have a combat knive on the ground, in space they don't get another weapon.
I lowered taser damage by 1 but you hardest point for them is the use against space eels and that is just one troop... against normal troops I don't think they are that much overpowered.
Trying to get rid of the Javelin for the dai-oni, but the best way to get rid fo copied weapons is unknown to me.. I changed it a bit and we'll see what happens now
used the flysprite you suggested and one for artillery
changed MR on large ships

AND with these changed I'm releasing v 0.5!!!!

[rdonj]

Did you by chance base the oni dragon off of another unit, such as a type of militia? Because all the times they've cropped up its been in a place where you might normally see them. If you did, maybe if you just created the unit from scratch the problem would go away. That being said, it sounds like you did copy the dai oni and then change his sprite and so on. If you made a completely new unit instead it should let you do it without the javelin. For the record, I also was doing a quick test game of a normal nation with your mod on and found oni dragons defending provinces. Not sure that proves anything though.

Yeah, tasers aren't really overpowered on some things, they just have some idiosyncracies.

It would also be really convenient if all the different nations had different-colored score graphs to make it easier to tell them apart