Thanks for the fast reply.
>1. They start with a blood/death spell to summon a vampire count.
The Vamp Count requires Blood-3 and Death-3 plus 44 slaves. That's a pretty steep cost for a nation that has Blood-1 and Death-0. Basically you must cultivate your pretender as a blood/death mage to use this aspect of the theme. You probably should have given players some clue about this in the description. I'd never have figured it out myself.
There is still no real way to use the death gems. Until you get a random pick in death or use the pretender.
I'm not too keen on giving nations abilities, but not the mages to use them.
>Otherwise use the blood mages, you can go quite far with 5 ghoul guardians.
Not if I have to hire a mage to lead every 5 of them.
>3. Use the #clear command and then add the abilities you want him to retain.
Except we have no commands to add those types of abilities back in...
>4. No
No ability to affect/create themes?
That's a MODing disaster as the themes are a large portion of the game.
In fact this forces me to muck with the nations main theme, which is something I really wanted to avoid.
I do not want to be forced to remove a main nation just to add in a mod. This defeats the whole point of modding, which is to ADD to a game.
[gigantic sigh] Until mods don't subtract main themes, and until the battle replay speed is fixed, I'm going to stay out of Modding. This isn't some sort of threat. It's just too frustrating to have almost what you need, but not quite enough. When the MOD tools are up to spec, I'll do a massive and fun MOD. Until then I'm watching from the sidelines.
[ January 12, 2004, 15:34: Message edited by: apoger ]