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Well, after playing Dominions 3 for a time, I turned, as most people do, to the great homemade Usermods. After a time of playing these mods, I found something missing. A good insane nation and a good Vampire nation. So, well, I combined them.
As a fan of the WhiteWolf Vamprie: Dark Ages and Vampire: The Masquerade Roleplaying Wolrds, I immediately thought of the insane Vampire Clan "The Malkavians".
So I checked some of my books for some background information on the Malkavians, created some 2D sprites (most modified out of others created used in other mods), learnt how to make a mod for Dominions 3 and well scripted it together.
I think it turned out rather well.
Here the "official" description:
"If you find yourself drowning in madness -- DIVE!
This is the House of Malkav, the broken Mirror, the shattered Dream. Surrender your sanity and bow to the voices from Faerieland."
"--Most Kindred cling to the familiar shores of sanity like drowning men. Though they know a constant, low-level madness from their slavery to the bloodlust, most Kindred usually resist it and fight off all other derangements. Some are eaten alive from within by the Beast; most grip their sanity with a miser's clutch.
But some Kindred plunge in where the strongest elders fear to go, giving full vent to their demon desires and mad caprices. Some do it by choice, but the rest do it because they are forced to. The curse of Malkav has stolen their choice in the matter, and they can either agree to dive into madness, or be dragged under the murky waters by the chains of insanity.--
The House of Malkav is a nation ruled by Vampires. Through the curse of Malkav, the Antediluvian who sired the first Malkavian, all Vampires who belong to the House of Malkav are insane. Their minds are shattered even though they have gained frightful power in madness.
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"Race: Thralls, Familiars, Ghouls and low level Malkavians. Military: strong but expensive infantry + some cheap Thralls, powerful yet insane Vamipres, strong summoning abillities . Magic: strong, only astral, blood and death magic. Priests: Strong but insane. Play with high turmoil/luck scale and 'the Elder' or the 'ninja wannabe' as pretender god."
So far so good, I hope you like playing this mod as much as I do. Feel free to commend on my work, for I am still open to suggestions.
god bless,
avarchillion
PS: I, of course, used the #shatteredsoul tag to simulate insanity in my vampires.
PPS: I forgot to mention, that this mod is fully playable.
PPPS: Also important: I don't think this mod is compatible with other mods.
PPPPS: Please forgive me my, sometimes bad english. I am German and therefore prone to misspell or misuse grammar now and then.
UPDATE: I have updated my mod and put the new version (1.4 into this post. So please download the 1.4 version (it should be a lot more balanced).
Last edited by Avarchillion; January 9th, 2012 at 07:11 AM..
The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Avarchillion For This Useful Post:
Here an updated version (now 1.2) of my mod, with an additional pretender god "the Ninja-Wannabe" and a new spell to summon 10 Faeriesprites.
Also some balancing.
Have fun.
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Thank you!
I made most of this mod about a year ago. Took me about one week of coding, balancing and of course pixel painting, but I just loved doing it.
I love being creative in that kind way.
Of course balancing still needs some work. The Vampires are extremly strong, but I hope I have countered that via the shatteredsoul feat.
At first I wanted to give them the #insane feat (but this was not possible, because it is hard-coded) so I had to switch to the shatteredsoul wich works suprisingly well with the nature of a Malkavian ("Open Tomb", "Mutter", "Mourn the Dead" ....).
Well, I´m just glad I found a game where I had the chance to put some of the WhiteWolf Vampire stuff into.
Maybe in future I will try to create some other Vampire-Clans as new nations Mods.
avarchillion
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There seems to be more responses to mods there and there are also several very experienced modders there that might give you good feedback/advice/tips.
well, after playing my mod again, I realized that there still were some balancing issues. So I re-balanced some stuff and there release the new version 1.2.2.
There is no new content included, but a lot of re-balancing happened:
- tweaked the heroes a bit
- tweaked the blood drink weapon of the vampires.
- reset some shatteredsoul stats
- tweaked the regeneration abillity
well, let me know what you think of the changes.
god bless,
avarchillion
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I have been sick today and therefore had the time to check into my mod again.
Well, that let to some bigger changes in the mod and therefore I proudly present "The House of Malkav" 1.3.
I added some new spells to summon all the vampires you could normally recruit. I did that, because the vampire nation is rather destructable to its own population and therefore will have falling income over time. As the vampires are expansive at a certain point in time you could not recruit army anymore. So well, now you also can summon them.
avarchillion
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This is an outstandingly fun mod nation. One of my very most favorite, and I have played MANY.
Very tough at first with the pretender and scales it is meant to be played with... (playing against Mushroom Kingdom on Impossible Aggressive + 7 other nations on Mighty Random) but there are a few issues.
1) The Elder cannot summon Big, Dumb, and Ugly. The blood slaves are used but no War Ghoul appears.
2) Waking Dreamers are UBER POWERFUL for their cost and /gemsummon, not to mention their research value, even with 30 Shattered Soul.
3) Maiandros is probably the most powerful being I have ever seen. I was lucky to get him and set him on the Koopa Kingdom early; he assassinated their Titan god several times while bringing their capitol to 100+ unrest. Then I used him as a raider, didn't even need any spells or items, or Immortality, he would frequently annihilate entire provinces of 150-250+ armies.
3) Mad Prophets are likewise overpowered with +4 Blood Vengeance. You can send them against most armies of enormous size and be confident they have a great chance of winning. Also, they cannot Preach, was that intended?
4) I find myself not recruiting anything but Waking Dreamers, Freaks, and Mad Prophets... they are so very powerful that nothing else much matters. Freaks though are much better balanced: their lack of head armor is a real equalizer.
I love, LOVE playing this very overpowered nation. The sprites are very well done, the descriptions are SUPERB (there are some few typos in the nation description and elsewhere), just the prices for immortal vampire commanders (which are thematically recruitable everywhere) are quite a bit low and two or three are extremely overpowerful in every scenario.
I did not find the crossbowmen at 15g/10r and 1 attack per round to be THAT gamebreaking. In fact, they were far more imminently killable than the vampires and I found to be eventually rather a waste of your extremely limited gold.
Also, the Thrall Cavalry does not have any weapon even though their graphic shows them to carry spears or lances.
Ok I finished my game. In the last post, Maiandros = Malk Content. He ended up with 987 kills and kept pretty much all of Mighty Mictlan at bay until he finally died. By then I had researched Darkness and had Vampire Lords flying around with Skeleton Staves casting it. The Lupin Mamas were much too powerful to stop with their ally summon. I didn't even really need the Darkness.
If I were to play again, I would definitely take a major drain scale, either 2 or 3 points, and try for Order. I would also go with Sloth 3. Then I would go straight for Lupin Mamas, via Waking Dreamers and use ONLY Mad Prophets for expansion. A big Earth Bless would more or less make this nation almost totally unstoppable.
UNITS:
Thralls are fine, and thematic with very high morale, and low stats otherwise. They autosummon which is ok, especially since I didn't seem to get them except when really needed. It was fun to watch them die in droves as they raced forward to PD against enemies.
Familiar Lanceriders are only using their Fist. I see they have a Glaive or something in the graphic... but still, ugh I hate overpriced cavalry. And that's being redundant: it seems to me that almost all cavalry is overpriced.
The Familiar Crossbowmen surely need balancing. At 15g/10r, they have 12 precision with a 15 AP attack once per round at 40 range. Come on. This is pretty much the only unit I ever bought.
Ghoul Assassins I would not purchase as I got 6 times the firepower with a like amount of Familiar Crossbowmen.
The Familiar Swordsmen are overpriced as well, even with a good Patrol bonus.
The fledgling Malkavians I would never buy for 80gp, they are much too fragile and this nation has so little gold up to midgame. Many times I would receive 5 random events, and all were bad: you cannot count on them for gold.
I only used about 4-5 of the pretty decent Neonate Malkavians throughout the game. Love the Finglonger.
Ghoul Guardians for PD are the MAN. At 55 gold I would not purchase them for my armies, they can easily come down in price to 30/40 but as PD they deflected most attacks leveled at my nation. No routing at 30 morale, 18 armor piercing attack (not magical? Hardly any of the weapons in this mod are, if any... I'm not sure if this was intended), with a 4 length weapon and 14 Attack. Always get 20 PD in any province you care at all about, because then the combination of these and Mad Prophets make that an extremely difficult province to take. Really the PD is extremely deadly for the price. Evocation mages did tend to make short work of it though and it would be slightly more balanced in MP.
HEROES:
The Malk Content is absolutely crazy. Probably the most powerful being I've ever seen in Dominions 3. Looked and acted like a Great Horror, with possibly stronger abilities.
I got Rasputin showing up at my capitol: he had 6 Death, 8 Blood. Dear lord. At 50 Shattered Soul he actually had a streak of about 10 rounds in a row rampaging through my capitol... so he may be somewhat balanced, weird to say. He did come in handy to summon Wraith Lords later on... I got him near endgame.
COMMANDERS:
One Mad Prophet is usually enough to destroy almost any province of independents or SP enemy nation, with their ridiculous Blood Vengeance +4. If you are looking into balancing, I would not give them more than +2, and probably lower their Holy to 3.
Mesmeric Manipulators are fun, I got one with Unequaled Obesity for much of the early game lol. Still, their 30 Shattered Soul means you have to use them extremely sparingly for their only unique function, which is Seduction/Assassination. Eventually she went haywire while in an enemy land and the PD killed her. Their 30 Magic Resistance comes in great handy for this job, they are awesome prophet killers. I can see myself using them in MP.
The Freaks I would only use later on for Blood Hunting, as their 20 Shattered Soul is less than any of the others, plus their relative cheapness of 200g is encouraging.
The other 3 commanders, The Awakend (is this meant to be spelled this way?), the Crazed Monster, and the Raving Lunatic are pretty much throwaways... I never hired one and there is no reason I can think of that I would want to. (Unless a Scythe has an area effect attack?) Still. Maybe some alternate magical paths would be nice here.
Vohzd and Broodmothers... seem pretty much in line. Though at 30 and 60 bloodslaves, I'd just rather have Vampire Lords for 77 slaves. They totally have their use as tramplers though. The Swallow Whole ability... how is that supposed to work for Tramplers? It deals 2x to units smaller than it, but don't they just Trample those?
SUMMONS:
Wraiths are very powerful. The Shivering Shiver gives you 4-5 of them for a mere 10 death gems, and they are Ethereal and Immortal with high Attack and 2x armor negating, paralyzing attacks. Still you have 0 commanders that can actually summon them without boosters. Kind of weird not having any vampires with over 2 Death. I did not find Cappadocians anywhere.
War Ghouls look great. Their powers seem about in line with other similar cost units. Throwing Body Ethereal on almost any mid-to-higher summon like this makes it a death machine.
Big Bad Lupins are sooo powerful, WAY too powerful. For 20 astral gems at Conjuration 7 they can Summon Allies to get a Lupin. Lupins are how I won the game... they are extraordinarily powerful. Huge amounts of hps, huge ATK value, 3 attacks, 20 strength. Great protection, especially when berserking, large amounts of regneration, and even indy commanders can use them. Recuperation and Dark Power are just icing on the cake. Either the Lupin Mamas or the Lupins themselves need definite balancing. Trick Lupines summon at 15 astral for 4 units seems balanced. Lupin Mamas for 20 astral gems is easily the biggest giveaway in the mod. They should cost at least double, and that is being pretty generous.
Vampire Elders at 4 astral/4 blood are almost laughable for 30 blood slaves. They cost 5 blood to get to, so good luck with that. Disappointing. They are totally useless as anything except Call Horror batteries, compared to the other commanders in this nation. That is to say, they are practically balanced.
Zombus are right in line with their cost and power level. The only thing useful about them is that they cause Fear which is kind of thematic with the rest of the nation and has good synergy. Though I didn't use them, I can see how they may occasionally be useful.
Fairy Beings at 6 astral and 6 flying movement are nice. But the fairies they autosummon do not seem to work... they always kill themselves with fairy dust and I don't think the Touch of Madness works. I set them to attack archers and they pretty much only ever killed themselves.
The Sczhlata were fine at about 1 blood slave each.
CONCLUSION:
This nation is much too powerful for MP. It was, however, extraordinarily fun to play in just about maxed out SP. The descriptions were stupendous, but I don't know if you took those out of the books or if you made them yourself. If you did write those just for this mod, my god. The various armors and weapons were often hilarious, and always cool.
This mod is HUGE. And the Malkavians play very differently than most any other mod nation I've tried. Sometimes the Shattered Soul gets in the way, but Immortal, Regenerating, Fearing, Life Draining, Multiple Attack units more than makes up for it. Very, very fun and extremely well done module, with glaring balance issues. Thank you for all the work that went in to this!!! Hope you find this useful and interesting.
I wonder if you could take the White Wolf concept of vampire Generation and put it into your next mod: For commanders you could recruit different archetype 6th Generation vampires which could then Summon Ally different lines of 7th Generation vampires which could then Summon Ally 8th Generation vampires...etc. This could be balanced by having more and more population and/or gold consumption as they increase in strength.
Perhaps at 9 Blood you could Ritual Summon one of three or four Antediluvians, a 3rd Generation vampire, the direct descendant of Malkav. Maybe they could eat other vampires, even commanders as fuel?
MA - The House of Malkav -The Malkavians
Linear Mode
