Oceania - Let's fix it. Mod discussion

[Burnsaber]

Okay, I've got some good news and some bad news.

Oceania's limitation of "only turtle-crap in land forts" is apparently pretty hard-coded. I cannot add any new recruitables to Oceanian land castles. So, the Dema alliance is out of the picture. Well, I re-read this thread and the Oceania suggestion thread for some ideas and then started working.

One thing that has always bothered me a bit in EA Oceania is that there are Triton Kings, but where are the queens. Oceania is a total sausagefest anyways. I thought about just giving some queens as summons, but they would be N/W anyways, and thus not very useful. I scrapped the idea, and but in the selphies, since Honeybadger was nice enough to give a graphic for the sea form!

Then I went for a different route with the land castle problem. If turtle infantry is all that you get, it needs to be sexier. So I replaced the turtle guys with a "Daughter of Selphie" (magepriest) and "Son of Selphie" (troop), which introduce the "mist bringer" themes of Chrispedersen.

Then I got a another idea for the queens when brainstorming descriptions for the selphies.

Oceania was once truly the kings of the sea. Knowing that they'd never be able to conquer the dry realm above the waves, the ancient "uber" Triton Kings (hinted in the description of vanilla Triton Kings), devised a plan to start a great flood and to make the world theirs. However, Pantakrator found out about this and stripped the Kings of much of their powers and cursed the triton queens with hideous bodies (inspired by the legend of scylla). Ta-daa! Late-game monsterous summon!

Since picture is worth a thousand words...



a) Daughter of Selphie's land form. She'll be A1W1H1 (with A/N/E/W random).

b) Daughter of Selphie's water form. Nothing special planned about it.

c) Selkie's land form. I'm going to farther away from the myths a bit and make them tricksy and curious water/mist spirits with good access to air to introduce the mist theme. They'll swap the air magic for water in sea. The Selkies have made a strange deal with Oceanian people... (I'll expalin in detail once I've figured out some details)

d) Son of Selkie's water from. Underwater, these guys won't do much. I might give them animalawe to give them a niche use UW against shark spam.

e) Son of Selkie's land form. These will be okay troops with glamour (granted to them by the magical otter-skin cloaks grafted to them by their mothers)

f) Cursed Queen - These will be a late-game summon. When the queens got mutated by Pantakrator, they couldn't stand it, and fled to the deeps. With aoens, they've taken to witchy practices in a futile attemp to get their old bodies back. They will grant small access to astral/death. Probably W2N2 with 100% for either S2 or D2. The lower part of the picture got somehow corrupted when I copy-pasted it.

g) Uncorrupted Queen - She will be a hero. She is uncursed because she was the one who told the pantakrator about the flooding plan. Hence, she didn't get the curse, but had to flee the wrath of Triton Kings. Compassionate soul, she will be a mighty healer and nature mage.

h) Seal, the water form of selkie.

i) The Dema Troops I managed to make before I found the full scale of the land castle problem, these will not be feautred, but since I made them, I just might as well show them off.

[Trumanator]

Maybe you could throw in a national spell that IS the great flood planned. Sort of like a reverse Thetis' blessing, maybe throw in some income drops and such for everyone else, sort of like utterdark.

[llamabeast]

Burnsaber, you are awesome.

Incidentally, when you say "Selphie" do you mean selkie? You seem to use both.

[llamabeast]

I can't think what you can do re. the flood, but if you can think of any floody spells they would be a great addition.

I suppose you could make a national quagmire, but then you'd want to give the troops swamp survival and that doesn't seem especially thematic.

[llamabeast]

By the way all the graphics are absolutely great, but I'm particularly a fan of the Daughter of Selphie (both forms), and both Triton Queens.

I'm actually looking forward to playing this, an impressive feat!

[llamabeast]

Hmm, I wonder if you could make a national Perpetual Storm (beginning of the flood).

Just thinking aloud.

Spammy spam spam...

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by Trumanator

Maybe you could throw in a national spell that IS the great flood planned. Sort of like a reverse Thetis' blessing, maybe throw in some income drops and such for everyone else, sort of like utterdark.

Good idea. I can't mod a spell like you descriped, but IIRC, there might have been a way to mod a spell that send a "flood" event to a coastal province. If so, I'll make a national spell of it, "Will of the Kings".

Originally Posted by llamabeast

Burnsaber, you are awesome.

Incidentally, when you say "Selphie" do you mean selkie? You seem to use both.

I know :P

Yeah, I'm not really decided on which spelling should I use. Since I'm not going exactly by the legend, I'm a bit lenient on using the direct name (althought I'm using the seal fur thing, you can notice the Selkie wearing a white cloak).

Originally Posted by llamabeast

By the way all the graphics are absolutely great, but I'm particularly a fan of the Daughter of Selphie (both forms), and both Triton Queens.

I'm actually looking forward to playing this, an impressive feat!

Not to brag, but I really nailed the land form of the Daughter in my opinion. I was actually thinking of switching the graphic between the Selkie and the Daughter, because the daughter looked more epic. I might copy paste the dress (taken mostly from mermage land form) to the actual selkie to make it look better.

The Quuens are mostly a mix & match collection of parts from the Nerid, Draikana & Mother of Monsters. I originally thought about making the corrupted queens have octopoid underbodies (like the baddie in the Little Mermaid disney flick), but since that would make them aquatic..

I have the graphics now, but I still need to write the descriptions and the full .dm file, so it might take a while. I'll probably release the first version by the end of month, thought.

Originally Posted by llamabeast

Hmm, I wonder if you could make a national Perpetual Storm (beginning of the flood).

Sweet idea! I'll do that. Oceania has much to benefit from storms too. (protects the missile weak land troops, allow air powering to lighting spams..). Now I just need a epic name for it. If I can't make the flood spell, this one will be called "Will of the Kings"

[chrispedersen]

Awesome stuff... and I'm not nearly the modder you are - but I may have a way to fix the land only recruit problems.

Give it a new nation number. Sure, pita, but it would work wouldn't it?

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Awesome stuff... and I'm not nearly the modder you are - but I may have a way to fix the land only recruit problems.

Give it a new nation number. Sure, pita, but it would work wouldn't it?

True! Never thought of that. Seems like some of the Dema alliance is back. (it's pretty.. stupid to only have 1 recrutable troop & commander in land castles). Now the daughter of selkie can be just a mage and the land-priest could be the dema shaman.

[llamabeast]

Right! I have been working this evening on a nice apocalyptic end-game battlefield enchantment. Code below.

It is meant to represent a powerful ritual to bring the wrath of the sea to the battlefield. The skies open, rain pours down in torrents, visibility is reduced to a few yards, the ground turns to mud, and from all sides the power of the sea itself descends to crush the enemies of the Oceanians.

I envisage it being maybe a research-8 spell in one of enchantment, alteration or conjuration. It would need quite high caster level, maybe water-6.

What it does:
- Storm
- Mist
- Quagmire
- Summons water elementals from all sides. Initially large elementals will come (in the first round or two it looks crazy). However, quickly the torrent will be reduced to just a few smaller elementals each turn. After 9 turns nothing more will come (hence it's not exploitable).

The spell looks potentially overpowered, but I don't think it is really. I haven't carefully tuned the number of water elementals, but I think they would not be a huge issue for a magically prepared late game army. In fact a mid game army could fend them off well enough I think.

Note that in the code the spell is trivial to cast, and not restricted to Oceania, so that it is easy to test.

Code:

#newspell
#copyspell "Storm"
#name "Oceanian Quagmire"
#school -1
#effect 81
#damage 85
#nextspell "Mist"
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "Summon Water Elemental"
#name "Oceanian Small Elementals"
#school -1
#effect 9043
#damage 412
#nreff 5
#nextspell "Oceanian Quagmire"
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "Summon Water Elemental"
#name "Oceanian Medium Elementals"
#school -1
#effect 3043
#damage 410
#nreff 3
#nextspell "Oceanian Small Elementals"
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "Living Water"
#name "Oceanian Large Elemental"
#school -1
#researchlevel 0
#effect 2043
#damage 408
#nreff 2
#nextspell "Oceanian Medium Elementals"
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "Storm"
#name "Coming of the Flood"
#school 0
#researchlevel 0
#path 0 2
#pathlevel 0 1
#fatiguecost 100
#nreff 5
#nextspell "Oceanian Large Elemental"
#end

(note the nreff 5 is not a mistake, it seems to be needed for the summons to work correctly)