Mod Nation - Tomb Kings - v1.03 released (March 2009)! - Page 6

llamabeast · #1 March 8th, 2009, 03:43 PM

Jazzepi - lots of blesses are quite interesting. W9 (and even W9F9) make your Burieds extremely vicious. W9E9 is curiously effective in making them tougher, and is also good for your Ushabtis. D9 (or D9W9) can make your Asp Archers very nasty - it can be hard to avoid their poison entirely, and with a high death bless any damage tends to cause an affliction. Astral is good for resisting banishment, and W9S9 can make your Burieds very hard to hurt. Nature is fairly useless since nothing can regenerate and nothing flees anyway. Blood might be reasonably useful, at least as a side effect if you wanted a Blood Fountain or something as your pretender.

I think now, though, you could reasonably opt for a low-bless strategy and go for scales. Your troops are all pretty decent once buffed by your priests. The fact that they never tire nor flee can make them pretty effective, and Strength of the Tomb means they can hurt armoured things.

I think there are quite a lot of different options on what you might want to focus one, which I'm pleased with. I'll be interested to see what you go for.

Jazzepi · #2 March 8th, 2009, 04:44 PM

I don't know if this is intentional or not, but when I play the mod with CBM and the mod installed, there are two Son of the Sun with "no description available". Both cost 0 points. One of them has Awe +1 from the start.

Also, why the heck do the mages with no armor, ~and~ no weapons, cost 3 resources?

Jazzepi

Sombre · #3 March 8th, 2009, 05:34 PM

Sounds like an id conflict. Unless llama specifically went through and checked it against the latest CBM, that'll happen.

You should be able to fix it yourself easily enough though.

Gregstrom · #4 March 8th, 2009, 06:11 PM

I think there are two Sons of the Sun in CBM - I'm pretty sure I've seen it with just CBM and no other mods in place. I think one has F and one has S, or something similar.

rdonj · #5 March 9th, 2009, 02:38 AM

Well, in Warhammerama I went with a W/S bless on an oracle, with high order, sloth, and magic. I don't remember for the other scales. It was a small game vs lizards, ogres, and rats, and I was terrified of wither bones, plus I figured there had to be a significant amount of banishment spam that would be coming at me. And the lizards have tons of powerful priests, so the extra magic resistance seemed like a very good idea (and most definitely was). My buried weren't quite good enough killers to take out ogres or E10 lizard temple guards, but sulphur haze worked well to kill both of those. And by the time I was fighting the lizards I had cloud of death, supplemented by the occasional shadow blast... all of which the buried are almost completely immune to.

I haven't tried any other bless with them really, W/S just seemed the best fit for them to me, plus it's cheap. I can see fire being quite devastating though. If you can get by using an earth bless it would be great for your tomb kings later on. And death would be nice as well. If only sorcerors were sacred, I can only imagine how delightful it would be watching your enemies become horrifically afflicted in a giant cloud of burning vapors.

And with immortals, keep in mind that they have map move 3. Sure, I was playing a small game where I had only a fairly small amount of land to fight in. I actually was never more than 3 provinces from the front, I think. But even without survival skills 3 map move should get just about anywhere pretty quickly. I would also think, if you had 100 blessed, well-buffed immortals you could kill just about any tartarian you could find. And do it again and again. But having them basically limited to a defensive role is a pretty significant mark against them.

In any case, this update imo sounds like a pretty significant boost to the tomb kings overall. I'll have to get a game or two going

llamabeast · #6 March 9th, 2009, 02:53 PM

I'm just about to upload another mini-update, v1.01.

Changes:

- I appear to have gone mad while balancing the Ushabti. They have now lost 2 points of protection and 1 of MR, the ritual blade has 1 attack rather than 2 and they cost 14 rather than 12 gems. They're still excellent. The Ushabti Avatars have gone up to 40 gems (from 30). They are still quite awesome and pretty cheap (considering you don't need GoH or GoR), and could easily be a strategy in themselves I reckon.
- Buried now cost 22.
- Tomb Priest cost -> 120 (from 100).
- High Priest cost -> 240 (from 210). The priests are better now that their buffs are so much more effective. Acolytes have stayed the same because they've not been improved, and their main cost is the opportunity cost of not hiring someone else anyway.
- Buried Sorcerors cost -> 200 (from 180). They were always meant to be expensive.
- The Gilded Scorpion now costs 150 design points, down from 175. He's extremely powerful, but short on slots.
- Fixed the Sons of the Sun. The problem was mysterious but I just worked around it.
- Fixed all the other non-standard pretenders so that they have CBM stats. Otherwise they would have vanilla stats even under CBM, because they're actually copies of the pretender units.

So I guess generally this update is a gentle nerf. v1.00 was probably a bit of a buff though, so hopefully they remain strong. The overall change has been a slight increase in expense and an improvement in magic and summons, which is probably to the nation's benefit overall.

llamabeast · #7 March 9th, 2009, 02:57 PM

Comments welcome, of course.

rdonj · #8 March 9th, 2009, 03:46 PM

Well, most of those changes don't bother me really. For example, the change to the buried. They're still only 8 gold more than your recruitable elites. The high priest change and the ushabti sound painful though. That was a pretty heavy nerf to the ushabti, they're not nearly as good now. I'm not sure it's a good idea to use them without a bless in this iteration. They already are large, expensive magic beings who if I recall can only regenerate health in a lab. It seems it's getting to be hard to use them efficiently. I don't suppose they are immune to petrification?

The high priest change will slow yor expansion down a bit and make an already expensive nation even more expensive. I'm not sure how much this particular change will hurt you. Maybe you'll actually want to create some of the lower level priests every once in a while.

llamabeast · #9 March 9th, 2009, 06:56 PM

Right! Ridiculously I'm just about to upload yet another little update, v1.02. This is planned to be the last change again for a while, so Jazzepi and anyone else using them in MP can settle to these final settings. Apologies for the multiple versions. Balancing can be tricky, and it makes your brain go funny.

Changes:
- Ushabti regained 20 natural prot and 16 MR. Their Ritual Blade also gained a couple of points to attack. However, they still cost 14 gems and still only have one attack. After I compared them to the crusher I realised that just being very tough was not a major feature, and there had to be some good reason to summon them rather than a crusher. They're meant to be a national perk after all.
- Ushabti Avatars gained *much* more interesting paths. When you summon one now you'll have no idea what you're going to get, but you can be fairly certain it'll be useful. Also they're not restricted to the national paths - the old gods they served had all manner of powers - so they can be used for diversification at a (very expensive) pinch. They're also much less likely to have weak astral, so they can't be trivially nailed by Magic Duel. They're not very good at water though. The river gods were among the first to be destroyed.
- Ushabti avatars had broken morale, fixed.
- Ushabti are now poor amphibians.
- Ushabti and Anubites gained #stonebeing, so needn't fear petrification.
- The Asp Bow had no resource cost, fixed.

Comments welcome as always.

llamabeast · #10 March 9th, 2009, 07:07 PM

Never let it be said that I'm not easily swayed by comments rdonj.

The Ushabti should be worthwhile again now. They are super nasty against the AI, but I guess a player should still be able to bring them down fairly easily. I hope so anyway. Well, they are much less tough than Crushers, and I've never heard anyone say that they're overpowered.

I think I'm pleased with the gold cost increases though. It should be an expensive nation I think. And if you end up sometimes recruiting the cheaper priests, that's very good news for variety!