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

[rdonj]

Bugs:
-In the descriptions for yithian units it talks about them having some kind of offensive mental powers, but none of them have any.
-I had two different versions of deep one priests, yithian awakeners and elder yithian awakeners available in my recruitment screen.
-There are two Create Orbital Station spells with the same name and description, but different levels/paths/costs.
-Summoned a ranged old one... no ranged weapon. I suspect you have a ranged weapon messed up here somewhere.

Suggestions:
-I don't really like having troops with their only melee weapon being a fist weapon
-I also don't like ships with fist weapons!
-get rid of the random on the stations and make them automatically have 2E.
-might want to do the same with the cultists, it's weird that their description says they can summon old ones when half of them can't. But with them it's less necessary.
-you might want to give the neoclidians shields as well. They have a lot of prot but ap weapons drastically reduce the effectiveness or armor. Or you could leave them as they are now and make them into a slightly high numbers race as they are a little less resource-wise than most units.
-streamer guns are pretty awful. 3 ap damage is not nearly enough to count as a ranged weapon in d3k. Try making them 6-8ap and seeing what happens. It may be a little overpowered but even 8 in not that much damage for d3k.
-I think researching is unnecessarily hard for neoclidia, even their 4 research mage starts old, and is a bit expensive. And they're supposed to be summoning old ones with some of their mages, taking up extra mage time. You should probably rethink mage cost/rp/age, as they are now I think they will research too slow.
-lightswords are pretty strong... I haven't used them yet but 16 armor negating damage might be a bit much for national recruitables.
-I think the god is a bit weak, he has path costs worse than any titan pretender, barely has better stats than a human pretender, and has terrible research ability. At the moment he's not terribly useful for any purpose.

[rdonj]

Okay I checked and the mindblasts you're using don't work because they are written Mindblast instead of Mind Blast. Just put that extra space and capital in there and it should work fine.

[Aezeal]

I like the feel of the nation though.. the sprites don't exactly fit their high prot etc for the regulars but it's close enough to work. Only thing that is sort of annoying is that R'lyeh usees the mindflayer sprites too.. but since they''ll probably always face eachother from other sides of the battle field it's probably not that much of an issue..

if Rdonj and I agree on the preteder being weak it must be so...
Either you make him a rainbow and thus lower newpath cost but I think that isn't the way to go, or you give him some better stats, some ability to reflect his weirdness and an extra magic path, or one path up to 3.

[rdonj]

I do really like what you did with orbital stations, having them be effectively manufacturing plants. That's pretty cool. And the ships are a bit closer offensively to what I was thinking when I first envisioned them. But I have the feeling they might be just a little overpowered compared to the units aezeal has made Pretty low hp though.

[Aezeal]

Having another nation with spaceships etc is good for the mod too (though personally I think getting some new maybe weirder spaceships for this mod should be first priority, also because those sprites are being used a bit often maybe.)

I'm thinking of another nation concept to introduce a death race in dom 3 K.. the sprites would be easy, and no different space forms probably.

A world inhabited by religous creatures, with lots of ancestor worship and communication with the souls of ancestors, destroyed by demons, blown apart. Their god/pretender usually a distant sort tried to save them and put all his remaining power into a casting to protect them to give them life eternal even. But the god of the demons twisted the spell and give them life eternal as shades and revenants.
A few pieces of that world land in a province, the site Shard of a broken world.

A lot of capitol only immortal souls of the pplz of the death planet, warped bu the spells of gods to be undead, ethereal and immortal. In other castles they can only force the souls of the dead that have lived there to follow (regular sort of shadish creatures, probably ethereal, not immortal)

all troops have AN attacks but with lowish damage

Relatively powerfull priests.

Recruitment of the death is not as in LA ermor, you can just buy the souls you want (I'll think of something blabla that the race was advanced in contacting souls no real magic was needed, just some cash to get the right stuff to arrange it etc etc)
No spaceships
A variet of cap only leaders, a small selection of everywhere recruitables.

A capitol

[rdonj]

Hmm, just got some weird "spr number too high for this file" error. I am not quite sure what caused that. I had just summoned my first orbital space station that turn? Yeah, and it doesn't seem to show up in my list of commanders. Unless maybe building one kills the one that made it?

Hmm, you could try something like that. A race with recruitable immortals could be pretty tough to balance. Having lots of ethereal units could be tough too. But if you feel up to the challenge

[Darkwind]

@ranged weapons: Ranged Old Ones are supposed to have lots of Mind Blasts. Streamgunners are supposed to attack 5 times, per turn.
@the pretender: He's supposed to be a semi-SC who can also get high in Astral. I'll lower the path cost to 50 maybe and give him S3. He also has a Mind Blast, but that's not too important.
@weapons: The Neoclidians are armed for a new era of Ranged Space Combat. If you're having melee problems due to having almost no melee weaponry, buy some Shoggoths. Trample the opposition under-blob. You could also buy Streamgunners.
@Orbital Stations: The higher level spell is level 3 Orbital Station. It can only be accessed by a Level 2. Higher levels get higher paths and consume fewer supplies, in addition to being tougher. I think I'll just give them 2E, since you're right the 1E ones are useless.
@research: Awakeners are now poor leaders, but have research bonus 4 (ie, 6/7 research). Elder Awakeners also get the research bonus. Both of them get a decrease in age(Awakener 10, Elder 25). Not much, but the Awakener shouldn't start old now.

Not sure what's up with the sprite numbers. Neoclidia is 2200-2248, maybe that's the problem. Checking an old version of Dom3K, it seems that that's 2600+.

And I'll fix the double-cap-only problem. it's because I placed the capital only troops & commanders as recruitables.

Here's my newest .dm. Time to play!

Edit: Also fixed a problem with Heavy Laserguns.
Edit2: I didn't want researchbonus 4. Too much. Down to 2 now.
Tripledit: Added Neoclidian Warship to unit roster.
Quadrupledit: Fixed a problem with the recruit screen mixing the space & land forms of units up.
Edit5: Two units were number 2205.

[Darkwind]

JUST as I was about to post edit 6, my editting limit runs out. Ah well.

Assuming this is stable, it'll be the last 'edit'. I'll wait for some other people to post first

So, I fixed the number problem (for real this time) and went through with my promised changes to the pretender.

Aaagh, I forgot to actually post the .zip.

[Aezeal]

hmmm low hp, no prot, and the immortals would be cap only... if needed high resc can prevent to much of them coming in the game.

I'm thinking an immortal trooper
an immortal

[Darkwind]

Originally Posted by rdonj

Hmm, just got some weird "spr number too high for this file" error. I am not quite sure what caused that. I had just summoned my first orbital space station that turn? Yeah, and it doesn't seem to show up in my list of commanders. Unless maybe building one kills the one that made it?

I got the error too. I went to look at the army setup after I summoned an advanced Orbital Station and it gave me the sprite number error too. Interestingly, the spaceforms for the units (which are all above that station's) didn't show up either. Also, I meant for building a station to kill the one that builds it, but that wasn't possible, sadly. I think the unit shows up as a non-commander, maybe due to the game getting confused about two nearly identical spells popping up.

As for the immortals, I'd think that giving their unique pretender a naturally low dominion would help keep the immortal units down a bit. I wouldn't want too powerful priests, either. H2 at most.

Finally, anyone have any experiences with the hopefully less-buggy Neoclidia? I've attached yet another .dm, as before I was accidentally saving the .txt only to the .dm--when I made a new change, the old ones were overwritten.