Mod: Nation - Tomb Kings - v1.03 released (March 2009)!

[llamabeast]

no worries.

[rdonj]

I'm in a game right now where I'm enjoying a good deal of success with 9w/9s blessed buried and mad amounts of summons. Buried sorcerors almost seem like the primary battle mages, as everything you get is immune to poison and sulphur haze is a pretty useful low level spell for them. I'm trying to produce astral fire-casting tomb kings but that has been slow going due to needing huge numbers of earth gems for summons and not having a very large income of them. And most of them having at most one astral.

I'm a bit worried about the bone scorpions. Sacred, high health, high prot tramplers with fear. Ouch. I think the fear may be just a little bit too much on top of everything else. I actually had 4 of them absorb crossbow fire from about 40 ulmish crossbowmen (and who knows how many short bows) and take maybe 20 damage... granted they're not cheap, but they're definitely worth it. It's a good thing most of the summons are in enchantment, tomb kings with the well of misery would be nasty.

The Undying didn't seem to be working on them though. Does regeneration work on things that are burning? If not that would explain it. Also, do you happen to know if soul slay works on lifeless/undead things?

[llamabeast]

Great feedback, thanks rdonj.

Yeah, strong blesses seem to work quite nicely with the Buried. I think the tower shield gives them a sufficiently good defense that the W9 bless makes them pretty hard to kill.

Buried sorcerors are meant to be the main battle mages, since their paths make them quite effective in battle. I was intending, though, that the player would end up with a lot of priests, because of the divine spells. What kind of balance do you end up with? Do you find the divine spells useful?

Why do you want astral fires-casting Tomb Kings, and why do earth gems matter for them?

Bone scorpions - interesting. They are meant to be nastily powerful, but maybe I ended up underpricing them. And they should at least be killable with some effort. I'll have a play with them at some point.

I'd thought The Undying did work on bone scorpions. If not I don't know why not. I'd thought of using The Undying on powerful undead as a sneaky perk of the Tomb Kings. Casting it on Tartarians would be great.

[rdonj]

At the moment, I'm building up buried and commanders for 3 turns and sending them out, most of the time it's 2 buried and a high priest, but in some of my forts I do 3 high priests. Earlier on I built more priests but the game is a ways in now and I have tons of them running around. I find the divine spells very useful, particularly Resilience as it brings buried from 4 to 13 prot, which is really useful. The Undying isn't really that useful on the troops but it's quite a bit better on Tomb Kings, scorpions and ushabti, especially for a nation with no native nature magic. Heal the dead is a bit hard to rely on as you can only script so far, and the ai would rather just cast revive dead when the scripting runs out. Strength of the Tomb has been bugging me though, the MR negates tag on it has made it pretty pointless to cast since almost every unit I have has 18+ MR when blessed.

I just like astral fire, it has a large aoe, does lots of an damage, plus with the high magic resistance on everything I'm using it's not very likely to do much friendly fire. Earth gems were a problem because I had an earth gem income of 7 for most of the game and I need to forge starshine skullcaps and crystal coins to be able to cast it since I've only gotten one tomb king so far with natural astral as high as 2. So it was tough trying to do that while summoning ushabti/anubites.

I'm pretty sure it does work, they do get the regeneration buff, it just wasn't healing the only scorpion that had taken damage in that battle and I think it was because it was on fire. I've seen it work on the other units, so I don't see why it wouldn't. Undying Tartarians would be rather nice. I don't think I'm going to get to play with them in this game though, I'm too close to winning. Maybe next time I'll focus less on enchantment.

[llamabeast]

Well, both Resilience and Strength of the Tomb have the MR-negates tag. I guess maybe SotT is less useful simply because the strength boost is less powerful, but having said that I think that for units like Buried, +4 to strength makes quite a big difference.

The best way to get the healing spell working is just to have two or three acolytes in every battle. The healing spell is pretty much the only thing they can cast, and they do so reliably. I'd be interested to know if you find them effective, but my own thought was that they were quite an asset in battle. That's a good thing because otherwise they're fairly useless.

Glad to hear you have quite a lot of priests running around. They are meant to be a priest-based nation.

[llamabeast]

Well, both Resilience and Strength of the Tomb have the MR-negates tag. I guess maybe SotT is less useful simply because the strength boost is less powerful, but having said that I think that for units like Buried, +4 to strength makes quite a big difference.

The best way to get the healing spell working is just to have two or three acolytes in every battle. The healing spell is pretty much the only thing they can cast, and they do so reliably. I'd be interested to know if you find them effective, but my own thought was that they were quite an asset in battle. That's a good thing because otherwise they're fairly useless.

Glad to hear you have quite a lot of priests running around. They are meant to be a priest-based nation.

[rdonj]

I didn't realize resilience was MR negates also, for some reason it seems to be successfully cast much more frequently. Maybe just because I usually don't have priests casting strength of the tombs on the first round of combat. I would find it very strange if one didn't have many priests running around, I'm pretty sure they're the most efficient researchers and they can cast several useful battlefield spells. I will try to incorporate more of the lower level priests when I play in the future to try and get more healing going on. I'm sure it would be very useful when fighting archer-heavy armies.

[rdonj]

Well, in the process of running a test game I proved conclusively to myself that the bone scorpions don't benefit from the undying, for some reason. Annoying, that.

The acolytes did prove rather useful though

[rdonj]

For the sheer joy of experimentation I just threw a regen bless on the buried and looked to see what that would do... when I got them blessed, the icon didn't show up and sure enough it didn't actually cause them to regenerate. I looked up the Regeneration spell and it specifically states it doesn't work on lifeless beings. So I don't know if it's possible to make them regenerate at all. I'm not 100% convinced healing works either, because I've seen heal spells hit and not do anything. I had a bone scorpion that may have gotten 1 hp from a heal, but then a second heal landed directly on it and did nothing.

[Sombre]

I have this horrible feeling a healing spell has to be AN to work properly, because healing is just like damage but with a different tag.