Mod: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)

[Adept]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

Removing the hand slots just means one more thing. They do even less damage. I would then only use them as falling frost casters who cannot be killed easily. (give skrattir a water ring, and they can always cast falling frost, do they get hit bad? they transform into werewolves that run away).

You just don't like the skrattir do you?

Don't like = it's too good for it's price and the synergy it has with the nation.

I have nothing against thugs and SCs, but the super werewolf skratti is cheese and a half. I never claimed they are unstoppable, just that they are too good. Again, this is my preference, and I don't expect it to be shared with everybody.

On a different topic? Furies useless? I disagree, they did a number on my bloodhunters in Bootcamp. I lost a lot of blood random hags, high blood gygja's, and skrattir in that game due to these *****es. But that was using CBM, where the spell is moved waaaaay down in cost and research (lvl 6, 30 f gems, f4 n3). They poison like crazy, auto cast darkness. Lot of stuff dies to them. And them picking up a blood thorn did not improve things.
Also, how do you make them worse by letting them pick up items?

You missed it the first time I guess. All they need to do is pick up an item that let's the cast a spell, and they are neutralised. A fury that picks up a skull amulet will sit in place, summoning one skeleton / turn.

I _like_ the Kindly Ones spell. It's very atmospheric and can be quite effective. What I don't like is the creatures being neutralised by such sillyness, especially as it's this easy to fix.

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I guess I should have re-stated the goals of the mod in this thread. Ignore the name, think of it as Adept's Mod if you are confused by the word balance in the name.

What the changes are meant to do: The weapon changes are easiest to understand. Many of the weapons in vanilla Dominions are prevalent, but really horrible choises. I've gone for a combination of getting closer to historical weapons in effectiveness, and making sure that better weapons have higher res cost. It's not very important as weapon res costs in Dominions are rather low anyway compared to those of armour. Still it has some effect, and at least one can now get a bit more use out of polearms.

The removal of forge boosters and gem production moves the emphasis a little towards armies, and away from magic. More importantly it lessens micro management. No spending time moving forging hammers from mage to mage over your empire, nor flushing out gems from people carrying fever fetishes, bloodstones and the like.

Making Jomon be more in line with rest of Dominions is a personal fancy of me and my friends. Blame it on an interest in history and martial arts interests if you will. I'm quite keen to see how Jomon will stand up now in our next match. A part of the motivation is that Dominions is actually one of the best (pseudo) historical wargames out there. It is interesting to see how a more realistic take on the samurai squares up with it's European rivals.

Fixing the people who only carry a spear will give a little more punch to some units in sore need of it. It won't come up that often, but like the chariot fix when it comes up it will be nice.