Mod: Nation - Lodum : Viral Death - version 0.4

[Jazzepi]

Lodum : Viral Death is a new nation for the Middle Era. Lodum is a land of living flesh and obscene aberrations pushed forth into the world by the magics of the Allspawn.

Dead, or captured, living creatures are broken down into their constitute parts and recycled into masses of writhing, sentient flesh. Should the Allspawn prevail, the new world would look much different, consumed and reshaped in its horrific image without gender, without love, and without choice, where all flesh dances to the Allspawn's tune.

STRENGTHS
Units regenerate
Cheap fortresses
Units spread disease on the battlefield
Sacred tramplers
Sacred recruitable thugs
Strong magic, good diversity (UWNS)
Sacred mages
Communions
Generally high morale
Units are easy to amass, low resource cost
Easy to get into the water
Poison immune
Units recuperate
Temples cost 300

WEAKNESSES
Expensive, and weak, recruitable priests
25% more damage from fire magic
Generally low attack values
Generally low protection values for an LA nation, almost no helmets for troops
Commanders have strange slots
All units are magical


Currently I'm still working through the very last conceptual steps of creating Lodum. You can see the tasks below that need to be accomplished. While it is far from a finished product, I think it's coming along nicely. I should have plenty of time this coming week to flesh out more of the nation since I'm on break.

Be aware that I've cribbed all the graphics from other units in the game. They're in there as placeholders. Generally the graphics should give you an idea of what role each unit was designed to fill. Feel free to mess around with the nation, but I haven't tried to seriously balance any of the unit costs, though I have spent some time on the individual troops. The sacred tramplers are way too powerful right now, and that's okay, my idea was to create the conceptual first, for everything, and then to start doing real game balance later. My ultimate goal is to have a very well thought out nation, that's balanced in multiplayer, and plays very differently then the vanilla nations.

If you have any feedback or find any glaring errors, please leave a note. To install the mod simply download the zip file and extract it into your mod folder.

TASKS to do as of 3/16/08 (Current Version 0.39)
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- Find a way to remove Ermor's holy spells .31 [FIXED]
- Lock down Slime Balls and Faceless Lords to capital only .32 [FIXED]
- Add one more mid level mage unit .33 [FIXED]
- Add descriptions .4 [FINISHED]
- Add vanilla pretenders .5
- Create custom pretenders, including Allspawn .61
- Add national spells (summons) .63
- Add national spells (BF spells) .64
- Add national spells (rituals) .65
- Add national heroes .7
- Sort out conflicts with other mods, and prep for upload to Llamaserver .75
- Balance nation for MP (Stage 1, staged fights) .8
- Balance nation for MP (Stage 2, real MP game testing) .85
- Add Graphics .9
- Final review and cleanup .95
- Final release 1.0

UPDATES
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3/16/08 - Added a bunch of descriptions. Still not all there, a few more to go. Futzed with a bunch of unit stats numbers, and made everything look nicer in the recruitment queue. Also finalized the recruitment queue.
3/17/08 - Put in the last of the descriptions. Swapped Childern of the Allspawn and Crest for thematic reasons. Lowered resource costs across the board. Lowered a gcost on boomer, slime balls, and one other unit. Removed Awe from Crest. Removed disease cloud from all commanders to prevent unnecessary micromanagement, and losing items from diseased limbs falling off.

[Humakty]

Your nation makes me think about the (even more!)corrupted marignon mod someone issued some long time ago. I think it might contain some graphics you could use/modify. Can't remember the name...Ah, marignon,realm of the twiceborn.

I recommend a less extreme choice of colours, as I found it quite painfull to look at my units. Sorts of cute horrors of fiendish darkness would be nice.

[Sombre]

Realm of the twiceborn.

This needs a bunch more stuff (like graphics) before I'd want to test it, but kudos for starting a mod Jazzepi :]

[VedalkenBear]

Jazzepi: I'll give this a whirl soon.

May I ask how you're supposed to do simple things like build temples without recruitable Priests? I assume there's a summon for it?

[Jazzepi]

I'm going to upload a bit of an overhaul in a few hours. I would wait till then to mess around with the mod.

There's actually one recruitable priest. I almost forgot about him. He costs 450 gp or so, and he's only level 1.

You can always prophetize, though.

Jazzepi

[VedalkenBear]

Jazzepi: Er, are there any national summons that are priests?

[Jazzepi]

Not any that are planned at the moment.

Also, I just uploaded a new version with a plethora of changes.

Jazzepi

[VedalkenBear]

Mm. So, if I understand you correctly, the only way to get a new Temple with this nation is:

1) Random event
2) Get your Prophet to build one.
3) Purchase a 450g (presumably mage-)priest for the express purpose of building a Temple.

I take it that this mod is not generally considered to be NI-friendly?

[Jazzepi]

NI? I assume that means AI?

No I didn't really have in mind for the AI to pickup this nation and play.

Jazzepi

[VedalkenBear]

Jazz: No Independents Mod. No independents exist.

I'm about to start playing with it, but I'm not too sanguine about the chances here.